What’s stopping many organizations from innovating their marketing? I don’t think it’s the “there’s no way to measure it yet” argument that is often used as a reason not to change.

In discussions about Marketing 2.0  most of we early adopters  tend to talk about the value of doing things differently, point to successful company examples, and maybe even get into conversations about how easy it is to get started.

Yet there’s an elephant in most conference rooms easy to overlook. Fear.

I was in a meeting this week with an organization that has seen its product sales decline 40 percent since 2001. The marketing team thought that maybe they should change their media mix, fine tune  messages, and then get creative and do a few viral videos, maybe hire some buzz agents.

Politely hijacking the meeting, I refocused the group on their customers’ value expectations and service experiences,  and then opened up a conversation about how to connect with customers in new Marketing 2.0 ways. The conversation got very animated in a positive way, with people clearly seeing how to link new approaches with a more focused strategy. Fantastic.

Wrapping up I suggested we list next steps to begin the 2.0 makeover. The room got kind of quiet. No one was saying much. The marketing director finally said, “Maybe we need more time to think about this. These would be very big changes to what we’ve been doing for many years. ”

Later that day I called the marketing director and asked what was getting in the way.

“I’m afraid that our board might not buy into this,” he confessed. “What if we stopped the TV advertising and sales went down even more than they already are? I really need to get consensus.”

Similarly after a Marketing 2.0 workshop with a major intellectual property law firm, one of the partners said while he liked the program, he wished we had spent 3/4 of the time talking about how to overcome obstacles.

What I’m learning (the hard way): spend as much time figuring out how to burn down the obstacles (aka fears) as on discussing the value of Marketing 2.0.