Mum's the word

In the UK we have recently had Mothers’ Day.

Or Mothering Sunday to give it its traditional name.

But Mothering Sunday has nothing to do with mothers.

That is quite a recent development.

And a commercial one.

But Mothering Sunday started off in the 16^th century as a religious festival on the fourth Sunday of Lent.

And was the day when people returned to their mother church.

They went ‘a-mothering’.

Later it became the day when domestic servants and others would be given a day off prior to Easter to visit their mother church with their own mothers and other family members.

It was often the only time when whole families could gather together.

Servants were not given free days on other occasions.

And conflicting working hours meant that opportunities were rare for families to get together.

It was such a special occasion that the austere rules of Lent were relaxed to allow families to celebrate with delicacies known as simnel cakes.

And in some areas Mothering Sunday was also known as Simnel Sunday.

But with the demise of domestic servants by the early part of the 20^th century the ancient traditions of Mothering Sunday had begun to fall into disuse.

Until Anna Jarvis, in America, began her campaign to make Mother’s Day a recognised holiday, to honour her own mother and ‘the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world’.

In 1914 the President created Mother’s Day as a national holiday to honour mothers.

And this new tradition, fuelled by the commercial instincts of gift and card manufacturers, rapidly took off.

Indeed the speed with which it attracted commercial interest and became misinterpreted so angered Anna Jarvis that she tried to rescind the Presidential Decree.

For her Mothers’ Day was about sentiment not profit.

Her idea had been adopted and adapted.

There is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come.

And it soon crossed the Atlantic.

To be merged with the older religious tradition of Mothering Sunday.

Mothering Sunday had evolved into Mothers’ Day.

It was now about mothers. No longer about paying a visit to the Mother Church.

It had moved from the religious to the secular.

From theology to commerce via sentiment.

It had adapted and evolved and acquired meaning like any brand does.

To stay relevant and distinctive and credible.

Like Nokia which started out as a pulp mill before moving onto make rubber products.

Like Nintendo, originally a playing card company.

Like Shell, which began life as an antiques and collectibles shop specialising in decorative shells imported from the Far East.

Like Mothering Sunday.

Still relevant, credible and distinctive today.

My unreasonably fair lady

Ask anyone to name an Irish author and you might get Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. And

not much else.

But if you were to ask the Man on the Clapham Omnibus to name anything written by Shaw you might get ‘My Fair Lady’.

It wasn’t.

That was Lerner and Loewe.

But he did write ‘Pygmalion’, the play on which the musical is based.

His name might be famous but famous for what.

Yet this was a man who wrote more than 60 plays.

Including ‘Man and Superman’, ‘Arms and the man’, ‘Major Barbara’, and ‘Saint Joan’.

And he is the only person to have been awarded a Nobel Prize (for literature) and an Oscar (for best adapted screenplay) for his film adaptation of his play ’Pygmalion’.

He had nothing to do with ‘My Fair Lady’ which appeared 3 years after his death.

But Shaw was far more than a playwright.

He wanted to change society, not through revolution, but through a gradual promotion of socialism.

He was a leading light in the Fabian Society which became the foundation philosophy of the Labour Party

He was a man of vision and championed many causes unpopular at the time but which we now take for granted.

He wanted to change society, to change the world, to make it a better place.

A man determined to leave his thumbprint on the world around him.

He spoke for a woman’s right to vote which begat Margaret Thatcher.

He promoted universal healthcare which begat the NHS.

He championed a minimum wage which begat the Living Wage, a cause now taken up by George Osborne.

And he sought the abolition of hereditary privilege which begat the introduction of Life Peers.

He helped establish the London School of Economics.

After death he even funded a new alphabet, the Shavian Alphabet, to address the vagaries of English spelling.

He was not a man to accept the world as it was.

He wanted a better world, a different world. He wanted society, the world to change, to progress. And he would use his skills as a writer, as an essayist and a lecturer to bring this about.

But his most impactful words appear in ‘Maxims for Revolutionaries’ in ‘Man and Superman’:

‘The reasonable adapts himself to the conditions around him. The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man’

You might describe these words as at the heart of Shaw’s approach to life.

And a philosophy adopted at great personal cost by Rosa Parks to end segregation in America; by Nelson Mandela to end apartheid; even by Tim Berners Lee to improve our lives through the World Wide Web.

This has to be the most important quote in the world. Ever. For anyone wanting to challenge and change.

And that is why it behoves us all to be unreasonable. To adapt the world to ourselves. In everything we do.

How unreasonable are you going to be today?

Hold your horses

In 1942 Britain after 3 years of war was almost on its knees.

