Marketing

  • The Amazing, Disappearing (and Collaborative) Phone Call

    Texting and instant messaging (IM) have rapidly supplanted voice calls as our preferred communication mode. When we say “I spoke with him” or “I had a conversation with her” often we’re referring to text chat rather than voice. This lack of real talking adversely impacts collaboration.

    In many organizations, people never bother to set up their voice mail. And we increasingly view voice calls as intrusive. Yet companies have redesigned their physical spaces ostensibly to encourage intrusions such as on-the-fly and chance encounters which can spark collaboration.

     

    Telephone advertisement
    1910 Advertisement for the automatic (dial) telephone service of the Illinois Tunnel Company in Chicago
    When I wrote the first edition of The Culture of Collaboration book in 2006, I summed up the deserialization of work and interaction as the “in-box culture is dead.” The idea was that something called presence would allow us to see who’s available and that we could connect with anybody in the organization via instant messaging. Then—and this is the important point—we could escalate that instant messaging session into a spontaneous voice or video call with the simultaneous capability of collaboratively working on documents, spreadsheets, presentations or in any application. So there was no longer a need to schedule voice and video calls. Through real-time collaboration, we could create far greater value.

    Somehow IM took hold in companies but escalation to voice and video calls has seemingly stalled. And use of voice on mobile devices has plummeted. At one time speakerphone quality was a key attribute of devices, but Apple iPhone and Samsung Galaxy marketing barely mention voice.

    IM has the advantage over email in that it’s nearly real-time and there’s an expectation of immediate response. So it’s easy to find people and connect with them. The problem is that like email IM and texting are one dimensional. It can be difficult to determine the real meaning and the emotion behind the words. If we talk with each other on a voice call, we can often understand each other better, cut to the chase and resolve issues more quickly than through IM. If the issues are more involved, a video call fits the bill.

    Also, people feel less isolated when using real-time voice and video. In fact, there are signs that we are desperate for real connection and interaction that IM and texting can’t deliver. The New York Times recently ran a story on how people are using calls to customer service representatives as therapy sessions. Increasingly, companies are training representatives to show compassion and focus on the emotional needs of the customer rather than rush them off the line.

    This phenomenon cuts both ways. Increasingly, customer service representatives are anxious for a real connection. I experienced this first hand when I called a credit card company recently to discuss my airline co-branded card. The representative told me about her background as a former flight attendant and a singer with a band. I also learned that she had a degree in advertising, likes to roller blade and moved from California to Florida. At the end of the call, she arranged a mileage bonus and said “thanks for letting me be me.” We both felt connected in a way that an IM session with the card company could never deliver.

    I’m currently writing a new edition of The Culture of Collaboration book and assessing where we’ve gone wrong and how we can get collaboration back on track. When it comes to tools, we’re half way there. Rather than getting stalled with texting and IM (not to mention social media), our challenge is to maximize our ability to find and connect with people. This means turning some of those texting and IM sessions into voice and video calls so that together we can create value.

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  • Collaboration to Change Product Use and Brand Perception

    The Apple iPod began as a music player and became a video player in part because consumers discovered a new use for the device. The brand perception then shifted.  Lego Mindstorms began as company-provided software and hardware to create small robots. Then consumers hacked the code, changed the products together and Lego ultimately began providing the source code and collaborating with its customers on new products. In time, consumers began perceiving Mindstorms as a collaborative activity.

    As in these cases, sometimes consumers collaborate to alter a product or its use and this ultimately changes the brand perception. In other cases, companies can collaborate with partners to discover new uses for products and change how consumers perceive the brand.

    Gin has traditionally involved martinis or gin and tonic—and at least one gin producer is collaborating with partners to change this use and brand perception. When Bombay Sapphire East

    Bombay Custom Tonic Bar
    The LUCKYRICE festival’s “custom tonic bar”: bartenders mix flavor extracts with Bombay Sapphire East gin and club soda

    emerged in test markets as the first product line extension of Bombay Sapphire gin in 2011, reviews described the gin as spicy. That’s because Bombay Sapphire East adds two new botanicals to Bombay Sapphire: lemongrass and black pepper. This “flavor profile” may seem a bit assertive to accompany typical cocktail fare like cheese and crackers. Therefore, it’s necessary for this brand to gain traction in a different culinary arena, namely Asian food.

