Well, sometimes. Once in a while we need a good doze of harsh bitter disappointment. It might be a good thing after all.
It might make us realize that we’re in the wrong place. That we are made for something better than what we’ve settled for. Could make us see that we need to shoot for a bigger thing out there. Whatever that ‘thing’ might be, for each and one of us.
“Nobody was buying them. 3M was going to cancel the whole program. Then the brand manager of the product persuaded the secretary of the chairman of 3M to send a case of Post-Its to the secretaries of the chairmen of the other 499 Fortune 500 companies. Suddenly, the most powerful sneezers in the most powerful companies in the country were sending around memos, all containing comments scrawled on Post-Its. It took just a few months after that for it to become yet another successful business communication device. A classical ideavirus!”
- one of the cool stories (among many others) read in ‘Unleashing the Ideavirus‘ by Seth Godin which, together with ‘The Tipping Point’ from Malcolm Gladwell make a great starting point when learning about viral marketing and how social phenomena spread among different groups (hives). These 2 are warmly recommended!
“Face it. Nobody is going to hand out big rewards ever again for being on time, performing work of good quality, being useful, finishing a project on budget or being good enough. That’s expected. That’s given. The rewards (and the ideavirus) belong to the first, the fastest, the coolest, the very best.”
Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin
“We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on it, and we knew that sooner or later, everyone was going to try it. So our feeling was that the later you try it, the better it was for us because we’d make a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better.”
Sergey Brin: co-founder Google
The following situation is given: you’re playing in the consumer goods market and you’re the 3rd player in a certain segment.
What are the odds that once your media plan is established you go ahead with an unconventional advertising campaign of branding all the elevators from the office buildings .. Your agency buys space and goes ahead with running the campaign .. So far, so good. Until you get this phone call being told that you got someone really pissed. Being told that you’ve branded some elevators with your logo, the elevators from the same building the market leader has its headquarters in!?
True story.
In his book, Confessions of an Advertising Man, Ogilvy shares one of his best headlines which was written for a Rolls-Royce print ad: ‘At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock’