MackCollier.com

by

Marketing and Movies: The Book of Eli

web3 rabbit hole

One of the driving forces in our lives is to find our purpose. Our ‘higher calling’, or something that motivates us to get up in the morning and do something. We all have a longing to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. It gives our lives meaning, comfort, and hope. These themes along with faith, perseverance and love are explored in the wonderful movie The Book of Eli.

Disclaimer: This post contains spoilers about the movie The Book of Eli. If you have not watched The Book of Eli, please do so before reading this post. It’s wonderful and well worth your time.  You can read the other posts in the Marketing and Movies series here.

The Book of Eli centers on a man named Eli (played by Denzel Washington). Eli lives in a post-apocalyptic world. At first, we know very little about Eli, the world he is living in, or his purpose. As the movie progresses, we learn from Eli that sometime before the movie is set, nuclear war happened, and in order to survive, people like Eli went underground to avoid radiation contamination. The planet was devastated, and the majority of earth was turned into a wasteland. Clean water for drinking and bathing is now a prized commodity, one that Eli, along with everyone else in the movie is desperately seeking.

Eli’s purpose in the movie is revealed to us gently. At first, we are simply told that Eli has the single-minded purpose of going west. Later, we learn that Eli has in his possession a King James Bible. Eli enters a town and while there, the owner of the town, Carnegie, discovers this fact as well, and asks Eli to give him the Bible. Eli refuses, and Carnegie instructs his henchmen to kill Eli.

A huge gunfight ensues, that sees Carnegie’s henchmen shoot Eli multiple times, but the bullets inexplicably miss Eli, or seem to be deflected off him. At the same time, Eli seems to have almost supernatural precision in his shooting, killing the entire gang in just a few shots. Eli leaves the gang in the streets, and continues out of town.

Outside of town, a girl from the town named Solara meets up with Eli. Solara is the daughter of Carnegie’s mistress, Claudia.  Eli tells her to go back to her mom, his journey is too dangerous for her. She says she will take Eli to find water if she can go with him. Eli never agrees, but follows Solara to a nearby spring. Eli gets all the water he can carry, then locks Solara in the spring. He reminds her that his journey is too dangerous for her, and leaves her.

Solara later escapes the spring, but instead of going back to her town, she continues after Eli. As she is traveling, she comes across a woman screaming for help. She goes to help the woman, but as soon as the woman sees that Solara is also a woman, she panics and begs her to leave immediately. Solara does not, and a group of bikers come out and attack Solara. Just as they are about to subdue Solara, Eli finds them and kills the group before they could assault Solara. Now Eli has no choice but to let Solara join him on his journey.

They continue west, and the next night they rest at a long abandoned nuclear plant. There, Eli explains more about the Bible. He says that one day he heard the voice of God in his head. God told him to go to a spot, and that he would find the Bible there. God told Eli to take the Bible, and to ‘go west’. Eli explains that God told him that He would protect him on his journey. It turns out, this is the last Bible in existence, but Eli still doesn’t know why he is taking it ‘out west’, just that God told him to, and that’s enough for him. Solara is stunned that Eli would do all this for a book, and would ‘go west’ based on simple faith.

Eli and Solara continue west, but Carnegie also continues to track them. Eventually, Carnegie finds Eli and Solara, and takes the Bible from Eli, and then shoots him. Carnegie kidnaps Solara, then heads back to his town with Solara.

Along the way back to his town, Solara is able to attack the driver of the truck that’s carrying her, and she takes over the vehicle and heads back toward the house where Eli was shot. Carnegie’s driver tells him that they have just enough gas to make it back to his town, so Carnegie decides to let Solara go.

Carnegie returns to his town, and gives the Bible to the engineer to open.  The Bible has a large gold lock on it. At the same time, Solara returns to the house where Eli was shot, and finds that he’s gone. Solara starts driving past the house, and after some time she encounters Eli walking down the road. She asks him where he is going and he says “West. Gotta go west”. So Solara continues to drive Eli west. Eventually, they come to the Golden Gate bridge. The bridge’s middle section is destroyed, so they start rowing a boat across the water and eventually come to Alcatraz Prison.

Back in town, Carnegie has opened the Bible, only to discover that he cannot read it. There’s a good reason why he can’t. And in the process, he also discovers something amazing about Eli:

Eli and Solara enter the prison facility, and the person running it informs them that they have a vast library and a printing press. Eli informs the man that he has a copy of the King James Bible. Then Eli proceeds to dictate the entire Bible to the man, as he meticulously records his every word. Once the process is finished, the printing press can then begin to print copies of the King James Bible, for the first time since they were destroyed during the nuclear war. This was Eli’s mission from God.

The movie implies that Eli died soon after his copy of the Bible was transcribed. Eli quotes 2 Timothy 4:7, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

The Book of Eli and the Secret of Great Marketing

For almost two decades I have consulted companies on their marketing strategies. One of the core teachings I try to stress to clients is that you aren’t marketing a product, you are marketing how your product fits into my life. Your goal as a marketer should be to make sure I understand the impact that your product will have on my life.

Because at the end of the day, our material possessions aren’t what drive us and give us happiness. It’s something bigger than that. It’s our experiences, our accomplishments.

It’s the life we live.

Throughout the movie, we watch as Solara reacts to understanding what Eli is doing, and why he is doing it. At first she experiences disbelief, and views Eli’s trek out west as being ridiculous. But later as she learns more about what Eli is doing, and witnesses firsthand his dedication to his journey, her disbelief gives way to awe, and finally to admiration.

At one point early on in the movie, Solara laments that her town is corrupt and people are being hurt, as an appeal to Eli for him to leave his mission and stay in the town and help them. Eli simply responds “Then change it” and continues west.

The movie ends with Solara paying her respects to Eli at his gravesite. She then turns on his music player, picks up his weapon, and begins her own journey, back to her town. Eli had a mission from God to perform, and in performing that mission, he also inspired Solara to find her own calling, her own mission.

Your calling as a marketer is to lead your customers to live better, more fulfilling lives. Selling products is a byproduct of that, not the goal. The marketing goal is to market how your product fits into the lives of your customers, how it makes their lives better and more meaningful.

by

Marketing and Movies: Top Gun

A few weeks ago I talked about how the movie Smokey and the Bandit had the greatest movie product placement of all time, Bandit’s jet black Firebird Trans-Am. The movie had an immediate impact on sales of the sporty Pontiac, and the car is still highly-prized by vintage car collectors to this day.

The car played an integral part of the movie Smokey and the Bandit, and did so in a way that wasn’t forced, that made sense to the audience and that actually made the car seem cool and desirable. While Smokey and the Bandit was at its heart a comedy-adventure movie, General Motors no doubt saw the movie as a 2 hour promotional video for the Pontiac Trans-Am. And a far better one than GM could have produced.

That brings us to 1986’s blockbuster movie Top Gun. The film’s protagonist is Pete Mitchell.a brilliant fighter pilot, who is constantly being disciplined for refusing to follow all of the ‘rules of engagement’ while flying. Pete is the son of Duke Mitchell, who was also an excellent fighter pilot, who flew in the Vietnam War. Pete has been told by the government that his dad disappeared behind enemy lines, and his family name has been engulfed in controversy as a result. In fact, we learn in the movie that Pete was denied entry into the US Naval Academy because of the actions of his father.

So understandably, Maverick flies with a bit of a chip on his shoulder, to not only live up to the flying skills of his father, but to prove himself to fellow pilots that doubt him based on the reputation of his dad. Maverick is eventually given the opportunity to join Top Gun, the premier school for teaching dogfighting skills to pilots. This school is for the elite of the elite, so it’s the perfect place for a pilot with a chip on his shoulder to prove himself. Maverick quickly positions himself as one of the top pilots in the school, but a tragic accident while training leaves him questioning if he should quit the school or not. Before deciding to leave, he visits one of his instructors, who tells him that he had actually flown with his dad in Vietnam, and that the story he had been told for years about his father was wrong. The instructor told Maverick that he and his father were hopelessly outmatched in an aerial combat exchange.  Maverick’s father had a chance to leave the fight and save his own life, but he stayed to save the lives of several teammates, before his plane was finally shot down.

The story itself is interesting enough, but what makes the film is the breathtaking flight sequences. It was actually a wonderful recruitment tool for the US Navy, who saw a massive spike in enrollment because of the movie. Saavy recruiters even set up booths in the lobby of movie theaters so they could talk to candidates as soon as they left the movie, no doubt excited about what they had just experienced.

And the Navy will likely see another spike in recruitment when the film’s sequel, Top Gun 2, is released next Summer. As you can see from this trailer, the flight scenes are absolutely incredible:

If you were to argue that the Top Gun films are simply a protracted recruitment video for the Navy, you wouldn’t be completely wrong. The Pentagon worked with the studio to make the original Top Gun movie and has worked with the studio on the sequel. Because the government knows that storytelling is a very effective marketing tool. We talked yesterday about using storytelling to make your blog writing more interesting, and it also works incredibly well for movies.

