momorantings

As I only post when something catches my attention, my posting habits are a little sporadic. Sometimes I will write a couple of posts in a week, and other times I will only post once a month. I have been feeling pretty guilty lately about not posting more, but nothing really jumped out at me until very recently. In the past couple of weeks, two things have impacted my work as a marketer--I was extraordinarily fortunate to attend a convening of Black playwrights as part of the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage, and I finally got around to reading Outrageous Fortune , the new report put out by TDF about new play development. Via both contexts, I heard numerous complaints about how institutional theaters market new work. It became clear to me that marketing directors, in some cases, have the ability to kill new work. In Outrageous Fortune , one playwright contends that institutional theaters are "about a certain kind of system...when plays come in, they want to syste...

This week, I went to this place to attend a meeting held under the banner of "taking videogames seriously". Gamers, media types and government ministers were in attendance and the discussion was wide-ranging. I was disappointed that the importance of play as both a learned skill and a creativity stimulant was not touched upon, but it was interesting to hear one insider talk of the "childishness" inherent in the industry's marketing. He was referring specifically to Call Of Duty, the fastest-selling videogame of all time and, in his words, a title that was guaranteed to sell. A title that nevertheless was promoted in a way that successfully pandered to controversy by the inclusion of an airport shoot-out that apparently has nothing to do with the game's narrative. These things happen because selling is simultaneously a sub-set of marketing and also the ultimate goal of all marketing and all business. In an ideal world, you should strive to ensure that your ...

"Don't shoot at other people's targets. Make your own target around where your arrow lands."

I'd guess that most people who read this blog know about Seth Godin. I'd also guess that they'd assume that most people in their field would know too. But if you ask around, you'd be surprised how many people don't. Try it this weekend. It's always good to challenge assumptions and it's also good to realise that achieving great marketing success does not involve the ubiquity for which you're striving and which seems so out of reach. It may be a numbers game, but the numbers aren't as daunting as you might think.

Yesterday, I was invited to a London Business School marketing seminar at which Professor Leonard Lee presented a paper he's co-authored with On Amir and Dan Ariely (of Predictably Irrational fame). There was a lot of arcane discussion about statistical error and its constituent parts (an hour in, we were still debating the introductory slides). But the upshot was further confirmation that people make more consistent choices when they are emotionally rather than cognitively stimulated. In marketing terms, that means you will invoke greater loyalty if you can engage your customers emotionally. In turn, that has led to companies trying to evoke warm emotional reactions while barely mentioning their product/service and potential customers gawping incomprehendingly. The really difficult part is generating an emotional reaction that is irrevocably tied to your product/service. It can't be an afterthought. It has to be intrinsic to everything you do.

Yesterday's Jon Stewart Show did a nice send-up of following the newest trends in trendspotting. They nailed it with the term Nowcasting - the act of presenting as about to happen, something that is already happening. Trends are important of course, but too many people pay too much attention to the predictions for this year. They may happen, they may not but, even if they do, it's too late for you to catch that particular ship. Far better to look at what's predicted to happen in five or ten years time and incrementally future-proof your business for all eventualities.

Just before Christmas, I was shown some tree decorations. They were the physical representations of the recipients’ use of doppler, last.fm and flickr. They were lovely and widely appreciated, but I was also very aware that I couldn’t easily decode them. A few weeks later, in Ben’s write-up of them, he mentioned Matt Jones’s assertion that data visualisations need to be “glanceable”, i.e. comprehended at a glance. That’s a great description and one that deserves further investigation. How does something become glanceable? Three elements immediately spring to mind. For something to be truly glanceable, the viewer must intuitively have an understanding of: 1) the context (what is being presented) 2) what the data means (how it's being presented), and arguably 3) how it relates to other data (why it's being presented). The central role of intuitiveness in data visualisation is obvious but, I think, it should also be applied to the design of all your products/services. After all, ...

From the sublime to the ridiculous. Next up in the back to basics series, I'm delighted to present the birkenstock-clad Robert Campbell - a man who makes up in original thinking and humanity for what he may lack in urbane dress-sense. Robert is co-creator of the cynic advertising empire, a provocative irritant to the rest of that industry and runs a new venture called Sunshine in Hong Kong. He swears a lot, has won many awards and, as with Seth, he's someone whom I initially met and shared ideas with online, but came to know in real life too. His terrific answers approach the questions not only from the perspective of someone who runs his own business but also as someone who solves marketing problems for others. Here they are. How do you get new business? In my experience, the ad industry tends to lose about 30% of its revenue annually so they need to continually fight for new business just to stand still. When we started cynic, we thought this was a mad situation to be in s...

Back in 2000, I downloaded the two hundred pages that constituted Seth Godin's brilliant Permission Marketing . Since then I've had the pleasure of attending his seminars and talks, and when I started blogging he generously warned his readers of that fact . He writes shorter books these day and his new one Linchpin is published this month. It's about answering the crucial question of how you make yourself the linchpin of your market and/or your company. That ties in directly with the ethos of my "back to basics" questionnaire and I'm thrilled that he agreed to answer these five questions as well. How do you get new business? New business gets me. This sounded unattainable to me for decades as I scrambled, often one check away from bankruptcy, to build a business, a product, an organization... but then, after a while, I discovered that people would contact me asking for this or that. The hard work isn't getting them to call, the hard work is breaking away...