Decide To Misuse It.

While explaining their new customised newspaper business, Russell presciently observed that what they were saying to the industry was

"We've broken your business model, now give us your machines."

I was reminded of this last week during a presentation by an architect from Zaha Hadid's company. He was explaining how he had borrowed some CGI software to automatically generate a variety of ways to populate a piece of land with buildings. It was largely incomprehensible to me, but it seemed to work. And then he threw away this line.

"We just decided to misuse it."

Marketing is all too often about using tools, be that direct mail or a television campaign. The real skill is deciding how to use or misuse them.

That's something that's going to be increasingly true at a strategic level too. If the tools of your trade are the tools of a failing business model, you have no choice but to misuse them.

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