Why this idea means business : We explore knowledge management’s role in marketing. Learn how organising the 2 types of knowledge helps you sharpen your marketing. Read this to learn why knowledge management and marketing aren’t a contradiction in terms.
“Knowledge is power,” said Sir Francis Bacon, 400+ years ago. (Though his actual line was “knowledge itself is power”).
However, the idea of knowledge has changed a lot since those days.
It seems like the correlation between knowledge and power has plummeted since Sir Frannie’s time. Just look at some of those who’ve been in power in the political and business worlds in recent years.
Watch a Trump interview. Read a LinkedIn (cough, ahem) “AI thought leader” piece. It seems lacking knowledge is no barrier to power these days.
In marketing, knowledge should feel like power though. Market research knowledge to better understand customers. Brand-building knowledge to build better brand identities. And of course, brand activation knowledge to engage customers and drive growth.
A more recent idea about knowledge is knowledge management. This business approach explores how organisations create, share and use knowledge. Sounds clever, right? Worth doing. Yet, very few businesses do knowledge management. This article explores why that’s the case in marketing, and what to do about it.
Types of knowledge
In simple terms, knowledge management shows that there are 2 main types of knowledge :-
- explicit knowledge – this is written down and stored physically or digitally.
- tacit knowledge – this is about how to do things or how things work. It’s “stored” in people’s memories.
These co-exist and interact with each other. In fact, you need this interaction for both types of knowledge to grow. They work in tandem.
For example, the knowledge you read in a “how to” guide is explicit (e.g. our how to use emotions in creativity article). But when you learn its key points, the knowledge becomes tacit to you. You “just know it”. You don’t need to read it again. Tacit knowledge is better known as “know-how”, i.e. you know how to do something without instructions.
The advantages of explicit knowledge management
From a business point of view, explicit knowledge is valuable as it’s more tangible. It has a physical (or digital) form that means you can store, share and access it easily.
Storing knowledge means it can be retained and re-used when required. It’s never lost or forgotten. For example, think of your old marketing plans and dashboard reports. Full of explicit knowledge.
The business retains it even if the people who initially wrote it leave the business.
Explicit knowledge can also be shared more easily. You send an email attaching the plan or report. Or you link to a website page, a book or a newspaper or magazine article.
And finally, the easy accessibility of explicit knowledge makes it very practical, especially for group decision-making. Everyone gets access to the same (explicit) knowledge about your customers, brand or category. Theoretically, that should lead to better-informed decisions.
The challenges of explicit knowledge management
These seem like compelling business benefits, right?
would want to master explicit knowledge management. Yet, ask your average brand marketer about it (and there are plenty of those to choose from), chances are you’ll get a very unknowledgeable response.
Bigger businesses might say all their research reports are organised into a research library. Or their previous marketing plans on a shared drive.
But this is mostly a token effort in knowledge management. And that’s because knowledge management also comes with challenges :-
- Time and effort required.
- Organising and prioritising.
- Information overload.
Time and effort required
First, gathering explicit knowledge takes time and effort. Someone has to write it down in a way that can be stored, shared and accessed.
Your regular way of working might do some of this. Writing plans and reports, for example. However, these rarely capture all the relevant knowledge about a particular topic.
Plus, they only capture the knowledge at a specific moment in time. New knowledge which comes later has to be captured elsewhere.
This is a particular challenge with projects. After a project finishes, you should run a post-launch review with the team. However, these are rare. In the rush to finish a project, people rarely have the energy or motivation to write down their learnings. By the time you get round to a review, some people may have left, and some knowledge has probably been forgotten.
Explicit knowledge management is also hindered by the leadership types who like to “go fast” and “don’t do detail”. We all know them, right? They only read exec summaries and love making snap decisions based on their own (tacit)knowledge. They’re kryptonite for knowledge management. Their egos either ignore previously captured knowledge or completely override it.
These leader types rarely promote or reward explicit knowledge capture. Quite the opposite, in fact. They view anyone who takes the time to write down learnings as somewhat dull and diligent. This demotivates those who want to make their knowledge explicit to benefit others.
Organising and prioritising
Explicit knowledge also has to be organised so that it’s easy for others to find relevant knowledge when they need it.
Knowledge management systems are usually driven by those with a library or IT background, who know how to organise information into a usable structure.
These systems usually use schemas, a term adapted from psychology to show how our brains organise and manage information.
You plan how to structure information so that others can use it. For example, giving website pages titles, categories, tags and links so that when someone searches on a topic, the right results come up.
But someone has to input that “meta” information about the knowledge. Plus, you also need a process to make sure this is done consistently. This is more time and effort and makes capturing explicit knowledge less likely to happen.
Information overload
The final explicit knowledge management challenge is the vast quantity of knowledge to choose from. Information overload has become more common, the more knowledge we can access.
Our brains can store lots of information. But the brain’s “working parts” limit how much information we can handle / process at once.
Our brains’ logical functions which can make the best use of explicit knowledge mostly only work in short bursts as they consume lots of energy.
Instead, the “autopilot” parts of our brain – our emotions and instincts – handle most incoming knowledge first. These parts of our brains focus on easy and obvious knowledge. (Sometimes called WYSIATI – What You See Is All There Is in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. See here for more on this). So it takes a conscious effort to work your way past information overload. And it’s usually easier to just “wing it” with your existing knowledge.
The advantages of tacit knowledge management
Winging it with existing knowledge is a good way to describe tacit knowledge.
We all feel happy doing this as tacit knowledge technically comes from our brain’s emotional centre.
Specifically, our memory (the hippocampus). Because it requires less conscious effort, it’s usually our starting point for managing new knowledge.
In some cases. this is a good thing.
