Five brand tips from dead poets

When you see a display of best-selling business books, what’s your immediate reaction?  Excited?  Eager to discover new insights that can help your brand, company or career?  Or do they make you feel a little squirmy?  After glancing at one, do you ever feel that you’ve read it already?

To me, most look bloated and formulaic, with 10 pages of insight air-puffed into book-length.  The rest?  Bullet points, charts, graphics (pyramids! interlocking puzzle pieces!) and repetitive examples.  All pulsing with ego and chest-thumping energy.

If your mind hungers for more than fast food, where else can you turn for help on brand and business decisions?

Presenting: Dead Poets Marketing

When today’s gurus-du-jour fail to nourish or inspire, look no further than great dead writers to perk up your brand!   This sampler goes way back, from Ancient Greece and Rome to 13th c. Persia and 14th c. Italy.  Yet the insights still register as fresh and timely.

It is tedious to tell again tales already plainly told.
(Homer, 8th c. BC)

Brand-take: Originality matters. Avoid me-too approaches and the temptation of easy formulas.  Ask yourself honestly: How many brands would you truly mourn if they disappeared tomorrow?  Also: How many ads, from the Super Bowl or even last night, do you still remember or find compelling?

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
(Plato,* 428-348 BC)

Brand-take: Back away from the data deck, the focus group transcript and the conference room.  Go out and watch people.  Steve Jobs spends untold hours observing customers in Apple stores.  And you?

If you want to be loved, be lovable.
(Ovid, 43 BC-17/18 AD)

Brand-take: To have passionate followers, have passion for those you serve and give them real reasons to care.  Friendly, heartfelt engagement with customers shouldn’t be considered wildly original, surely?  Yet Zappos is considered remarkable precisely for this reason.  By being lovable, the company has grown an army of evangelist customers (and its founder has…written a best-selling business book).

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
(Rumi, 1207-1273)

Brand-take: Forget about what you think you know.  Challenge your assumptions: turn them upside down, inside out and see what happens. Microsoft and Yahoo were clever.  Apple and Google offer us radical magic.

“And I — my head oppressed by horror — said:
“Master, what is it that I hear? Who are
those people so defeated by their pain?”

And he to me: “This miserable way
is 
taken by the sorry souls
of those who
 lived without disgrace and without praise.
(Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321)

Brand-take: There is no honor or safety in mediocrity. In Dante’s Inferno, the space just inside the Gate of Hell is reserved for the bland and innocuous.  Brands, companies, categories (and careers) in the murky middle have disappeared, and will continue to.

Beyond notable quotes

These quotes are just bullet points gone classical.  The larger point is to cast a wide and inventive net when seeking guidance on important issues like navigating your brand through stormy waters, making key decisions, or attempting something new.

Poetry, myths, art and music create emotionally rich, imaginative spaces where fresh truths can touch us deeply in ways no PowerPoint or business book can match.  Popular business gurus may well offer valid ideas, but they have no monopoly on wisdom.  And they rarely offer bold new glimpses into the human heart.

Artistic and symbolic thinking dwell in the right brain, home of the wondrous and the unconventional. Tasty servings of right-brain insight will provide healthy balance, for whole-brain goodness.

*You’re right: Plato wasn’t a poet.  But certainly a great dead thinker and influential writer!