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Оглавление“A computer on every desk and in every home.”
—Bill Gates
Scene: This really happened. It’s the early 1920s, and Harry Houdini is the world’s most celebrated magician. Right now,
he’s sitting behind a closed curtain, having just escaped from one of his signature magical props, the Chinese Water Torture Cell. Moments ago, onstage before a live audience, his feet were locked into stocks fixed into a restraint brace, and he was hoisted upside down, suspended in midair by his ankles. The brace fits on top of the Torture Cell proper, which is a sinister-looking device, a phone booth size glass box reinforced with a steel framework and filled with water.
Head-first, ankles locked, Houdini is lowered into the water, which sloshes over the top of the Cell as his body enters. Once the brace that holds his ankles is fitted securely atop the Cell, assistants lock it into place. The audience glimpses the writhing struggles of the fully immersed magician just before a curtain is drawn across the Cell.
The audience knows it’s a show. They know Houdini has escaped from the Torture Cell before. Yet they somehow feel certain that this time he will drown and die.
Unseen, Houdini quickly escapes. He kills time behind the curtain, swimsuit-clad, dripping, passing the minutes, waiting, his ears attuned to the buzz, groan, gasp, and suppressed screams of the unseen audience. When their collective crescendo of suspenseful anxiety just begins to fade, Houdini knows the audience has just begun to lose hope. That is when he bursts out from behind the curtain, smiling, dripping, taking his bow before a theater full of witnesses giddy with the combination of awe, relief, and joy that comes from an aspiration realized.
“The American Academy of Achievement”—there actually is such a thing13—was founded in 1961 by a photographic journalist named Brian Blaine Reynolds “to bring aspiring young people together with real-life heroes—the kind of achievers [photographer Reynolds] met every week on assignment.” On March 17, 2010, the Academy published an interview with Bill Gates, a 1992 inductee into the Academy and a former client of David Morey. As anyone who has followed Gates and Microsoft knows, he issued in 1980 a most memorable statement of the Microsoft mission. It was an aspiration of boundless ambition: A computer on every desk and in every home.
“When did you first have the vision of a computer on every desk at work and in every home?” the Academy interviewer asked Gates.
“Paul Allen and I had used that phrase even before we wrote the BASIC (programming language) for Microsoft.” This would have been 1975, when Gates, Allen, and Monte Davidoff were hired by the makers of the now-legendary Altair computer to create the first high-level programming language for their machine. Released before Micro-Soft shed its hyphen, Altair BASIC was Microsoft’s very first product. “We actually talked about it in an article in—I think 1977 was the first time it appears in print—where we say, ‘a computer on every desk and in every home…’” 14
Talk about an aspiration!
Consider… The famous phrase became a formal mission statement in 1980, at a time when Microsoft, a software maker, did not even make computers. Three years earlier, in 1977, it was just beginning to make software. Two years before that, in 1975, three guys who were among a small group of “hobbyists” tinkering with the Altair 8800 were paid to write a version of BASIC that could squeeze some degree of practical functionality out of 256 bytes to 64 kilobytes of RAM with a processor chugging along at 2.0 MHz in a computer programmed via toggle switches and lights rather than with a keyboard and monitor. Altair BASIC, Microsoft’s foundational piece of software, was itself
an aspiration.
“It’s very hard to recall how crazy and wild that was, you know,” Gates told the Academy interviewer, “‘on every desk and in every home.’ At the time, you [had] people who are very smart saying, ‘Why would somebody need a computer?’ Even Ken Olsen, who had run this company Digital Equipment, who made the computer I grew up with, and that we admired both him and his company immensely, was saying that this seemed kind of a silly idea that people would want to have a computer.”15
Dream Bigger Dreams
In 1975, 1977, and 1980, when typewriter repair was a job you could count on, Bill Gates was writing, thinking, imagining, and dreaming the way Harry Houdini had done some fifty years before. Magic, you see, is at its very best all about dreaming bigger dreams. Dream bigger dreams could have been the mission statement of Harry Houdini, the very archetype of a modern magician. It was he who redefined magic for modern audiences by making it relevant to their innermost and yet most universal dreams. Houdini’s astounding escapes were also great escapes, because they were intensely relevant to an audience who dreamed of magically freeing themselves from the myriad chains of everyday life.
