Learn by Doing: Brand Battle in the Classroom

“I hear and I forget.  I see and I remember.  I do and I understand.”  － Confucius

We learn best by doing – ask any cricket coach; the only way you master a sport is by strapping on the pads and going to bat.

Of course there is value in reading and watching the game but with repetitive, unimaginative study too often those illustrative practices become little more than blunt weapons with which to beat any natural creative spark out of the student.

Education becomes little more than memorizing equations, formulae and concepts; regurgitate them in exams and valiantly keeping score.

And as we all know you can’t read the perfect game.

Involvement drives engagement; that’s why in my eight years as a Business School Professor I have become increasingly aware of the responsibility I have towards my students to prepare them for the world of business away from descriptive practices.

Conscious of the reality of the classroom, I teamed up with two progressively minded organizations, the Muthoot Group and Delhi Daredevils, to focus upon the problem of how to develop a novel experiential teaching tool.

Brand Battle Simulations took the practice of ‘war games’ a technique used by the US military to prepare their troops for the multiply eventualities of combat and applied it to the world of business.

As in a typical war game, student-teams take roles to simulate an unfolding crisis or gauge the possible reaction of competitors to a critical strategic move.

When recently teaching Brand Management, I invited the Directors of the Muthoot Group and the CMO of Delhi Daredevils to form control groups charged with presenting individual teams of up to ten MBA students with a scenario – imagined or real – about a current business crisis that they were then asked to solve.

With teams either playing the client, competition or a stakeholder I acted as the coach, guiding the student-teams to apply business theories, interpret secondary research, synthesize knowledge gleaned, and evaluate strategies.

Due to the nature of ‘play’ within a classroom environment, students felt free to think beyond the client brief to implement creative solutions to unforeseen problems while allowing clients to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses, threats and opportunities of their brand strategy.

‘Learn by Doing’ lectures make their apparent lack of formal planning their strength.  In this model, a language teacher could aid learning by getting his class to act out scenes from a play or a short story, a science teacher could demonstrate the flammable nature of hydrogen by showing its effects with a little washing up liquid and a match.

The only limit placed on learning is the limits of your imagination.

While ‘learn by doing’ lectures may be nonlinear and rigid, they are always coherent and surprising.  Beneath the seeming chaos in the classroom, there is always an underlying method that aids edification.

Like any good coach, educators are charged with getting the best from their students – to motivate and reward them through experiential teaching but too often our educational system stifles development with demonstrative pedagogic ideas.

The problems then left facing educators in this respect are familiar; students do not assimilate the necessary know-how and -why, and nor do they possess sufficient motivation to ask why these processes are critical to higher thinking.

The ominous problem remains; students know too much and do too little.

A growing self-awareness of the issue at hand has in effect crippled development in some of the premier business schools in the United States.

For instance, the Harvard Business School pioneered a case study approach to educating its students which attempted to tackle this malaise by fostering business education through a mix of theoretical reflection and deft application of the knowledge gained.

However, its modus operandi of promoting theoretical reflection became its primary value.  Students were still no closer to experiencing practical business situations.

It seems unimaginable that any other profession would prepare their students to enter the world of work without giving them the necessary practical tools in which to succeed.

After all, you wouldn’t trust a surgeon who had only perused elaborate case studies, discussed them in the classroom and written eloquently on the subject if he has no practical experience of the operating theatre.

‘Hear one, see one, do one,’ is an adage used by residents to learn a procedure.  In business education, however, the saying would be: “Hear one, talk about one, talk about another one.”

The reality is that what MBAs have to learn to be the managers of tomorrow they will have to do so within classrooms today – and how we are teaching them will only get them so far.

