SD#60: Killing brands, planting trees and practising memory
April 16, 2023
Welcome to the 60 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here.
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Hi friends,
Observant marketers might have noticed that there are recurring themes in the marketing learnings I put within the newsletter. That is on purpose. I believe there are fundamental learnings that we should repeat over and over again till they are fully engrained in our work. I do not believe our discipline is at that point yet. Similar observations could be made within productivity or health topics and this is what helps us shape ourselves. What recurring themes can you see in your thinking?
🔎 Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Marketing) The single outcome of advertising that is most likely to result in business success is fame Nothing about advertising is absolute. All we have are likelihoods and probabilities. No ad we make is guaranteed to work. No strategy we concoct is guaranteed to be successful. Some are more likely to work than others, and that’s the best we can do. Believing we have certainty about our advertising activities is foolish and delusional. If it is true that all we have are likelihoods and probabilities, we should ask ourselves what the single outcome of advertising is that is most likely to result in business success? I believe the answer is obvious. Fame. All of the world’s hugely successful brands have one common characteristic. They are famous. A famous brand has enormous advantages over its competitors that are not famous. Fame has many positive but not necessarily logical associations. These include trust, social acceptance, and credibility. Any brand can try to differentiate or position itself by claiming to engender “trust, acceptance, and credibility.” But only fame has the unique ability to communicate these attributes without having to say them. Does this mean that fame is a guarantee of success? Certainly not. Business success is related to several factors that have nothing to do with advertising. But fame is the most likely contribution to success that advertising can affect. 👉 PR Week |
2. (Productivity) Flip between two projects to practice productive procrastination Engineer, inveterate inventor, and energy expert Saul Griffith shared his technique for productive procrastination – flip between two projects to prevent focus fatigue. What does this mean? Well, to start with, Griffith notes that he too is a terrible procrastinator. He can’t stick to his to-do list. He’ll beaver away at his work attentively for a while, but then “focus fatigue” will creep in — and he’ll drift away. But here’s the thing: Rather than fight these hummingbird tendencies, he works with them. What Griffith does is set up a few side tasks that require him to acquire a new skill: “Learning projects,” as he calls them. Often these are weird, offbeat and not immediately related to anything that he’s doing for pay. But the side projects are all — in some way — creatively intriguing, and better yet, they require him to pick up and practice a new skill. That means they’re fun to pivot toward. So whenever he feels the urge to procrastinate — whenever he can’t bring himself to work on his main job — he turns to one of those side projects instead. Griffith still procrastinates a ton! The difference is that he now winds up doing some cool, enlightening and ultimately useful things during those bouts of work avoidance. 👉 Clive Thompson |
3. (Philosophy) Essentialism isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin? Do you simultaneously feel overworked and underutilised? Are you often busy but not productive? Do you feel like your time is constantly being hijacked by other people’s agendas? If you answered yes to any of these, the way out is the Way of the Essentialist. The Way of the Essentialist isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done. It is not a time management strategy or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential and then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution toward the things that really matter. By forcing us to apply more selective criteria for what is essential, the disciplined pursuit of less empowers us to reclaim control of our own choices about where to spend our precious time and energy — instead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for us. Essentialism is not one more thing; it’s a whole new way of doing everything. It’s about doing less but better—in every area of our lives. 👉 Essentialism via Weekend Briefing |
4. (Marketing) Well-managed brands should not just enjoy a successful, profitable existence. Their excellence should extend to their extinction. Learning when to kill a brand, and then how to kill it, are vital skills In marketing, we tend to follow the Western/Christian approach to life and death. We venerate and overstate the former and ignore and avoid the latter. That’s crazy because, apart from a few very old luxury brands, death is just as common as creation in the world of brand management. Companies keep launching new brands but, unless I am missing something, they must be shutting down just as many. We just don’t talk about it in marketing. The focus is always on launching, scaling up and growth hacking. Nobody in our profession talks about killing products or sending them off into that good night with an appropriate farewell, finishing the brand story with a final