| thepowerofpain.com :: the pain papers :: newsletter #8 |
THE PAIN PAPERS:
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——————————————————————————————————- Learn How to Use Pain to Drive Innovation ——————————————————————————————————- The Pain Papers ——————————————————————————————————- FORWARDING THIS NEWSLETTER IS MANDATORY. Any other unauthorized publication, excerpting, or duplication of the contents without the permission of Christopher K. O'Leary is a violation of copyright law. For past issues of The Pain Papers, see... To subscribe to The Pain Papers, please send a message
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message to... ...or see the instructions at the bottom of this message. ——————————————————————————————————- MADNESS Now that two weeks have passed since the 11th, it's time for me to get back in the saddle - although I still can't get the images out of my head. However, let me say two things. First, thank you to all of those in the international community who have offered their prayers and support. It has made things easier. Second, it is remarkable how a horrible, painful event can act as a catalyst. You should see how the U.S. is pulling together. This country probably hasn't felt this unified since '41. Leaders (and enemies) shouldn't forget what a shared enemy and a common purpose can do to a people. ——————————————————————————————————- THE LANGUAGE OF PAIN I was conducting an interview for the book the other day and had a very interesting conversation. I was sharing my ideas with an executive of a large company that I will profile in the book. I asked her if and how her company dealt with pain and problems and she told me... "We don't have 'problems', we have 'opportunities'". Ugghhh. Talk about a missed 'opportunity'. Of course, this company isn't unique. Many companies, in the interests of optimism and positive thinking, have literally banned words like "problem" from their corporate vocabularies. The problem of is that, if innovation depends on monitoring and addressing the pain that is being felt in the marketplace, anything that serves to attenuate pain signals will only further insulate a company from the marketplace and thus make it less relevant and less responsive. Could it be that, as language grows more sterile, thinking and innovation grow more sterile as well? Everybody knows that urgency depends on the intensity of the pain signal that is received. That is why we yell when we have a problem and want something done immediately. The problem is that mechanisms like corporate vocabularies make it much harder for companies to understand the actual nature of problems that are occurring in the marketplace. They are less able to understand what the marketplace is trying to tell them. This will ultimately cripple their innovation efforts. Companies that are interested in keeping up with the marketplace will ensure that they get the pure, undiluted feedback that is required to make the right decisions and act with the correct degree of urgency. ——————————————————————————————————- ADVERTISING AS TEACHING I am not a big fan of advertising. I made this clear in my column The Trouble with Advertising. The problem is that many companies do not seem to understand what advertising can and cannot do. As a result, they tend to think about it all wrong. When I think about advertising, I think about it is as teaching. Think about it. In both cases you have a message that you want a person to retain and be able to recall in the proper context. You want to teach them and not merely entertain them. You want them to learn. As a result, in both cases you need to focus on crafting a message so that the information that it contains is perceived as meaningful and not meaningless. This is important because numerous studies have shown meaningful and meaningless information are handled very differently by the brain. Meaningful information is linked into existing neural networks. Meaningless information most often is just placed in isolated locations. If you are successful in infusing the message with meaning, then it will be stored appropriately and will be more easily remembered in the proper context. Of course, the idea of advertising as teaching makes much advertising look ridiculous. If you were teaching someone about a subject, would you be obtuse? Would you never tell them what you were teaching them or why? Of course not. You would be straightforward, because your goal is for them to remember what they have been taught and be able to recall and use that information in the proper context. Then why does it make sense to spend millions of dollars on ads that never mention the product that is being sold or the problem that is being alleviated? Of course, it doesn't. Companies that are worried about getting the most bang for their advertising dollar will take a different approach to advertising. When crafting their messages, they will always keep The Three Questions in mind...