Help your customers understand how your products or services are valuable and make their lives more meaningful. That’s great marketing at its heart. Top Gun inspired many Americans to join the Navy to be a part of something bigger than themselves. And hopefully fly cool planes as well. But it was all marketing.  The fact that it didn’t really feel like marketing is what makes it so effective.

by

Marketing and Movies: The Dark Knight

The original Batman film from 1989 was a critical and commercial success. In particular, Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Batman nemesis The Joker, as well as director Tim Burton’s efforts were particularly praised. So when it was announced that the Batman series reboot would again feature The Joker in 2008’s The Dark Knight, many fans were rightly skeptical of actor Heath Ledger’s ability to match the performance that Jack Nicholson had brought to the character two decades before.

Ledger proved up to the task, not only meeting but surpassing the work of the screen legend Nicholson. Ledger’s performance of The Joker was simply a masterwork, his work dominated the film and made you believe you were actually watching an insane serial killer. Ledger was that scary good:

As it turns out, the marketing for The Dark Knight was scary good as well. I wrote about one aspect of the film’s phenomenal marketing campaign in my book Think Like a Rock Star:

Sometimes the best marketing doesn’t ‘look’ like marketing at all. When Warner Bros. was promoting the movie The Dark Knight, it put together all the standard online and offline marketing promotions that you would expect to see for a summer blockbuster. But the marketing campaign for The Dark Knight also had an element of ‘fun’ to it. Warner Bros. created an elaborate online marketing campaign, one element of which required you to ‘decode’ online websites that tied into the movie. If you were the first person from your area to decipher the website, you would be given the address of a local bakery that was holding a cake for you to pick up under the name Robbin Banks (robbin’ banks, get it?). When you received the cake, the icing said ‘Call Me Now’ and included a phone number. If you dialed the number, the cake itself started ringing! Inside the cake there was a packet containing a cell phone and other items from the company Rent A Clown, apparently set up by Batman’s arch-enemy in the movie, The Joker! Campaigns such as this were great fun for fans of The Dark Knight, and helped create a lot of extra buzz around the film.

Here’s the cake that you received for solving the puzzle:

Keep in mind this was done in 2008, just as YouTube was starting to take off, so The Dark Knight was one of the first films to really leverage UGC to help virally promote the film online. Also note that such a campaign isn’t aimed at casual fans of the franchise, but rather at fans that were already invested in the film as soon as it was announced. These fans are more loyal to the film and loved the idea of ‘solving a riddle’ to figure out the online puzzle, then to get the reward of getting the cake AND the phone and materials inside. The marketing is giving an incentive to the winner of the puzzle to promote the film even further. If you won one of these cakes, you wanted to brag about it, you wanted to share with your friends on social media, which simply leads to more promotion of the film, for free!

If you somehow haven’t seen The Dark Knight yet, please watch it ASAP. Heath Ledger died during the filming of The Dark Knight and this film left the world with a complete understanding of what a brilliant talent he truly was.

by

Marketing and Movies: Hearts In Atlantis

Hearts In Atlantis is a wonderful drama that, when you finish watching it you will likely say “Wait, that was based on a Stephen King book?” It was, and it features a wonderful performance by the always brilliant Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins plays Ted Brautigan, a man with psychic powers who is being chased by a governmental group that wants to use Ted’s powers. Ted frequently moves to stay one step ahead of the government or ‘low men’ as he calls them.

But as the movie opens, we are in the present day and the studio of Bobby Garfield. Bobby has just received a package from the attorney of his childhood friend ‘Sully’ Sullivan. Bobby, Sully and Carol Gerber were childhood friends, and when they were children, Sully had once promised Bobby that he would leave Bobby his baseball glove in his will. Bobby opens the package to find that baseball glove inside. He soon learns that Sully was killed in a car accident, and travels back to his hometown to attend the funeral. While there, he meets with Sully’s attorney, and mentions that he hadn’t seen Carol yet, and that he was very much looking forward to seeing her during his trip. The attorney then informs Bobby that Carol had actually died a few years earlier. Shocked, Bobby returns to his old childhood home, and the majority of the movie is shown as Bobby remembering what his life was like one summer with Sully and Carol, and then later, when Ted Brautigan came into their lives.

One of the over-arching themes of the movie is the magic of being a child during the summer. So many of us seem to have that one magical summer of our youth where we made special friends, had our ‘summer love’ or just enjoyed being a carefree child enjoying a magical time in our lives. The movie does a great job of making us nostalgic for the summers of our youth. I’ll talk about this more in a minute. When Ted arrives on the scene, he is living next door to Bobby and his mom. Ted soon offers to pay Bobby $1 a week to read the newspaper to him, claiming his eyesight is failing him. Bobby shrewdly suspects that there’s more to the offer, and asks Ted to tell him what the REAL job is. Ted then explains that what he really wants Bobby to do is keep an eye out around town for the government group or ‘low men’ that are chasing him. One of Ted’s psychic abilities includes being able to ‘sense’ when his pursuers are closing in on him. Ted can also read minds, and when Bobby’s mom suddenly arrives home and yells for him, Bobby flinches, but Ted quickly grabs his hand and tells him “She can’t tell what you are thinking. You think she can, and that’s her power over you.”

