Mar 22, 2023 | Branding, Communication
‘If you want to change the world, change the metaphor‘. Joseph Campbell
Every storyteller knows how powerful metaphors are, we all use them to describe to ourselves and others, the complex situations and challenges we face. The tales our parents read us as children are all metaphors, almost always describing desirable behaviour. I remember my father telling me the ‘angry bee’ metaphor on several occasions as a kid. Once when I was losing a tennis match, and my temper, he said, ‘An angry bee stings, and dies. It was therefore better not to get angry’. (I later discovered it was a metaphor Seneca had used to try and persuade Nero that being a murdering pyromaniac would not be good for his legacy)
Metaphors can also be subtle uses of language that go largely unnoticed, but which can have a significant effect on the way we think about a situation. For example, ‘crime wave’ is an emotive term that may lead to someone reading the term conclude that there was more crime than if the numbers were simply stated. The latter lacks the drama and emotive impact of the former.
Similarly, President Reagans ‘war on crime’ drove a military type response to drugs that resulted in a huge increase in incarceration rates, but no reduction in the availability of drugs. The ‘war’ was won when the ‘enemy’ was stopped, while doing nothing to address the causes of them becoming enemies in the first place. (Americans seem to be very good at this sort of self- delusion)
There is a substantial body of academic evidence surrounding the proposition that the use of metaphors counts for much more than we would naturally assume.
A former client, an SME whose lifeblood was being able to get to the senior people in target businesses in a B2B environment, found themselves struggling.
Many of those he needed to speak to, build a relationship with, and persuade that his solution was one that could be deployed easily, were increasingly protected by personal assistants in various forms.
He referred to them as ‘gate-keepers’ which they were. Their job was to ensure as far as possible that their bosses time was not wasted, that distractions were minimised and that they only saw the most important things.
My clients product did not necessarily fall into the ‘must see’ category, and he was therefore often frustrated.
After several conversations, we changed the metaphor in his mental model of the PA as ‘gate-keepers’ to one where they were ‘enablers’. In other words, he took the view that his task was not to get to the MD through the gatekeeper, but to engage the gatekeeper and turn them into an ‘enabler’ and even an advocate for their product.
Once this approach was understood and implemented, the results were spectacular.
Consider for a moment the impact of the current usage of the words ‘War’ and ‘China’ in any political statement from proponents of the AUKUS submarine deal. The language and the resultant frame through which most will consider the merits of this project will be influenced by the usage of those two words. Had anyone in power used the term ‘industrial development catalyst’ or ‘nation building’ it would have significantly changed the nature of the ‘debate’ surrounding this decision.
Metaphors are a natural and very important component of our communication. We learn to understand them as children, using them automatically to communicate effectively.
What metaphors are you using in your communication?
Mar 17, 2023 | Communication, Sales
Goliath, contrary to the stories, usually does win, it is just that we simply never hear about it. There is no drama, no unexpected outcome, no backstory of how little, under resourced David beat the giant who had all the advantages, and got away with the prize.
We use these stories in marketing all the time, because they work, and we know they work, because they have been told to us as stories when we were kids, and we remember them.
They have meaning.
Go to a live event, with someone selling something from the stage, and you will always hear pretty much the same sequence: hardship, battling against the odds, a personalised stage of despair then some insight that shows them the path, which made them hugely successful.
Now they want to help you walk the same path, they offer a picture of what it will be like at the end of the path, you just must be brave enough to take those steps, to grasp the opportunity they are offering, which they know works, because they are the living proof.
Trouble is, just buying the books and courses of someone who has been successful does not make you successful.
In fact, the reality is usually that the only success that someone flogging a book or course has had, is in selling you a book or a course.
Mar 13, 2023 | Innovation, Marketing
ChatGPT has blasted into our consciousness over the last 2 months. It has created an equal measure of excitement as people see the opportunities for leveraging their capabilities, and dismay at the problems they see being created.
Both are right, but if we are to make judgements about which side of that fence we choose to sit, it makes sense to understand a little bit about how it works.
These AI tools work on letters, and groups of letters, which then make up words, and the probability of one letter following another, and then another, and then one word following another, and another.
There are about 40,000 commonly used words in English, and billions of words published. From this database computation can give you the probability of a letter following another, eg. The probability of a U following a Q is very high, the probability of a V Following an L is low. This probability logic is extended to groups of 3, 4, 5 letters, one calculation of probability at a time. The outcomes of those cascading probability calculations transforms letters into groups that make up words based on the text used to ‘train’ the software.