Arguably, Harry Houdini’s appeal would only have increased had he lived beyond the Roaring Twenties and continued to perform during the 1930s. The twenties were an era of relative prosperity—or at least of its glittering promise. The decade both embodied and encouraged aspiration. In bleak contrast, the thirties, marked by a global economic Great Depression of unprecedented severity, amputated dreams, locking people into the financial and emotional equivalent of the boxes, cells, and vaults from which Houdini had routinely escaped. A fascinating article published in the August 1932 edition of Popular Aviation asked the age-old question, “Can Man Propel Himself Through the Air by His Own Power?” The article’s author, W. I. Oliver, “[n]oted student of aviation history and ornithopter flight,” cited the Greek myth of Icarus, who flew on magical waxen wings his father Daedalus had fashioned for him as well as for himself to escape from the impenetrable labyrinth of the monstrous Minotaur. Young Icarus, exhilarated by the freedom of flight, sheered away from his father to fly higher and higher until, having approached too near the sun, the wax began to melt, and he fell back to earth and his death. This end notwithstanding, Icarus had realized—for a time, at least—the dream of human-powered flight.
Turning from mythology and the heat of the sun, Oliver went on to explore a more practical limitation of animal-powered flight. He invited his readers to “picture a sparrow and an eagle in a pen,” forty feet square, with no top, and with walls four feet in height. “The small sparrow rises vertically at the rate of nine to ten feet per second and could easily clear the walls. The eagle, on the other hand, could not escape, because the
eagle requires a wing flapping run of sixty feet to clear the four-foot fence.…the same rule applies to the condor, buzzards, seagull and other large heavy birds…” 16
In the 1930s, Popular Aviation advertised itself as having the “Largest Sale of Any Aviation Magazine.” That was really saying something, since the early thirties were a golden age of aviation. As the Great Depression threatened to drag everyone down, the wonders of flight promised to lift everyone up. The dream of escape and transcendence that Houdini had offered in the 1920s, flying machines offered in the 1930s. Too bad Houdini had succumbed in 1926 to peritonitis following a ruptured appendix, which may or may not have been aggravated by multiple gut punches delivered (all in good fun) by a fan. If anything, the 1930s offered an even bigger market than the 1920s for the kind of magical aspirations to which Houdini catered. As for W. I. Oliver’s practical mathematical calculations concerning the aerodynamics of birds and the human beings who sought to emulate them, perhaps the more important point is nature’s instinctive belief that we all need lots of room to take off, to aspire to bigger dreams, to escape from our version of the forty-foot-square pen. Houdini, it turns out, was not all about mere entertainment any more than the myth of Icarus and Daedalus was just a good story or Oliver’s fascination with bird flight was no more than an aerodynamic calculation. All these things were and are about the magic of aspiration.
“The Magic Is Out There”
In 1999, Michael Eisner handpicked Bob Iger to succeed him as CEO of The Walt Disney Company. During this time, Iger happened to be a client of David Morey’s company, and David’s business partner, Scott Miller, asked him a critical question. Do you really want the job?
The thing is, Iger was doing very nicely, thank you, as president and CEO of ABC, Inc., which Disney had purchased in 1996. Disney itself? Not so much. In fact, the company was in sharp decline. It was no longer delivering on the aspirational promise founder Walt Disney had invented way back in 1923. No, the parks, movie business, broadcast and cable television, and retail operations were all sliding. As for the Disney digital and gaming business, it never even got off the ground. To add proverbial insult to proverbial injury, the company seemed to be doing its damnedest to destroy its aspirational relationship with young parents by over-licensing the Disney brands, putting its beloved characters on everything from pasta to toilet paper, and generally abusing moms and dads with an ill-conceived Disney Store concept guaranteed to turn even the sweetest little kid into a spoiled rotten undersized tyrant.
As for tweens and teens, core Disney mainstays since the mid-1950s, the company was neglecting if not undoing these all-important consumer relationships. Half-hearted efforts to revive the classic 1950s Mickey Mouse Club TV show in 1977 (The New Mickey Mouse Club) and 1989-1994 (The All-New Mickey Mouse Club) were about as imaginative as the “New” and the “All-New” prefixes tacked onto the original name. True, Michael Eisner had performed like the bona fide business genius he was when Roy E. Disney and others brought him on board as CEO and Chairman in 1984. But by the 1990s, by many accounts he had become a manager who had challenges delegating, and he was attracting significant criticism. The trouble was his sincere conviction that he and only he possessed the secret of the “Disney magic.” This prompted him to commandeer every decision, soon sending the company’s frightened shareholders into revolt. So by the time Bob Iger asked our advice about the job, things had gotten relatively ugly.
