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Aaron Shields
“When people appear to be something other than good and decent, it is only because they are reacting to stress, pain, or the deprivation of basic human needs such as security, love, and self-esteem.
The greater our need for food or safety or affection or self-esteem, the more we will see and treat the items of reality, including ourselves and other people, in accordance with their respective abilities to facilitate or obstruct the satisfaction of that need. Laboring under the effects of deficiency motivation is like looking at the world through a clouded lens, and removing those effects is like replacing the clouded lens with a clear one. Self-actualizing persons’ contact with reality is simply more direct. And along with this unfiltered, unmediated directness of their contact with reality comes also a vastly heightened ability to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy, however stale those experiences may have become for others.
Practically every serious description of the ‘authentic person’ extant implies that such a person, by virtue of what he has become, assumes a new relation to his society and indeed, to society in general. He not only transcends himself in various ways; he also transcends his/her own culture.”
Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being
We hope you have a great independence day with your friends and family.
It’s only the second movie to ever pass the $500 million mark, with Dan Fellman, Warner Brothers’ head of distribution, predicting that it will end up taking in somewhere between $530 and $550 million.
Critics trying to figure out why The Dark Knight has been so successful have come up with a series of rational, and seemingly plausible reasons why the movie is so popular. But, frankly, I don’t buy any rationalization I’ve seen.
Some claim it has to with the fact that it was Heath Ledger’s last movie. But, Ledger was never a box office superstar. The Dark Knight has made more money than all of Ledger’s other movies combined. And, it’s not even his last film. He has a role in next year’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, and I’ll bet that film won’t be a box office smash.
Some claim it has to do with Heath Ledger’s performance. But when have great performances translated into big box office money?
Some claim it has to do with director Chris Nolan reinvigorating the Batman franchise. But, Batman Begins grossed less than Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman.
Some claim a combination of these factors is responsible. That’s reasonable, but I think something much more interesting lurks below the blockbuster surface: The Dark Knight taps into the power of archetypes in a very accessible way—a combination I’ve yet to see as clearly demonstrated in any other film. It was even evident in the trailers.
And, I have no doubt that the heavy archetypal atmosphere was intended by Nolan: in Batman Begins Jonathan Crane, a Jungian analyst and the alter ego of the villain Scarecrow, explains that people often externalize their inner demons, in his case in the form of the scarecrow.
It’s hard to imagine a supervillain that is a closer manifestation of evil chaos than the Joker. The Joker, in Jungian terms, is Batman’s shadow. The shadow is irrational, and is the repressed side of a persona, containing things that, if they became conscious, contradict the way an individual believes himself to be.
The Joker is chaotic, acting without rationality, he embodies the forces that Batman tries to repress. If Batman were to let them manifest, he could easily become as evil as any villain. In trying to take down the Joker, Batman is afraid of becoming too much like the Joker, not willing to let the shadow through as conquering the shadow impulses and falling prey to them are equally likely.
This struggle between Batman and the Joker, two sides of one personality, is at the heart of the movie, and at the heart of all the trailers.
In the end, Harvey Dent’s transformation into Two-Face shows what happens when one gives in and becomes the victim of the shadow’s impulses. He has two faces, one is his normal persona and the other is the shadow. He is the synthesis of Batman and the Joker, were Batman not able to confront the irrational evil inside. After Two-Face dies, Batman must allow himself to embody some of the evil aspects without giving into them, to lift the burden from Harvey Dent, who couldn’t contain his shadow impulses, and save Gotham’s soul.
And what does this have to do with marketing? If you’ve read my article on Archetypal Branding, you know I’m a big proponent of discovering the archetype inside your brand. The Dark Knight embraced the idea of the shadow archetype, and in doing so depicted the internal struggle all humans experience with their darker side. It spoke to a deep, undeniable aspect of the human condition. This is what all great archetypes do.
Archetypes energize your brand and tap deep into your customers’ relationship with your brand. They pass beyond a rational, surface level, and get to the heart of the emotional relationship with your brand. They speak subconsciously to your customers about what it means to be human—about what it means to be them.
And yes, as The Dark Knight shows, embracing archetypes and delivering them in a way that can be easily understood by your customers can be profitable.
Dr. Michael DeBakey was a god-like figure in the world of surgery, he performed in the neighborhood of 60,000 surgeries, invented over 50 medical instruments, had a pioneering role in developing the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) units, the artificial heart, as well as a slew of other surgical techniques.
As a 23-year-old medical student he invented the roller pump, a critical component to the heart and lung machine that makes open-heart surgery possible. In developing this pump, DeBakey couldn’t find any useful device in the medical literature, so he went to the library and started studying pumps of various formats created over the past 2000 years. He found his solution in the 19th century.
He also developed a type of ventricular assist device (VAD)—a device that replaces partial function of a failing heart—which isn’t particularly surprising taken in the context of his other achievements, except he invented it in his 90s.
Dr. DeBakey’s achievements are astounding, but the thing I find most fascinating about him is a comment by Dr. Sanjay Gupta in a blog post about DeBakey’s passing: when DeBakey was asked what accounted for his inventiveness he attributed it to reading one new book a week, even reading the Encyclopedia Britannica when he was younger.
This was striking in light of how many people claim that they don’t have time to read. A 2005 Gallup poll reported that only half of all Americans read more than five books a year; yet, according to a 2006 Nielsen Media Research study, the average American watches four hours and thirty-five minutes of television each day. There isn’t a lack of time to read, the time is just diverted elsewhere. And, surely if the greatest living surgeon had time to read, anyone does.
The majority of people who claim they don’t have time to read tend to be bogged down in the daily grind of their work, from entry-level positions to the executive level. They get stuck in the execution; they confuse busyness with effectiveness. It’s not surprising that these types feel they don’t have time to read: they are caught in a web of constant doing—it seems like hard work.
The Nobel-prize-winning structural biologist Max Perutz once said of James Watson, one of the co-discovers of the structure of DNA, “Jim never made the mistake of confusing hard work with hard thinking.”
And look where hard, effective thinking got Watson and DeBakey. And, they both read, a lot.
This quest to learn isn’t just characteristic of great scientific minds, it’s also characteristic of great business leaders. Howard Schultz went searching for the future of the Starbucks business, and found it in the cafes of Italy; Sam Walton made frequent trips to all of his stores to see what was working and what wasn’t and how he could use it to improve the business of WalMart; and, Oprah has transformed her love for knowledge into empowerment for her devoted fans through Oprah’s Book Club.
Reading books are not only a great way to learn but also a great way to extract yourself from the web of busyness and can provide valuable insight for many dimensions of your life.
So, next time you feel busy, sit down, read a book and reflect. How can the ideas change your business? How can they change your life?
Every marketing company has the answer. But, solutions to marketing problems aren’t simple 2+2=4 answers.
Solutions to marketing problems can be like learning acting—Sanford Meisner, one of the greatest acting teachers of the 20th century, would sometimes expel students from his class, not because they were bad actors and didn’t have a chance in the field, but because he knew he wasn’t the right teacher for them.
Solutions to marketing problems can be like purchasing a suit—there’s a world of difference between the look of a suit worn right off the rack and one tailored to and individual’s specifications. Great solutions to marketing problems involve a combination of finding an approach that can be sold into your company and at the same time adapting whatever approach is used to the needs of the organization.
Yet, most companies do neither. Almost every company I’ve worked with has binders of studies from different firms that are cookie-cutter in approach, often with clever “custom-tailored” names that describe different demographic groups that they never implement. I often wonder how much time was wasted in naming the groups rather than solving the problems that they were hired to solve, like why customers choose them over their competitors and what they can do to amplify the relationship. And on top of that, these marketing firms think their solution will work for every company.
Finding an approach that works
So, what qualities make a marketing approach successful and, more importantly, useable?
First, establish a foundation you can build a unique house on for your customers instead of already-finished houses where the only options are different floors, windows, and doors. You need an approach, a belief system, to solving marketing problems without having a preconceived notion about what the answer should be or what form it should take.
Second, understand the organization’s world. Is your approach something that the client’s organization can actually use? Sometimes, the nature of an organization and its beliefs, right or wrong, about how an organization should work may preclude your type of solution. Don’t be afraid to tell them no.
Third, given the organization’s approach, what possible forms can your solution take? You need to provide the results in a box the organization is comfortable playing in.