All three of the childhood friends grow a quick affection for Ted, especially Bobby. Bobby’s father died when he was very young, and one of the subplots of the movie is Bobby recalling his love of his father. And in this scene, we find out that Bobby’s father and Ted were once at the same football game sharing another love, that of former Chicago Bears great Bronco Nagurski:

Nostalgia in marketing is very powerful, and I think it’s even more impactful in volatile times like this when we want to return to a time when things were more…pleasant. More peaceful, more normal. Nostalgia often involves us returning to our youth, and note that Ted made his story far more interesting to Bobby by involving his dad in the telling of the story.

Whenever I talk about creating content that builds awareness, I mention that you (as the content creator) need to remember that you are trying to connect with an audience that doesn’t know who you are. So you create content that focuses on what’s important and relevant to the customer. In the above scene, what if Ted had told Bobby a story about “Jim Thorpe, the greatest football player that ever lived.” Bobby’s first reaction might have been “Well he wasn’t as good as Bronco Nagurski, my dad LOVED Bronco Nagurski!” Bobby likely doesn’t know who Thorpe was, but he knows who Bronco Nagurski was, cause his dad loved him. Ted reaches Bobby by telling a story about a football player that his dad loved.

Nostalgia in marketing can be very powerful. Anytime you can tie your marketing messages to something else that your customer loves and remembers fondly, it’s a good thing. And if you haven’t, do check out Hearts In Atlantis, a wonderful movie. This quote from Ted may tell you where the movie gets it title from “Sometimes when you’re young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you’re living in someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been?”

by

Marketing and Movies: Smokey and the Bandit

1977 was a great year for blockbuster movies. Saturday Night Fever, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and of course, Star Wars: A New Hope. Another top-grossing movie in 1977 was Smokey and the Bandit. Smokey and the Bandit had an all-star cast; Burt Reynolds, Sally Fields and Jackie Gleason. The movie centers on a Coors Beer run that two buddies (Bandit and Cledus) have to make in 28 hours, from Georgia to Texas, and back to Georgia.

But the scene-stealer in this movie wasn’t an actor, it was an automobile. The logistics of making a round trip from Georgia to Texas in 28 hours meant that Cledus (who would drive the truck hauling the beer) would have to drive faster than the speed limit to make the trip on time. Obviously, that meant Cledus needed a way to evade the police.

That’s where the Bandit came in. The Bandit drove a 1977 Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am. The Bandit would draw all the attention from the police to him, clearing a path for Cledus to drive unencumbered. Bandit is the perfect driver for a flashy and fast sports car designed to draw attention. In one scene Sally Fields’ character Carrie asks Bandit what he does:

Bandit: “I go from place to place, and do what I do best.’

Carrie: “What’s that?”

Bandit: “Show off.”

As you can see, Bandit’s Firebird Trans-Am was one of the stars of the movie. And its presence had an immediate impact on Trans-Am sales. “We could have our whole front line full with Trans Ams. It was a big car for us,” said Art Douglas, 61, of Jim  Douglas Auto Sales on Baldwin Avenue in Pontiac, which his father founded in 1975. “The movie made the car popular, really more with non-car people. I mean, that car was hot.” “When it all comes together with the actor, the car, the script and that moment in pop culture? For an automaker that’s better than advertising,” McElroy said. “When you hit that magic, and a car becomes a star, wow, it can really help sales.”

Most product placements, whether its in a movie or television series, really aren’t that effective. Typically, the placement is for a product that’s in the background and really contributes nothing to the plot or story of the film or show. Smokey and the Bandit was completely different in that the Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am MADE the story. Without that automobile, there’s no plot. The Trans-Am made the story, and made it better, and made it cooler. This is what great product placements always do, the product plays a role, that isn’t forced, and makes the scene or larger show better.

Yesterday when I talked about the three types of content you could create for your customers, one of those types was ‘inspirational’ content. If you think about it, the Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am was inspirational content. It showed us how cool it could be to own and drive a car like that. Note the above quote from the gentleman that owned a car lot when the movie came out, he said that the Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am was a big hit with ‘non-car people’. In other words, people that didn’t really care about cars, cared about THAT car, because it had the ‘cool’ factor. Many of Apple’s products have that ‘cool’ factor due to impressive design and slick marketing.