“Do you really want the job?” Scott asked him.
“Yes,” Iger replied. “I want the job.”
“Well, okay, you’ve been selected,” Scott replied. “But now you must be elected.”
Morey and Miller understood Disney’s plight. In kid’s entertainment, Disney was the long-established “incumbent” player and had been for seventy-five years of the soon-to-end twentieth century. Like all too many incumbents, however, Disney had forgotten its original dreams. To recover its magic, the company needed done for it precisely what magicians do for their audiences. Disney needed its aspirations rebooted. The metaphor is appropriate. When any digital device runs too long, it tends to slow down and even seize up. The only thing you can do to fix it is to reboot. Often, this means pulling the power plug, plugging it back in, and starting all over. Similarly, when a company is an incumbent for too long, it slows down or seizes up and finds itself in need of radical intervention in the form of an aspirational reboot. “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison on January 30, 1787, “and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”17 Rather more savagely, Jefferson wrote to William Stephens Smith on November 13, 1787, “[T]he tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants, it is its natural manure.”18 Incumbency requires an assault from insurgency. And that is precisely what Bob Iger delivered.
He conducted nothing less than an insurgent political campaign, beginning what would be one of the most successful runs of any American CEO, a trajectory that continues to this day. He aimed to reboot and satisfy the aspirations of the company’s stakeholders. He set out to recapture the aspirations of customers whose loyalty had made Disney legendary for over eighty years. With a keen understanding of perceptions, he took control of his stage and focused his performance to win over the dissident Disney factions he faced coming into the leadership role: dissatisfied shareholders, disaffected young parents, and alienated teens and tweens, as well as demoralized division heads, employees, and partners in the global creative community. His objective was to define himself in such a way that all stakeholders would come to feel that his leadership selection had been their idea all along. He wanted to be perceived as their choice for CEO, fulfilling their aspirations.
A tall order? Absolutely. And we told him that he had to pull it off within the space of no more than a year.
We worked with Bob to put into action a strategic approach that we have found rarely fails. It consists of defining three things:
1.Yourself
2.The aspirations of your leadership
3.The future
Using this approach, Bob quickly differentiated himself from his predecessor. Whereas Eisner had firmly believed that only he understood the “Disney magic,” Bob met with his top managers in his corner suite at Team Disney Burbank, a Michael Graves building adorned on its façade with the Seven Dwarves. Facing his management team, he spread his fingers and placed his palm flat against his chest.
“The magic is not in here,” he said. After taking a beat, he continued: “It’s not in this building. It’s not in Burbank.”
Now he met the eyes of each executive. “The magic,” he said, is out there. Our job is to find it.”
Successful magicians possess the knowledge and skills of their craft, but they know that the “magic” is not theirs at all. It belongs to their audience. Some call it a capacity for wonder and astonishment. We call it aspiration. Without aspiration, there is no magic because there is no motive for magic. “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” the American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. Doubtless, he was inspired in this thought by the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, of whom he was a great admirer. “Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion,” Hegel wrote. We believe this declaration can support at least two more variations: “Nothing great was ever achieved without aspiration” and “Nothing great was ever achieved without magic.”
At Disney, Bob Iger has consistently defined himself as an executive who leads people to discover and act upon their aspirations, which if they are thinking like magicians, are parallel to and even coincide with the aspirations of their customers. Through this approach, Iger did a brilliant job of restoring the company’s relationship with young families and moms and resetting its relationship with teens and tweens. The aspiration he expressed for Disney was as iconic as Mickey’s ears: “We will define family fun everywhere in the world.”
The Non-Miracle of Net-a-Porter
Magic looks miraculous. It isn’t. And Bob Iger worked no miracles at Disney. Yes, the company was in trouble when he took it over, but let us acknowledge that when Iger took the helm, the Disney organization already had a formidable brand. The good news is that any company—anyone in business—can learn to create brands that not only imagine consumer aspirations, but imagine those aspirations achieved.
