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    Fresh Eggs & Flying Lessons
    Fresh Eggs & Flying Lessons
    Fresh Eggs & Flying Lessons
    Ebook175 pages2 hours

    Fresh Eggs & Flying Lessons

    By Mark Sareff

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    About this ebook

    This e-book is intended as a mentoring piece - for anyone interested in Brands, Marketing and Communication. It contains 70 of the most popular articles enjoyed in over 80 countries on the FlyingSeraph blog.
    They’re short pieces, bite-size mental snacks really, based on real-world experience - typically no more than 3 minutes apiece.
    Each is ideal as the basis for a discussion in the workplace or a tutorial in an education setting.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMark Sareff
    Release dateAug 14, 2017
    ISBN9781370744671
    Fresh Eggs & Flying Lessons

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    • 5/5
      Great book on imaginative advertising. it has an universal appeal. anyone remotely related to advertising must read it.

    Book preview

    Fresh Eggs & Flying Lessons - Mark Sareff

    Introduction

    This e-book is intended as a mentoring piece - for anyone interested in Brands, Marketing and Communication. It contains 70 of the most popular articles enjoyed in over 80 countries on the Flying Seraph blog.

    They’re short pieces, bite-size mental snacks really, based on real-world experience - typically no more than 3 minutes apiece.

    Each is ideal as the basis for a discussion in the workplace or a tutorial in an education setting.

    I hope you find inspiration and ideas to help make your Brand fly - at the very least, to protect you from having any unoriginal accidents!

    Do you know the 2 fundamental laws of Marketing?

    I’d imagine at least 50% of the world’s marketers were reared on Professor Kotler’s books – prescribed reading at a huge number of Universities. The primary course text when I taught 2nd and 3rd year students.

    I’m stunned when I talk about the 2 fundamental laws of Marketing – a Kotler idea – and get blank looks.

    This post will necessarily be short - the concept is very tight and needs little expansion beyond reminding folk who’ve forgotten.

    Here they are:

    The law of slow learning: People take a while to learn a new concept. For it to become a part of System 1 (the brain’s autopilot) it may take a few uses of a product or service and perhaps a few exposures to communication.

    If we layer the increased ‘noise’ people are trying to opt out of, and fragmentation, this law teaches us to persevere. At minimum, a reminder that ideas wear out in our boardrooms way faster than in ‘consumer-land’.

    The law of fast forgetting: Most people don’t give a damn – about your company, your brand, or your campaign. Most of the time they’re not trying to create a relationship with you or your products and services. In fact, most of the time, they’d prefer to opt out. Prefer not to think. Prefer not to have us trying to ‘engage’ them.

    It follows in the case of the vast majority of brands, products, services and campaigns, that they are here today and forgotten tomorrow.

    Consider what they’re up against. They’re competing for attention with life. Life in all its richness. With all its really important things. Against this, most brands and campaigns are trivial and not deserving of mental storage space.

    The 2 laws, taken together, call for impactful ideas. Ideas that resonate strongly within the broader context of life and the culture. Reinforced - as good relationships are – by the right amount of relevant contact.

    If there were a ‘Maslow’ hierarchy of Marketing thinking, these 2 laws would form the bottom layer, in my view.

    All the tricks, techniques and nuances are for naught if you forget (or were never taught) these two fundamental and sobering guidelines.

    Why data won’t get you very far

    W. Edwards Deming was a remarkable man. Often called the ‘original data scientist’.

    So it feels right, in one sense, to see so many people post, ‘like’, Tweet and otherwise share the following (attributed to him):

    Without data you’re just another person with an opinion.

    In this highly ‘sciencified’ era, we feel compelled to measure everything. Rushing to prove we’re all logical, rational folk. We’re smart. We’re grounded. We think. We don’t rush to judgment.

    For those promoting data and the scientific approach, Deming’s words provide great support and comfort.

    Yet I can’t help believing that publishing and promoting this quote is well-meaning, but only a half-truth (i.e. not good enough for a court).

    You see Deming also said this:

    The most important things cannot be measured.

    And this:

    The most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable….

    If I wanted to be mischievous – which I do enjoy – I’d say, on the evidence, he is saying that data is necessary but insufficient.

    I worry far less about justification.

    I’m far more interested in anticipation and imagination - the possibilities…

    I see data far more as an after-the-fact explanation. Like most research I’m involved with, most data I’m exposed to is a rear view mirror.

    Don’t get me wrong. I love a clear explanation of ‘what has been’ or ‘what is’.

    It’s just that I care far more about ‘what could be’.

    That is the domain of imagination and creativity. It’s the realm of gut feel, intuition and possibility. Data will play a part (Informed gut feel, perhaps.). But compared to the value of conjecture and speculation, its role in making genuine breakthrough – as opposed to tinkering and optimising – is pretty small. Sometimes downright obstructive.