So if your company wants to use product placements, or even if you want to sponsor digital content, think about how the placement or sponsorship can MAKE THE USER EXPERIENCE BETTER. This should always be the goal for your product placement or sponsorship. If it gets in the way, it gets ignored. But if it makes the scene, then it becomes ‘cool’ and desirable.

by

Marketing and Movies: Interstellar

I’ve never been a big fan of science fiction movies. The simple reason why is, I can’t relate to most of them. Most science fiction movies have plots and special effects that are completely untethered to reality. I need to be able to look at what’s happening and think “Ok, I can see how that’s possible”. When I was a kid, I wasn’t a fan of Superman or Hulk, I loved Batman. Because I didn’t think it was possible to be a superpowered alien from another planet or a radioactive giant, but I could totally see being an obsessed millionaire who was a hand to hand combat expert, and who could buy any crime-fighting toy he needed. I could RELATE to being Batman, I couldn’t relate to being Superman or Hulk.

Interstellar is the second Christopher Nolan movie I’ve discussed in the Marketing and Movies series. One of the many things that Nolan excels at is taking complex and potentially confusing concepts and making them relatable and easier for the viewer to understand. A couple week ago, I talked about how Nolan helped the viewer understand what life was like for Leonard Shelby in dealing with short term memory loss by altering the structure of the movie Memento.

With interstellar, Nolan, for the most part, does a great job of taking potentially abstract ideas and making them easier for the viewer to understand by tying them to something that makes sense for us. There’s a couple of instances where Nolan does this. The general plot of the movie is that blight, a plant disease, is killing the world’s crops. The blight will wipe out one form of crop, so farmers will rotate and start growing a new crop, but eventually the blight adjusts and destroys that crop as well. The end result is that miles and miles of farmland is reduced to dirt. This results in frequent and massive dust storms that plague the farmers and their families. These types of dust storms were actually common in the early 20th century in the heartland.  Early on in the movie, we are shown interviews with people who had survived these storms. It turns out, these were actual interviews from people who survived the dust storms during the 1930s. Nolan used clips from Ken Burns’ 2012 series The Dust Bowl which were actual interviews from people who had lived through these storms. So Nolan is already giving us a way to relate to what these farmers are going through, even though we’ve never experienced similar dust storms.

Later in the film, a wordhole is discovered that NASA has previously sent two crafts into searching for potentially habitable planets if it becomes necessary to leave Earth. NASA sends a second craft into the wormhole to visit two planets which show promise. This is another spot in the film where Nolan could have lost me, if the two planets that the crew visited seemed completely unrelatable. Instead, Nolan made both planets similar enough to Earth that the viewer can relate to them. Both environments contain enough Earth-like elements that the viewer can look at Nolan’s vision of what these planets are like and think “Ok, that makes sense to me”.

There’s a key lesson in this for marketers. When you are attempting to promote your products or services to customers, you need to help them understand how what you sell will improve their lives. A very easy way to do this is to talk about your product or service in terms of what those customers are doing now, and how your product or service will help improve their efforts. For instance, let’s say your company sells a ‘copper infused’ cooking pan. Your pan costs 10% more than the average cooking pan on the market. If you sell your pan as simply being ‘the future of cooking’, customers will respond with ‘what does that even mean?’ And asking them to pay an additional 10% more for features they don’t see the value in, kills the product.

But if you promote how the cooking pan will improve the life of your customer, that helps them see the value. If you promote that the cooking pan reduces cooking time by 23%, thanks to being copper-infused, and is 15% easier to clean than the average cooking pan, that’s real benefits that customers can see the value in. That helps justify the 10% higher price tag. Promote these features to time-strapped parents trying to get their kids off to school in the morning AND with a hot breakfast, and you’ve got a winning combination.

The key is to understand your customers, and help them understand how your product benefits them and improves their lives. This is especially important when you are dealing with potential customers who aren’t familiar with your brand. You need to speak clearly to customers and help them understand the value of your product or service. And speak in terms and concepts that the customer can relate to.

by

Marketing and Movies: Moneyball

I am a sucker for shows or documentaries that detail how a business started from nothing and became a success. I’m also a big fan of sports movies. Moneyball is both, so of course it’s one of my favorite movies.

Moneyball follows the 2001 offseason and 2002 season that saw the Oakland Athletics overcome massive budget constraints and the loss of its star players to set the American League record for consecutive wins, and make the postseason. I think the story of Moneyball will resonate with a lot of business owners who are having to take a long, hard look at its direction given the economic and business uncertainty we are all facing heading into 2021.

