February round-up of ideas

[00:00:00] Ideas are everywhere. Welcome to Lessons Learned in Marketing, the Phoenix Group podcast. I'm your host, David Bellerive. [00:00:07][6.5]

[00:00:10] Today is the monthly roundup, a look back at some of the top stories and interesting things have come across over the past month and this month are some juicy things. First, I want to talk about buttergate, and branding. And then I want to share with you Christopher Penn's article on the secret scrolls, finding your Densho. Also great writing tip or art tip from Austin Kleon pointing at things, the power of retrospectives and how your best ideas are often your last ideas. All that's coming up. [00:00:47][37.4]

[00:00:53] All right, story number one, Buttergate. Butter gate. It sounds so intriguing. You've probably heard about it, but here is my summary. So butter apparently is not as spreadable as it used to be, and it doesn't melt the way it used to melt. What is happening? Apparently, some dairy farmers are adding palm oil to the cow feed, which then increases the fat content of the milk. They're doing this, I assume, for cost savings or speed or something like that. [00:01:37][44.8]

[00:01:38] So what does all this have to do with branding? That's where it's super fascinating. [00:01:41][3.3]

[00:01:42] Brands face three big challenges all the time cash, consistency and clutter. And the dairy farmers have hit themselves headfirst into two of those cash and consistency. So when we talk about cash as a challenge for brands, of course, I mean, the cash that you need to spend to market your brand and to build your brand and maintain your brand, but also the pursuit of cash. Oftentimes companies will sacrifice the brand in pursuit of cash. And this could be one of those instances where looking for a cheaper alternative or a quicker way to bring fat into the or fat content into milk, they've added palm oil. [00:02:27][44.9]

[00:02:28] Now, the repercussions of that are it has actually affected the brand. And it will be very interesting to see to what extent, because the dairy farmers have been very, very good at maintaining this brand and building it up and teaching us as Canadians that Canadian milk, Canadian dairy farmers. It's pure, it's wholesome, it's healthy. It's good for us. We don't add antibiotics. We really do give you the best milk possible. Now, they aren't adding an ingredient here, but they are changing the formula in a sense, so that pursuit of cash has affected the brand. The other one is consistency. Of course, if butter has changed, if they've added palm oil and somehow this has affected the consistency, the spreadability and the melting point, that could be a very bad sign for the brand to a point where consumers might just consider margarine to be an equal to butter or just as bad, lower the level of trust in dairy farmers. [00:03:32][63.1]

[00:03:33] I'm really interested in seeing how the dairy farmers respond to all of this. Don't mess with my butter, baby. [00:03:39][6.2]

[00:03:44] This story comes from Christopher Penn and I thought it was really cool exercise to try. Who's Christopher Penn? He's the founder or co-founder of Trust Insights, has a weekly newsletter, really good, and does a podcast Marketing Over Coffee with John Wall. [00:04:01][16.9]

[00:04:02] And as a Google analytics expert, kind of a he's got a real wide breadth of knowledge. In about the middle of February he sent this out with in his newsletter, which is called Almost Timely News. What are your secret scrolls of marketing? Hmm. I said that sounds intriguing. Where is he going with this? [00:04:21][19.3]

[00:04:22] Well, he's asking what your secret sauce is? What separates you from everyone else? And he correlates your secret sauce to secret scrolls, which is something from medieval Japan. Here's what he writes. [00:04:35][13.2]

[00:04:37] "A bit of a history lesson in medieval Japan and many other nations. But my experience is in the Japanese martial arts, the headmasters of different martial arts schools would keep Densho or secret scrolls, but listed out their secret techniques, their recipes for winning when other people didn't want them to win. These secret scrolls contain the most important points, the most important knowledge that the headmasters wanted to pass from generation to generation. They were like family cookbooks only for survival techniques instead of Easter Ham and still from the newsletter. Why does this matter? As you progress in your career, you need your own set of secret scrolls. You need your own collection of knowledge and wisdom gathered along the way. That's uniquely yours. That defines who you are as a marketing practitioner. What are the things only you can do and how do you do those things? They could be as simple as a recipe or worksheet for deploying a Facebook ad. They could be as complex as custom code. You've written to process marketing data in your own unique way. They could be as elegant as a compilation of PowerPoint slides that sum up all the frameworks you use. [00:05:46][69.5]

