Trends. Analysis. Insight. Data. Focus Group. Hypothesis.

A tag cloud in my world of strategic planning will reveal something quite improbable. Something Nassim Nicholas Taleb has coined as the Black Swan. Much ado about nothing! What if I were to tell you that everything you do is utterly useless, meaningless, bulls**t! Seriously! How would I make you feel? That’s how NNT has made me feel right about now! Quite improbable but true!

What is so Black Swan about my world? The simple fact that everything we do as planners to simplify or to put it more aptly platonify is not as meaningful or even accurate as I once believed it was. We get it wrong at so many levels. A lot of what I do simply put is baloney (or faluda from where I come from)!

So what am I going to do? I could choose to be the ostrich or I could choose to be the Black Swan! The highly improbable planner who fails even harder trying to change the game! The probable outcome but this is what I will do. Will you do the same?

Prediction is not possible. Deal with it. Those hypothesis we try to confirm. Seek to be proven wrong! Fight the confirmation error. Yes my sole motto from now would be to proven wrong. I want to be told I was wrong the next time I do research. Try not to make sense of things! OMG! How am I going to do without that. We go through so much research and have to “craft” that illusive insight – Narrative Fallacy (or Fraud to put it bluntly). The best in my world are the ones with a point of view and creating a story around it is the art that sticks! Is there a better way! Not quite sure yet. The things we don’t hear, don’t find out about in a research – the problem of silent evidence. Basing our strategies on the little evidence we get is what we do! This is not getting any better is it! A whole of lot of modeling, mapping, scenario planning is ludic fallacy at play. It all looks hunky dory on paper but it is far from what goes on in the real world or so says NNT?

Skeptical. That is the point. NNT would be proud. But don’t just stop there. Be empirically skeptic. That’s what he is. That’s not what I am though nor will be anytime soon. I may not have the luxury to empirically prove my point of view. But I do know what I need to do and I am not quite ready to tell you! Yet

How do you tell a vanilla story in a way that is fresh and surprising? Use an analogy. Their power is undeniable. From the oldest religious to modern day pep talk analogies are a great way to make a point. Advertising is all about making a point and in most cases than some, the point is not new. How many times have we seen a food brand claim taste, a beverage brand claim refreshment and a telecom brand claim value. It usually helps to focus on a specific feature to begin with, mix it up with an analogy and you could end up with something great. This is what Clear – an internet services provider in the United States has done to communicate two features of it’s offering. One is for “No Data Limits” and the other is for “No Contract”. Both features are not new to the industry but their agency’s creative team have come up with some very human, everyday analogies to make their point. Check out the two ads below:

Ever heard of Vitamin Waw! It is an extremely potent rare form of vitamin found only in certain parts of the world. It can be a life saver, a game changer, can give you wings like the ones that not even Red Bull can match. Great thing about it, unlike other vitamins you can never overdose on it.  The more you have this power pill the stronger you become. It is magical dare I say. There is just one problem though. It is only available in Saudi Arabia to a minority of the locals and it is not for sale! Acquiring Vitamin Waw takes a lot of effort, sometimes years. Having the good fortune of belonging to a certain lineage does allow automatic access to this magical elixir but that is about it. People who live in Saudi Arabia see it’s power manifest everyday, they may not consciously know what it is but they are certainly a witness to it’s impact.

Wonder how the improbable just happens. Stories we all hear everyday of people circumventing the law to do things deemed impossible . Yup you guessed it, it’s all the power of Vitamin Waw. For the vast majority I am probably not making any sense but all my fellow residents of Saudi Arabia have certainly heard of “wasta” and the colloquial term ‘Vitamin Waw’. Bit of an anti-climax I suspect? You were expecting more than this. Well here it is. We all know about the power of “wasta”. It is both powerful and unique. This post is about the “why?” Where does this phenomenon of “wasta” come from? What is so unique about Saudi Society that breeds this?

