Unicorns & The Second Industrial Revolution

November 14, 2014

I stumbled across the Passion Planner on Kickstarter today. It looks like a pretty cool product and I’ll probably buy one, but that’s not what I want to talk about today.

Seeing that planner made me aware that there is likely a shift coming in the skill-sets that we most desire as we seek to bring a vision to life. The term “unicorn” is used in the tech world to describe an employee that has multiple skill-sets like coding, design and user experience. As the cost of creating a product or service has decreased, the most desired employees have been those who create the technology and quickly bring ideas to life. A quick scroll through Product Hunt will illustrate the fruit of this trend. It’s amazing. New products are being created every day that solve problems we didn’t even know we had. In short, it is getting easier to get your idea out of your head and into the real world.

After watching the Passion Planner video on Kickstarter, I went to its website only to find that all of the planners were sold out. Here is a college student who reinvented (or perhaps just reorganized) the stodgy planner — and is killing it. It wasn’t a software program. It didn’t consolidate any processes or save time. It didn’t do much else other than introduce an alternative way of thinking about a very old product. There was probably not a single Unicorn (as described above) involved in this products success.

Maybe, though, that’s just it. Maybe the next high-demand skill won’t be the ability to build technology, but to navigate how it has changed industries like marketing, sales and advertising. Perhaps the next set of skills that will be deemed “unicorn-y” will be the ability write, design, organize, and build movements using tools like HubSpot to create not only compelling stories, but communities to receive them. The concept of content marketers and community managers have been around for some time, but the magical combination lies in the ability to do both of those things, while understanding and implementing new technologies to amplify those organized efforts. As more and more products emerge with more and more features and benefits, the ability to craft and deliver compelling stories might once again take center stage.

This isn’t an unfamiliar development. Advertising has always been about the ability to effect an emotional impact that stirs people to action, and it galvanized as an industry when the industrial revolution made it easier to produce things. As the market became saturated with more soaps, detergents and cigarettes, the winners were those who did the best of job of building communities using the technology that was available during their time. Admen like David Olgivy and Bill Bernback were the rockstars of their day. They knew how to use radio, television, print and outdoor advertising to deliver compelling and actionable messaging. Today, those channels have become cluttered, and the ability to deliver authenticity and emotion has dramatically declined, forcing advertising to craft for the lowest common denominator and border on being deceptive in desperate attempts to capture attention.

Many have talked about technology being the second industrial revolution as technology finds its way into every product and service. If this is the case, perhaps the next generation of David Olgilvys and Bill Bernbachs are upon us.

In summary, perhaps the rockstars in the next 10 years won’t be those who are creating products that tell you Yo, but will instead (and once again), those who are crafting messages and using tools that do a better job of saying Yo, look at this.

Originally published at gadoci.me.