When Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew was asked about why he thought Singapore was successful, he was characteristically quotable:
“A multi-cultural society and air-conditioning” was his reply.
In October at The Marketing Society Changemakers Conference, both were in fine display, with an array of speakers representing truly diverse backgrounds with satisfyingly inspiring stories to tell.
And the room, which suitably was the Old Parliament House of Singapore, where LKY and the founding generation sat and literally built Singapore from the ground up, was extremely well air-conditioned (read: freezing).
Our Singapore Chair Gita de Beer introduced the start of the sessions with the observation that of all The Marketing Society events, this one is personal: less about craft and the nuts and bolts of marketing, more about personal growth and stories.
And boy did it deliver. But that also makes this summary somewhat hard to write. I am sure that everyone who was fortunate to attend will have their own perspectives, and walked about with their own impressions and personal learnings.
So distilling 5 hours of personal stories of challenge and growth into a few themes of learnings is an almost impossible task… but let me give it a go:
The Insights
1. Humans
A session with Laurence Liew (the Director of Innovation at AI Singapore) and Prophet ECD Peter Dixon about AI, and also with wonderful graphic artist niceaunties, who uses AI to bring her project to life in so many crazy ways, reminded us that AI is only as good as its interaction with humans, either as co-creators or as consumers of the end product.
And the idea that what it means to be “human” is the residual of all that AI cannot do, was certainly a powerful take on how the human / AI relationship is going to unfold over time.
2. Product
Marketers often feel that the product is something that gets done to us – not something we can influence. Well David Aaker, the creator of modern brand management, had a call to arms which was echoed by many other speakers, that as marketers we sit at the bleeding edge of customer insight, and therefore MUST have seat at the table.
As author and fraud victim survivor Tracy Hall said in the context of trust, “believe me, leaving product development to the engineers will get you a very different outcome to the one you may want.”
3. Trust
Which leads us nicely to a wonderful theme that was powerfully brought home by the one-woman force of nature, Tracy Hall and her very personal story that I can’t do justice to here, but is very worth hearing.
“Criminals don’t hack Systems they hack people” was the core of her message.
Trust as an asset that is tangible and measurable and should be treated as valuable and relevant as any other asset was a truly valuable reframe on something we all talk about, but mostly push into the background.
4. Heritage
Appropriately for a meeting of people in a space oozing heritage from every pore, the topic of brands with heritage (rather than heritage brands) was another theme that was brilliantly covered by Tom Child from JLR, and also by NiceAunties, for whom personal heritage sits at the heart of her work.
With so much change going on all the time, it’s heritage that reminds us of what it means to be human, and that creates a frame against which we can judge our actions.
But the final word surely has to go to the softly spoken force of nature that is Maz Farrelly, who informed us all that she had been “in all our houses”, but hit her point home hard: It is not anyone’s job to be interested in you. It’s your job to be interesting!”
And in what was almost certainly a first for Singapore’s Old Parliament House, she got everyone dancing to Rick Astley’s classic hit “Never Gonna Give You Up”.
Well done to The Marketing Society team for creating an agenda that was definitely interesting.