There are indeed some very local customs and habits that play a big role in driving this way of life. Those habits may be shared by other Arab cultures but there is clearly a Saudi aspect that is unlike any other. It is this deep offline social networking that locals engage in that equates if not takes precedence to their close family ties. Just how close are these engagements? If a sister is getting married on a day of this special ‘networking’ day then the brother will have no choice but to miss his sister’s wedding. That’s right! It’s that important and it happens every week on a pre-fixed date for life. It’s not something limited to older men from the upper strata of society either but it’s a custom that is prevalent across genders and ages. College going kids for example will have their own networking rituals played out at a sisha cafe or on chalets near the beach on weekends for example. Women too will strictly follow their meeting rites exchanging thoughts from anything mundane to the not so ordinary. The real value of these meeting rituals is in the strength of the connections that are nurtured over the years. Imagine a high-profile businessman meeting regularly with a similar group of entrepreneurs, senior government officials and in some cases a member of the royal family and doing so to a level where all family matters, business goals and challenges are completely known to everyone in the group. If each member values this connection to a point that they commit to it like they would to a blood relative then you can imagine the strength of this connection. Speaking to some locals I learnt that these commitments demand a huge emotional investment as everyone tries their utmost to keep up with both the happy celebrations and the sad events of each connection. The rewards are obvious but they don’t come easy. Knitting such close ties to a network of twenty or so people at a very deep level gives them immense power in the society to get things done. With each family member having their own network the combined effect means for a certain level in society these individuals can pretty much get anything done. In a world which is just learning to capitalize on the strength of weak ties through online social networks here is a culture that has been doing it for centuries and these are no weak ties here either. They are equal to the strongest ties any individual could have.

At DDB we are really focusing on “Social Creativity”. Our goal being not just to connect people with brands but people with people. A concept known as “six degrees of separation” coined by Frigyes Karinthy states that every one of us is connected to another in just six steps. Today it has inspired a whole new thinking in science known as ‘network science’ and it has been proven that we truly are connected to each other in just six steps. However, if the same study were done in Saudi Arabia those steps maybe fewer than six despite the fact that the penetration of online social networks is much lower here than most developed economies.

So what does this mean for marketing? For one this is a unique insight into Saudi culture. The power of these networks can have a huge impact on brand building especially stakeholders as we experience it in our day-to-day business. The impressions and feedback from these networks can be a bigger influencer to a decision-maker than what conventional research might say. Also as we work to unleash Social Creativity in the online world globally there may still be room, at least in Saudi Arabia to use the power of these offline networks to build brands by encouraging participation, play and pass on!

Originally written for the PDDB Blog – reposted from here!

Welcome to 2012! As with every new year this year too brings with it new hope and a plethora of new year resolutions that unlike yesteryears would not be forgotten right after they are carved in stone…err…on a tablet I presume. Something tells me they too would meet a fate that is rather expected, almost certain I dare say. Well this post is about the unexpected. On a personal note Incito Mentis is now two years old. I personally did not expect to come this far. It’s been an enriching journey that I sure hope to continue with in the forseeable future, God willing. Unlike last year when I covered some of the key lessons from my first year of blogging this time around I am going to cover my personal favorites of the year from three categories – Insights, Ideas and Technology.  These are the same three areas that I most often write and think about. This post is the first of three posts and is going to cover “Insight of the Year”.

Before I can begin I have to admit that we have a problem. A problem of definition. What is an insight? It’s like one of those many topics in marketing that have as many definitions as the marketers themselves (including the ones who think they are marketers…lucky for you since you are reading this post I believe you are NOT one of them). Questions like ‘What is Marketing? What is a Brand? How do you define Activation? etc.’ all fall under this elusive area for which there is NO ONE right answer. Adding to the confusion I too, a self-proclaimed insight expert, would define an insight as ‘the discovery of an underlying truth’. In the context of my work in brand communications this would be mean “the discovery of an underlying human truth”. Now that we have the definition out of the way (so I think!). Let’s look at what I discovered this year that would be my pick for “Insight of the Year 2011.” No nominees just one clear winner. This is not the Oscars or is it!?

Well I live and work in Saudi Arabia and have been doing so for the last 6 years. As an expatriate working in this region it has been very hard for me to make sense of Arab culture and Saudi society. In 2011 the dots seemed to connect, as a wise man once said, and I came to discover a very unexpected truth about Saudi Arabia and it’s people. Saudi Arabia is a “Land of Paradoxes”.  This seemed like that one one thing that explained much of their observed behavior if not everything. Saudi Arabia is not a land of grey but a land of distinct blacks and equally distinct whites. In other words for every observed behavior there is most likely an equal and opposite set of behaviors to be seen that would contradict everything that was known prior to the fact . As a reader of this post, it would be fair to weigh in a heavy dose of skepticism to this theory. Platonified reductionism does not necessarily lead to a fresh insight but personally I have found this idea very unexpected and unique to Saudi Arabia.

Try it for any observed behavior in the kingdom and a paradox would be equally true. I have attempted to capture this theory in a keynote presentation. You can check it out here. Subsequent posts to understand Saudi culture have further added to this belief, also captured in another post here.

Hope you enjoyed reading this! I would love to hear your point of view on the subject even if it contradicts my own! After all, this post is all about paradoxes to begin with.

