"There are so few opportunities for interns these days. AI has taken up these entry level positions" "I have applied to 300+ positions and got only two responses, but did not land the job", "Is a 9 to 5 model cooked in the age of AI?"
I am at the stage in my life where, around me, I see young graduates looking for intern or initial job openings. I hear these young minds and equally if not less anxious parents discuss AI disruption to entry level positions. From my own experiences with my daughter aged 24, these are real voices, but, I am actually VERY VERY JEALOUS (in a positive way) of these young kids. They are on the cusp of something, where, if they organize well, they will compound on intelligence. My generation was about limited structured data packaged as information. Let me explain.
"Soy Sauce as a Means" to Understand and Contribute to the World
In my first visit to Japan in 1998, my customer took me to a dinner with a couple of his friends and I met a marketer from a soy sauce maker. He was so passionate about what he was doing. Here is what a "day in life" for him was..
Since secondary school I developed a liking to cook. This was to help my mother who used to be away at work. I used soy sauce in so many original ways that I wanted to try soy sauce in ethnic cuisine too in a unique way. I was desperate to get into this soy sauce company and did succeed. In ten years I have travelled across Japan spending a night in so many Japanese homes (monitor campaigns) where we learn unique home made soy sauces in different prefectures, districts and sometimes unique in a particular home. We also introduce our discoveries and have great conversations. I have learnt so much about explicit and implicit experiences with soy and the sauce thanks to such inspirations.
PROFOUND. Thats the only one word I can get to describe what I had heard. He was not on a job, but a career with a purpose, a BELIEF in bringing value straight to customers. Perfectly aligned. And then WEB arrived.
Arrival of the Web and the observation SHIFT.
Early 2000s the web brought in, an opportunity and alongwith it a distraction. Websites, Search, Social Media, Apps, CRM, MA, brought in a new layer of visibility (or so perceived), just not possible with traditional methods. Clicks, engagements, conversions more data flooded the systems. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) became a career path.
Marketing now, also needed to observe traces people leave on digital properties, along-with continuing to observe people themselves.
Budgets got stretched. The Customer Acquisiton Cost (CAC) footprint on balance sheets was exploding and mostly the money was flowing striaght to Google, Meta like ad networks and digital agencies. I was delivering marketing platforms at Eli Lilly Japan in 2008 and the leadership challenged us to show ROI, that was the dashboard world where me, my team, the agency and interns worked day and night to extract insights which leadership could approve and we were the marketers in the digital age, distanced from the customer.
What was NATURAL had to be REMINDED
The soy sauce example where customer centricity was natural, with digital, had to be reintroduced. Through Adobe, I have met so many customers conduct workshops on Customer Centricity to remind the team "why we do what we do". Graduate interns across organizations landed STRAIGHT into digital engagement and measurement from day one sometimes having no experience of the real world customer observation.
We are BUSY
Digital Platforms started getting more complex and deployment started becoming the goal in many cases. Teams stayed busy in operations too on Paid media, Social media and Owned media initiatives. Customer journey workshops threw great ideas, but rarely got operationalized in the face of urgent work and business critical reporting timelines. I have seen so many AMAZING ideas get labelled as "too ideal or utopian" in the process and never got to the consideration, let alone execution stage. Primary reasons
Ideas needed to be backed by a business plan and the member who proposed the idea, was so busy with the daily grind, that he/her never had the time to make that plan in detail
Enough research could not be performed to back the hypothesis, too much content creation and data analysis work on table to first clear
Even if plan made sense, budget locked on other social media experiments were considered "equally important"
Ads were a must and attribution budgets were locked well ahead for a year leaving the very small window of opportunities gasping for attention
net-net, Digital just made everyone busy with building, tagging digital experiences, routine content creation, attribution, performance marketing activities spearating noise from signals on TRACES of BEHAVIOR, far from the customers
A Timeless Way of Looking At Marketing
Lets go back to the soya sauce example. What Kubota san wanted to do(food experiences), what he was inherently good at (cooking), what the world could find value in (new recipes)and what could be monetized(the soy sauce company). Thats the Ikigai, the Japanese concept which can be equated to the Indian thinking of Vishwas - Vyavahar - Vyapar or what Devdutt Pattanaik popularized in his book Business Sutra as Belief(Vishwas) - Behavior(Vyavahar) - Business(Vyapar).
The important shift is to understand that
In formative years collecting experiences through human observation is what is callled first principles thinking.
In Japanese we call the implicit as the unspoken or the 暗黙 (spelt as "an-moku")