Hee-Haw Marketing

The Working Class

Well, it's come to this. I'm busy as always, but missing all this blogging fun. Good for the soul. So in the spirit of Andrew, I think I'll just repost an email. Maybe you'll find it interesting, too.

One of our strategists at Twist found a pretty great survey of Walmart moms. One question in particular stood out to me. Or as Gillian said, "Walmart Moms were less likely to refer to themselves as middle class, and more likely to describe themselves as working class (let's get real – this probably speaks to them being more realistic and having less status anxiety than the other women surveyed – we all know America doesn't have much of a middle class. I've read other studies that have shown that most people, regardless of whether they are rich or struggling, will self-report that they are middle class)."

So I yammer on in response…

I especially love the bit around working class versus middle class. Working class is used in an almost derogatory fashion throughout most of the States. Like middle class implies you're working your way towards the upper class, whereas manufacturing types in Michigan or Pennsylvania, Miners in West Virginia, whatever – don't relate as well to the quintessential American story. Their parents did the same job. And their parents before them. And that sort of thing is a badge of honor within those communities, not a sign of stagnation.

It's partly what I love so much about the Levi's Ready to Work campaign. It took the ideals of the working class, freedom in open spaces, working with your hands – these things they were feeling like they were losing, and made it a cause for the creative class in San Francisco, LA, Chicago, NY – who were just discovering those very same ideals and making them their own.

We are all workers – Braddock, Pennsylvania

Levi's workshops

Also speaks to the broader point of how we should be looking at our own jobs. It's not enough to look at a situation or an audience and understand them in a vacuum, but we're at our best when we're connecting those audiences to a larger story. Which doing that is all about all of our other inputs we bring in. What is it that our brains bring to the table that help us sift and see how one thing is like another in ways others can't.

(and full disclosure, Walmart is a client)

On Strategists as Connectors

In Tim Harford's latest article he said, "The advancing frontier of scientific knowledge forces most researchers to specialise in ever narrower fields and, as a result, collaboration between these silos is essential." As he also mentions, this isn't something happening just in science or research, but many other sectors from finance to retailing. We've progressed so far because of our ability to work together. But now we're so specialized that we're having trouble speaking to one other.

For anyone that's ever walked into a company from another industry, it doesn't take long to realize that it's not just what they do that's different, but also the entire language structure that allows them to do what they do. If splicing language was apparently so effective at creating barriers in babel, just imagine the hinderence our evolution to specialist groups can be.

So now the need for the glue is even greater, those few that bridge the gap between one person who knows how to do one thing and another who knows some complementary thing. If our world is more reliant on working together towards some end, these roles are not nice to haves but baseline essentials for progress. Especially now as a single engagement may touch everything from HR to community managers to media types and technologists working towards the same ends.

This is where strategists have to be at their best, defining meaty problems that allow various specialist types to find solutions meaningful to them, building a common language and environment that allows teams of different thinkers to work together and rallying the commitment that encourages projects to bloom.

Or as Tim finished, "Perhaps the real lesson is that promoting cross-disciplinary research need not require a mysterious blend of social-networking tools and funky collaborative architectural spaces. All that is sometimes required is a shared problem, or a shared set of tools, and, above all, the money to pay for the job to be done."

photo via carl heindl

Primacy of Work

One of those things they never tell you when you become responsible for a team is just how terribly difficult it is to not just find good people, but to know the good ones when you stumble across them. I think it's mostly just getting your own head straight as to what exactly you're looking for and why - not just in skill sets, but in the softer stuff that makes the team work or not work. Skills can be taught, attitudes are a much more difficult thing.

A couple weeks back, my cousin-in-law, the pops and I were having a backchannel discussion primarily around hiring, motivations, balance and the like. This comment from my Dad struck me as especially right on.

Back in the day, late 1960s it was, I was working for Quaker Oats, trying to hire an assistant brand manager. Quaker’s HR group gave us all a “white paper” on hiring which identified four key traits that correlated with superior performance. Can’t remember three of them (intelligence was no doubt on the list), but at the time I was struck by Number One success factor: “Primacy of work.” More than forty years ago, somebody had figured out that if a person really loves what he/she is doing, if it is wrapped into their self-image and self-esteem and idea of fulfillment, they’ll be self-motivated and very likely to outperform the wage slaves and those who have no higher goal than personal ambition. In later years, I have added Curiosity and a Sense of Humor to my list of “must-haves.”

The primacy of work. Simple, but brilliant I think. You push yourself, you operate and you work because you have no choice but to do so. It is who you are.

When asked for the meaning of life, journalist H.L. Mencken wrote,

I do not lay eggs, as a hen does, because I was born without any equipment for it. For the same reason I do not get myself elected to Congress, or play the violoncello, or teach metaphysics in a college, or work in a steel mill. What I do is simply what lies easiest to my hand. It happens that I was born with an intense and insatiable interest in ideas, and thus like to play with them. It happens also that I was born with rather more than the average facility for putting them into words. In consequence, I am a writer and editor, which is to say, a dealer in them and concoctor of them.

This is why purpose and vision matters. This is why when we create expectations for ourselves and our organizations we need to operate towards a greater ideal. Without living within the bigger idea, it's much more difficult to know what primacy of work means for us and instead we fall back on skill sets alone.

So adding to my list of curiosity, an openness with ideas and a proclivity for experimentation, I'll add the primacy of work, too. Heads up.

Curious to hear what you guys look for, as well.

photo via vamitos

Things are Interesting

Thomas Edison and the Original Cat Video

The Finest from All over the World, Made in Japan
"It used be that the Japanese offered idiosyncratic takes on foreign things. White bread was transformed into shokupan, a Platonic ideal of fluffiness, aerated and feather-light in a way that made Wonder Bread seem dense. Pasta was almost always spaghetti, perfectly cooked al dente, but typically doused with cream sauce and often served with spicy codfish roe. Foreign imports here took on a life of their own, becoming something completely different and utterly Japanese.

...That doesn't mean the Japanese have turned away from the world. They've just started approaching it on their own terms, venturing abroad and returning home with increasingly more international tastes and much higher standards, realizing that the apex of bread making may not be Wonder Bread–style loaves, but pain à l'ancienne."

How Leaders Kill Meaning at Work
"Most likely, your company aspires to greatness, articulating a high purpose for the organization in its corporate mission statement. But are you inadvertently signaling the opposite through your words and actions?"

Nextpedition - A custom-made adventure from American Express

The Next Step in Copying will be Physical
"We believe that the next stop in copying will be made from digital form into physical form," The Pirate Bay declares. "It will be physical objects." 

Everything is a Remix, Part 4

Working with Uncertainty

The somewhat interesting, frustrating, fascinating fact of creativity in advertising is that it's something most ask for, then get at doing just about everything possible to remove all the newness, risk and unfamiliarity needed to make what we do impactful.

So that was the starting place for my Infopresse chat in Montreal. If creativty inherently means uncertainty, and we live in one of the most uncertain times in history - we might as well make it work for us rather than against us.

Without further adieu...

And of course - the slideshare if you'd like to follow along.

View more presentations from Paul McEnany.