Happy Insight Mining in 2012!

What happens when sports marketing meets Web 2.0? You get content that spreads like a forest fire blazing through the web. It is apparently random and insanely awesome!

Sports is a youth passion that brands often leverage on to using the celebrity status of sporting giants to connect with their audience. Pepsi for one has been famous for its endorsement deals with all kinds of sports celebrities. In the old world of one way communication these stars would be used from anything like a TV commercial to being the face on a billboard. But what does sports marketing look like in a web 2.0 world? Like everything else on social media it’s all about content. However in the context of sports marketing there are some differences. Looking at best practices I sense at least one such pattern, a structure that can inspire others looking to create branded content in the sporting domain. I am calling this tactic ‘Random Greatness’. Check out these two videos below to see what I am talking about – one is for Gillette using Roger Federer and the other is for Pepsi using David Beckham. Awesome stuff!

What is common about them? They both seem obviously random and insanely awesome! I believe there is a strategy to create content like this. It is not as random and obvious as it may seem. The question is how can YOU go about creating content like this? I have tried to distill my thinking into three key points:

Star Power: Having a good dose of celebrity is the pivotal starting point for creating ‘random greatness’. Celebrities command more attention over anything they do compared to similar acts of superficiality undertaken by a non-celebrity. Since this is about about leveraging an investment in a sports celebrity to begin with the only thing to think about here is the level of star power. More power means more fans and therefore the probability of the content going viral is proportionately increased. So if you represent a brand with big sports stars lined up you are already half way there.

Showmanship: Stars are revered for many reasons. Some for their good looks while others for their personality. Sports celebrities more often than not are held up high on the pedestal of fame for their showmanship, the sheer skill they exhibit in their game. Jeremy ‘Linsanity” Lin for example has become an overnight sensation not for anything but his prowess at the NBA. While creating ‘random greatness’ this is the other key point. Fans love to just see their stars and if they get to see them in all their glory doing what they do best than THAT is the ultimate treat. ‘Not only do I get to see my idol but I see them being awesome!’

Authenticity: This is the final ingredient to creating ‘random greatness’. Everything up to this point was about greatness – the power of the star and an opportunity to see the awesomeness of their talent. The randomness creates the WOW! Factor because it adds authenticity to the whole setting. Both the examples have a very backstage, behind-the-scenes type of feel that gives the impression that these acts of greatness were purely coincidental, just happened by accident but luckily there was someone with a camera recording that moment in high definition. Right!

There you have it. My recipe for creating great content if you are a brand with a sports celebrity in your stable. Now only if I had a client with whom I could cook something like this with! Any takers?

You could be excused for thinking that Saudi Arabia is one of the richest countries in the world! With a GDP per capita in the Top 50s and estimated cash reserves of over $500 billion at the end of 2010 prove this! Add to that the news of Qatar being the richest nation in the world on the basis of GDP per capita, the image of this regions riches is further perpetuated. What if I were to tell you that this is only half the story? And the other half is a complete paradox of what most would expect about Saudi Arabia.

Did you know that in a nation of 27 million only 10% of the population is making more than $4000 per month? With people in a government job making less than $1000 a month and those in a private company making about $2000 a month. This shows the great divide between the rich and the poor. The situation gets even worse when one looks at the impending real estate crisis prevailing today. On one hand we have some families who own more land than anyone can imagine and on the other there are thousands if not millions struggling to own a home. For perspective the Kindgom needs about 2 million new housing units over the next 10 years but the government is unable to do anything about it apparently because there is no vacant land available. There has been a royal decree to build 500,000 housing units with no project end date in sight. Why? The land owners have no incentive to sell. For a city like Riyadh, 50% of the land is vacant and unused. We are talking about 800 sq. km. of prime real estate laid to waste. With more demand and an artificially created shortage of land the average Saudi is forced to not only forget about ever owning a home (with a basic apartment costing about $150,000) but pay about $8,000 to $10,000 in annual rent on an income of about $24,000 per annum.

Add to this a bustling youth population of 5 million in the age bracket 18-30 with about 10% unemployed. We can expect one half of this segment – the men looking to marry and hoping to save about $20,000 as dowry. When you look at the complete picture the equation simply does not add up. Either they are going to be homeless or single! This is one aspect of the paradoxes that prevail in Saudi Arabia. A paradox that has been captured on film and recently exposed through social media. One is the short film “Monopoly” – an inspiring dark comedy made to raise awareness about the impending real estate crisis . The film was produced and directed by Bader Al-Hamoud. So far it had received over 1 million views (1.46 million to be exact!). You can check out the film with English subtitles here.

