The Second World War brought huge changes to Melanesia. What had until then been a sleepy enough chain of “South Sea” islands of the type that appear in advertisements for Bounty and seduced the likes of Paul Gaugin, were suddenly in or adjacent to the theatre of global conflict.
First the Japanese and then the Americans occupied the islands during the conflict in the Pacific. They proceeded to do the types of things armies do in that situation - namely build runways and control towers, put up flags and march about in symbolic garb. And sure as night follows day, planes landed, supply drops were delivered, rations and trinkets of all types appeared from the sky. And then they left.
Shortly following the end of the war, a visitor to the island would come across a surprising sight. The islanders were building runways, control towers, putting up flags and marching around in symbolic garb. They were speaking into wooden radio sets and walkie talkies. Well - it worked for the Japanese and the Americans didn’t it? If they performed the same rituals surely planes carrying ‘cargo’ would descend from the sky?
Modern Era Cargo Cults
It’s easy to laugh about such stories. But a moment’s reflection should tell us that we aren’t nearly as clever or as far removed from such superstitions as we might think. In fact, we perform our own cargo cult rituals every hour of every day - or at least that’s the impression I’ve received during over 25 years in the marketing and tech industries.
And the truth is we do it for the same reasons. The Melanesians saw American troops perform certain actions and be rewarded with cargo. In the same way, we earnestly scan the pages of Forbes, AdAge or whatever you’re having yourself and learn what successful companies DO that we might want to copy. The question about whether this is the right course of action for our business, at this moment in time, doesn’t always occur to us.
I will give just a single example. There is a widespread and apparently unshakeable belief in many B2B organizations that the single best way to sell is to employ salespeople. By diligently employing a sales person, assigning them a quota, presenting them with a playbook and opening up an expense account (just like the big companies do), sales will surely follow.
But the sales person is the runway. Sure, it’s a requirement if you want a plane to land. But it ain’t gonna magic up any incoming air traffic just by existing. That requires prospects, and it requires prospects who have understood your vision and are developing warm fuzzy feelings about your product. And that requires a lot of work ‘from first principles’.
Marketing (and Selling) From First Principles
A lot of people have a huge amount to gain by making marketing confusing. It isn’t. In fact it ultimately boils down to three questions:
Who are the people who might buy my product or service?
What do I want them to believe?
How do I get them to believe it?
OK, there’s a little white lie in there to the extent that those three questions cover and encompass an awful lot of thought and activity. Or at least they should. But that isn’t really the point. The point is that by answering these questions we begin to formulate strategy, and from that strategy our day-to-day tactics emerge. In other words, the things we do relate directly to the outcome we want to deliver, and we understand the mechanism by which that will happen.
The alternative is the cargo cult approach. We look at what successful companies do and we copy those activities. The things we do bear no relation whatsoever to our business and marketing objectives, but we read about them in the “big book of things marketing departments are supposed to do” and anyway - it sure feels good to sponsor a football team and sit in a corporate box every weekend.
In many cases, and in particular in instances where the target market is relatively small, an awful lot of marketing from first principles is about learning to say “no”. If I am selling to a tightly defined group of individuals, huge swathes of activity can be excluded because they are simply not a cost-effective way to speak to “the people who might buy my product or service”.
It is probably easier to observe this approach in the breach rather than the observance. Any listener to Morning Ireland has probably wondered why a national radio advertisement is the best way to get a message through to “anyone involved in the disposal or recycling of tyres”, to give one recent example. The answer of course is that it isn’t. This is cargo cult behaviour at its most obvious, although I suppose it does have the benefit of making the act of doing something as public as possible.
But the flip side of saying “no” is of course the ability to put proper thought and resources behind the approach that is right. If I need to talk to anyone involved in the disposal or recycling of tyres, I can probably look them all up and call round in person for the cost of producing a broadcasting a radio ad on a program most of them probably don’t listen to. Not sexy, but gets the job done.
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