    Any doubt? Here is but one example:

    Akio Morita ran Sony. He was told that people in Sony Walkman focus groups couldn’t possibly imagine why they’d want to carry their music around with them (data). No need for this type of product. Thankfully, he trusted his gut. Told his people to press on. Gave the world the Walkman and, indirectly the iPod.

    In the non-commercial sphere, I often wonder why – when we can analyse music and reveal its mathematical heart – has data science not given us a new Beethoven? When we can subject text to rigorous scientific scrutiny – why don’t we have a machine that writes with the elegance and beauty of Shakespeare? When we can deconstruct Picasso scientifically, where is our Picasso algorithm?

    My suggestion is this:

    If you really like the Deming saying about data and opinion, that’s fine. As long as you balance it – as he did – with his ‘important things can’t be measured’ saying.

    I’d far prefer you follow this Bill Bernbach quote:

    We are so busy listening to statistics we forget we can create them.

    Or this – also from Bernbach:

    Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

    Sir Martin Sorrell got it right many years ago. In a paper for the IPA called ‘Beans and Pearls’ he explained that he hired extraordinarily imaginative people to produce pearls. He confined himself to counting the resulting beans.

    And that, folks, is the sequence in which to use the 2 Deming quotes: first imagine, then measure. Have an opinion, then test.

    Whatever you do, don’t fool yourself into believing data takes precedence over imagination, gut feel or opinion.

    Don’t dismiss opinion, imagination, intuition, pet theory merely because the data hasn’t got there yet.

    Where have all the dreamers gone?

    Eddie Hart was my dream CEO.

    He barged into my office one day when I worked in Marketing demanding to know: ‘Why, whenever I walk past your door, do I never see your feet on your desk?’

    I was mid-twenties. He was a really daunting bloke. I had no idea where his line of thinking was going.

    He followed that with: You’re infinitely more valuable to us if you spend your time with your feet up daydreaming. That’s what I really pay you for.

    I’m horrified by how much the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction.

    Frankly, I’ve had a gutful of hearing that Marketing folk don’t belong at the boardroom table. That they’re ‘fluffy’. Dreamers. That today’s marketers need to be far more left-brained (if you subscribe to left brain/right brain).

    This is utter nonsense.

    I’ve had the great fortune to work with truly inspirational marketers – like Austin McGhie at Kellogg, Paul O’Brien at Warner-Lambert, David Thomason at MLA, Peter Bush at McDonalds, Don Meij at Domino’s and Joe Saad (who ran Weight Watchers). The analytical stuff - piece of cake. Strength of character - there in spades. Far more importantly, they had courage, empathy, fertile imaginations and faith in their own gut-feel - damn good right-brains.

    Stay with me a wee bit longer, please, and you’ll see where I’m going with this:

    A few years back, the Financial Times reported that: ‘The average British and American company is valued by the stock market at around twice net balance sheets. Brand rich companies are valued by the stock market at four times net assets.’

    The crucial difference between a product (the rational/functional bit we deliver) and a brand (rational + emotional) is the ‘fluffy stuff’. The intangible, non-rational - sometimes will o’ the wisp - component doesn’t come from analytical thinking but from creativity, imagination, intuition, empathy.

    The ‘fluffy stuff’ has huge economic benefit. It creates and sustains margin and doubles shareholder value. So it follows we need more, not less of these so-called ‘fluffy’ people - right at the very heart of the organisation where margin and shareholder value are created.

    It’s time for the pendulum to swing back the other way. Let’s identify, nurture and promote the dreamers - they will create value for the left-brainers to count.

    Walking it in: what we simply must learn from the Army

    Out on the battlefield where it is often literally ‘rocket science’ (nothing as trivial as our Marketing world) the artillery guys use a technique they call ‘walking it in’.

    If we’re to make breakthroughs regularly – by design, not just good fortune - we need to learn from them.

    Here’s how it works: they fire a few shells, watch where they land, re-calibrate the weapons and fire again – more accurately each time. Actually, if you think about it, that’s precisely how Angry Birds works.

    And it’s the way we need to re-frame the idea development process. Old-timers like me, you see, were taught this sequence: Ready, Aim, Fire. I grew up believing that you gather a whole load of facts, suspicions, pet theories and hypotheses, distil and polish like crazy until perfect and then (and only then) do you think about execution.

    I recently had the great privilege of attending d.School at Stanford. Their Design Thinker program (taught with IDEO) breaks that model. Instead, you’re taught Ready, Fire, Aim - the same technique used by armies worldwide. It’s a far nimbler process of generating multiple options, testing them rapidly and cheaply, and building in order to learn fast (and abandon dead ends fast).

    Come to think of it, the word strategy comes from the military – it meant ‘army general’ in Greek. Not a bad idea, then, for modern strategists to follow the modern military. How do you feel about ‘walking it in’?

    Eeny-meeny-miny-moe

    There’s a peculiar gravity trap in most

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