In the 2001 offseason, Oakland lost its two ‘star’ players, Johnny Damon and Jason Giambi to rivals who could afford to pay far richer salaries than the Athletics could. General Manager Bill Beane went to the Athletics owner and told him he needed more money to make the Athletics competitive. The owner said there was no more money for Beane and that he should do the best he can. Beane then went to his scouts who were focused on trying to replace Giambi and Damon. Beane became frustrated with this mentality because he knew that the Athletics couldn’t afford players that could hit the same number of HRs and who had the same batting average as Giambi and Damon. And even if they could find a couple of players that could put up similar stats to Giambi and Damon, the Athletics would lose them in a year or two when a richer ballclub offered them a higher salary that the Athletics couldn’t match.

Beane knew that the Athletics needed to change the way they viewed acquiring players. At first he tried to get the best players the Athletics could afford. He visited the Indians, and proposed several trades or player acquisitions, but Beane noticed that these offers were all rejected after advisor Peter Brand spoke to management. Beane left the meeting frustrated, and decided to speak to Brand directly to find out what he told Indians management to get them to kill his player offers.

Brand then explained to Beane that many baseball teams were making a grave mistake in evaluating players. Most teams at the time were focusing on stats like home runs, runs batted in and batting average. Brand explained “your goal shouldn’t be to buy players, it should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs.” Beane was impressed by Brand’s new approach to player evaluation and hired him from the Indians to help him rebuild the Athletics team.

In part of doing that, Beane and Brand began evaluating offensive players based not on HRs, RBIs or BA, but instead on whether or not they got on base. In this scene, Beane meets with the Athletics’ scouts and explains the change in philosophy when it comes to evaluating players:

As you can see, the scouts were confused by this approach as soon as they heard it. As Beane and Brand continued to acquire players who didn’t have flashy stats (but who did get on base), the fans and rest of the league scratched their heads at what the Athletics were doing. Then, the team began to struggle mightily, resulting in huge pressure being put on Beane to change his ‘moneyball’ approach to building his team in order to save his job. Beane decided to see the season through, even trading Carlos Pena, who was projected as a future All-Star, simply because he wasn’t the best fit for his new ‘moneyball’ system. That decision led to Brand asking him to please reconsider, and Beane told him that if they believed in their ‘moneyball’ approach, that they needed to commit to it:

Over time, Beane and Brand worked with the players to help educate them on how to get on base more often and how to play smart once they did. In one scene, Beane explains to a player that he wants him to focus on getting on base, not on stealing bases.  The player replies “but you pay me to steal bases, that’s what I do”, to which Beane replies “I pay you to get on first, not get thrown out at second.”

They worked with the players to stress to them the importance of waiting for their perfect pitch. Brand used analytics to show the players when to take pitches and when to swing, based on their hitting history. The play of the team improved dramatically, as the Athletics went from one of the worst teams in baseball to one of the best. Along the way, the Athletics won 20-straight games, setting an American League record that would stand for 15 years.

Now there’s several themes from Moneyball that I think tie nicely to successful marketing and business. First, there’s having the courage to try something new if your current strategy has proven not to work. Beane faced a ton of resistance to his Moneyball approach both within the Athletics organization, and in the sport of baseball. He was trying something new, and quite honestly a lot of people wanted to see him fail. That leads to the second key lesson, to commit to your strategy and give it a chance. When the Athletics actually did start losing, that just increased the pressure on Beane to drop the ‘moneyball’ approach. But Beane trusted in the strategy that he and Brand had developed, and committed to seeing it through.

But what really resonated for me personally was the idea of evaluating players based on whether or not they get on base versus if they have flashy stats. Getting on base can be done in some very unsexy ways, like taking 12 pitches and a walk, or getting hit by a pitch. Beane just wanted to see his players get on base, he didn’t care how they did it. At the time, many teams wanted a player that would hit 40 HRs, and didn’t really care if his on-base percentage was .250.

For years, I approached blogging and content creation as if I was constantly chasing home runs. Or in terms of blogging, a home run would be an ‘awesome post’. So every post was supposed to be a home run, or ‘awesome’. And we constantly hear this, don’t we?  ‘It’s about quality, not quantity!’ or ‘If you can’t write a great post, wait till you can!’

The reality is, no blogger writes a great post every time. But for years, that was my goal, write a great post every time. And write a lot of them.

I used to love Kathy Sierra’s blog Creating Passionate Users. Kathy was a very infrequent blogger. She would typically blog once, maybe twice a month at most. But almost every post she wrote, was incredible. Whenever a new Kathy Sierra post was published, it would create an immediate ripple throughout the blogging and tech community.

Kathy hit a home run every time she posted. I thought that was the standard. That’s what I wanted to do.