(Originally published by THE HINDU in Education Plus section on Monday, March 25, 2013)

Best Commercials 2012

Most advertising is kitsch; some of it is amusing; much is trash. But, those brilliantly communicated ideas that garner enormous cultural attention amply justify why advertising should not be construed as annoying legerdemain, economic waste, or cultural dross. Here are some of 2012′s brilliant advertisements made for TV and reused on YouTube:

10. Dollar Shave Club, “Our Blades are F***ing Great”
Agency: Paulilu Productions
Los Angeles, USA

 

9. Adidas, “Take the Stage”

Agency: Sid Lee
London, England

 

8. Guinness, “St. Patrick’s Day”

Agency: AMV BBDO
London, England

 

7. EMDA, “Alzheimer Awareness”

Agency: ACW Grey
Tel Aviv, Israel

 

6. Chrysler, “It’s Half Time in America”

Agency: Wieden + Kennedy
Portland, OR; United States

 

5. ETN, “Howling Football”

Agency: Ambient Advert
Berlin, Germany

 

4. LG, “Smart Thief”

Agency: Y&R
Amsterdam, Holland

 

3. Barack Obama, “Obama for America”

Agency: Bully Pulpit Interactive
Washington DC; United States

 

2. P&G, “Best Job”

Agency: Wieden + Kennedy
Portland, OR; United States

 

1. Red Bull, “Red Bull Stratos”

Agency: Riedel Communications
Filmed near Roswell, NM; United States (FlightLine Films)

What is Branding?

THE POWER OF brands is undeniable. The moment we decide to buy soda, we know what brand of soda we’d purchase even before we leave our apartments to the corner store. Brands create unmatched loyalty and boundless profits for corporations. What’s it about brands that transforms people’s emotions and behavior? Why should a pair of jeans from True Religion inspire such an emotional response and commitment. Why should MBAs who graduate from Thunderbird or bikers who ride a Harley ink the logo of the brand to claim membership to an exclusive clique? In 2007, I embarked on a journey to find out the answer(s) how brands create devotion strictly from the consumer’s perceptive. My journey took me to ashrams in India, secret consumer tribe conventions, Sturgis and Daytona motorcycle rallies, Apple stores, tattoo parlors across the length and breadth of the US, and many other exciting places. I am still collecting valuable data with plans of publishing my findings. This keynote presentation uses four iconic brands: Coca-Cola, Apple, Thunderbird, and Motorhead. I hope this set of slides helps unlock some of the secrets of how brands build emotional connections, and why branding is important.

Lizard Brain: The Key to Brand Success

Rationality does not cut any ice with the lizard brain.  You appeal to it at a deeper level, and when you do, the keys to brand success are found.

We have only just scratched the surface of our potential – like icebergs at least 98% of our emotional and intellectual awareness occurs ‘under the surface’ in the murky depths of the subconscious mind¹.

It would be disingenuous to dismiss this when approaching the all-encompassing practice of Marketing Research; after all, an iceberg wouldn’t even reach the surface without this sturdy base below.

So why do market researchers only focus on that 2% rather than engaging with those core beliefs that keep that smaller percentage visible?

Here’s a lesson from my graduate school days: A friend of mine, fresh from his native country and in the US less than a week stumbled upon a way to earn a quick buck. He registered himself to take part in a focus group for consumers who loved to eat Mac and Cheese straight from the box.

In his native country, breakfasts are as freshly cooked as they are varied – they didn’t even sell Mac and Cheese; however for his insights into this largely unknown delicacy he received a cool $100.  He even showed me the T-Shirts and CDs he brought with his Mac and Cheese money.

My friend displayed the basic human characteristics that we all take for granted; those impulses that lie above the surface.  We as a species, driven by a collective consciousness that elevates intelligence as a desirable quality, even in the lack of that quality, will strive to appear intelligent.

Such social performances can come in myriad forms – artful omissions, the provision of incomplete or misleading information, outright deception, faking, lying, carefully chosen words, persistence, bullshitting, and so on.

