Revenue-driven Marketing

Born to Build: The Joy of Learning Through Trial and Error

We are all born to build things, in one way or another.  For some of us, it’s being unable to pass a set of Legos without fiddling with the blocks, or being unable to resist the urge to throw just one more spice into the soup. 

For me, it’s making art, even if it’s a cruddy watercolor I painted on the beach while watching the kids or a surreptitious sketch of a stranger at Starbucks while waiting for a client to show up.  As a formally-trained fine artist, I have to chuckle that my most prolific medium these days is PowerPoint.  As much as I love to write stories in .ppt format, it’s not nearly enough to satisfy the craving.

Mark Frauenfelder’s book Made by Hand confirms my suspicion.  Building tangible things fulfills a primal need:  learning by making our own mistakes.   

Kids do it every day because they lack the fear of failure.  How freeing to be able to make missteps as an adult, learning (and hopefully laughing!) along the way..

Note:  in the midst of drafting this post, I was forced to put the principles of the book in action. My laptop OS died a miserable death and I had to reformat my primary drive and rebuild it from scratch.  

It wasn’t my definition of a good time, but it could have been a lot worse, and in the process, I rediscovered my inner geek, the one who used to rollback to DOS 2.1 when a DOS 3.0 install didn’t take, and lamented the day my command line went away.

It was a great feeling to switch from automatic to manual, and to feel as if I was fully capable of controlling my own computing destiny (after a litany of missteps, of course).  The only difference between these days and my DOS days is that it would have been impossible to do the installs & updates without using my backup laptop alongside to pull up online documentation, Microsoft tech notes and support threads...

The Mashup of Consumerism in Developing Markets

Sketching the scenery of south India from a moving vehicle, I was forced to take it all in and put it down on paper as fast as I could.  Indians are absorbing consumer culture just as quickly, and adding the best of the "new world" while retaining the uniqueness of a 4000+ year old culture.

I passed by a Pizza Hut next to actual "huts", villages with intermittent electricity, bullock carts and bustling Internet cafes where farmers were trading commodities while students were doing their homework.  Fresh sugarcane juice was being squeezed with a sturdy device that looked like an improvised clothes wringer with a flywheel.  Next to the sugarcane stall were signs for Java programming, SAT and MCAST preperation classes.

A book that I picked up at Bengaluru airport, We Are Like That Only,(Winning in the Indian Market  is the U.S. edition) by Rama Bijapurkar  sheds light on the consumer mashup in modern India.  Generalizing a market of a billion people and their demand for consumer goods based on per capita income, past behavior and population growth would be short-sighted.  Indians don't want to emulate the west, they want to adopt western goods and services in their own way.

Surprise! Checklists are not the Antithesis of Creativity (or Progress)

As an "idea person", I'm somewhat averse to checklists (except maybe for the pre-flight packing checklists from TravelSmith). After reading Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto, however, I'm starting to think that Checklists may be for both thinkers and doers.

A practiced surgeon, Gawande has proven that checklists in the operating room save lives. He has observed how other professions benefit from this approach, and has brought back field notes from multiple markets, including the aviation industry, the source of the safety checklist.

Putting a process in place to manage the details can facilitate teamwork with an "ensemble cast" of players. The "Miracle on the Hudson" story of US Airways Flight 1549 last January was more than covered by the media. Gawande, however, walks through little known details. The pilot and co-pilot had never worked together before, and the rudimentary pre-flight checklists enabled them to discuss their respective skill sets, meet with the crew and smoothly handle the baton pass when things went awry. I walked through this section of the book with a team of 6th graders prior to their Destination Imagination tournament on Saturday. They were tired after six hours of tournament day, but they found the story fresh and relevant.

I misplace ideas regularly, many of them lost forever on errant sticky notes. I'm planning to take more notes in "checklist form" to make sure they're put to better use.

In Praise of Quitting...for the Right Reasons

Has your marketing plan ever been scrutinized by "been there once, done that once" club?

A a couple of examples: 

"Tradeshows don't work.   We didn't get any leads from the one we did last year".

"This publication has terrible response rates.    We tried advertising in it once".

Trying anything once in marketing is a bad idea -- especially if the audience/product/company is new and has yet to build awareness in the market.

Seth Godin's new book, The Dip, is a concise guide on when to quit (when you're about to hit the law of diminishing returns) and when to persist (with an eye on long-term returns).   It's refreshing to find a change management book that one may actually have time to read in the midst of a transition.

It's also heartening to get permission to quit, in the midst of "grit-your-teeth for glory" business tomes.

Although you might be pursuing the wrong market, don't quit it for the wrong reasons.  An extra data point or two to test the waters may give you the answer -- all you need are the guts to follow through.