Since 1940 it had been fighting Germany on its own.  And although the USA and Russia had now joined in, it was still having to fight and resist on three fronts.

In Europe. In the Middle East. In the Far East.

As a consequence Britain was facing a manpower crisis. It was under pressure to find more fit men of fighting age for its army, navy and air force.

Without taking too many men from vital war industries.

To find the men it needed the War Ministry initiated a review of everything it did to identify duplicated and needless tasks.

This is the kind of thing that today many businesses hire expensive consultants to do to strip out costs.

One of the activities reviewed was the manpower requirements needed to fire a field gun.

The study concluded that it required four trained artillery men to do this.

And yet each battery contained five men.

No one knew why each battery was fully staffed with five. But the commanders insisted that each battery required five men because that was the standard artillery doctrine, the way it had always been done.

With equal adamance those doing the research argued that only four were needed.

A stalemate ensued between the advocates of the status quo and the advocates of progressiveness.

Until some eagle-eyed subaltern identified the reason for the extra man.

For centuries artillery had been taken into battle by horses.

And on the battlefield someone was required to hold onto the horses so that they did not flee when the cannons started noisily to fire.

This was the role of the fifth man.

There was only one problem.

In the years between World War 1 and World War 2 virtually all the horse drawn artillery units had been mechanised. Artillery was no longer taken into battle by horses. There was no longer any horses  to hold. There was no need for a fifth man.

This was a sacred cow.

But it is not just in the military that you will find dogged logic, persistent thinking. Many brands, many businesses share these traits.

A common set of beliefs can be a strength for any brand but having a dominant logic can lock the brand into a narrow way of thinking. And can lead to group think.

This is not good.

We need to develop and systemise an uncommon sense. A different way at looking at the business and its markets.  New thinking to provide competitive advantage.

But to get there requires the sacred cows, the common assumptions of the business and the market in which it operates to be identified, challenged, tested and destroyed.

And by discarding the sacred cows when examination exposes them to be untrue, a brand can liberate itself.

Sam Walton was once told that you don’t place ‘good sized discount stores into little one horse towns’. He did.

And he credited his success to his destruction of this market assumption, this sacred cow.

So what are the things that you never question or challenge in your business, in the markets you serve?

Making a list of these will be a start.

To ensure you are not the one left holding the horses.

Stuff your face

How many hot dogs can you eat in 12 minutes?

Believe it or not the World Record is 62.

Every year there is a contest to determine the fastest speed eater of hot dogs. The challenge is to see who can eat the most hot dogs in 12 minutes.

For years and years the record had steadily crept up, one hot dog at a time.

By 2000 the record stood at 25 hot dogs. Still impressive.

The technique adopted by most competitors had stayed the same year after year.

It was simple.

To stuff as many hot dogs as greedily and as quickly into the mouth as possible.

Presumably he or she with the biggest mouth won.

In the early years of the new Millennium a new face had come onto the scene. He adopted a new approach.

For Takeru Kobayashi it was not just about speed. It was about breaking down the approach and seeking improvements across the technique.

Instead of eating the hot dog whole, he tried breaking it in half. He found that it gave him more options for chewing, and freed his hands to improve loading.

Then he experimented with eating the dog and bread separately.

Next he tested dipping the rolls in water, then water sprinkled with vegetable oil, then he videotaped his training sessions. All designed to help find new ways to eat a hot dog as quickly as possible.

Finally he looked to find different ways of chewing and swallowing to create space in his stomach in order to avoid vomiting.

In 2000 when he first turned up to compete he didn’t look the part. He was slight and short, unlike his supersized competitors who had been gorging on hot dogs for years.

He wasn't taken seriously at first.

But he smashed the competition and the world record out of sight, eating an incredible 50 hot dogs.

In one year he had doubled the world record.

This thinking, this approach is called Marginal Gains Theory.

Where the little things matter.

Where by looking for continuous improvement across all the small things we do, we can create a cumulative effect that can be significant and substantive.

And by breaking down the process and the thinking into its constituent parts we can find new ways of thinking, new approaches, to the challenge. Finding marginal gains as we go.

Each gain might be small but the cumulative effective can be revolutionary. Transformative.

All it requires is a creative and marginal gain mindset and the will to challenge established ways of doing things.

And if it can work in improving hot dog performance, it can work in improving marketing performance.

Where are your marginal gains?

Be brief to be creative

After a few months away I am delighted to be back.

So let us start with a short story about creativity.

In some people’s eyes Ernest Hemingway is America’s finest writer. He certainly liked to be at the centre of the action. This is what makes his writing a great read.

When America entered World War 1 he enlisted immediately and was sent to Italy. On his first day he was dragging shredded bodies away after an explosion.