    This past Friday evening, Bombay Sapphire East sponsored the 6th Annual LUCKYRICE feast at the Bently Reserve venue in San Francisco’s financial district. As I entered the event, an Asian woman handed me one of many varieties of exotic drinks bartenders were mixing with Bombay Sapphire East. A who’s who roster of upscale Asian restaurants with tables scattered around the event were cranking out specialties to accompany Bombay Sapphire East. The brand was clearly collaborating with chefs to create the perception that the gin goes well with Asian food. This is by no means a stretch.

    I sampled a drink called Piman which includes Bombay Sapphire East, yellow pepper puree and Kalamansi (an orange/kumquat hybrid) syrup.  I also checked out the Bombay Sapphire East “custom tonic” bar at which bartenders combined such flavor extracts as bergamot and elderflower with club soda and gin (see above image). These drinks complimented available dishes including Dosa restaurant’s Hyderabad chicken biryani, M.Y. China’s black pepper beef with mushrooms and Brussels sprouts, and Asian Box’s lamb meatballs in coconut curry.

    Collaborating with Asian chefs, the people behind Bombay Sapphire East are not only changing consumer perceptions about their gin. They’re also working with Asian restaurants to co-create and sell cocktails using a gin accented with botanicals that compliment Asian food.  This creates value for the restaurants and for Bacardi Limited, which owns Bombay Sapphire East.

    Whether the product is booze, blenders, toothpaste or technology, collaborating with partners to change brand use and perception can transform a sleeper product into a sales leader.

     

     

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  • Collaboration Keeps Martini Thriving for 150 Years

    Winemaking, at its best, involves collaboration. Making vermouth adds a layer of complexity to winemaking and therefore requires an extra dose of collaboration along with added alcohol, sugar and botanicals. Martini, also known as Martini and Rossi, is the top-selling vermouth producer globally.

    In the building known as Department 54 at Martini near Turin, Italy, winemakers and herbalists

    Martini botanicals
    Making vermouth involves blending wine and botanicals. (Photo: Gary Sexton)

    collaborate to blend wine with botanicals. These include such herbs as dittany from Crete, a purported aphrodisiac, and the bitter artemesia. Also in the mix are flowers including roses and violets plus such fruits as raspberry and lemon. Martini winemakers and herbalists also include woods including quassia from Jamaica and cascarilla bark from the Bahamas plus many roots and spices.

    Many of these ingredients lined tables at San Francisco’s Dirty Habit restaurant a couple of weeks ago where I joined Martini Master Blender Giuseppe Musso, Operations Director Giorgio Castagnotti and Head Wine Maker Franco Brezza as they explained the intricacies of vermouth blending and production. The Martini team was in San Francisco to introduce Gran Lusso, a new vermouth celebrating the company’s 150 years.

    As Giuseppe described the woods, herbs and other botanicals, twenty or so writers and guests sipped

    Martini vermouth
    Botanicals line the tables at Martini’s vermouth tasting. (Photo: Gary Sexton)

    vermouths. Giuseppe has spent his entire 30-year career with Martini. His emotion bubbled to the surface as he described how Martini people treat each another as family and how the company emphasizes sharing skills and techniques from one generation to the next. Since 1992, Martini has been part of Bacardi Limited, the largest privately-held, family-owned spirits company.

    Most vermouths use white wine. For the new Gran Lusso vermouth, Martini blends red wine from Barbera grapes with white wine from          Trebbiano grapes.  To extract the botanicals, the winemakers and herbalists have created a new method for Gran Lusso. They combine grape must from Moscato di Canelli grapes with a natural spirit, and then they age the mixture for a year before adding botanicals. They then add a “secret ingredient” called “extract 94” which originates from a Martini recipe reportedly from 1904. The result is a bitter sweet vermouth with aromatic complexity.

    What struck me about the Martini team’s formal presentations and informal discussions with guests is the lack of marketing bravado and genuine love for their products and company which they constantly referred to as “family.” At dog-and-pony shows staged by less collaborative companies, people pepper presentations and conversations with empty superlatives such as “Our products are best-of-breed” or “Nobody can do what we do.”

    In The Culture of Collaboration book, I call this Superlative Syndrome. It’s a manifestation of what the Greeks called hubris or excessive pride. Superlative Syndrome often masks defects and can ruin a business as trust evaporates. Customers, financial analysts and the media become conditioned to doubt the company’s messages. Team members learn to cut corners and lie. In contrast, Martini delivers its message with sincerity and cultivates long relationships with business partners, customers and team members.