This deceptive behavior does not have any power; it is only when someone believes in the manipulation that its power manifests itself.  In an interview, Vasudevi Reddy of University of Portsmouth claims:

“Fake crying is one of the earliest forms of deception to emerge, and infants use it to get attention even though nothing was wrong.” ²

In this case, it’s a question of dignity: the infant knows the parameters in which it will be most successful. Now, think about adults; Do any of these responses sound familiar?

“Honey, you look perfect in that dress!”

“Oh, your e-mail must have ended up in my spam folder; that’s why I didn’t respond!”

“Your updates never show up on my Facebook newsfeed.”

Both women and men consciously fabricate these face-saving stories.  In one out of ten interactions, married couples lie to each other, and such made up incidents skyrocket to 80% in the context of spending. ³

Stepping back from spending for a moment;  I recently eavesdropped in on a conversation on my daily train ride to work.  A forty-something, suit-wearing professional was boasting to her companion about how she had hoodwinked a focus group that called for participants who were paid subscribers to Skype.  Just hours before she was due to take part in the market research study, she googled everything she need to know about the survey and lied through her teeth all her way to $300 in participation money.

My question here is:  What’s the use in spending tons of money in carrying out elaborate market research sessions – asking the neocortex or the rational mind, questions about irrational behaviour?

The logical side of our brain is only going to lie or act as if it were intelligent.  Truth is often the first casualty of any conflict, and there is no greater conflict than that between the consumer’s beliefs and their buying behavior.  Don’t believe me?  Keep reading:

The irrational buying behavior of the average consumer was put on display during recent consumer research for an 11powerN client.  Several New Yorkers were asked why they drove a SUV on the streets of Manhattan.  Oddly enough, the number one response was:  ‘What if I chose to go off the road?’  Keep in mind this is Manhattan.  Manhattan.  You remember: the financial and cultural nexus of the US?  Manhattan the island?  Off-road?  The more I probed, the weirder their responses got; “Oh it’s because I go off-roading at weekends.”

As amusing as those responses are even if consumers were downright truthful; how do they put their irrational buying behavior or the emotions they have for a product, service, or experience into words?

Today’s marketers recognize a very distinct “ebb and flow” of an emotional wave influencing the consumer’s choices; this recognition, however, does not extend to the identification of an emotional connection that can bridge the gap” and afford any sort of measurement of an association of that magnitude.  Given the existence of this reality and its attendant limitation, one must ask:  Is the expenditure of funds in extending this elaborate market research helping or hindering the marketer in understanding this emotional connection?  To what end should the marketer seek to find in asking the rational mind questions about irrational behavior?

If presented with rational thought and behavior, the neocortex will have no choice but to lie – that is, to “act out” as if it were intelligent.

Fish where fishes are.  Answers to subconsciously driven motives need to be sourced at the subconscious level.  Market researchers have a duty to extract the subconscious agents that make decisions, preferences, feelings, and beliefs by probing into the subconscious or ‘the lizard brain’ as I’d like to call it.

The lizard brain is not mutually exclusive; it pervades every dimension of our lives. It doesn’t shut down when we go to bed or go on vacation.  Every second, it is dictating how one should act, judge, think and feel.

Theologians, philosophers, and scientists have been studying the unconscious to know why we do what we do for several centuries.  Half a century ago, Ernest Dichter, the founder of motivational research, helped launch in-depth consumer interviews to explore non-rational motivations in consumers when marketers still believed in the homo economicus.

In the last decade or two, there have been a host of tools developed by social psychologists, cultural anthropologists, neuroscientists, sociologists, and economists that have given marketers a peeping hole into this lizard brain or reptilian complex.

Lizard harbors vast riches in still largely unmapped areas immersed in deep emotions, traditions, values, and culture.  Marketers who see the advantage in wandering into this dimly-lit treasure trove will be richly rewarded with the keys to brand success.