Finally, never be satisfied. I remember a series of science articles that built up a case for the mechanism behind the union of a sperm and an egg. Paper after paper built up “proof” for the mechanism, which assumed two specific chemicals were on one of the compounds. Everything seemed sure, until one group of scientists ran the compound through a mass spectrometer, a device that assists in determining the composition of the compound, and discovered that neither of the chemicals was present.
Most marketers would have been content to stop at the first study that seemed to prove the point. Few would have made it into the second or third study. I doubt any would have made it as far as the scientists did.
Leaving room for doubt
Marketers would do well to model themselves after scientists and listen to one of the greatest mind of the 20th century, the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman:
The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darned sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize the ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty—some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.
All four criteria for developing effective marketing solutions could really be reduced to this: never be sure that one answer is the only answer, or even the right one; don’t be afraid to doubt yourself; don’t be afraid to move away from the tried and “true”; and never lose your curiosity.
The ultimate goals of business should never change. But business doesn’t operate in a bubble and the solutions will need to change over time. Finding a solid foundation that works inside your organization will give you a place to start from that, with ingenuity and hard work, will always assist in leading you where you need to go.
Remain curious: don’t settle for the answer of today. Settle for the search of tomorrow’s solution. Let your foundation be your guide, without letting it determine your destination.
Last night I gazed into my psychic crystal ball and discovered a popular trend: creating new names, words, and phrases to describe things that we already have words to describe. It’s as if the old words have lost their meaning and we need to give them a hip-hoperation to imbue them with a new sense of relevancy.
But do we really need to create new words?
Or, do we just need to reacquaint ourselves with things we already know? I’m going with the latter.
But, wait! Before you freak out and say we really do need to give marketing terminology some Shakespearization, let me just say, “Don’t have a Purple Cow man!” No seriously, don’t.
After all, what is a Purple Cow? A way to surprise our customers, stop them in their tracks, and make them notice. We all loved surprises as children, but as adults, we’ve become desensitized—few things make us jump up and shout, “Hip hip horray!”
Before I get too excited and start running through the streets shouting, “Eureka!” and rush off writing a book called Unwrapping The Present, double entendre included, let us step back and look at our old friend: surprise.
You enter an auditorium and take your seat. You listen to a discussion with a popular author about his latest book. You feel it relates to you. You can see how his advice can improve your life. You gain a positive outlook. Suddenly, you’re told to reach under the seat. You pull out a pair of keys and are told they’re to your new car. But you’re not the only one—everyone else in the audience has keys. Everyone’s getting a new car. You’ve just been the recipient of a surprise gift from Oprah Winfrey.
Oprah truly understands surprise: it’s not just about doing something shocking and unexpected; it’s about doing some shocking and unexpected that is intricately related to the business. It’s the same formula that makes great movies with twist endings work—right until the end of The Usual Suspects you don’t suspect that Roger Kint is Keyser Söze, but when he switches his walk and you realize how he fabricated the story, it all makes sense in the context of everything that came before it.
From the focus of the shows to the Oprah Book Club to the Angel Network, the foundation of Oprah’s business is helping people better their lives and giving to others. By making a huge act of giving unexpected, Oprah takes full advantage of the power of surprise.
So before you read the next cleverly-titled New York Times bestselling marketing book that has already toppled over the tipping point, think about what you already know, how it can be applied to your business, and how you can give it new life and make your customers smile.
Almost every company is doing something they shouldn’t be. Nothing akin to the deceptive practices of Enron, but something that in someway hurts or dilutes the value of the brand.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple he encountered more products than Shiva could juggle. In Inside Steve’s Brain, Leander Kahney reports that during a 1998 World Wide Developers Conference, Jobs commented, “I started to ask people, now why would I recommend a 3400 over a 4400? When should somebody jump up to a 6500, but not a 7300? And after three weeks, I couldn’t figure this out. If I couldn’t figure this out…how could our customers figure this out?”
Frustrated, Jobs simplified their line into four products on a grid: consumer/professional and portable/desktop. It was so simple anyone could understand it. Not only did it lower the barrier to entry into the Apple family, it reinforced Jobs’ vision of simplicity, which is at the heart of the Apple brand.
