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SD#36: Inspiring emotion, failure and savings

Written by

Tomas Ausra

September 18, 2022

Hi friends,

Welcome to another edition of Seven Dawns, your weekly newsletter on marketing, productivity, psychology and more.

Our seven ideas this week:


1. (Marketing) The best ideas don’t start with a grand theory, they start with a little tinker

In 1971 Carolyn Davidson was a young graphic design student at Portland State University. She was happy enough to earn some extra money when a member of faculty asked her to do some design work for his company, Blue Ribbon Sports, and agreed on a fee of $2 an hour. He wanted a stripe for a new running shoe, asking for ‘something that suggests speed’. When, after many hours of work, she presented him and his colleagues with a logo, they were unimpressed and asked ‘What else you got?’ But after a few minutes her client, realising he needed something urgently for a presentation to the Japanese, grudgingly accepted it. ‘I don’t love it’, he said, ‘but maybe it will grow on me.’ He paid Carolyn’s bill of $35.

In case you haven’t twigged yet, the client was Phil Knight, the product he needed a logo for was a new model of sports shoe which he called the ‘Nike’ after the Greek goddess of victory, and the logo was the original but already a very recognisable version of what we now know as the Swoosh.

Most theory about brand building assumes that the correct procedure is to start with a definition of the ‘brand essence’ – maybe at the heart of a ‘brand key’ or ‘brand onion’ – and that the creative task is then to communicate this through images or behaviour. But history shows us that the actual sequence of events is often the other way round – many brands start with a visual image, and the meaning – or meanings – of the image are created by the brand’s various stakeholders. I want to suggest that this sequence is probably much more common, and maybe a more helpful one for us to have in mind, than the received wisdom about brand essence coming first.

Paul Feldwick
2. (Psychology) Teaching someone might not be enough, you need to inspire emotion

Kobe Bryant once said you can’t improve a player by just giving them feedback on their free throw technique. Instead, you have to start somewhere else.

“What you have to do is you have to get them emotionally to want to be better. You have to get them to an emotional space where they wake up every morning driven to be the best version of themselves.”

He’d figure out which emotional buttons to press with his teammates at practice. Some players were hyper-competitive, so he’d insult them to piss them off. Others just loved the craft; for them, he’d use encouraging words.

Learning starts with desire
3. (Marketing) Does attention to ads matter?

Ehrenberg-Bass has much to say about advertising media. During an event in Sydney, professor Byron Sharp was quick to remind his audience of the two “golden rules” that the Institute advises clients to follow. “First, you have to reach everyone in the category… and spread your budget across timeslots, across locations.”

Mass reach and always on. Clear. But when questioned about attention, things got more interesting and animated. “Our job is to get some attention,” Sharp agreed. “I don’t want to do advertising and not be seen. But after that, paying for a lot more? No.”

Except Sharp is wrong. About the value of attention in general. And about the specific need to engage with audiences more to ensure longer periods of attention. There is a growing accumulation of evidence from the likes of Lumen, Dentsu and the inestimable Professor Karen Nelson-Field to demonstrate the point. And marketers must be following the debate because it has major implications for what they do.

Attention is not a binary variable, irrespective of what Ehrenberg-Bass might try to tell us. Simply reaching or not reaching a target customer is not the end of it. More attention in the form of extended dwell time is not a sucker’s objective, quite the reverse. It can have a significant impact on whether your brand achieves salience and whether preference eventuates.

Mark Ritson via Marketing Week
 
4. (Society) The faster the start-up grows, the faster it can be destroyed

What do goldfish and tech companies have in common? If you take two groups of identical baby fish and put one in abnormally cold water; the other in abnormally warm water, The fish living in cold water will grow slower than normal, while those in warm water will grow faster than normal. Put both groups back in regular temperature water and they’ll eventually converge to become normal, full-sized adults.

Then the magic happens. Fish with slowed-down growth in their early days go on to live 30% longer than average. Those with artificial supercharged growth early on die 15% earlier than average.

The cause isn’t complicated. Super-charged growth can cause permanent tissue damage and may only be achieved by the diversion of resources away from the maintenance and repair of damaged biomolecules. Slowed-down growth does the opposite—allowing an increased allocation to maintenance and repair. In the startup world, a focus on topline growth often leads to underinvestment in other areas, which makes the company less resilient, more fragile and more prone to implosions. For all the hype about hyper-growth startups, we need to acknowledge that fast growth comes with risk.

Collaborative fund
 
5. (Psychology) Why you should practice failure

We learn valuable lessons when we experience failure and setbacks. Most of us wait for those failures to happen to us, however, instead of seeking them out. But deliberately making mistakes can give us the knowledge we need to more easily overcome obstacles in the future.

We learn from our mistakes. When we screw up and fail, we learn how not to handle things. We learn what not to do. Failing is a by-product of trying to succeed. If we want to avoid costly mistakes in the future when the stakes are high, then making some now might be excellent preparation.

In 1932, at the dawn of the aviation age, Amelia Earhart described the value for all pilots of learning through deliberate mistakes. “The fundamental stunts taught to students are slips, stalls, and spins,” she says in her autobiography The Fun of It. “A knowledge of some stunts is judged necessary to good flying. Unless a pilot has actually recovered from a stall, has put his plane into a spin and brought it out, he cannot know accurately what those acts entail. He should be familiar enough with abnormal positions of his craft to recover without having to think how.”

fs
6. (Career) Do things, tell people

These are the only things you need to do to be successful. You can get away with just doing one of the two, but that’s rare, and usually, someone else is doing the other part for you. If you don’t have any marketable skills, learn some. Then make something that you can talk about. Make something cool. Something interesting. Spend time on it. Go crazy. Even if it’s the least useful thing you’ve ever made if you can talk about it, make it.

Next, find events where the people you want to work with are. Then get a drink into you (or don’t) and talk to them about it. Relax. It’s probably interesting to them too… Then you get contacts, business cards, and email addresses. Then you get contracts, job offers, investors, whatever. You make friends who think what you do is cool. You make a name for yourself as “the person who did that cool thing.” Then, the next time someone wants to do something in any way related to that cool thing, they come to you first.

Carl Lange
7. (Finance) Saving more or spending more

48% of U.S. adults experienced “high” or “moderate” levels of anxiety around their level of savings according to Northwestern Mutual’s 2018 Planning & Progress Study.

Despite this anxiety, the evidence suggests that the opposite seems to be true—many individuals seem to be saving too much. The Investments & Wealth Institute reported, ‘Across all wealth levels, 58% of retirees withdraw less than their investments earn, 26% withdraw up to the amount the portfolio earns, and 14% are drawing down principal.’

Surprisingly, retiree wealth tends to go up, not down, with age. This suggests that more people should be asking the question, “Am I saving too much?” rather than “Am I saving enough?”

Of Dollars And Data

Fun things to click on:


103 bits of advice I wish I had known. How does healthcare spending correlate with life expectancy? Artwork within an artwork within an artwork within an artwork.


Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

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SD#37: Jargons, data and mimetics