blank slate
Reading Don Tapscott’s ‘Wikinomics‘ on the train ride home, this particular passage stood out to me,
“Products that don’t enable and invite customer participation will be anathema - staid, old-fashioned remnants of a less customer-friendly era. If you expect to be around in the next decade, your organization will need to find ways to join and lead prosumer communities.”
The rules are changing, so what happens now? Usually when the rules change, no one knows how to play. No one except the person who changed the rules to begin with.
I went home and flicked on the television for the first time in ages. There was a new show about ad executives in the 1950’s. The show is called Mad Men. It reeked of a Desperate Housewives storyline aimed at men (safe to say I was actually captivated). In one scene, the jaded but very cunning Director explains to his tobacco client, who has just been banned from making positive health claims about cigarettes, that advertising is based on one thing - happiness.
6 tobacco companies, all facing the same restrictions on their advertising, all trying to appease the health boards and at the same time, please the customer’s conscious. And then the Director has his epiphany… people want their happiness. There was a blank slate in front of them. The rules were about to change and someone needed to apply a new set. It was to be the beginning of branding by attributes. Anyone could be anything they wanted. Toasted. Adventurous. Debonair.
What would your world look like if you changed the rules to suit what you wanted all along?
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Someone who talks a lot, listens a lot, sings on the streets and loves big ideas. If you need a discipline or two for piece of mind, try Marketer and Entrepreneur. If you need a title to legitimize why you'd waste your time here, I can't help you. I work with people on fire for the things they love.
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My world would look a whole lot brighter if I was given - no nonsense - the opportunities I know I’m capable of tackling and triumphing.
I think this one’s rules have already been rewritten though, it’s more widely referred to as ‘entrepreneurship. But, nevertheless… even that has yet to be re-re-defined.