moment of consistency and leaving employees and consumers feeling the fulfilling catharsis of a perfect end. Saving a company 10 million quid by stopping a shit product from being launched is just as valuable as making the same amount from a successful launch. We just don’t think about it that way in marketing. About the brands we killed. The products we destroyed. The money we saved. There is a stigma about killing products that we need to get beyond. Let us embrace the idea that brands, like all of us, must die. And, as marketers, take pride in both that killer fact and the expert manner that killing demands of us. It is the perfect coda to all the optimistic talk of launch and innovation that occupies our industry too much. As a marketer, make sure you consider what lies on the other side of the curtain and the ideal moment for it to fall. 👉 Marketing Week |
5. (Psychology) Planting trees reduces mortality rates Previous studies have linked exposure to nature with an array of human health benefits. Access to nature is a major factor for mental health, and that doesn’t necessarily require the greenery to be primaeval wilderness. Research shows urban forests and street trees can offer comparable benefits. Several longitudinal studies have shown that exposure to more vegetation is associated with lower non-accidental mortality, the authors of the new study note, and some have also linked exposure to greenery with reduced cardiovascular and respiratory mortality. “However, most studies use satellite imaging to estimate the vegetation index, which does not distinguish different types of vegetation and cannot be directly translated into tangible interventions,” says Payam Dadvand, a researcher with the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) and senior author of the new study. For their study, Dadvand and his colleagues capitalised on a well-documented tree-planting campaign that unfolded in Portland, Oregon, between 1990 and 2019. Using data from the Oregon Health Authority, they then associated each census tract’s tree data with its mortality rate, due to cardiovascular, respiratory, or non-accidental causes. The results reveal lower mortality rates in neighbourhoods with more trees planted, and the researchers report this negative association is significant for both cardiovascular and general non-accidental mortality, especially among males and anyone above the age of 65. 👉 Science Alert |
6. (Copywriting) Trying to be too clever is dangerous when people can’t see the thinking behind your actions It’s obviously important to capture people’s attention with your advertising copy. You can do this with plays on words, rhymes, metaphors and a myriad of seriously fun stuff. But the cleverer you try to be, the harder your message might be to understand. As Jay Abraham has said: “Sometimes, the best copy to sell a horse is ‘Horde for Sale.’” It’s fine to keep things simple. Clear, direct copy almost always converts better than a clever turn of phrase. 👉 The Word Man |
7. (Psychology) Even if you consider yourself a forgetful person, memory is a skill that can be practised and strengthened The responsibilities of modern life mean there are more priorities than ever vying for your attention. Absentmindedness is one of memory researcher Daniel Schacter’s “seven sins of memory,” common weaknesses in memory everyone experiences. This is when you don’t pay attention to where you put your keys or are so scatterbrained you miss an important doctor’s appointment. A method to help you pay closer attention to the tasks at hand is what is called the PLR technique: pause, link, and rehearse. This can help you both remember someone’s name and recall the reason you walked into a room. If you’re hiding a birthday present for your kid but fear you won’t remember where you put it, take five seconds to pause and focus on where you’re putting the gift. And use technology to your advantage: Put meetings in your phone’s calendar (be detailed about who you’re meeting, where, and why) and make sure alerts are turned on, set reminders, and take photos of events to refer to later. Events that occur during heightened emotional states — fear, joy, anxiety, excitement, sadness — are more memorable. It’s why you remember your wedding day and perhaps not your 10th date. To remember more mundane things — where you’re storing dress shoes you wear once a year, a name, an item you need to pick up at the store — make these things extraordinary, says five-time USA Memory Champion and memory coach Nelson Dellis. Another one of Schacter’s seven sins of memory is transience, which refers to forgetting over time. For example, the more time that passes after you watch a movie, the more details you’ll forget. But if you study or reflect on things you want to remember, the more likely these memories will be strengthened. 👉 Vox |
👨🏫 Quote of the week:
“The greatest impediments to changes in our traditional roles seem to lie not in the visible world of conscious intent, but in the murky realm of the unconscious mind”
Dr. Augustus Napier
🎁 Fun things to click on:
No one spends more time around the world’s most famous artwork than the security guards who protect it. But did you know many of those security guards are artists themselves? A stop motion video on how hard it is to switch off from work. 2022 in search trends.
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.
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Speak soon,
Tom