Many words have multiple meanings, depending on the context in which it is used, homonyms. Sometimes the spelling is different, but they sound exactly the same. We understand what is meant by the context in which the word appears. For example: if I said, ‘I am on leave’ everyone knows I am on holiday. By contrast if I said, ‘I am going to leave’, it means I am about to depart whatever event we were at. I might also leave something for you at the door.
The word ‘leave’ is spelt and pronounced exactly the same way every time, it is the context in which it is used that makes the difference.
The juxtaposition of words also makes a difference to our understanding. If you remember your primary school grammar, it is all about the position of the subject and the verb.
If I was to say: ‘I am going to leave the party‘ the subject, object, and the verb are in the correct position in English for easy understanding. If I was to say ‘the party I am going to leave‘, most would understand, but would be expecting me to say more, despite the words being identical, it is just the position that changed.
Linguists have studied these relationships for years. Their mantra is: You will understand a word by the company it keeps.
If you take this to its logical extreme, the position of every word in a body of text has an impact on the understanding of every other word, and group of words in the same body.
If the surrounding text to my sentence is about going to a friend’s place for a drink, that will lead to a probability that the ‘party’ has to do with a social event. On the other hand, if the surrounding words were about politics, the phrase ‘I am leaving the party’ takes on a completely different meaning. All these considerations are taken into account by the magic of the probability of me leaving the party when the words friends and drinks are in the surrounding copy. Should those surrounding words be government, and policy, it is more likely the party I am leaving would be a political one.
The operating system of Open AI, and others, have scraped the web for all text published, and stuck it into what amounts to a huge multidimensional spreadsheet. The machine calculates the probability of any one letter appearing after another, then any word appearing next to another based on the occurrences of those letters and words and groups of letters and words in the scraped text. It does this over and over again, spreading the web of probabilities of words and groups of words appearing together, in a particular order, wider and wider, one word at a time, across the body of copy.
This process is extraordinarily computationally intensive. It is hugely expensive to build and program machines that can do these enormous sets of calculations on this amount of text.
If you give such programs a general brief, the best it can do is return a general response. The more detailed you can make the brief, the more explicit the context, the better the machine will be able to use probability to find that combination of words that best matches your requirements, then spit out a response to you.
As a marketer, you understand that when giving a creative brief to an ad agency, the more detail you can give the creatives, the more relevant will be the creative responses. A general brief will give you lots of ordinary creative responses. By contrast, a detailed brief that clearly articulates the target market, product benefits, and the value to be derived from the products use, will generate better creative responses.
ChatGPT is no different, so for good results, give it a good brief.
What makes this so powerful for those who are expert in their domains, is that they will be able to give better briefs, and so have returned better results, which will then be the basis of their creative thinking. This offers the opportunity to improve on the best that has been done to date. For those who are not as expert, their briefs will not be as good, the context in which the machine defines probabilities will be wider, so the output more general, generic, average, and average these days increasingly simply does not cut it.
I hope that helps.
For a more detailed and technical explanation of how ChatGPT works written by an expert, go to the fifth PS at the end of this blog post published when I first stumbled across ChatGPT in December last year.
Header Credit: Dall-E. The brief was ‘ChatGPT algorithms working hard to compute copy in a surreal setting’
Feb 22, 2023 | Customers, Marketing
Few would disagree that the very best way to find a new customer, to build a business, is to have existing happy customers refer you to their networks.
Even anonymous referrals are better than nothing. How often have you looked up a service provider on social media, and looked at the ratings? Recognising they may be from friends, fools, and their mother, they are still a guide.
Happy customers will refer automatically.
Sadly this is not the case in a proactive sense. Happy customers may give you a wrap when they happen to be talking about whatever problem you solved for them with their friends and colleagues. That is not the same as proactively being an advocate for your product. You have to ask them to refer you, and the manner of asking is crucial.
Customers do not like referring.
In my experience, happy customers do like referring you, but as noted, they have to be asked. The psychological drive of reciprocity comes in here. When you have met and hopefully exceeded the expectations of a customer, they will feel obliged to at least be nice to you. Asking for a referral is a very easy way for them to be nice.
It is OK to pay for a referral.
No, it is not. Paying for a referral is almost an insult. Most people do not like to benefit personally from a referral where there is a friend or acquaintance involved, as it is their credibility at stake.
Potential customers do not believe in referred products.
Yes, they do. When someone who is trusted delivers a referral, that referral takes on an element of the trust that is in the relationship. Both parties know that trust will be damaged if a referral does not ‘pan out’ as promised, so they are careful. This is entirely different to the so called ‘influencer marketing’ that infests digital platforms. These influencers are no different to the talking heads we used to see all the time in ads in earlier times.
Assuming a referral will lead to a sale.
