Blue Monday and the sympathy window

This year’s marketing society annual conference promised an ambitious theme – to ‘go beyond’. With a visual theme strikingly reminiscent of New Order’s iconic Blue Monday 12” single artwork (although I think it was supposed to be more ‘Interstellar meets Star Wars’) the content, as usual, was superb (if not quite from another time and space dimension). Meabh Quoirin of The Future Foundation did a great job of landing the first bold topic, The Future of Consumer Engagement. She rattled through some great examples of increasing consumer expectations of service including ‘Magic’ - a new delivery service, served via text, curated by humans and claiming to deliver almost anything within two hours. 
 

Whilst it's only been going a few weeks (in San Francisco, natch) there is already a waiting list of over 50,000 people clamouring to use this extraordinary service. It will be fascinating to see if an offering like this can ever scale or be profitable and whether it represents the apotheosis of customer experience or merely a milestone in the descent of mankind into sloth and inertia! 
 

I was thrilled to hear Dan Ariely (of 'Predictably Irrational' fame) be predictably scintillating. He covered some great topics like 'the pain of paying' (always worse when linked to consumption); how concepts of ‘Fairness’ get established, and how hedonic rewards are often perceived as far more valuable than utilitarian ones. That said, it was humbling to see that he isn't always correct with the results of some Google Adwords incentive experiments showing that our intuition about the drivers of human behaviour aren’t always correct.
 

For me, we are all in the business of trying to better understand why we make the decisions we do and it's clear that the equation for human motivation is still complex, messy and morally ambiguous. 
 

Less ambiguous, though equally messy was Anthony Thomson’s punchy and entertaining story of launching not one challenger bank but two, ‘Metro’ and now ‘Atom’. His essential message included Twitter sound-bite gold such as ‘Culture Eats Strategy for breakfast’ and ‘people just don’t like banks’. The afternoon included insights from two chaps who know a thing or two about winning on the global stage. The irrepressible Dave Brailsford (whose attendance these last few years has been more than a mere marginal gain for attendees) and the extraordinary Ron Dennis were both fascinating to listen to.  

 

Sir Dave cited the positive aspects of team conflict, providing there is harmony around overall goals, whilst Ron Dennis admitted allowing himself a two second ‘sympathy window’ each morning (to indulge in self-pity and doubt) before he got on with his day. I’m sure most marketers (And Sir Dave) were thinking the same as me – if he cut that down by a margin of 50% he’d regain a one second advantage over his rivals that could propel McLaren back to winning ways on the track!

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This review was by Chris Pearce of TMW. Read more from him here.

You can also follow him here @chrispearce