Came across a great podcast recently that I thought would be interesting to share – its part of the London School of Economics Public Lecture Series which is a fantastic general resource to follow and listen to excellent quality speakers coming from a range of academic and industry backgrounds. To be honest, I dont know why more colleges dont try and run these types of series – specifically Irish ones from my perspective. We have great access to academics, industry and international speakers, it should be as a matter of course recorded and shared.

Anyway, this was one from Dave Trott an Ad Guy who has written a book Predatory Thinking: A Master Class in out thinking the Competition. He’s a great speaker – full of insightful wisdoms about how to stand out from the competition and the importance of making an impact with your marketing and advertising, but also to communicate in a clear way with your audience who you are and what you actually do. I particularly like his emphasis on Gestalt and how humans think in terms of pattern making, and therefore in order to standout from the competition you need to break away from the perceived competitive pattern and find some differentiators for your business, product, service etc…all obvious stuff but he communicates in a no nonsense fashion.

Also intriguing is the level of recall that most marketing/advertising is generating – 4% Positive, 7% Negative and 89% No Impact. Thats a lot of money blown on No impact. And why? The inability to grab peoples attention, stand out and then to communicate what you actually do and finally persuade them to take some action. He makes some interesting points around what is media? And he talks about his interpretation is that We are The Media – people – its us as individuals who spread ideas and messages – so from a marketing perspective if you fail to get into the heads of your market then they wont/cant communicate your message for you and propagate it. He believes people misunderstand the channel for The Media – and therefore overly focus on the channel rather than always trying to get into the heads of people, and really understand what makes them react and respond. This type of reasoning resonates well at the moment, with the huge emphasis on social media at present – where people are obsessing about the channel and not actually understanding the media per se – which is in order for the channel to be successful you must activate the media (which is the users) into doing something. And if you don’t understand what motivates them your marketing is going to fall on deaf ears.

He gives some good examples of how to think beyond the seemingly intractable problem by going upstream and solving another problem that essentially neutralise the initial problem – and this is part of the how to out thinking the competition.

I loved it (listened to it twice) – have a listen here > Predatory Thinking at the London School of Economics and on iTunes