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What I Learned at The Art of Marketing
by Chris Day @ Fully Managed™ Posted 1 year ago
Yesterday I attended “The Art of Marketing” at the Metro Convention Centre in Toronto. Over 1600 of Canada’s top marketers were present, all looking to learn something about the evolution of marketing in our rapidly changing world.
I was initially drawn to the event for the opportunity to see Seth Godin speak, a provocative and visionary thinker of our time. I’ve been following Seth for some time on Twitter, his famous blog (ranked #20 in the world) and TED.com - Ideas Worth Spreading. Seth certainly did not disappoint; he delivered a fast, furious and thought provoking talk based around his new book, Linchpin.
The most memorable speaker of the day for me was Dan Heath, bestselling author of “Made to Stick” and more recently “Switch - How to Change Things When Change is Hard”. I found his research-driven, highly distilled model of what drives change - specifically the model of the elephant (emotion) and the rider (logic) extremely insightful and relevant. Of course, I’ll be reading that book shortly.
Key Takeaways
Great companies are just a collection of great people. Jim Collin’s book “Good to Great” touches on this point in depth. If you have the right people on the bus and give them the opportunity to think and innovate, the collective group will become great. So many decisions are made each day which cannot be monitored or controlled, they have to be innate – the right people will mostlymake the right decisions.
When it comes to marketing (and in fact business in general), if you aren’t creating art or innovating (or spending too much time looking for a manual) your days are numbered. You need to be willing to take risks and possibly offend somebody in the process. Mitch Joel talked a lot about the concept of “rebooting” (ctrl-alt-del) your mindset.
Conquer the “Lizzard Brain”, the gut response which makes us gravitate towards the status quo, and tackle it head-on. You’ll be able to get past the ingrained, prejudiced and structured (read: boring) rules we often apply out of fear, ultimately stunting our chance for greatness.
Nobody is going to teach you how to connect with your customer; you need to figure that out yourself. Even if you figure that out, one caveat I found hilarious from Seth was: “If you have a crappy product or service, I can’t help you with that.”
You may need to appeal to the elephant (emotion) to initiate change. Often it is emotion and not logic (e.g. statistics) that becomes a turning point for major change. Find out how to connect with your audience, your peers, your family and your clients this way and change becomes less painful.
Don’t underestimate the power of mystique in marketing - the lure of unanswered questions. Jagermeister has experienced year-over-year growth of 40% (I haven’t fact checked this). This is pretty amazing when you consider how bad the product tastes and how other similar brands are doing. What drives people to it is the air of uncertainty, the urban legends, and the tribe-like culture surrounding it – Jaeger-bomb anyone?
Exercise Goodness. After Hurricane Katrina (and recently in Haiti), the Tide company decided to create a program where they would handle the washing, cleaning, sorting and folding of clothes for those who were unable. Do you think those who used the service would switch to another brand? Do you think they might advocate Tide to their friends and family?
by Chris Day @ Fully Managed™ 