References

1. LeDoux, Joseph (1998). “The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life,” New York, NY: Simon and Schuster
2. Gray, Richard (2007). “Babies not as Innocent as they Pretend,” The Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3298979/Babies-not-as-innocent-as-they-pretend.html (retrieved on 8/5/2012)
3. Villareal, Phil (2010).  “Survey:  80 Percent of Married Couples Lie about Spending,”  The Consumerist, http://consumerist.com/2010/07/survey-80-percent-of-married-couples-lie-about-spending.html (retrieved on 8/5/2012)

Illustration:  Mohan Raj

Noteworthy Keynote Presentations

ONE OF THE least pleasant aspects of a professional’s job is the need to put things in a presentation format and present it.  Almost everyone finds it a chore and wishes he were better at it.  And many people are told specifically that they need to improve if they want to progress.  Look no further.  For a person who seeks to learn, I’ve put down seven important points below:

(1)  Use Pyramid Structure:

How do we remember telephone numbers?  We group them.  773-399-0773 (that’s my old Chicago telephone number!).  Any grouping of ideas is easier to comprehend if it arrives presorted into its pyramid.  This suggests that every slide should be deliberately structured to form a pyramid of ideas.

(2)  Need for Logic:

It is not enough simply to group ideas or bullets in a logical way in a slide without also stating to yourself what the logic of the relationship is.  This means that instead of remembering bullets, you remember bullet categories into which bullets fall.  As a presenter, you are thinking one level of abstraction higher, because thought-transfer is at a higher level.

(3)  Order Top Down:

Controlling the sequence in which you present your ideas is the single most important act necessary to presenting.  The clearest sequence is always to give the summarizing idea before you give the individual ideas being summarized.  And, the individual ideas better be well-thought to answer in advance any questions audience may have.  In other words, first the conclusion – like a newspaper headline – then the beef.

(4)  Create an Image to Recite Story:

Tell a story.  If you can’t tell, at least please do not orally state what is on the slide.  Audience can read on their own.

“Near the end of March 1845 I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber..it was a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, through which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods where the pines and hickories were springing up.  The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces, and it was all dark colored and saturated with water.”   - Henry David Thoreau                             

As you took Thoreau’s words, did you not build up a sort of mental picture in your mind, to which you added details as you took in successive phrases and sentences?  Malcolm Galdwell (“The Tipping Point,” “Blink”) is a persuasive orator.  In fact his presentation at SXSW 2005 is rated on par with Steven Jobs’ Mac introduction of 1984 or Gore’s emotive presentation of global warming.  People love Malcolm because he is a story teller.  He doesn’t lecture; he paints a picture.  With simple colors.  He does more with less.

(5)  The Power of Pause:

Even if you memorize your speech, force yourself to pause.  Never utter hmms and aahs.  Just pause.  It’s profound.  Even if you don’t lose your breath, please pause.  Even an ordinary address seems elegant with the power of pause.

(6)  Fail to Plan is Plan to Fail:

Mark Twain once said, “It takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.”  It makes sense to practice your presentation with a tape recorder and in front of a mirror.

(7)  Body Talks more than the Tongue:

Use your limbs as you modulate your tone.  Be passionate.  Stretch your limbs.  Ooze energy.  Get audience motivated.  Walk around.  Involve the audience.  Leave handouts.

Some remarkable discourses the world witnessed:

Guy Kawasaki, “The Art of the Start,” TiECon 2006

Steve Jobs, “Introduction of Macintosh,” 1984

Tom Peters, “A Ham Sandwich,” 1990

Dick Hardt, “Identity 2.0,” OSCON 2005

Hans Rosling, “Global Trends in Health and Economics,” TED Talk 2006

Dad Ads

This is a collection of the five most-shared ads for Dads on YouTube. Happy Father’s Day!

(5) “Dad Life”
        Remake of American Greetings
        USA

(4) “Just like your Daddy”
        IRN-BRU
        Scotland

(3) “Dear Sophie”
        Google Chrome
        USA

 

(2) “Happy Father’s Day”
        Oreo
        USA

(1) “The Father and the Child”
         Thai Life Insurance
         Thailand

Transcendence to Consulting Mastery

Written with: Mary Sully de Luque

Good is to deliver a notch above to exist in a consulting firm; great is to go way beyond.  Mastery means own and empower along the way and all the way.

