GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

Clockwise: Jumble Room, The Randy Pike, Augill Castle, Little Town Farm as seen on ‘Secretly Famous’

A key element of a Lovemark is secret ingredients (in the Mystery bucket). Think the recipe for Coca-Cola. The Harley Davidson sound. How you get the Caramello into the center. Some secrets however are for sharing, not locking up. In sojourns to the Lake District of England where I have a home in Grasmere (the most beautiful village in the whole wide world) I was introduced to Nathan Westgate and his team of ‘secret agents’ who search out the most unique places to stay, eat and visit.

Nathan has created a website Secretly Famous that shares recommendations of quirky and unusual places that have the real charm and character of the Lake District, one of the world’s must-do tourism trails (read your Wordsworth). You’ll find farms, barns, bars, beds and bakeries. His ‘secretly found’ places are all independently owned, are run by people who have amazing passion for what they do, and champion the best local produce.

My favorite place in Grasmere to recover my senses is The Jumble Room run by Andy and Chrissy Hill – “a small bohemian-style restaurant”. You’ll find this is now “Secretly Famous” along with The Randy Pike in Ambleside, Augill Castle near Kirky Stephen, and Little Town Farm near Preston, among many others.

Nathan, who is a brand consultant in Preston, has started with the Lake District and Lancashire, will venture to Cheshire and Yorkshire in 2010, and then the world.

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GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

A few years back I sat next to Jean Paul Gaultier on a flight from Paris to Athens. Coincidentally we were en route to the same hotel… he invited me to a party he was holding that night and I found my favourite male fragrance… Le Male. Last year Jean Paul created a USB flash drive that perfumes the air with the unmistakable Le Male fragrance as it works. It’s great to see the over-looked sense of smell injecting some excitement into a product which is often bland and sold on functionality alone. And while this was only available as a gift-with-purchase of the fragrance, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before other makers of technology products move past the tablestakes faster/bigger/cheaper functional benefits and ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ when it comes to the power of scent.

It’s not news that smell is strongly linked to memory, but a recent piece of research has confirmed that it’s particularly useful for enhancing recall of all sorts of brand associations. And of course it’s a key Lovemarks ingredient. The olfactory sense has been making small inroads in the technology arena, with scent-strips being added to Sony cellphones in Japan and Asus’ fragrant laptops (also see my previous post on Smell of Books adding just that to emotionalize e-books), but so far nothing wildly original has made it to the mainstream marketplace. Why don’t Internet hotspots emit a fragrance to show where the signal is strongest – a whiff of wi-fi?

The arts, on the other hand, have thrown themselves into exploring the untapped opportunities of the nose. A ‘scent opera‘ premiered at the Guggenheim last year, where music was accompanied by sequences of perfume ‘chords’ rather than singing. And I love designer Hyun Choi’s ‘Flavor of Time‘ clock concept which assigns a scent to each hour for a unique new way to tell the time – providing a new contender in the old analogue-vs-digital debate!

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GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

Top Left: January 2010 edition of Harvard Business Review, Top right: Michael G. Jacobides

“The play’s the thing” may be from Hamlet but the subject is from Michael Jacobides, an associate professor of strategic and international management at the London Business School who appears in the new issue of Harvard Business Review with an article Strategy Tools for a Shifting Landscape.

His starting point is the breathtaking speed at which customers and competitors transform – and the turbulence this creates. Traditional strategy frameworks aren’t working, he says – they simplify rather than taking account of complexity and changing boundaries; they produce “still pictures of the future.” Jacobides puts forward the playscript – a narrative in which “words are more powerful and flexible than value curves.” Playscripts “consider how a company could succeed by reinventing its role as reality changes.” His method involves characters and their roles, storylines and connections, links and rules, plots and subplots. More fun than the usual approach to strategy planning!

Jacobides’ HBR article applies the playscript method to the challenges of the pharmaceutical industry; looks at how Ikea future proofed itself, how IBM reinvented itself, how Marvel Entertainment turned itself around – and this is the part I especially like – how Saatchi & Saatchi changed the very basis of its competition via Lovemarks.