     

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  • Every Worker is a Knowledge Worker

    Management consultants, technology vendors, and human resources departments often segregate workforces into “knowledge workers” and everybody else.  In a collaborative organization, every worker is a knowledge worker. Every team member contributes, shares knowledge, and participates in making decisions, whether he or she is loading crates, designing products, servicing customer accounts, creating tactical marketing plans, or determining long-term strategy.

    My current column for Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com entitled "Every Worker is a Knowledge Worker" describes how organizations can desegregate the workforce. You can read the column here.

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  • Video Driving Enhanced Collaboration

    “Like television archives, stored desktop videoconferences can potentially provide a legacy of our meetings, presentations, and collaborations. These video anthologies may follow us through our careers and personal lives.”

    This observation is from the book, Personal Videoconferencing, published in 1996 by Manning/Prentice Hall. It so happens that I wrote the book. Recently, I’ve been re-reading the book, articles and columns on collaboration that I wrote in the mid-1990’s to assess how collaboration has progressed over the last fifteen years. This exercise is particularly relevant, because I’m currently writing my third book on collaboration. And to know where collaboration is headed, it’s essential to understand its evolution.

    There’s no need to pre-empt my forthcoming book here, but I feel compelled to share some thoughts about the role of video. In 1996, video was the most controversial aspect of collaboration. Engineers, marketing people, and senior leaders were divided on the value of video. Videoconferencing on desktop and notebook computers was emerging and so was non-video web conferencing. Many technologists insisted that people primarily wanted to share documents, spreadsheets and electronic whiteboards rather than see one another. Inside Intel, which was developing an early conferencing system called ProShare, a debate raged on whether to include video in the product. Ultimately, the video proponents won that debate.

    In the mid-1990’s, audio conferencing people dominated the conferencing industry and felt threatened by video. So, video was defending itself from assaults from two groups of naysayers: the legacy voice people and the early non-video web conferencing crowd. Essentially, many people with entrenched interests felt uncomfortable using interactive video, disliked how they came across, and lacked vision regarding video’s role in business. In short, they felt threatened by the emerging medium. Their attitude was similar to that of “serious” print and radio journalists towards television news when that medium emerged in the 1950’s.

    Fast forward to 2011. The age of YouTube, reality television, and Skype has conditioned us to embrace video. We’re comfortable seeing friends, relatives and colleagues when we communicate at a distance and having them see us. It’s no longer a stretch to accept that video creates an emotional connection second only to an in-person exchange. Nearly every collaborative organization I’ve encountered and almost all of those I feature in The Culture of Collaboration book have not only adopted real-time, interactive video, but also have integrated video into their cultures and business processes.

    A few years ago, I gave a speech in London at the Tandberg global sales directors’ meeting. Tandberg leaders sensed a shift in how their customers were making purchase decisions for videoconferencing systems. Increasingly, business unit heads or senior leaders rather than telecom or IT people were calling the shots. So, video was moving from an equipment sale to a consultive sale involvement business processes. I was in London to give sales leaders some pointers about winning in the shifting environment.

    Having acquired Tandberg, Cisco is nudging enterprises to adopt video throughout their operations. And Cisco offers a broad portfolio of video products ranging from telepresence to WebEx to Flip video cameras. From a sales perspective, though, Cisco still struggles with some of the same issues that plague other telepresence and visual communication vendors including Polycom and HP. Namely, it’s easy to slip back into pushing boxes of products. The challenge is to collaborate with customers to create value by integrating tools into their cultures and processes.

    Ilan Kasan and Grace Kim of Cisco recently demonstrated for me a new version of WebEx. The new version, dubbed the WebEx High Quality Video Experience, offers Active Presence, which is a “film strip” of video feeds showing everybody on a call. Cisco TelePresence offers the same capability, and now people can join TelePresence sessions via WebEx. Plus the new version enables the Apple iPad with WebEx.

    Marketing departments of technology vendors are typically bullish on customer adoption forecasts. Cisco is no exception. David Hsieh, Cisco’s vice president of emerging technologies marketing, tells me that within twelve months, 36 percent of Cisco’s top customers will roll out telepresence and video collaboration across their entire enterprises. That percentage climbs to 46 percent in over two years. David and his colleagues believe this, because Cisco gathered its top customers in a room and asked them about their purchase plans. However, my experience with this type of survey is that customers are more likely to reveal purported purchase plans when they are surrounded by other customers—and therefore the results from the customer gathering may be skewed towards greater adoption.

