Few books really jump out at me, much less stick around on my bookshelf to suffer underlining and bracketing in the margins. Chip and Dan Heath’s 2007 tome, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is one that’s suffering, in all the best possible terms.
(For reference, a few others that I return to for advice and insight often are The Book of Gossage, Jack Foster’s How To Get Ideas, Stephen King’s On Writing – A Memoir To The Craft, Judith Weston’s Directing Actors and Robert Grudin’s amazing effort, The Grace of Great Things – Creativity and Innovation.)
I’m not done with Made to Stick. But it’s well marked, already.
The book asks, simply, why some ideas (cultural, marketing, etc.) remain etched in our minds and some don’t. So much good advice for advertising professionals, CEOs and CMOs drips off the pages.
My current favorite insight begins on page 25—the story of “Commander’s Intent.”
In the 1980s, the American Military evolved its planning processes from a historic “command and control” operation to one that allows each chain of the command greater flexibility. They called this new approach, Commander’s Intent (CI). The impetus for CI was quite blunt: “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”
Might we suggest, “No marketing plan survives contact with its audience?” Or, “No creative brief survives contact with a creative team?”
The military’s CI assignment poses two questions to whomever is in charge:
1. If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must:
2. The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is:
As the brothers Heath make clear, “At high levels…the CI may be relatively abstract. At the tactical level, it is much more concrete.” Then they go on to apply Commander’s Intent to the example of Southwest Airlines, relaying a story told by James Carville and Paul Begala:
“Herb Kelleher [the long-serving CEO of Southwest] once told someone, ‘I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are THE low cost airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can.’”
Thus, Southwest’s Commander’s Intent is: “We are THE low cost airline.” Whatever you do within the airline’s operations, whatever you say or do within marketing must ratify and insure Southwest remains THE low cost airline.
How many brands can articulate their Commander’s Intent so succinctly? We’ve found that companies who can express such clarity save time, money and typically see much greater impact from their advertising.
But how do you arrive at the CI for a brand?
Well, you could hire us. My inclination is start with the past, with whatever fragments of DNA we can uncover from the brand and the company supporting it. Much as it’s said we solidify our impression of another person within 30 seconds, I believe a brand’s DNA is cast almost at birth. Now, the precise words probably weren’t set in stone, but the behavior of the company—its process of reacting to events—and the kinds of products or services it offers and how it offers them very likely were etched early on.
This is why so many brands now struggle with social media. Who they are—their brand’s DNA—tells the company to resist the Conversation Economy, and repel Empowered Consumers. These brands still employ Command And Control, versus Commander’s Intent.
Yet, somewhere deep lurks an answer. Because no company is so foolish as to reject their audience. They wouldn’t exist. As Howard Gossage put it, in another of my favorite books, “The salesman reasonably expects his company’s advertising to be interesting enough so that the prospect’s receptivity is a little stimulated.”
Somewhere deep lurks the Commander’s Intent.
Let’s go find yours.