Your impediment may be some product that doesn’t fit your brand, some advertisement that doesn’t speak to the heart of your customers, or customer service that doesn’t reflect your brand’s values. It’s anything that mars your brand’s ultimate vision and hinders you from clearly telling your story to the world. Simply, it dilutes your brand’s power.
As the theatre director and Pulitzer-prize-winning writer David Mamet would say: if a chair onstage doesn’t contribute to the story, (pause) get rid of the fucking chair.
Figuring out which chair doesn’t belong on your stage begins with defining your brand’s ultimate vision. And, your ultimate vision must take into account what your best customers—your Brand Lovers—love about your brand.
Once you’ve defined your ultimate vision, ask yourself, “What has to die for us to get there?”
Leander Kahney’s latest book Inside Steve’s Brain, a look at what makes Steve Jobs tick, made me stop, jump out of my seat, and shout, “Are you serious?” It wasn’t caused by a sudden revelation or a scandal; it came from a passage clipped from an interview with Seth Godin:
Not everyone loves Apple’s advertising. Seth Godin, author of several best-sellers about marketing, said Apple’s advertising has often been mediocre. “I’m underwhelmed by most of Apple’s advertising,” he told me by phone from his office in New York. “It’s not been effective. Apple’s advertising is more about pandering to the insiders than acquiring new users. If you have a Mac, you love Apple’s advertising because it says ‘I’m smarter than you.’ If you don’t have a Mac it says ‘you’re stupid.’”
Apple’s advertising is not effective. Really? Are you serious?
On an anecdotal level, I’m sure most of you know someone who has switched to an Apple computer in the past few years. But, how many of you know someone who has switched back? I don’t. Recently I watched a friend, who doesn’t own a cell phone, drop to floor in the middle of an iPhone commercial and start to proclaim how much he needs one.
Anecdotes are one thing and market numbers are another. But in this case, they both show the same thing. The first fiscal quarter of 2008 showed a 35% year-over-year growth in revenue, up $2.5 billion from the previous December, posting the most successful quarter in Apple’s history. The second fiscal quarter results surpassed Apple’s first quarter predictions with a 32.9% year-over-year growth, marking the strongest March quarter in Apple’s history. And, remember, this growth is occurring during an economic downturn.
Surely this growth isn’t coming at the hands of lifelong, hardcore Apple loyalists. Twenty-five percent of our office last year used Apple Computers; this year it’s 100%. We’re not the only ones: Investment bank Morgan Stanley reported that 40% of college students plan to make their next purchase an Apple computer, a full 25% increase in that market share over current statistics, which is likely to have an effect on the work force after these students graduate. And, even Godin has recognized how ubiquitous Apple computers have become.
If it’s not the advertising, then, surely it must be the technology. But, if the history of inventions is any indication, the best technology doesn’t always win. And, it seems Godin would agree. In a 2006 talk for Google, Godin told Google: “What I want to sell you really hard on is not that technology wins, ‘cause I don’t think it does, I think what technology does is that it gives you a shot at marketing. And, if you don’t buy into that then I believe that the company sooner rather than later is going to smash into a wall.”
So Godin’s essentially saying that Apple’s advertising isn’t effective, but technology only succeeds if the marketing works. And, Apple’s obviously succeeding. I’m not sure I follow the logic.
Rather than being ineffective, I’d consider Apple’s advertising brilliant. Most new converts got hooked into the Apple brand through the iPod and the silhouette-dancing ads. These ads are some of the most inviting ads in the last decade: anyone can picture themselves as the faceless figures rocking out to their own tunes. The message is obvious: if you love music, come in.
Once you’ve already bought into the brand, why wouldn’t you want to stand out as a person making the best choice? This is what the advertising for these computers reflects: Apple is the better choice. And, sooner or later, if you don’t already have an Apple computer and you’ve already bought into the Apple brand, you’re going to want one to go along with that iPod or iPhone. Apple stores are even set up with this in mind: try the iPod or iPhone and while you’re at it why don’t you play with that pretty computer sitting next to it.
Apple’s advertising, as I see it, is really a two-pronged approach: (1) invite you in with the iPod advertising and (2) keep you there with the computer advertising. One makes you want to come in, and the other makes you want to stay there, all while keeping true to the brand’s identity.
Ineffective? Anything but.