Emergence of the New Cool

For some time now, we have been all taught that to be competitive is a real cool thing. Nothing fundamentally wrong with that. Our worship of competitive spirit keeps us charged, gets our adrenaline glands active, helps us test the boundary of human potential in sports, academics, business and makes authors of books on the topic really wealthy.

Trouble brews when we push that spirit too far and start playing zero sum games. That gets too much blood on the street, adrenaline pumps so hard that the heart gives in, and people do things in business that can now be called the Enron or the Worldcom effect, immortalizing relatively insignificant names such as Sarbanes and Oxley.

When I look back on 2006, I can see a year when getting too competitive started appearing uncool. Early in the year, a new book started appearing in the hand of every business executive trying to impress the boss. It is a simple and common sensical book with the title Blue Ocean Strategy. The mild but certain wave against over-competition manifested itself in what I believe is the new cool – collaboration. Collaboration is not on the surface of the stream yet; but if you look deep, you can see the strong undercurrent.

It’s not as if people and companies did not collaborate in the past; but somehow 2006 was different.

Client-Agency Collaboration

After years of clients trying to push down agency remuneration, I saw many clients in 2006 re-think. Result, the remuneration market has started to harden. Progressive clients have always believed that when you throw peanuts, you get monkeys. In 2006, I saw many clients starting to practice that belief. Now they believe in paying well and expect good counsel. Many have started treating the agency as equals and seating them at the marketing strategy table early on. Fewer clients are interacting with the media owners directly just for kicks. Net, the air of suspicion and distrust that has shrouded the client-agency relationship over last few years, has begun to clear. Fewer clients now take pleasure in calling a dozen agencies for a pitch, or getting the agencies to work on hypothetical, speculative assignments.

Agency-Media Owner Collaboration

Many people believe that there is no relationship more adversarial than the buyer-seller relationship. Both know they need each other; but quite often circumstances encourage them into thinking that they can perhaps do without each other. That’s why there is sometimes a sinister ring to the word ‘negotiation’. Having played the cat-and-mouse game for nearly a decade now, 2006 saw many examples of ‘let’s do something exciting together’ discussions rather than the ‘let me steal something from you’ type. This is one of the reasons why embedded marketing and advertiser funded programming gained currency during the year. And smart media owners started getting less irritated by the term ‘innovation’ when uttered by agency buyers. Smart agencies realize that media owners have more to give than just time or space and that has given a new dimension to collaboration.

Agency-Agency Collaboration

I forget whether technically 2006 was the year of the pitch fee debate or 2005, but it was certainly a hot topic for most part of the year. I am not discussing the relative merit of the concept here, but it did reflect a push back from agencies against pitch-happy clients. Privately and semi-privately, agencies have started collaborating on alerting each other on naughty clients, super-flirtatious employees, and game-playing media owners. There were some attempts to explore ways to resolve the talent crisis faced by the industry.

Media Owner-Media Owner Collaboration

Who would have thought the TOI and HT would ever join hands? But they did…first in Mumbai in shared printing services and then in Delhi to actually launch a joint title. There were many less visible examples of this newfound brotherhood in 2006- classical rivals finding strains of friendship in each other.

Marketer-Marketer Collaboration

Remember Coke and Pepsi joining hands to fight off the pesticide battle? They are not the only ones. More marketers are collaborating between themselves now than ever, redefining the meaning of competition. They are doing it in manufacturing, marketing, and even human resource management. Quite often, many of our clients ask us to introduce them to other clients, so that they can find mutual areas of collaboration.

Some cynics might say collaboration was always there. Others might claim not to see it even now. To me, never has the undercurrent been more prominent than in 2006. Does that mean, competition is dead? No way. But in a networked world, as social scientists say, there are no permanent friends nor any permanent foes. Whether you name this trend ‘coopetition’ or anything else, it is there for us to recognize and use. There will still be a few of us who will swear by competitive spirit alone. I can only wish them well in a brave new world.

[Published in IMPACT Jan 2007 issue]