So every time I would start out to blog, I wanted to make every post be an awesome one. By the 3rd or 4th day, I had typically run out of ‘awesome’ ideas for posts. So I would tell myself ‘if you can’t write an awesome blog post today, then don’t write anything’. So I wouldn’t. Then the next day I would try again. Before I knew it, I was blogging once a week, then once every other week.

This process repeated itself over the years. This year, I decided to try something different. Before, I told myself “Your job is to write an awesome blog post today”.  Now, I tell myself “Your job is to write a blog post today”.

See the difference? Before I was shooting to hit a ‘home run’ at every at bat, which is completely unrealistic.  Now, I focus on getting on base.  Just writing a blog post.

Because the reality is, the more you write, the better you become at writing.  The more often you blog, the better you become at blogging, the better you become at writing awesome posts.

So that’s my ‘moneyball’ approach to blogging; Don’t worry about hitting a home run, just get on base.

by

Marketing and Movies: Memento

The customer is always right and always ‘remembers’ things from their POV.

Christopher Nolan’s resume as a director is spectacular. Interstellar, Inception, Dunkirk, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight, which in my opinion includes the finest performance by an actor ever; Heath Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker.

But I think Nolan’s masterwork as a director and storyteller is a movie you may have never heard of; Memento.  Memento follows a man named Leonard Shelby with a very unique condition; He cannot make new memories. Throughout the course of the movie, Leonard tells us of the an attacker who broke into his home, attacked him and his wife. The attacker killed Leonard’s wife and in the process of fighting with Leonard, Leonard was knocked unconscious resulting in Leonard’s ‘condition’. Leonard has this scene where he recalls that night to Natalie:

 

Natalie: “What’s the last thing that you do remember?”

Leonard: “My wife…”

Natalie: “That’s sweet.”

Leonard: “…dying.”

 

Leonard’s life since that point has been focused on finding his wife’s killer and extracting vengeance. This quest is obviously made much more difficult by the fact that Leonard cannot form new memories.  In general, he can remember the last 5 minutes or so, but if something startles him, such as a loud noise like a car backfiring, his short-term memory will ‘reset’ and he will forget even the last few minutes. He could be talking to someone and know who that person is, and suddenly forget who that person is or why he’s talking to him. Here’s an example where Leonard is running and trying to figure out why he is running. He then sees a man running too, and mistakenly assumes he is chasing the man:

 

To help put the audience in Leonard’s shoes, Nolan brilliantly organizes the story into 5-minute or so segments. The segments then alternate so that you actually see the ‘end’ of the story at the first of the movie. Then the following segment shows you the first few minutes of the story, then the following segment shows you the next to last segment of the story, so on and so forth until the movie ends in the actual ‘middle’ of the story. Nolan does this purposely to help the audience understand what Leonard’s life is like with his condition. A life lived in 5-minute increments.

Since Leonard cannot make new memories, he created an elaborate system of note-taking to help him make up for not being able to create new memories. He takes Polaroid pictures of important people and places he encounters, and then writes notes on the pictures so he knows why they are relevant to his quest to find his wife’s killer. Leonard even went so far as to cover his body with tattoos which are a list of the most basic ‘facts’ of the case, such as the name of the man he is looking for, his description, and other important information that Leonard needed to have with him at all times.

But the one element of this story that I find absolutely fascinating is how Leonard’s world of truth and fiction, right and wrong, is recreated every five minutes due to his memory condition. In fact, multiple characters in the film use Leonard’s inability to keep his memory to their advantage. In one scene, Natalie tells Leonard that she is about to lie to him, but that it will be a few minutes in the future and Leonard won’t remember that she’s now telling him this. She walks outside and Leonard begins frantically searching for a pen and paper so he can write down what she just told him. As he is searching, Natalie walks back in the house and slams the front door.  The slamming of the front door jars Leonard and causes his short-term memory of Natalie’s previous conversation to disappear.

This creates an ongoing puzzle for the audience to solve when watching this movie.  Because at any time, any character, including Leonard, could be lying, or they could be telling the truth. And if what Natalie is saying now is the truth, that means what Teddy told Leonard in the previous scene was a lie or vice versa. And Nolan gives us at least one example of every character in the movie telling at least one lie. So we are constantly having to evaluate each scene based on who seems truthful and who doesn’t.

But throughout the course of the movie, we learn that Leonard’s version of what happened on and since the night he lost his ability to make new memories, may not be what actually happened. In other words, Leonard through the retelling of the story in his own mind, has likely altered events to make his actions more pure, and to give his quest to find his wife’s killer more meaning.

Now, how does all this relate to marketing?

