Creating Business Magic. David Morey
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superpowers versus superpowers. And they played by clearly understood rules. Sure, there was competition, and there were the occasional Pepsi Challenges or guerilla campaigns, but even those were played according to the well-understood rules of incumbent engagement. The campaigns may have been insurgent, but the war itself was strictly conventional. Today, to believe that insurgent brands will play by traditional market rules is to believe that ISIS will adhere to international law and the Marquess of Queensberry Rules to boot. Insurgent brands hold the cards today, and they shuffle the deck.
Magic Lessons From the “Founder/Performer” CEOs
Magic legends such as Robert-Houdin, Thurston, Houdini, Malini, Blackstone, Henning, Copperfield, Burton, McBride, Blaine, and Angel call to mind the recent and current crop of Founder CEOs, such as Uber’s Travis Kalanick, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Alibaba’s Jack Ma, and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, all of whom have literally invented new industries. The success of these magicians as well as the Founder CEOs is based on five strategic drivers:
1.Discovery: Allowing early fans—early adopters—to find your brand themselves, on their own aspirational terms, and then
to harness the most powerful marketing force on earth: word
of mouth.
2.Craft: Today, millennials are leading U.S. business trends, both in the B2C and the B2B marketplace. Millennial consumers expect products to be as simple and as natural as possible. They demand what you might call “Honest Farmer” quality, just as they expect their favorite performers to be totally real, honest, and genuine.
3.Authenticity: Truth is the best propaganda. Brands must be transparent and aligned in terms of message throughout their development, packaging, distribution, placement, promotion, and pricing. Similarly, great performers show their true colors in every small detail on stage. Any deviation dilutes the brand’s power and meaning, and any differentiation must be relatable, credible, and simple.
4.Founder/Visionary Narrative: Consumers these days
associate new products with individual entrepreneurs and passionate visionaries. They want to know their “story,” especially the parts that explain why they developed their product, for whom they developed their product, and what marketplace “pain” it is designed to relieve. Today’s audiences are looking for the story that explains who the performer or the product is, what it (she/he) does, and how it (she/he) is different, special, and better than others.
5.Quirky/Un-Marketing: Mass marketing is over. The collapse of the effect of advertising in the U.S. is epic. Today, your target audience of early adopters seeks “un-marketing”—ideas that possess—or appear to possess—the purity of passion and conviction. From businesses to performers, today’s audiences want to follow their own bread crumbs to the apotheosis of their own aspirations.
Conviction
You cannot be a world-class magician unless you know—and deeply understand—why you are performing magic. This has always been true of magic, but has only become true of business and brand leadership in the new era of “un-marketing.” Like the best magicians, today’s business leaders cannot mount an effective campaign without a clear definition of how they see the world and how they intend to commit to achieving their goals in that world. This means defining the moral imperative driving what you do. Companies such as Nike, The Coca-Cola Company, and Disney have successfully defined their conviction and applied it as a powerful competitive advantage in their marketplaces.
Another example is Starbucks. From the beginning, the company put neither its faith nor its resources into advertising or other aspects of traditional marketing. Its communications have been singularly focused on the meaning of coffee as a total experience—not just a jolt of caffeine, the twenty-five-cent “Cup of Joe” defined by traditional market leaders like Maxwell House. In fact, faced with diminishing consumption of coffee by the rising generation, coffee marketers began diluting the beverage’s meaning in a desperate attempt to reposition it closer and closer to soft drinks, for which the young had a seemingly unquenchable thirst.
Starbucks took a different path, the path of conviction. It made coffee magic by elevating it beyond a bitter hot brown fluid that delivers a jolt of caffeine. Coffee became a source that instead delivered a magical—that is, quasi-sacred—experience. This redefinition of the coffee experience revitalized the product by bringing back to the fore its core meaning: not the bright, quick, effervescent, youthful refreshment of soda pop, but the slow, flavorful, contemplative experience at the heart of coffee’s tradition. It is not a refreshment but an elixir that depending on the aspiration of the consumer, engenders social conviviality or quiet contemplation. Either way, it conjures up an experience of an oasis of unhurried pleasure in a world moving faster and faster around it.
Competent magicians appeal to the mind. Great magicians move the heart. Move the heart of the audience, and their minds will follow. Psychologists believe there is no such thing as a rational decision. Unfortunately, most CEOs can’t quite bring themselves to believe this. They do not readily accept the necessity of understanding and embracing the power of aspiration and emotion in decision making. This is remarkable because, presumably, most business leaders accept that great performers—actors, musicians, magicians, and, for that matter, political leaders—appeal first and foremost to the heart. The truth is that aspiration and the emotions associated with it are just as critical in business as they are in performance or politics.
David Morey’s business partner, Scott Miller, tells a great story about how back in the 1990s, he was asked to help with the strategy for Billy Graham’s then-forthcoming autobiography. He was summoned to meet with the Billy Graham Evangelical Association in Minneapolis. There, the association’s CEO, John Corts, was trying to be polite by demurring and deferring to marketing guru Miller.
“We’re sure glad to have you here, Mr. Miller. We don’t know anything about marketing.”
“Oh, bullshit!” Scott replied.
He knew—and, what is more, they knew—that American evangelicals virtually invented the most powerful form of aspirational marketing, what today is called viral marketing. In the process, they gave the lie to the clichéd admonition, “Don’t just preach to the choir.” Evangelicals revel in preaching to the choir—and then in turning the choir into missionaries. Early on, before anybody, they perfected inside-out communicating—and always with high emotional and aspirational content.
A competent CEO is a good manager, much as a competent magician is a good stage manager. Both make themselves fully responsible for everything the audience sees. But a great CEO, like a great magician, must also be a leader—one who addresses more than the senses and the brain, and who also uses aspiration and emotion to lead the aspiration and emotion of the consumer or the audience. In the First Coming of Steve Jobs at Apple, he was a maestro of corporate aspiration and emotion. Under his leadership, Apple put millions of dollars into the production of corporate meetings to rally the troops and feed the aspirational emotions of the company’s Dolphin vs. Shark battle against IBM. And Jobs’ Apple not only developed the Macintosh, but also Windham Hill Records to provide appropriately emotional theme music for its meetings.
Or think historically—back to the desperately dark early days of World War II. Winston Churchill did not rally his small island nation to victory in the fight for its very life by inflating the chances of achieving that victory. Instead, with unparalleled eloquence, he painted a chilling and realistic picture of the fight ahead, pledging on behalf of his people:
We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…
The reality was that, as of June 4, 1940, when Churchill delivered his
“We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech, Adolf Hitler was winning. France was falling (it would surrender twenty-one days later) and, as Churchill had written on May 15 to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose America had