Beyond Advertising

Part IIIWhat to Do Now to Get Ready for—and Co-create—the Future

Young doctors in training are often instructed as follows: ‘Listen to your patient. He's telling you the diagnosis.' The same advice is now and must continue to be followed by marketers. Listen to your customer. He or she is telling you how to innovate. How to retain loyalty. How to drive sales. The customer is doing that through social media, in person, on your website, and over various channels. By listening to what made the customer dissatisfied or happy, or learning what would make the customer even happier, marketers are learning about where they need to innovate.

—Zain Raj, Chairman and CEO, Shapiro + Raj (2012)

In addition to the question, What could/should advertising look like in the future? we asked a second question of our Advertising 2020 contributors: What do we need to do now to get ready for that desired future? In Part III, we distill Jerry's decades of work at the Wharton School and augment it with insights from our 2020 collaborators to provide key elements for transformation. The concepts are intended to be valuable and actionable regardless of your title, your role in or out of the current advertising and marketing ecosystem, or where you are in the world.

In parallel with current approaches, the best place to start is by experimenting with three new approaches (see Figure III.1):

1. Embrace a culture of adaptive experimentation
2. Leverage all aspects of organizational architecture for change