The other is a series of short films titled “”Mal3ob3lena”by Firas Bakna, a Saudi Blogger who went out to the poor districts of Riyadh to give the “have’s” a true picture of the “have not’s”. The total views on his YouTube channel for all “Mal3ob3lena” related videos exceeds 3 million. You can check out the film with English subtitles here (the video is blocked in Saudi Arabia).

What is the key learning? The paradoxes that exist across all aspects of Saudi life are not as apparent and this is something we as marketers often tend to overlook. If these paradoxes are real and deeply rooted then FMCG companies, for example might have to rethink all the key elements of their Marketing Mix. We have seen Hindustan Lever in India realizing this fact and customizing their SKU’s to meet the needs of the rural customer. They started using sachets as a big volume driver and at the same time have been engaging poor rural women as a network of saleswomen to not only drive product sales but be a source of employment for them as well. Similar kind of approaches might be be needed for Saudi Arabia as well that reflect these prevailing paradoxes. It could prove to be a win-win for both parties.

I originally wrote this post for the PDDB Blog – reposted from here!

I could not believe the impact the news of Steve Jobs’ death had on me. I had only known him as an iconic public figure like so many of our time but his passing felt like some dear relative had been taken away from me. I am simply overwhelmed and furthermore surprised to know that I am not the only one. The impact he had made through his vision, his passion and his humanity is far greater than anyone I have known in my lifetime. His work was nothing less than revolutionary but it was HOW everything he did at Apple embodied this spirit and perhaps it was this spirit that drew us all so close to him.

This September I completed my sixth year of working in Saudi Arabia as Planning Director for DDB. Through the years I have come across many different perspectives and researches on the country and it was not so long ago that I tried to assimilate my learning and chalk out a point-of-view. It was triggered by the need to give an “outsider” – a client based out of Saudi Arabia an inside scoop on the market. The presentation was never made for whatever reason. Not seeing any use for it just lying around offline I decided to put it in the public domain online and share my perspective with the world.

Simply stated I believe Saudi Arabia is a very distinct country from a social and cultural context. It is unlike any other society where there would be minor extremes on both ends with a large majority in the middle. The parameters could be anything like the divide between modernity and tradition, rich and poor, from being culturally exposed to being culturally deprived etc. to name a few. For simplicity however, let’s just say that white is on one end, black on the other with gray in between. To my mind Saudi Arabia is one of those unique places in the world where there is a large white and a large black on either end, with a small gray in the middle. This is what makes Saudi Arabia a society of paradoxes, a society with extreme opposites co-existing together in large numbers. I cannot say if Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world which is so but I can surely say it is one of the few!

Below is my effort to put this perspective in a presentation form with supporting facts. Hope you find it both interesting and useful.

Creativity is a strange thing! It’s elusive and daunting but at the same time it is so easy to find senior creatives living with a false sense of greatness, believing that every piece of work they create is God’s gift to the planet. Yet when you see creative brilliance the end product seems so simple nevertheless. As a strategist, there is a parallel between what a planner would do and what a creative does. Both need to take a leap – one takes a strategic leap the other a creative leap. The question is how?

There are obviously many ways, tools, thinking frameworks, stimuli, processes, disciplines etc. that the best creative minds in the world have devised which can at least enable creative brilliance if not ensure it. One thinking framework is a media-neutral mindset. Before the digital era came upon us there was a time when “Integrated” and “360 degrees” were the buzz word in marketing communications. That time was not too long ago but it was an era when the worst form of integration was simply adapting a single idea, mostly led by the TV commercial, and pasting it across media, usually in the form of static media like print, outdoor, retail and your occasional web banner ad. On the other hand 360 thinking at it’s best was to come up with a “Big Idea”, a media neutral thought that can be scaled to any level where each media would play it’s unique role to carry the message forward both independently and as part of the larger story.

Somewhere in between these big ideas are those one-off brilliant (dare I say small) ideas. I often wonder what was the starting point for such creative brilliance. Have a look at these two examples:

IKEA “Curtains” – Cinema Ad

3M’s Post-it Super Sticky Notes  ”Train”

The question is! What are these ideas a product off? Is it simply great media-neutral thinking focusing on the key message and coming up with the best media to communicate the idea? Or is it a creative leap on a media decision that was already made? Why the doubt? Well for one on an everyday basis client briefs tend to have already taken a media decision. For example, in the case of IKEA the brief could have been to do a cinema ad. The creative team in this case took the leap and came up with the idea of using the right moment before the movie when the curtains are drawn to place their message.

