Our three Smarter Ways of Working Book Club choices this quarter offer lessons from successful people; and since you can’t get much more successful than being elected President of the United States, our Book Club Choice is "To Be President", a gripping account of Barack Obama’s rise, which reveals exactly how his innovative communications campaign engaged an audience at a very deep level.
Our second choice, "Alpha Dogs", takes a look at more tried and trusted political spin techniques, at how political strategists identify which battles need to be won, and then go about winning them.
We haven’t gone politics-mad here: lessons from both these books can clearly be applied to the world of brand communication.
Our third book this quarter is "Outliers" – Malcolm Gladwell’s latest. It hasn’t been met with the same rapturous acclaim as his earlier works, but we reckon there is still plenty here that is both interesting and relevant to our working lives.
SUMMARY: The quest for the White House - Every now and then something happens in politics that has ripples across everything.
Tory electioneering (Labour isn’t working) in the late seventies is one UK example of political campaigning that had an effect on all kinds of marketing. The Nixon/Kennedy debates in the early sixties had a similar fundamental effect.
The Obama phenomenon that we witnessed last year, the approach to the election of the first black US president ,is another instance with longterm ramifications for approaches to winning consumers over.
Our book club choice this January, as Obama enters the White House formally as President of the worlds most powerful nation, is an account of his rise. Written in an engaging and rather thrilling style by Ian Leslie – a brand consultant who closely followed the campaign – "To be President" is a gripping account of the twelve months leading up to the 4th November election.
The book is full of plot twists so that even though you know the outcome, you feel the drama of the race. However in spirit and design the Obama campaign was a movement and one of the most successful brand positionings we have seen recently. There’s lots of lessons that sit within the narrative and that’s why MediaCom is delighted to invite you to the Obama breakfast on February 6th this year to hear Leslie talk about his experiences and to workshop with our planning strategist Sean Healy the lessons for brands in 2009.
The first political campaign to use YouTube and the world wide web to their fullest potential this was not however a campaign that simply relied on new technology. One of the crucial decisions Obama’s campaign managers made was to open up the campaign in all sorts of ways which made it feel like a grass roots movement instead of a top down communication.
Leslie’s book is packed with fascinating detail. For example one of Sarah Palin’s first actions as the newly elected governor of Alaska was to put her predecessors private jet for sale on Ebay. Palin’s skill at judging the mood of the electorate is clearly expressed and her capability for leveraging her popularity. Barack Obama’s mother was called Stanley Ann (her father wanted a boy)! Hillary Clinton played “roll the orange down the aisle” to win over reporters in her campaign jet.
Republican tactics to undermine Obama are explained in the “Big Ugly Frog” strategy: “creating daily controversies that distract and unsettle their opponent “Stick that frog right in their face, shake it all around and say “Here, look at this big ugly frog.” Then as they defend themselves … real quick grab another…”.
The inspirational parts of Obama’s story make the most compelling reading in the book. His call for change, his agenda to gain power to create change and his insistence on an optimistic vision for America. In Obama’s victory speech he talked about Ann Nixon Cooper – a black woman of 106 years old. She was born just a generation past slavery and “this year, in this election, she cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change”.
Obama’s campaign had particular power because of its inclusiveness. He acknowledged in his victory speech that he had to represent and work for those Americans who had not voted for him, and it is said that he always works on the basis that the opponents he has to deal with politically have a point of some kind, they represent the electorate and they’re not bad because they disagree just working from a different perspective. There’s management lessons in that for us all.
And finally – here’s Obama’s summing up of an encounter with a local council woman in South Carolina in 2007 who used a rousing chant to wake up apathetic crowds at council meetings. He said “It shows you what one voice can do. One voice can change a room; and if it can change a room, it can change a city; and if it can change a city, it can change a state; and if it can change a state, then it can change a nation; and if it can change a nation, it can change a world”
Lets hope he’s right.
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SUMMARY: The story of Success - ….Could your brands be an outlier?