The article cites the company’s revival after its near collapse in the mid 1990s. Noting that “companies can change strategies by changing their roles,” Jacobides writes that “Saatchi & Saatchi didn’t just change its value proposition. It transformed itself into a strategic link between clients and their customers.” By “writing a new playscript” Lovemarks shifted Saatchi & Saatchi from being suppliers to strategic partners; created an industry wide concept; cemented connections to clients; and increased the number of pitchless wins.

For me, it really was a case of “to be or not to be.”

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GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

A public art project that links New York’s subway system with the idea of “optimism” is bound to attract some cynicism, if not outright ridicule. That’s because public transit everywhere in the world is one of the more popular targets for complaint, vitriol and even fist-shaking rage.

However, radical optimists seek out optimism in the hardest places – and where better than the subways of New York?

A campaign instigated by Manhattan designer Reed Seifer to distribute 14 million Metrocards emblazoned with the word “Optimism” to New York commuters kicked off in November last year under the MTA’s Arts in Transit program. He’s been an optimism promoter since the early 80s after an experience as a young boy with his father and a homeless man. He wrote a thesis on optimism and then started selling buttons. Now he’s reached exponential scale. The naysayers were quickly vocal – “I am optimistic that the MTA is mismanaged and the fares will continue to go up while service goes down”, and the sarcastic sucker-punch: “I feel better already.”

It’ll be interesting to see what effect the campaign has. Is simply putting a positive word out there into the atmosphere enough to cause social change? I’m a great believer in the power of language to change the entire conversation. This is how Lovemarks came about – I wanted to change the whole paradigm of brand management which had run out of juice. Love is the most provocative act of all, and people can get remarkably jumpy at the prospect of getting close to Love. One of the ways we started to propagate the idea of Lovemarks in Saatchi & Saatchi was to simply use the word a lot – in emails and conversations. Do it naturally, don’t overdo it – but just do it!

Whether Optimism is as compelling as Love is yet to be seen. I’ve called myself a Radical Optimist – not an everyday garden variety, but a committed evangelist. Reed Seifer is therefore a Radical Optimist, taking the notion beyond the “glass is half full” cliche.

Radical Optimism is not about seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses; it’s about taking notice of the roses that are out there – and getting out there to plant some more. Negativity and pessimism is easy. As the MTA campaign reminds us, traveling through life with some optimism in our back pocket is a great idea for us and for those around us.

Oh and here’s the thing – the New York transit system is a world-beater, and it deserves better than the relentless negativity that seems to be directed its way. Did you know that New York is one of the most sustainable cities on the planet – per capita greenhouse emissions are around a third of the rest of the USA – and that’s largely thanks to the subway system, and the five million people who use it every day.

Image source: https://www.mta.info/mta/aft/about/optimism.html

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GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

It’s getting to that time of the year when people are makng New Year’s Resolutions. For anyone working in business, here’s an idea: let’s try and make 2010 the year of plain English. A good way to start would be to read George Orwell’s 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language. Orwell understood how language could be used a weapon against the powerless, and how jargon and cliches are used to hide meaning, not clarify it. He offers six timeless rules for effective communication:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I am not 100% on number 6, and here’s another one for people in business:

7. Try and express your thoughts in one breath.

MBA-speak started by infecting the workplace but has tragically made its way into sport (losing teams now “lack accountability”) and even the home (KPI’s in the kitchen!).

• Why do we have to touch base to get our ducks in a row when we could just meet?
• Why must we synergize our learnings going forward, when comparing notes would do fine?
• Why wouldn’t a busy person save time by saying “I’m busy” instead of due to cascading workflow, I am lacking in requisite bandwidth?
• Why reach out when you can just make a call?
• Why can’t we leave a meeting with things to do, rather than take-home actionables?

Communication is about accountability. If we express ourselves clearly, we have no choice but to stand by what we say. By resorting to cliches and jargon, people are blurring meaning to avoid scrutiny. It’s also laziness.

People are hungry for clarity and authenticity. In every part of life, let’s commit to using language to amplify meaning, not bury it.