Similarly, what about the 3M Post-it Super Sticky Notes on a train? Was the starting point media neutral? Suppose on the one hand the brief was to communicate the strength of these Super Sticky Notes most probably through a conventional media campaign but the creative team believing in media neutral ideas came up with a live demonstration of the product strength “What if they can be stuck on a high speed train and if none of them come off by the end of the journey then this is an undeniable proof of the product benefit?” Or the brief itself required a non-conventional media solution to demonstrate the product benefit and the creative were put in that mindset to think out of the box from the word go and so they did.  I would like to believe this is truly great media neutral thinking at least in retrospect. But then again perhaps not! What do you think? Have your say in the comments section below.

I am probably very wrong but in my opinion there is a huge downside to Web 2.0. Despite the numerous tools and filters available one can easily get carried away in this vast ocean of knowledge and data that is sweeping at currents faster than those that flow beneath Antartica!

Why do I say that? For the last two years I have been swimming in this ocean supposedly prepared. As a strategist it’s critical to keep a lookout for all the trends that could shape our future. Around 2002, we saw Web 2.0 emerge through tools like weblogs (commonly known as blogs) and RSS. Social Networking sites like Orkut and Myspace began to spring up as well. People could now engage in a dialogue, broadcast their point-of-view to the world and create their own content like any publisher. This was also the time when BlackBerry made email access ubiquitous and the buzzword of this era was “Information Overload”. In early 2009 Clay Shirky, a new media professor at NYU described the phenomenon not as a case of Information Overload but as a failure of filters.

Triggered by this thought I began my journey through this vast mountain of data. I setup Google Reader for my RSS feeds, neatly creating folders for all my topics of interests, from advertising and branding to telecom and trends. I searched the web for leading content across all Web 2.0 channels and over the years built a rich feed of content. I was an early adopter on social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook learning to divide and define the use for each. Joined the bandwagon of the “One with the Most Followers on Twitter is King” and soon realized the fallacy of this notion. Used Twitter lists to filter the relevant stuff again dividing them by my topics of interests and context – from family and friends, news, celebrities to my professional lists focusing on branding, planning and telecom to name a few! With the iPhone things became even simpler (or more complicated depending on how you see it!). After trying out a plethora of apps for feeds and tweets I settled with a few, checking in at least once every hour across platforms. I lost many followers as I would overtake the feed of newcomers by tweeting at a rate of one tweet a minute, sometimes even more! Eventually I learnt how to space out and manage tweets more professionally by using platforms like HootSuite.

The end result! I felt great. The dopamine kept kicking in. I felt like a guru on everything! From the latest news around the world to all those crazy memes taking over the web, I was in the know. Be it technology updates to what was happening in the ever-evolving world of social media to blog posts on all topics related to marketing and brand communications. I was smoking away on this illusive and addictive drug called “knowzac” (not really but you get the point). Having abandoned passive media like TV and newspapers, thinking they were for old timers and geeks I was riding the new media wave, feeling cool that I was in full control of what I consumed and when! (Or so it seemed…)

Then it hit me! I had cascaded from a being a content creator to a blatant consumer of content, sucking on everything that came my way taking out no time to analyze, think or contribute an original perspective. I learnt that even in the world of information and knowledge the plague of consumerism is a force to reckon with. My openness to consuming content from a wide variety of sources was driven by this belief that creativity is best enabled through a rich and diverse base of knowledge. If an idea is simply a fresh connection of two or more known thoughts then the depth of the pool is likely to create bigger, fresher ideas! What happened on the way was a halt to content creation and very limited critical thinking. I was reading more than I ever did in my life but I simply was not thinking enough because most content was very short and too diverse to really make sense of as a whole. However the satisfaction of reading lots of things and then sharing them online kept me away from doing the stuff that really counted.

How will I change my behavior going forward? I will try and do the following:

• Focus More: I see two ways of going about this. I would have to curate my lists and feeds even more and get rid of anyone or anything that is deviating me from my subjects of focus or make a mental note not to get carried away with interesting but nonconstructive blabber at least from a professional standpoint (not always easy to do though).
• Be Proactive: Choose a topic, dig deeper and explore enough to be able to come out with a distinct point of view. Be the one choosing what to read and get further into rather than vice versa.
• Think More: Even if serendipity is allowed whatever that comes across should be thought over, reflected upon and then internalized through a point of view. There should clearly by some thinking done after coming across anything new and interesting rather than just reading through it just for the sake of it.

I believe perhaps that by keeping the above points in mind I would be able to better utilize my time to not only gain knowledge but also to apply it meaningfully to my work. Hope this helps you too. If you have some learning and experiences of your own that you would like to share I am all ears (or eyes in this case!)