    Nevertheless, Cisco believes the survey results indicate something significant. “This represents a major shift in the market. Cisco is going to put a major stake in the ground,” according to David. There’s a difference, though, between rolling out systems and actually integrating tools into workflow, processes and culture. Cisco, Polycom, HP and other visual communications and collaboration vendors must devote greater time and resources to integrating tools into workflow and processes. This approach will create far greater value for their shareholders and salespeople than simply moving products. As customers see other customers creating value  through extending and enhancing collaboration, adoption becomes more viral.

    Clearly, the debate has advanced from whether video is necessary in business to how video can be used most effectively to create value.

    Real change happens when the culture shifts and tools, including video, become part-and-parcel of how an organization collaborates and does business. Tools rarely create collaboration, but they play a critical role in extending and enhancing collaboration. Sold and used effectively, video is the tool that can enhance collaboration like no other.

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  • Cisco’s John Chambers: the Hardest Part is the Culture

    I was watching Cisco CEO John Chambers do his trademark walk-and-talk style keynote yesterday at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square as Cisco was kicking off its Collaboration Summit when suddenly John interrupted his pitch for collaboration.

     

    “Do you know what the hardest change is in this?” he queried the audience rhetorically. “As any CEO will tell you, it’s the culture.”

     

    John’s observation resonated with me in that the fundamental premise of The Culture of Collaboration book is that “without a culture of collaboration, the best processes, systems, tools and leadership strategies fall flat.” In the book, I also note that “the overwhelming reason why collaboration eludes organizations involves culture.”

     

    Understanding the role of culture in creating a collaborative enterprise is paramount, particularly as Cisco introduces 61 collaboration products. Collaboration tools are key enablers, but they are far more effective in enabling collaboration in enterprises with collaborative cultures and processes.  Cisco has been focusing on collaboration more than any other initiative as an organizational imperitive and in product efforts. Now the company is fixated on persuading customers that it has reached a milestone in innovating collaboration. With that in mind, Cisco vice president of enterprise solutions Alan Cohen, a history buff and blogger, noted that Cisco was announcing its slew of products on the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall and observed that it was one of the “biggest transitions in our history.”

     

    As Tony Bates, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise Group, highlighted Cisco’s major product introductions, he emphasized the increasing role of video in collaboration—from Flip Video camcorders to WebEx web conferencing to telepresence—and the interactivity of these tools. You can read details of the product announcements here.

     

    At a cocktail party following the keynotes, Tony and I had an engaging conversation about how the role of video has evolved. I mentioned that when I was researching my first book, Personal Videoconferencing, in the mid-1990’s, there was considerable push back against real-time video as a viable business tool. People were scared of the camera, and there was a pervasive view that one needed to have highly-honed presentation skills to use videoconferencing. Tony observed that people are increasingly accepting that the way they conduct themselves in meetings and in one-on-one workplace interactions is good enough for many video interactions.

     

    Currently, most telepresence and web conferencing interactions are scheduled. As organizational cultures evolve to support more real-time collaboration, video interaction will become more spontaneous. Then real-time video will transcend communications and become part-and-parcel of collaboration. 

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  • Replacing ROI with Return on Collaboration?

    Yesterday I had a compelling discussion with Alla Reznik, director of global voice and collaboration for Verizon. Alla is from Russia, and she’s the only U.S.-based marketing professional I know who can provide input on the Russian language edition of The Culture of Collaboration book published by Ecom of Moscow. Alla and I chatted about regional cultural differences in how people collaborate—and differences in how they respond to surveys.

     

    It was a timely discussion, because today Verizon and Cisco are releasing a new study tackling return on investment (ROI) for collaboration expenditures. ROI has long frustrated collaboration tools vendors, because of the difficulty in quantifying “soft” benefits such as corporate reputation. The research, conducted by Frost & Sullivan, identifies a model for measuring what it calls return on collaboration (ROC).

     

    ROC measures the impact of collaboration on key functional areas. These include research and development, human resources, sales, marketing, investor relations, and public relations. Traditional ROI measures money gained or lost on an investment. In contrast, ROC tracks the amount of “improvement” derived from a financial investment in collaboration. The study identified research and development, sales and marketing as the functional areas with the highest ROC.