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GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

Contrasting expectations of species-level evolution, the classic phyletic gradualism model (left), and the punctuated equilibrium model (right).

Biology fascinates me. I love the work of Stephen Jay Gould who theorized how change in evolution happens at the edges, the margin, the fringe. He calls this ‘punctuated equilibrium’, and it explains how evolution doesn’t take place on a predictable, linear path but with unpredictable and dramatic bursts coming from the outer reaches of the species. The same can be said of the world of ideas and innovation.

Another biologist, Richard Dawkins, a brilliant communicator, created a lot of confusion when he called his 1976 book on evolution, ‘The Selfish Gene’. The book details the brutal efficiency of evolution, but the phrase itself has entered common usage to mean that human beings are genetically programmed for selfishness. It means nothing of the sort – and isn’t it great when research comes along that proves the exact opposite.

The NY Times reported last month that research into young babies demonstrates that we are born with an in-built instinct to help others. Before parents have even begun to teach the rules of social behavior, researchers saw kids as young as 12 or 18 months in small, selfless acts of kindness. This innate generosity and willingness to share and cooperate is unique to humans; even our closest ancestors have no interest in helping out a fellow chimpanzee unless there is something in it for them.

Researchers are quick to point out that there is ample evidence that selfishness plays a part in our make-up too. As one of the researchers puts it, “That’s why we have moral dilemmas, because we are both selfish and altruistic at the same time.”

These findings confirm what radical optimists already believe, and it’s nice to have some science to put in the back pocket.

Image source: https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/08/index.html

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GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

Fear of new technology is not new. In 1982, the king of all Hollywood lobbyists, Jack Valenti, told the US Congress:

“I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”

Hysteria aside, the movie industry was utterly convinced that the advent of video cassettes would destroy the film industry. 30 years on, video and DVD have had the opposite effect – far from undermining the industry, they are integral to its ongoing profitability. How could Hollywood keep producing so many films, at such great cost and such variable quality without the “straight to DVD” option? Even the notorious box-office bomb, Waterworld, almost broke even in the end, thanks to DVD sales.

There has been similar angst about the fate of books and the publishing industry since the arrival of the Internet and new technology like e-readers. In 2007, the US National Endowment for the Arts reported a “remarkable decline” of American reading habits, its chairman saying that it would damage the civic, political and economic fabric of the country. The New Yorker chimed in, quoting sociologists who claimed that “reading for pleasure will one day be the province of a special ‘reading class’, much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy.” The Boston strangler strikes again!

E-readers are all the rage this holiday season. Industry experts forecast that Amazon will sell 900,000 Kindles in the last two months of 2009. The Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble Nook, which sold-out before it even hit the shelves, are also on a tear. There was a lot of skepticism about e-readers in the first couple of years, and a lot of doomsayers who thought they spelled the end of the written word.

The truth is that technology has ended the monopoly of bound, mass-produced manuscripts we call books, and expanded choice for readers. We can read on the computer screen, on dedicated e-readers like Kindle and Nook or on our cell-phones.

We love books for the stories and the emotional power, the insights and inspirations. Who ever puts down a great book and says, “Wow, I loved the paper-stock, and the font was awesome!”

People who love reading will read more than ever before – I know I do.

Circumstances, mood and moment will determine how and what we read – the Kindle is great for plane trips or train-rides; the cell-phone works well for a quick catch-up with emails or news, and nothing (for me, at least) will beat the pleasures of a book on a beach, or a bookshop on a rainy afternoon.

Editor’s note: Will Apple go after the e-reading market with the rumored Apple tablet?

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GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

Avatar, opening in the US tomorrow, has Hollywood holding its breath. The $350 million spectacle by writer/director James Cameron seems destined to one of only two possible fates: spectacular blockbuster or massive bomb. The middle road never seems open to Cameron, who famously drives Tinsel-town bean-counters bonkers with his uncompromising vision and gargantuan budgets. Sigourney Weaver calls him an “idealistic perfectionist”, which is a pretty good aspiration for all of us.

I haven’t seen the film yet, but I wish it well for three reasons.

One, Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop in New Zealand has been responsible for the special effects, which are said to take 3-D animation to a different plane. Another hit for Weta would be great for this awesome Wellington Lovemark – and for the city itself.

Second, I love James Cameron’s gutsy approach. In an industry teeming with yes-men, corporate cronies and wannabes, Cameron stands apart as a maverick who rises and falls on the size of his talent, not his Rolodex. He put his philosophy this way:

“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.”

Most importantly, I hope that Avatar succeeds because it represents something that has all but disappeared from mainstream film – a truly original idea. It is not recycled from a TV show or old movie, nor is it based on a book, play, musical or comic book. James Cameron is the sole writing credit, and the story is woven entirely from his imagination.

The rise of innovation in Hollywood (and Wellywood and Bollywood) has been startling, but it has not been matched by the rise of great originality – in fact, the opposite has happened. The graphs below show how the number of films made from an original idea – as opposed to sequels, book or musical adaptations, comic books or earlier films – has declined dramatically in the past decade. Instead, we are saturated by sequels. 15 of the top 20 box office hits of the 2000s were sequels (and some of them were brilliant, but the point is valid).

The last decade will be remembered for awesome innovation we used to help tell stories on screen. Let’s hope that the ’10s is known more for the creativity and originality we bring to storytelling itself.

Image source: https://www.topnews.in/avatar-will-make-titanic-look-picnic-says-james-cameron-2244474

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GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

Newspapers are up against it in the Participation Economy, the Internet-powered revolution of joining in, taking part, sharing and joy. For the modern consumer, the idea of reading newspapers full of day-old news hand-picked by faceless editors seems, well, very early 90’s.

These days we get to be our own editor-in-chief, selecting the bits of news, opinion and analysis that best suit our tastes, politics or predilections. The news business still hasn’t worked out a way to make this work financially, but I suspect that will change soon. Free is not sustainable. Walter Isaacson, former editor of Time, proposed one possible approach to the issue of payment here.

There may be some spark in the old format yet. On the first day of the climate talks in Copenhagen, 56 newspapers in 20 languages pulled off a dramatic and high-impact stunt. They simultaneously published a front-page editorial calling for action on climate change. Papers included The Guardian (which got the ball rolling), the Toronto Star, the Jakarta Globe, Le Monde, The Brunei Times, la Repubblica and The Cambodia Daily.

This degree of collaboration across geographical and political boundaries carries a high degree of difficulty. Whatever you think about the editorial itself, the scale and audacity of the maneuver is impressive. The old-school newspaper editorial is long past its heyday, but – on this occasion at least – some creative thinking and collaboration breathed some life back into the art-form.

Image Source: https://babycreativeblog.com/copenhagen/

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GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

I don’t get a lot of free time, and that’s the way I like it. For me it’s never been about work-life balance, but always about work-life integration. Finding compelling and compatible work to who I am and who I want to continue being, and devoting everything I have to performing at peak, getting into flow.

In these new straightened economic times, we’re all having to work harder, knuckling down to the task at hand, and making sure we’re building a future that is sustaining and rewarding. It’s not easy. But it’s easier if you love what you’re doing, and you’re doing it all the time. Naysayers will say nay, but its actually easier than ever to devote yourself to what sustains you. All you need is a computer, and the desire to make a difference.

Probably nowhere in the world is this more clear than in my home of New York City, where once again, creativity is biting back and inspiring people to throw everything they have at their situation. I don’t know if the people who run the https://www.overthinkingit.com/ blog do anything else with their day, but something tells me everything they do has to be fun. At least they have enough time to bring us the graph above.

Which is fun, and will get you arguing about rock music, Rolling Stone, or crude oil. Their blog is classic pop-culture with a semi-serious spin. It’s fun for the readers, but what fun is it for the bloggers themselves? These people have created their world and devoted their time for their own enjoyment. It just so happens we love it too.

Our only way to make the long road ahead through our economic crisis run faster is to enjoy ourselves, to be creative in everything we do, and integrate work and life. Start today with something simple. Eliminate the reasons not to, apply yourself wholeheartedly, make sure you’re smiling, and enjoy the (bumpy) ride.

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