Later he was seriously hurt by mortar fire suffering serious shrapnel wounds to both legs. He feared that he might never walk again.

His experiences of war, life and death inspired his novel, ‘A Farewell to Arms’.

He was sent as a journalist to cover the Spanish Civil War which he did from the front lines. If there was a battle or a war you could bet Hemingway would be there.

His time in Spain inspired ‘Death in the Afternoon’ and ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’.

In World War 2 he was present at the Normandy landings, fought his way through France, was there at the liberation of Paris, and covered the Battle of the Bulge.

He won a Bronze Star.

His Big Game hunting experiences in Africa, when he nearly died, inspired ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’.

And in 1954 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He was an author. A journalist. A soldier. A real life Action Man.

And yet the piece of literature he considered his finest consists of 6 words.

In the 1920s he was challenged by some literary friends to compose a short story with no more than six words.

The result.

‘For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.’

Which only goes to show that creativity and innovation does not require much.

Indeed it might be said that less is more when it comes to creativity and imagination and innovation.

Creative thinking is far more likely when there are restraints and constraints in place.

Restraints and constraints forces people to step back. To look at the big picture. And make connections between ideas, concepts, stuff they might not otherwise make.

This is the hallmark of creativity. And the way I believe creativity and innovation should be uncovered.

The tighter the brief the better the output.

The less time, the less money, the less resources we have at our disposal, the better the solution we can come up with, provided we think things through properly.

Too often in an effort to cover every base, to ensure we include everything, to quite literally throw the kitchen sink at a problem, we can fail to focus our thinking.

Great strategic thinking, brilliant marketing, is about deciding what not to do, who not to target, what not to say, as much as it is about deciding what to do, who to target, what to say.

And it is about looking hard for connections and opportunities that might not be as apparent if resources are in abundance.

If you have no constraints, impose some, and see where your thinking takes you.

You never know, you might just come up with a Nobel Prize winning solution.

 

Respect.....

David Ogilvy once famously said ‘the customer isn’t stupid, she is your wife’. So would you call your wife ‘a punter’?  I very much doubt it.

And yet too often in many businesses there is a tendency not only to consider customers as stupid, as morons, as cash cows. Look at the recent furore over the launch of England’s World Cup strip to see how prospective customers think they are being treated by Nike.

But not only are customers seen in this light but there is a tendency to refer to customers as ‘punters’. I so hate that term for the people who pay our wages. And if anyone doubts this consider what Henry Ford said ‘it is not the employer who pays our wages..we only handle the money..it is the customer who pays our wages’.

Surely then we should treat these very important people with more respect.

According to the OED  a punter is a prostitute’s client. Is that how we think of ourselves? As a prostitute doing anything we can to make some money? Hardly a noble profession.

Alternatively a punter is a person ‘who gambles, places a bet or makes a risky investment’. Do we really think that someone who buys our brand is making a bet or doing some risky? Surely the brand is more confident and self-assured than that?

So we would not refer to our wives as ‘punters’.  Surely we do not see our profession as akin to prostitution. And nor do we would consider anyone buying our brand as doing something risky.

Therefore it is not appropriate to call our customers ‘punters’.

So let us show due respect and deference to those who buy our brands, our products and services, and let us call them customers.

And maybe then we might stop thinking of them as stupid. 

You do the maths...

Last week I was in conversation with a young business school student I know who was specialising in marketing. Consequently he was less keen on the financial and accounting aspects of his course. He was rather surprised that despite his indifference to the numbers he was still getting ok marks in these papers.

This attitude is wrong.

Marketing and finance are not mutually exclusive concepts. It is important that marketers of all ages get the financial aspects of the business.

For one thing marketing is all about profitably meeting customer needs. How can you do this if you don’t understand the financials behind the proposition that is being marketed?

And for another thing marketers hoping to reach a general management position and even the board, and some marketers can and do reach such exalted positions, must have an understanding of the business model of the business in which they work and its commercial drivers, including the financials.

And lastly it is no use any marketer bemoaning that the finance people don’t understand marketing. Make them understand. And just like making any foreigner understand what you are saying, it helps so much if you speak their language.

And that is why marketers must learn to understand, appreciate and love the numbers. You will be a much better marketer if you do. And it really is not that difficult.

And if anyone wants to better understand the importance of being able to read the books. Watch ‘Dragons Den’. The one thing that lets anyone with a great and innovative idea down? They don’t get the numbers. Brilliant idea, brilliant marketing, brilliant sales but no idea how to monetise the marketing and make money.

So don’t give up on the numbers. You never know when they might come in handy.