CONSULTING FIRMS are in the business of renting out brains; the most valuable asset in a consultancy is human capital.  Consequently, consulting firms scour top business schools for the best problem-solving brains, purposefully making the selection process emotionally and intellectually intense.  Once aboard, everyone around the consultant seems as a reflection of the consultant or scarily they may appear better qualified than the consultant.  And yet, six to ten years into consulting, only few transcend to thought leaders, empowering partners.

Arguably, attitude, brains, capability, and diligence give much comfort to function -  not mastery to perform consulting.  It is fallacious to assume the only goal of consulting is to provide advice toward solving problems, when the challenge most clients face is producing the strategic change itself.  To produce that change in a client organization, the inventories of theories, models, tools, and techniques are required but seldom adequate.

Good is the enemy of great.  Good consultants view that their work for clients ennobles them; masterful consultants, on the other hand, view themselves as ennoblers of their work to clients.  To elaborate the quantum difference between good and masterful consulting, let us consider two important aspects of management consulting:

(1)  Interaction at various levels with client organization

(2)  Creation and management of knowledge

No two business organizations are alike. Every organization has a culture, a pattern with which the entire organization views, believes, and grows.  Most organizations, however, can be compartmentalized into five, levels (as shown in figure above) based on structural power within the organization.  Consultants often interact at all the levels of a client organization.  Usually the executive management anticipated change to be brought about in their organization resulting in hiring a consultancy to seek advice, expertise, or validation.

Levels 1-3 are rarely embrace change because of functional inertia and unitary mindset driven through insecurities, intense competition with peers, reluctance to let go, and other human behavioral factors.  Consultants pursue, analyze, and articulate research, and collect the fee.  As change agents, however, masterful consultants build consensus as partners, not as experts with middle managers and team leaders of client organizations. Typically the progress and/or milestones of the consulting project are familiarized to the executive management (level 4,5) in steering committee meetings.  At such important meetings, masterful consultants create copious ownership opportunities for middle managers and team leaders, call it client-centered consulting.  The client-centered approach stands in shining contrast to other approaches which other consultants may adopt namely, consultant- or consultancy-centered, or strategy-centered, or task-centered approaches.  Client-centric consulting cannot be used in a piecemeal fashion to produce mastery; it is a shared responsibility, a committed interactive approach.  As the parent guides the child, the masterful consultant guides the client so that both own the process of change.  The consultant empowers the client to own the outcome, the change itself, in deeper levels of the organization enabling faster and smoother transition.  On the consulting side of the spectrum, masterful consultants may not be as sharp or current as new MBA hires, but they differentiate themselves in the way they hold, apply, and communicate knowledge.

The theories and models are tacit in the background of their awareness, but their explicit use of the knowledge to reveal simple patterns is holistic and systemic.  Masters don’t pretend or present themselves as knowers to answers, which itself is a humbling sight.  Instead they are empathetic curators creating the perfect platform to discover the outcome with their clients. Yet there is more to consulting than knowledge creation.  The problem is not the lack of knowledge, but the inability to act on the knowledge.  Masterful consultants do not merely relay the knowledge in the form of a keynote presentation or a report with charts and graphs; they go the distance to apply the knowledge and implement the change with the client.  Know what you know.  More importantly, know what you do not know.  Don’t give advice; just ask great probing questions.

Dr. Mary Sully de Luque, Ph.D. teaches courses in Leadership at the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona USA.  Earlier when she served as a post doctoral research fellow at the Wharton School with Dr. Robert House, Ph.D., she co-authored the seminal, ten-year research work, Culture, Leadership, and Organizations:  The GLOBE Study of 62 Countries.