The Burning Platform

"A man working on an oil platform in the North Sea was awakened suddenly one night by an explosion. Amidst the chaos, he made his way to the edge of the platform. As a plume of fire billowed behind him, he decided to jump from the burning platform even though jumping is a risky option for the following reasons: It was a 150-foot drop from the platform to the water. There is debris and burning oil on the surface of the water. If the jump into the 40°F water did not kill him, he would die of exposure within 15 minutes. Luckily, the man survived the jump and hauled aboard a rescue boat shortly thereafter. When asked why he jumped, he replied, “Better probable death than certain death.” The point is the literally “burning” platform caused the radical change in his behavior." The above apocryphal story is supposed to be the beginning of the "burning platform" paradigm in business. When Stephen Elop took over a troubled Nokia he wrote a "burning platform" memo to exhort Nokia to abandon the old certainties and jump into the freezing waters of the new and unknown. Nokia has since than jumped but it is not yet clear whether it will sink or swim. I earn a living in the discipline of marketing. I suspect that the discipline of marketing in India is facing a burning platform moment. An entire generation of marketers and advertising people have grown up targeting the X generation. They learnt every trick in the book to master the art of feeding the unending appetite of the X generation for self-aggrandizement, status-seeking and the catering to the senses. However given the bulge in India's demographics, the market is today dominated by the next generation of consumers - known as Generation Y in some circles and the Millenials- in the others. Not only does this generation move to a different beat (at Aqumena, the marketing consultancy of which I am a founder partner, we are working on an insight paper on Gen Y which we hope to soon put on the Aqumena blog - http://aqumena.blogspot.com) they are overturning the notion of mass media - 20th century marketing's most important tool and hand-maiden -as well as being actively suspicious of marketing and advertising. The result is a burning platform issue for marketers and their partners - the market researchers, the advertising agencies, the PR guys et al.I am seeing that some have jumped and are flailing about in the water. Some are on the edge, pondering whether to jump. But the strange thing is that are a whole lot who do not even acknowledge that the platform is burning. Watching them would have been funny if it was not so tragic. Sometimes it makes me wonder whether there are some other much large, much deeper platforms burning, unnoticed,under our feet. Democracy? Capitalism? India?