For example, when you need regular, repeated behaviours. We’re not just talking assembly line operators here though. The same thinking applies to actors learning a script or musicians learning a new tune. The script and the sheet of music are “explicit”. However, the artists perform them using their tacit knowledge of the lines or the notes.
Tacit knowledge works best when there’s no time to think about how you do something. It’s about building habits and routines to do things instinctively. To do things fast.
In businesses, this could be the skilled craftsmen in your operations team who know how to make your products to high standards. It might be your agency’s tacit knowledge about how to advertise or build websites to pull in customers.
The key point is that people enjoy using their tacit knowledge. Everyone likes to show that they’re knowledgeable and skilled at doing something. This builds confidence and status. Tacit knowledge gives you a feeling of control and a sense of purpose.
The challenges of tacit knowledge management
Here’s the challenge with tacit knowledge management though.
Because it’s so much easier and enjoyable, it often becomes the only way we manage knowledge.
“Go with what you know”. “Go with your gut”. You hear these a lot, right? Those are all about relying on your tacit knowledge.
But what if your tacit knowledge doesn’t know enough? What if it needs to learn more?
These are logical questions. But because our emotional and instinctive brains are in charge most of the time. we rarely ask ourselves them.
Relying solely on tacit knowledge increases the danger of complacency. It closes our minds to new learning and opportunities. We do the same old, same old, unable to change our ways. This also makes us predictable. In marketing terms, that’s the opposite of what you want as a competitive advantage.
Applying and rewarding knowledge
Smart, brain-led businesses recognise the need for both explicit and tacit knowledge and the need to have them work together.
Creating more explicit knowledge helps you store, share and access knowledge, a process which then spreads more tacit knowledge around your teams.
The challenges for leadership teams are to reduce the barriers to explicit knowledge and encourage the spread of tacit knowledge.
This is usually about people management and information systems. So it sounds like an HR and IT challenge, right? But arguably for all business functions, the better you manage knowledge, the better the ideas you’ll have and the better you’ll perform.
Optimising your knowledge management set-up usually revolves around :-
- Training and development.
- Post-project reviews.
- Job rotation.
- Communities of Practice.
- Leadership role-modelling.
Training and development
You should plan how you’ll train and develop the people who work on your brand.
This can be formal e.g. creating a brand book (e.g. see our brand identity guide) or informal (e.g. brainstorming ideas in an innovation workshop).
After all, brands are just mental models, living in the minds of customers and the people who run them. Training and development help you build the knowledge needed to build better brands.
Post-project reviews
Much marketing work is project-driven. Advertising campaigns. New websites. Innovation launches and packaging development.
Each project usually creates new knowledge. This knowledge can lead to future opportunities. So you need a post-project review process to pull these learnings into your marketing knowledge management system. Be that a filing cabinet of worksheet post-its, or a fully automated and highly organised idea database.
Job rotation
Another practical way to build explicit and tacit knowledge is job rotation. You move people around different roles and functions as part of their career development.
New roles always require some sort of “new” knowledge. So you’re motivated to seek out (explicit) knowledge and put it into action (making it tacit). But you’re also more motivated to share your own tacit knowledge with the person taking your old role (making it explicit). In this way, job rotation programs enable individuals to gather more knowledge and spread it more effectively through the organisation.
Communities of Practice
Another common knowledge management tool to spread knowledge is called a Community of Practice.
These are most often found in larger organisations spread over multiple locations. They connect groups of people who share a common interest in a particular topic. This might be in the form of online forums, regular video calls or events where all those interested come together to discuss the topic.
For example, maybe it’s everyone with an interest in market research. Or innovation. Or digital marketing. You usually appoint a leader or small team to “own” the community of practice. They take the lead in sharing new knowledge and organising meet-ups to discuss the topic.
Leadership role-modelling
Of course, most of all, you need your leadership team to support these knowledge management activities. If they want a business that stores, shares and uses knowledge wisely, they must visibly commit to promoting and rewarding those right types of behaviours.
They should also role model those behaviours themselves. For example, giving up their time to actively support training and development. Getting involved in post-project reviews. Sharing learnings from jobs they’ve rotated through. And being champions and participants in relevant communities of practice.
Conclusion - Knowledge management and marketing - not a contradiction in terms
Knowledge management is a very logical business improvement activity.
However, because it doesn’t have strong emotional or instinctive appeal, and those parts of our brain drive most behaviours, it’s often ignored or forgotten.
Many marketers lean heavily on emotion and instinct. This can make marketing and knowledge management sometimes feel like a contradiction in terms. But it doesn’t have to be like that.
The key is to make knowledge management practices and processes more appealing to our emotions and instincts. To make them feel motivating and worthwhile.
For example, increasing knowledge makes you more confident about how you do your job. Being most confident generally makes you happier in life.
Sharing your knowledge to help others is also very personally rewarding. It takes effort, but it shows a generosity of spirit and goodwill. This usually pays off when you see others applying that knowledge. Or when you’re the recipient of someone else’s shared knowledge.
Great knowledge management benefits everyone because it spreads the power of knowledge far and wide. And that hasn’t changed since Sir Francis Bacon’s time.
Check out our recent logical thinking article for more on this. Or get in touch to learn more about how to get smarter at knowledge management.
Photo credits
Bookshelf : Photo by Jamie Taylor on Unsplash
Girl reading magazine : Photo by Jerry Wang on Unsplash
Woman editing on a Macbook : Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash
Bored in front of computer : Photo by Magnet.me on Unsplash
Person typing on a Macbook : Photo by Thomas Lefebvre on Unsplash
Rope netting : Photo by Clint Adair on Unsplash
Hand / Stop : Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash
Happy woman : Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
Woman covering face under blanket : Photo by Alexandra Gorn on Unsplash
Woman presenting on stage : Photo by Product School on Unsplash