     

    The study called “Meetings Around the World 2: Charting the Course of Advanced Collaboration” is based on questionnaires completed by 3662 information technology and line-of-business decision makers in 10 countries. Respondents represented enterprises plus small and medium sized businesses. Nearly half the organizations are using unified communications and collaboration tools ranging from enterprise instant messaging to Cisco TelePresence. Among the study’s key findings is that collaboration is more than twice as important as strategic orientation and six times more important than market factors in determining business performance.

     

     

    “The world has changed quite a bit since 2006,” according to Alla, who was referring to the 2006 study dubbed “Meetings Around the World 1.” This earlier study determined that collaboration fuels business performance and that collaboration capability is based on technology, culture and structure. The new study indicates that culture and structure are even more important to collaboration than they were in the previous study conducted in 2006.  The point is that collaboration technology makes the most difference in organizations with collaborative cultures and structures. Similarly, the fundamental premise of The Culture of Collaboration book is that maximizing time, talent and tools to create value requires collaborative culture.

     

    The main purpose of the study is to convince business decision makers to invest in collaboration tools and technologies.  One conclusion is that a $1 million investment in collaboration tools and technologies will deliver a $4 million dollar “improvement.” However, this result apparently fails to consider whether the organization has adopted a collaborative culture. I would argue that a $1 million investment by an organization with a collaborative culture will produce greater results than the same investment by an organization with a command-and-control, internally-competitive culture. So while the study does highlight the role of culture and structure, more work is necessary in integrating these elements into measuring ROC.

     

    The big question for Verizon and Cisco is whether CFO’s, CIO’s and business decision makers will accept ROC. “We’re curious ourselves,” Alla told me. While there’s work to do in proving the value of collaboration, ROC is an important step towards evaluating the return on collaboration investment.

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  • @GoCollaboration Aggregates Collaboration Blogs on Twitter

    Micro-blogging is transforming how people connect and disseminate information. The most prevalent micro-blogging service is Twitter, but there are many other services that are focusing on micro-blogging within enterprises. Typically, a micro-blog is a sentence or two plus sometimes a link to a blog or other content.

     

    Sensing that micro-blogging has the potential to create value internally and externally, many companies are adopting the medium. Internally, micro-blogging can provide project, function, and subject updates throughout the day plus encourage DM, which is Twitter talk for “direct message” or private message exchange. Micro-blogging is another tool that may potentially enhance collaboration among colleagues. Externally, micro-blogging can enhance brands and create viral adoption of products and services.

     

    Micro-blogging can also be used to aggregate content from multiple blogs and sources. Considering that other bloggers have compelling thoughts and ideas about collaboration and realizing the potential for one-stop-shopping for collaboration blogs, Joe Solomon and I created @GoCollaboration on Twitter. I’ve worked with Joe on numerous projects, and he’s a collaborator extraordinaire.

     

    @GoCollaboration includes more than thirty collaboration blogs including The Culture of CollaborationÒ.  We’re aggregating everything from the Wikinomics blog and the Learning to Collaborate blog to the Cisco collaboration blog and the Intuit QuickBase blog. @GoCollaboration also includes blogs that are focused on key components of collaboration like Keith Sawyer’s informative Creativity and Innovation blog and the Enterprise 2.0 blog. Besides aggregating this and other blogs, I’m also including my own tweets and conversation on @GoCollaboration.

     

    If you have suggestions for non-technical collaboration blogs we should include on @GoCollaboration, let me know.

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  • Spontaneous Telepresence and Cisco’s Collaboration Advances

    An overlooked aspect of Cisco’s announcement yesterday of its new collaboration portfolio is tighter integration between the company’s telepresence and unified communications product lines. Collaboration tools are far more valuable—both from the vendor and customer perspectives—as part of an integrated strategy rather than as stand-alone solutions.

     

    So far, telepresence has been largely limited to scheduled sessions and has had little integration with unified communications. The real benefit of unified communications is that it enables spontaneous encounters. Unified communications leverages presence (not to be confused with telepresence). Presence lets colleagues find each other, view each other’s availability on “buddy” lists or corporate directories and connect spontaneously through instant messaging, voice, web conferencing or videoconferencing. It’s also possible to do 1-click escalation from one mode to another.