Let’s go back to that first line in this post: The customer is always right and always ‘remembers’ things from their POV. If you think about it, we all do this. All human beings tend to remember things differently than they actually happened. Maybe by a tiny bit, maybe by a lottabit. For years I remembered my childhood home as being on this sprawling plot of land, with massive fields surrounding it where I played as a child. The entire area seemed to cover miles in my memory. A few years ago, I drove back to visit that area and was stunned at how small everything actually was. What I remembered as being a massive area of land was only a couple of acres at best.

So when it comes to marketing, you need to remember this lesson that we tend to ‘remember’ things more positively when it comes to our own actions.  This is especially relevant when you are working in customer service and dealing with angry customers. Often, these customers can clearly see the company’s fault, and be totally oblivious to what they may have done to contribute to their support issue. The lesson for the company is to not lose its temper and to have empathy for the customer.  Understand the customer’s POV and don’t take any criticism seriously. Studies have shown than when we become angry and upset, our ability to think rationally is diminished, and this increases as we become more upset.

If you can show the customer that you have empathy for them and their situation, that will go a long way toward putting them at ease and you can have a much more productive interaction. The customer as a group IS always right because if you don’t satisfy your customers, you will lose them. Now this doesn’t mean every INDIVIDUAL customer is ‘right’ and this is where some people are confused by the true meaning of the phrase ‘the customer is always right’.

Just understand that we all have a unique POV and we all tend to view ourselves in the best possible light. That’s just human nature. Accept that, show empathy to your customers, listen to them, and a productive interaction, whether as a support issue or as a purchase, will be the result.

PS: Hopefully this post has piqued your interest to check out Memento. Here’s the trailer for the movie:

by

Marketing and Movies: Ford vs Ferrari

A few days ago I noticed a marketer instructed her followers on Twitter to treat their customers as potential ‘mouthpieces’ for their brand. While I cringed at the idea of companies viewing their customers as simply being a ‘mouthpiece’ for the brand, the reality is that such a notion will resonate with a lot of companies. Many companies do view its customers as nothing more than promotional channels. This is an incredibly short-sighted view, and it fails to acknowledge the true value of your customers. And it doesn’t create the relationship that lets their talents and abilities shine the brightest.

This lesson was at the front of my mind as I recently watched the movie Ford vs Ferrari. In the late 1950s, Ford decided that it needed to do a better job of appealing to younger car owners. The marketing department (headed by future Chrysler CEO Lee IIacoca), decided that the way to reach young car buyers was via racing, more specifically, by having Ford win the 24 Hours of Le Mans, one of the most prestigious auto races in the world. At the time, Ferrari was dominating Le Mans, and Ford approached Ferrari with an offer to buy the automaker, which greatly insulted Ferrari. In the process of refusing the offer, Enzo Ferrari greatly insulted Ford CEO Henry Ford II, which compelled Ford to go all-in on winning the race at Le Mans.

Ferrari had dominated Le Mans because racing was the heartbeat of the brand.  Motorsports and producing impeccable racing cars was at the heart of Ferrari’s culture. This wasn’t the case at Ford. So Ford, not having the love of motorsports and racing that Ferrari did, approached its entry into Le Mans as a business move, moreso than as a move motivated by a love of racing. Ford hired former Le Mans winner Carroll Shelby to create a car and team that could win Le Mans. But Ford tried to impose its culture on the effort, telling Shelby that he cannot have Ken Miles drive for the team, since Ford wanted a brand spokesperson moreso than the best driver to be behind the wheel at Le Mans. The result was a disasterous finish for Ford at its first attempt at Le Mans, which almost resulted in Ford firing Shelby.

Shelby kept his job, and continued working with Ken Miles to build a car that could win Le Mans for Ford. When Le Mans approached the following year, Ford continued to insist that Miles not drive the car, contending he would not be the proper spokesman for the Ford brand. The ongoing negotiations between Shelby and Ford led to this emotional scene from the movie:

Ford was making a mistake with its entry into Le Mans that many companies make today when they approach better connecting with their customers. Many companies approach this as a business proposition, but they fail to realize that it’s a people proposition. Your company cannot inspire its customers to take action on behalf of your brand if your brand is attempting to view your customers simply as potential sales. Forging better and stronger connections with your customers has to be ingrained in your brand. You have to have a culture that seeks out and pushes to forge deeper connections with your customers. Not simply because you want more sales, but also because you honestly care about the people that buy your brand’s product and services.

Ford went on to let Miles race at Daytona, which he won. He then went on to race at Le Mans, and led the Ford racing team to a 1-2-3 finish at Le Mans. Ford would go on to win 4 straight Le Mans, all driven by cars build by Shelby and Miles. Ford won at Le Mans by learning to trust the drivers who understood the sport of racing on a level which the brand did not. Likewise, if your brand wants to build better relationships with its customers, you will also have to trust those customers and listen to what they have to say.