They will be sure to answer these questions in their ads. They will be more concerned with creating meaning than simply making an impression on someone because meaningless impressions are quickly forgotten. Finally, they will focus on crafting messages and materials that can sell on their own. In most cases, you will not be around to sell your product or service, so your advertising materials must do the selling (and thus the teaching) for you. ——————————————————————————————————- WHO'S YOUR FOCUS? I was researching quotes for the book the other day and came across this one... "When the focus of attention is on ways to defeat the competition, strategy inevitably gets defined primarily in terms of the competition." - Kenichi Ohmae "The Borderless World" This is a great and telling quote. It points out the nature of the problem that many companies face with their innovation efforts. Too often companies are looking in the wrong places for innovation. They are more concerned about the tactics of the competition than the needs of the customer. They end up listening to the competition and not the customer. This leads to a war of one-upmanship that serves nobody and only creates opportunities for new entrants. ——————————————————————————————————- CHANGE A dangerous trend is afoot, my friends. I call it the "Change happens, deal with it" school of thought. The primary tool of the proponents of this ideology is a book by Spencer Johnson called "Who Moved my Cheese?" The premise of the book is that people should stop hemming and hawing and learn to deal with change. I have so many problems with this idea, but let me just give you my main observation. Change doesn't just happen. It is driven by people - inside or outside of the organization. By telling people "Change happens, deal with it", you are ridding those people who drive change of the need to explain themselves and justify their actions. You are telling them that they don't have to explain their actions. You are telling them that they don't need to get buy-in. Most importantly, you are telling them that they do not have to justify their actions in the context of alleviating pain or solving problems. "Change happens, deal with it" takes us back to the bad old days of the autocracy. Back to the bad old days of asking people to check their brains at the door. People are not stupid. They will ask questions. Good questions. Hard questions. You should see this as a good thing and not a bad thing. Maybe it makes it harder to ram stupid ideas through your organization, but isn't that good? If your people are asking hard questions, then the marketplace is likely going to ask those same questions. Don't you think you need to come up with those answers sooner rather than later? ——————————————————————————————————- GOOD TO GREAT Fast Company has just published a great new article by Jim Collins. The article is called "Good to Great" and talks about the secrets of companies that rose from mediocrity to superiority. It's great reading... https://www.fastcompany.com/online/51/goodtogreat.html ——————————————————————————————————- ARE BRANDS DEAD? On the topic of branding and whether brands are dead, Marketingprofs.com ran an interesting article a few weeks ago... https://www.marketingprofs.com/Perspect/brandsnotdead.asp ——————————————————————————————————- I received the following comments from Pascal Clerotte (Pascalclerotte@aol.com) the other day... "Retail is certainly France's most sophisticated industry. Carrefour, the world second largest retailer (after wal-mart) was a matter of fact a pionner in retailer's brand/generics. In the mid 70's, they developped their own alternatives to branded products, from chocolate to washing powder. You could buy products branded as 'unbranded cereals', 'unbranded orange juice', 'unbranded socks', 'unbranded dippers' etc. All those products were very visible as they used - no matter the product - the same graphic design: plain white with one red and one blue strip cut by carrefour' logo. Besides being one of the smartest marketing moves I have ever seen (at that time,it mass consumption and multi-nationals were heavily critised; the aftermath of 1968's events and the rise of environmental awerness - thus solved the pain young urban people felt buying products form emperialistic companies like Procter & gamble, Nestlé, and Unilever), this example illustrates what I beleive is at the core of any innovation process: subversion. What carrefour did is to reverse (subversere in latin means to turn upside down) the relationship between products-brand is the same way that Mary Quant did when she claimed in the sixties that 'ugliness is life'. They achieved also to market their what can be refered to as an "underlying brand' as french regulation at that time didn't allow them to market products under the brand 'carrefour' that they didn't manufacture themselves. They also solved pain themself, and eventually paved the way for mass retailer brands." ——————————————————————————————————- QUOTES NEEDED I am researching quotes for the book. Do you have any favorite quotes that I could use for the book? Please send them to me. ——————————————————————————————————- Please send all comments or feedback to chris@thepowerofpain.com FORWARDING THIS NEWSLETTER IS MANDATORY. Any other unauthorized publication, excerpting, or duplication of the contents without the permission of Christopher K. O'Leary is a violation of copyright law. To subscribe to The Pain Papers, please send a message
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