     

    The capability to connect spontaneously is essential in supporting the cultural shift to real-time collaboration. As I describe in The Culture of Collaboration book, the move towards collaborative business models is about shifting from the pass-along approach to work to “do it now together.” So as telepresence becomes integrated with unified communications, users will be able to escalate on the fly from IM, voice, and web conferencing to telepresence.

     

    Cisco TelePresence Expert on Demand Cisco’s new TelePresence Expert on Demand integrates the immersive experience of telepresence with call handling features of unified communications. The product is optimized for business-to-consumer scenarios. A bank branch customer interested in a specialized loan investment or comprehensive relationship can connect instantly with the right expert (read salesperson) in a remote location. Patients at a regional medical clinic can gain access to specialist doctors. “The customer feels as if he or she is sitting across the desk from the expert,” notes Chris Thompson, senior director of marketing for Cisco’s unified communications group.

     

    Using telepresence in this way is new and will provide many opportunities. However, the concept of expert on demand using video seems newer than it is. After a discussion last week with Chris Thompson about Cisco's upcoming announcement and uses for Cisco TelePresence Expert on Demand, I flipped through a book I wrote that was published in 1996 called Personal Videoconferencing. The book describes a broad range of uses for videoconferencing including the expert-on-demand model that Cisco is now marketing for telepresence. Experts I wrote about ranged from financial specialists to doctors to educators. At the time, US Bank, Huntington Bancshares and Citibank were conducting pilot programs using video banking kiosks linking customers with financial product specialists.

     

    Telemedicine typically uses real-time video communications to link doctors with patients, doctors with doctors, and other health professionals with doctors and patients. As part of extensive research into telemedicine I began conducting in the 1990’s, I spent time with telehome nurses who deliver expertise to patients via video. While telepresence is currently cost-prohibitive for most home use, the technology could be used in nursing homes and care centers. Here’s a link to a column I wrote in 1997 on telehome healthcare for Telemedicine Today magazine.

     

    Telemedicine can extend medical specialties to underserved populations including rural areas, developing countries and prisons. Considering that a drawback of telemedicine is the sub-optimal virtual environment of standard videoconferencing, telepresence could significantly enhance the experience for both patients and doctors.

     

    While researching telemedicine in 1999, I visited Pelican Bay State Prison, a maximum security facility which houses California’s most violent criminal offenders. Pelican Bay is in Crescent City, California, a rural community where there is a real shortage of doctors, particularly specialists. Because many of California’s prisons are in underserved areas, the California Department of Corrections began using telemedicine in the late 1990’s to link doctors with inmates. Gastroenterologists, psychiatrists and other specialists saw patients at prisons throughout California via video from a telemedicine services center in Sacramento. Primary care doctors were on site with the patients. Telepresence could have enhanced these consultations.

     

    Cisco’s TelePresence Expert on Demand will enhance remote expert applications with a more immersive and natural experience. Also, the product is a major step towards integrating telepresence with unified communications. Cisco says that full integration of telepresence with unified communications for enterprise collaboration is in the works. That advance is essential, because telepresence will become more spontaneous and part of work flow.

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  • Collaboration and Marketing, Branding and Advertising

    Should companies leverage collaboration as a marketing tool? That depends. Too many companies have embraced collaboration as a buzz word or initiative du jour without any real commitment to collaboration. The emperor has no clothes, so to speak. But it makes lots of sense for marketers to use collaboration in branding and corporate image campaigns if the rhetoric is based on something real.

    Corporate social responsibility has hit the big time as advertisers discover that consumers and businesses are increasingly likely to buy products they associate with some greater good. The green movement falls under this umbrella. Incidentally, American Public Media’s Jill Barshay reported on this topic Tuesday, December 11 on the “Marketplace” broadcast. You can listen to the story or read a transcript here.

    Similarly, collaboration can create a perception of value for consumers and business customers. A collaboration image suggests that the company is innovative, receptive and responsive. There are certainly companies that can make this claim and could really leverage collaboration from a marketing perspective. However, there are still many hierarchical companies that foster competitive cultures in which people live and work in fear and rarely interact outside of their functions, regions or business units. It’s ludicrous and ineffective for such companies to use collaboration as a buzz word or build campaigns around the idea—but it happens!

    Currently, I’m researching how collaboration can be used effectively in marketing, branding and advertising. The bottom line is that campaigns must be based on reality rather than me-too marketing.

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