[00:05:47] "Personally, they could be as deceptively simple as your own spin on certain. The strategy frameworks, so why do all this? Well, it's for your own personal brand. You want to get to a point in your career where people ask for you and your specific service by name, by keeping secret scrolls or kind of documenting what you do. The theory is that you'll continue to build on it and develop it and grow with it once you know your own secret sauce. Every job interview, every sales pitch, every opportunity to shine will be easier because you'll know exactly what you know and how well you know it.". [00:06:22][35.1]

[00:06:23] Christopher Penn says to start, basically, all you have to do is write it down. [00:06:27][3.7]

[00:06:28] Next, here's a great tip from Austin Kleon. Austin is a writer, he did the book Steal Like an Artist. Fantastic book, if you haven't read. It also has a lot of really great tips in his newsletter that you can subscribe to as he shared this idea for writers or artists who are struggling. Point at things. Yeah, it's that simple point to things. In a sense. That's what we do as writers and as artists. We point at things, we see something and point at it. So you can see it to. [00:06:58][30.6]

[00:06:59] The super short article features some other artists and writers who share their own sort of spin on what what that means, pointing at things. And your your job is to just point at things, including Robin Rendel, who's a blogger who says blogging is pointing at things and falling in love. [00:07:17][18.2]

[00:07:19] I really like that last part, falling in love because we need to when we write and I assume artists need that as well, when they paint or create is you need to have that passion. You need the falling in love part and even just pointing at it and describing it and building it, you really do start to fall in love with the idea. So if you're ever a little short on inspiration or if you need a way to start a project, try pointing at it. Thanks, Austin. [00:07:50][31.1]

[00:07:51] And next up is a HOTLINK. It's about retrospectives and it's from Tim Casola who says, Never skip retros. What's a retro? Well, a retro is just basically a debri following a project. When the team gets together and sort of looks at what went right and what went wrong, and Tim kind of walks through why he recommends retrospectives, but mostly he points to an amazing resource called Fun Retrospectives.com at funretrospectives.com is a library of tons of retro formats. [00:08:24][33.6]

[00:08:25] Go there when you need inspiration for your next retrospective or to just figure out neat ways to debrief a team after a project has been completed. [00:08:33][7.6]

[00:08:35] Last one. And as I shared it with a team here at Phoenix Group, I called it a critical share. It's a short article that outlines how our first ideas, the ones that come to us quickly, tend to be the most obvious ones. Is that bad? Well, it's only by digging more deeply that we really sort of get the creative ideas that those great ideas start to emerge, the new ones and the fresh ones. We always tend to stop at our first good idea. Our tendency is to shoot out a bunch of ideas. And we're as creatives generally really good at just pouring out a bunch of ideas and then it starts to get hard. We stop because we think we've run out of ideas, but that doesn't mean we've run out of creativity. So while it's uncomfortable that feeling, that discomfort is actually your mind pushing its cognitive boundaries and looking for novel connections, ones that haven't been made before. And those are the key conditions for getting creative ideas. The article is on HBR. Your best ideas are often your last ideas. You can Google that or I will have a link to it in the podcast notes. And it's from Lauren Nordgren and Brian Lucas. [00:09:54][79.7]

[00:09:55] And I'll read a short piece from the article that talks about how to push past that lull or that cliff, as they call it, where the ideas just stop, invest in your creative process. [00:10:07][12.1]

[00:10:09] "There's no set formula for success. For example, committing X percent more time to the ideation process will give you Y percent more creative ideas. But there are several ways to ensure that you're giving key creative processes the time and attention they need. First, set aside more time for creative process than you might think is necessary, whether that means an extra ideation session, a longer brainstorm or even dedicated buffer time that can be used for additional meetings if needed. To ask your team to generate two or even three times as many ideas as you think you need, particularly in the early stages of ideation, setting aggressive idea quotas can help people push past more obvious early stage ideas and uncover a truly novel opportunities. And three, experiment with your team's creative processes and measure the results. You can then use that data to drive future decisions. For example, next time you run a workshop track when the best ideas were actually generated, where they generated by the team that brainstormed for one hour or the team that took three hours, did increasing your team's idea quota result in more highly creative proposals? Testing out these different variables can help you calibrate your processes and capture your team's creative potential." [00:11:30][81.5]

[00:11:32] Really, really fantastic article. Well, that's a round up of things I shared here at Phoenix. And I think those are the top things from February. I hope you enjoy them. The links, all of the links you can find in the show notes. Thanks for listening. [00:11:32][0.0]

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