It’s likely that If you are reading this you’ll know all about Malcom Gladwell. Widely regarded as one of the great storytellers of his age, you’ll have read his previous tomes (‘The Tipping Point’ and ‘Blink) and undoubtedly will have been guilty of using his lexicon in meetings… ‘Have we reached a tipping point team?’.
Widely embraced by the marketing and agency community, the Tipping Point argued that social phenomena are spread in the same way as disease and we duly began targeting maverns and not ‘all adults’. His next work, Blink, suggested that our instinct can be more valid than our protracted circumspection and we began to support the role of neuroscience in marketing to the unconscious.
In his third book, Gladwell describes an Outlier as “ a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be outlier. The book is about human outliers and what factors contribute to their extraordinariness”.
The argument of Outliers is really summed up in 3 points (with thanks to Seth Godin):
Released in November 2008, Outliers has proved something of an Outlier itself. Where as it’s predecessors received unanimous acclaim, Outliers has at best received mixed reviews, at worst faced the accusation that it’s overlong and it is not very good.
Detractors point to two key elements that make it an underwhelming read. Firstly, the central point, that true success isn’t based on innate ability alone but circumstance and hard graft isn’t really that revelatory. Secondly, that in essence the book is a bit of a vanity project. The grand reveal is that Gladwell himself fits the profile of an outlier. They argue these two combine to leave you with a general feeling of post read ennui
Whilst I agree with the points the detractors make, I think there are two reasons to read Outliers. As a Gladwell book it remains very well worth a read. At the very least it is another exercise in great story telling that we could all learn from mixing great research with accessible writing craft. It’s to Gladwell’s credit that his style has been copied so often since his first book, but never bettered.
Beyond reasons of style there is a very good read reason why I feel it a great read. What if, instead of people, Gladwell was talking about your brands?..
Have you the circumstances for true success?....
have you achieved your 10,000 hours?.....
does when your brand was born mean it will never be a success or should be but is not?
Etc etc
If you anthropomorphise your brand you could learn a lot here. Ask the questions that this exercise prompts and you could be on your way to a brand outlier either by backing your brands that truly have the chances to be great or, and even more key, recognising that the brand that is the perennial under achiever will always remain that and it’s time to move on.
Leading you to this epiphany alone makes Outliers a very good read indeed
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SUMMARY: The American Who Turned Political Spin into a Global Business.
James Harding gives an insightful account of how Scott Miller and David Sawyer (The Sawyer Miller Group) served as strategists on every presidential contest from Nixon to George W. Bush and charts how they made a massive impact on the outcome of political elections all over the world. They gave birth to political spin techniques that endure today. If history, political consultancy and marketing float your boat, then this book is definitely for you.
As someone working in marketing and communications, I found a number of parallels from the archives of history to what’s happening in our world today.
Scott Miller was an ad. man and good at copy writing, while David Sawyer had an ambition to be a film maker and was keen to use a camera at any given opportunity. A combined skills set that proved to be very successful. Although a very new and emerging media at the time, they were quick to grasp that television could have a massive impact on the outcome of political elections – an interesting parallel with the web in the most recent battle for the presidency in the US.
The way in which they took a candidates personality, not matter how unpalatable and formed it into a character that the public could buy-into, is fascinating at times. The book tells how they created the sound-bites on policy and personality that could win elections, understood how to segment a population and which battles needed to be won and which could be scarified. Really no different to many of the decisions marketing directors need make to ensure their brands succeed.
Their know-how was applied beyond politics - Harding gives a compelling account of how Coca Cola’s lead in the US soda market was being usurped by Pepsi and in an attempt to reverse their fortune, Coke changed their recipe. This turned into a PR disaster for Coke, but with some lateral thinking they subsequently managed to turn the situation to their advantage - a great history lesson for anyone in marketing or PR.
There are parts of the book that I found a little long-winded and drawn out, but when I got through those patches I was rewarded by some compelling accounts that more than compensated.
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