The curse of waffle - an Indian perspective

Has this ever happened to you?

It happens to me all the time - and did again today.

Somebody suggested I approach a possible client, so I went first to their website.

For the life of me I couldn't understand what they do. I could see vaguely who they were selling to, but how exactly they were going to help - what precisely they do - was utterly unclear.

There were just a lot of fancy words like "innovative solutions", "state of the art" and "cutting edge".

I know I'm not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but I imagine many of their prospects are equally thick.

So how many times do you go onto a website and utterly fail to understand what the hell they are selling?

This comes to mind because of a message I got recently from an old friend. I first met him in 1987 when I went to India to help set up O & M Direct, which was about the first proper direct marketing agency there.

It was David Ogilvy's idea that I go, and it led to one of the best experiences I have ever had. I made some wonderful friends, including R. Sridhar, who was in charge of the new venture and whose rather earnest picture is above.

We've kept in touch, and he sent me this dialogue.

“Good morning!”

I heard the familiar voice and I knew it was Prasna Rao.

“Morning Prasna. Where were you all these days?”

“Remember, I am the one who asks questions.”

“Ok, please ask your question then.”

“Remember the Ogilvy party you attended last month?”

“Yes, it was nice.”

“Remember you met several old friends and a few who you did not know?”

“I do.”

“They asked you a simple question and you failed miserably in answering it.”

“Really?”

“Yes, the question was: ‘What do you do?’ I am going to ask you that question now. So, what do you do?”

“I am a consultant.”

“That is what you are, but it does not answer the question. So, what do you do?”

“I am an Innovation Coach.”

“That sounds very fancy, but what do you do?”

“I am in the Corporate Creativity and Innovation Domain.”

“Pompous but useless. What do you do Sridhar?”

“I run IDEAS-RS, a professional consulting firm.”

“Says nothing. What do you do?”

“Prasna, do you have to take yourself so seriously?”

“Yes, especially when you sound so bad. Let me explain. When people ask you the question ‘What do you do’, you can convert that into an excellent conversation starter or make it a dead end. All your answers so far are dead end answers. So let us try again. What do you do?”

“I am stuck. Give me some help Prasna. How do I tackle this?”

“Ok. Try filling the blanks in these three sentences:

‘I’m a ________(descriptor/designation/profession). I help _______ (people/clients) who want to ______ (benefit)’

‘I work with _______(people/clients) who want to ________ (benefit)

‘I’m like a ________ (descriptor/metaphor). I specialise in helping __________ (people/clients) __________ (benefits)’

“You think this will work?”

“Why don’t you try first?”

“I’m an Innovation Coach. I help my clients who want to get out of habitual thinking and open their minds to fresh new ideas.’

“Can you make it tighter. Say it aloud. Shorten the second half of your answer.”

‘I’m an Innovation Coach. I help clients who want to get rid of mental blocks.”

“Sounds better. Let us try the other two. What do you do?”

“I work with clients who want to get new ideas for business growth.”

“I work with clients who want to develop new product ideas.”

“I work with ambitious clients who want to achieve impossible goals.”

“You are getting it Sridhar. Let us try the last one now. What do you do?”

“I’m like a plumber. I specialise in helping clients remove their mental blocks and facilitate a continuous flow of fresh ideas.”

“I’m like a mental lubricant. I specialise in helping clients overcome their barriers to new ideas”

“I’m like a coach. I specialise in helping clients win in the innovation game.”

‘I’m like a mental broom. I specialise in helping managers remove the cobwebs in their thinking.”

“You are getting better. Do you know why I asked you to do this?”

“No. Why did you ask me to do this?”

“Because you were missing opportunities to share with people some of the interesting things you do.”

“But how will these answers help?”

“In 90% of the cases it will lead the other person to ask ‘How do you do that?’ and opens the door for a dialogue. Unless of course you make that answer pompous and boring. and create a new dead end.”

Something for Sunday dinner

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yUKjh0ey7mc&feature=related

Something for the weekend

The video looks a bit squashed, but you get the idea.

http://www.draytonbird.net/Draytons_blog/Forensics.wmv

If you think it's in bad taste, blame my partner Al, the degenerate swine. He'll have to go.

The World Weather Conspiracy - Again

In the 1970s, desperate for money, I wrote anything for anyone. Chapters for books, speeches, ads, direct mail, all-singing, all dancing presentations – anything to stave off the bailiffs.

And here we are 30 odd years later – not much change.

Talking of which, one book I part-wrote was about changes in the world’s weather. It was called The CIA and the World Weather Conspiracy.What the hell it was really about I have no idea now, but I do know it predicted a New Ice Age.