Many things must be aligned for a sale to eventuate, all a referral does is give you a credible foot in the door, the right to have that first conversation in the sales process. You still need to do the hard yards. You still need the sales process.
In a world where the first and must win commercial battle is for the attention of your potential customer, the presence of a credible referral is like getting a 20 metre start in a 100metre race.
Feb 3, 2023 | Branding, Demand chains, Marketing, Small business, Strategy
Woolworths last week announced they would close 250 of their current 300 in store butcher shops. Clearly, centralisation and opacity of the supply chain that serves customers via Woolworths is geared to the lowest common denominator, price.
At the other end of the scale is Wolki farm in Albury. This is an integrated farm to retail supply chain that innovates at every point. Rather than just trying to do the same job as always for a lesser cost, they re-engineered the whole chain. From their website: ‘We are the connector between the conscientious consumer and quality produce’
Their 24/7 retail outlet in Albury is just the end of the chain, but full of innovation. I do not normally inhabit TikTok, but this video of owner Jake Wolki’s view of the future was referred to me by a (younger) friend, who knows my views about agricultural supply chains.
The challenge both retailers are setting out to address is the core challenge of marketing: how to create and communicate value that motivates customers to a transaction facilitating longer term engagement.
Woolworths (and Coles, Aldi, et al) do it by price and convenience. They might mumble about quality, but it is at best a second order priority. As long as it is edible, legal, and delivers the category target margin, it is OK. By absolute contrast, Wolki’s (I do not know them at all, had not heard of them until last week) are clearly focussed on quality, product provenance, and integrity. The price they charge for their produce will reflect all that, but no consumer who is looking for the cheapest cut of meat is likely to find it at Wolki’s. What they do get in detail is supply chain transparency that delivers the provenance and guarantee of quality of the product they are about to buy.
That may interest only a small proportion of the market, but that proportion is significantly larger than it was just a couple of years ago, and will continue to compound.
It seems to me that Woolies are repeating the mistake they made with Thomas Dux 6 years ago. They are ignoring the messages being sent by consumers from the ‘edges’ of their customer base that ‘Mass’ was not acceptable. More probably, they are choosing to ignore those consumers in favour of low cost supply chain control, and reluctance to rock the competitive ship by innovation. Perhaps they will prove me wrong, and use the remaining few in store butchers to experiment?
Photo credit: Wolki Farm from the website
Jan 23, 2023 | Change, Communication, Marketing
Considering my definition of marketing as being: ‘The identification, development, leveraging and defence of competitive advantage’ it makes sense to consider the impact of AI, as it is happening all around us. Largely unnoticed until the explosive birth of ChatGPT in November last year following the earlier release of Dall-E, the doomsayers are at work.
I am not a data scientist, my limit is writing a formula in Excel no longer than 3 factors, but you do not need to be a data scientist to think about this stuff.
AI learns from itself by iterating with the benefit of ‘digital hindsight’, the outcomes of the previous iterations built in. Think of a radiologist reading scans. In the course of a year they might read a thousand, each time learning from the experience of the previous readings. Over the course of a professional career of 25 years, they might read 25,000, then they retire, and the experience is lost. An AI system can read hundreds of thousands in a week, each building on the previous, looking for patterns, so millions over a couple of years. They can also take data from other sources and blend it into the analysis, and they never retire, so the experience is not lost, it compounds. Importantly however, it compounds based on what has happened, making visible what is already in the data. We have yet to build an algorithm that can be creative.
The ingredients necessary are just 4:
- Input data,
- Computing power,
- Quantitative understanding of human behaviour (still evolving) and,
- An AI system.
Successful Marketing uses all four, although to date in vastly different ways and to differing degrees. It requires an intimate understanding of customer behaviour and how your behaviour and that of the customers impacts others in the supply chain. This is almost ground zero for marketing success.
The combination of the recently released ChatGPT and its stablemate from OpenAI Dall-E will do for content creation in its broadest sense, what the digital camera did for photography. Suddenly everyone became a ‘photographer’, so who needed professionals? Slowly, the gap between even good amateurs and the professionals became clearer, the value added by the real pros, as distinct from the others became more obvious, and presented the clear choices that needed to be made. A similar process will evolve with written and visual content. It has become very easy to produce stuff that will pass muster as OK, but is that good enough in a homogeneous world?
The combination of these tools and a professional will reduce the time taken to produce great work, so the costs will go down, and the quality will not suffer, but be enhanced. A great outcome for the few true professionals.
The downside will be felt by those who claim expertise, but do not genuinely have it. Their output of regurgitated marketing strategies, tactics and collateral material will resemble the thousands of templates already available, and be of little genuine competitive use.
Header cartoon credit: Tom Gauld in new Scientist