What goes around comes around. Last December at a U.N. Global Warming conference in Poland 650 of the world's top climatologists said that man-made global warming is a load of old cobblers put about by the media and we should really be worried about freezing to death.

Dr. David Gee, Chairman of the International Geological Congress, asked "For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?"

The earth's temperature peaked in 1998. It's been falling ever since; it dropped a lot in 2007 and even more in 2008 when temperatures touched 1980 levels. Satellite photos show that Arctic ice is back where it was in 1979. And has that hole in the ozone layer melted Antarctica? No; the ice has grown 5 % since 1980.

So during this period of massive global warming which has us all quivering in our shoes and being persecuted by local government fuckwits for not sorting out our garbage, the biggest chunks of ice on earth grew bigger.

Dr. Kunihiko, Chancellor of Japan's Institute of Science and Technology actually said: "CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or the other ... every scientist knows this, but it doesn't pay to say so." And you know Chancellors never lie if you exclude the Great Bloated Haggis, who does little else.

Interestingly, a big Russian study overwhelmingly suggests that we’re on the verge of another Ice Age. Core samples from Vostok Station in Antarctica show what's happened to our atmosphere and temperature for the last 420,000 years. It seems the 12,000 years of relative warmth we have basked in are about to end.

So now we can all shiver our way through an ice age for some 100,000 years - well, you can, because I won't be around. And core samples show conclusively that CO2 levels follow the earth's temperature, not precede it - which destroys the basis for much of the scare-mongering.

So all those years ago the book I worked on had it right, and Al Gore, as I always thought, is a grasping, self-publicising tosser who runs around the world getting paid $100,000 a time plus expenses to talk bollocks, show misleading videos of polar bears and frighten people.

Did you know he got the Nobel Peace Prize? What has the weather got to do with peace?

But then, being stupid, like all committees, they have chosen some odd people, including Menachim Begin and Yasser Arafat who between them caused more than a few deaths. No doubt we shall see those murderous bastards in the IRA on the list eventually. And how about George Bush and the Bliar?

This piece is partly based on one by John Tomlinson of the Flint Journal

Strange things go on in the mind

Apropos of David Ogilvy, in 1985 he gave me a little booklet called "Type and Layout. Communicating - or just making pretty shapes" by Prof Colin Wheildon of New South Wales University.

It was the first (and only) example of research I had ever seen into what made for better communications based not on what people liked or didn't like, but on how well they understood things they read and how easy they found them to read.

Only relatively recently have other people - internet marketers - started to look into this subject intelligently but it has always fascinated me. I hate guessing; I prefer to know

Anyhow, one thing I have learned about communication is that people remember pictures more easily than words, and the latest editor of Prof. Wheildon's work wrote to me about this.

I was commenting about the fact that if I say "rabbit" it is not the word but the little furry animal that you see with your mind's eye.

Geoff Heard of Worsley Press, writing from the heat of East Timor, dashed off an interesting message:

Your mention of the word "rabbit" and the mental picture of the furry animal (which would be very quickly transformed to "dinner" here).

The mental picture over the word has to do with levels of processing in the brain and with familiarity.

In "Type & Layout" Colin Wheildon talked about how a red headline would stop people reading the body text. The bright colour would continually drag their eyes back to the headline.

The colour is dominant because it is a more basic level of processing. It is pre-literate. I've mentioned in the additional material I wrote for Type & Layout the psychological test that demonstrates this.

Write "green" in red letters then flash it on a screen. When that flash gets down to something under 1/30th second, viewers will swear they have seen the WORD "red".

They know they have seen type, but there isn't the time to read it, but the colour means they have redness on the brain."

Isn't that amazing, dear reader?

And on the subject of the pre-literate, here's an exquisitely crafted message I got today from someone selling a postal discount service. A work of art, untrammelled by petty considerations of grammar or punctuation and cleverly aimed at the burgeoning transsexual market.

Dear Sir or Maddam,
I appreciate that your very busy and wiil hopefully speak to you soon, please allow me to give you a description of our services as I do feel they could be of great benefit to your company and clients.

(Then there was gap of two of three lines, perhaps designed to whet my appetite for thrills to come, or maybe to make up for the lack of a gap after "Maddam", after which it continued)

Firstly we are not a downstream access provider, we are consultants who have access to the best rates available in the market place for all types of mail.

We started as international mail consultants this is extremely successful and we have saved our clients thousands buy using our knowledge and experience.

What mastery of the written word! These people have the kind of talent that until recently ended up running banks, and still runs the British government.

The people of Israel and Gaza must have wept tears of joy when Gordon Brown came to tell them what to do. Why can't he just stay there and sort things out, I wonder? We would all be ever so grateful. Three hundred years should just about do it.