Consider the story of Net-a-Porter, a London-based high-fashion retailer founded in 2000 by Natalie Massenet. She pioneered the Web as a platform on which consumers could achieve their most fashionable aspirations. Born Natalie Rooney in Los Angeles to an American journalist/film publicist father and a British model for Chanel mother, Massenet spent her early childhood in Paris. She grew up in close contact with the fashion industry and became a fashion journalist for Women’s Wear Daily and Tatler. This experience not only gave her a unique perspective on the fashion industry, it also inspired her to develop the concept of a magazine-format website capable of converting readers into consumers with a mouse click on clothing items they encountered while browsing. In 2000, this concept was met with a great deal of skepticism, but Massenet was convinced of the power of the concept: a magazine platform that created interest and functioned as a retail store, providing the means of instantly acting on interest. Massenet was among the early generation of e-retailers who recognized the magic of the digital platform, which could variously anticipate, create, and shape consumer aspiration while enabling the effortless transformation of aspiration into reality.
The naysayers notwithstanding, Massenet launched her company from a flat in Chelsea, London. Remember, this was 2000, a year in which “dot-coms” were being lavishly overvalued and recklessly overfunded. Often, what they promised far exceeded the state of Internet technology at the time, and many dot-coms turned into dot-bombs. Massenet walked straight into this situation with Net-a-Porter. Not only were overly hyped dot-coms imploding all around her, the concept of selling exclusively online was almost unimaginable. Most computer users were still literally dialing into this thing called the World Wide Web. Designers as well as investors were justifiably wary of putting merchandise, money, and reputation into an enterprise that lacked the brick-and-mortar presence of a Saks Fifth Avenue or Barneys. Whenever Massenet tried to pitch her business ideas, there was always the same question: “But where is the actual store located?”
Her persistence, however, paid off. In 2001, she persuaded up-and-coming new designer Roland Mouret to sell his first collection on her site. That was sufficient to overcome inertia, and by 2004, Net-a-Porter was turning a profit. A fashion discount site, The Outnet, followed in 2009, and Massenet sold Net-a-Porter to the Swiss-based luxury goods holding company Richemont in 2010, remaining as the company’s executive chairman as well as a prime investor. Today, Net-a-Porter grabs the attention of over five million women a month, who read, browse, and shop the latest runway looks from the season’s most sought-after collections. Not only does Net-a-Porter act as an online retailer, it also presents the latest fashion news, trend reports, and style advice to women around the world. Endorsements from celebrities like Victoria Beckham (in WWD, April 18, 2012) further strengthen its appeal: “I do like using style apps on my iPad and I also like to shop online. I love Net-a-Porter in particular. Being a working mum with four children, having the ability to shop online
is wonderful.”
The average Net-a-Porter customer is a thirty-three-year old female who is affluent and accomplished. Typical customers hold such positions as CEO, senior executive, attorney, fashion director, or media director. They have plenty of household income to spend on luxury and fashion, and the members of this target audience are not bashful about their own aspirations. They want the best, and they want to get it the way they want to get it—conveniently, at the mere click of a mouse. Net-a-Porter’s website was created with a clear layout resembling any hardcopy fashion magazine. When browsing and scrolling across any of the magazine’s editorial pages, a pop-up window near the user’s mouse curser conveniently enables purchase. Net-a-Porter gives buyers literally no excuses for failing to buy. Fulfillment of aspiration is just a click away.
Over the years, Massenet focused on aspirational consumers like herself, who value time over cash. Her goal was to provide effortless shopping to people who are so busy earning money that they crave the convenience of getting luxury goods with minimal digital effort. Massenet then included the final touch on the packaging itself. An elegantly mysterious black box is delivered to your home—or office—tied up in a bow. Such attention to detail from order to delivery is a signature of the brand. Today, Net-a-Porter’s deliveries make the receiver feel more than anything else valued as a customer. Consumer aspirations are delivered with each purchase.
Net-a-Porter blazed a new path within the retail industry. Massenet created it as the Web’s first one hundred percent shop-able publication. In serving her customers’ aspirations, her goal was to redefine the magazine industry. In the process, however, she ended up redefining the retail industry. Supremely well-executed digital enterprises share with magic the ability to render the universe seamless and frictionless. Physical effort, distance, and time itself are made, in the wave of a wand or the click of a mouse, to disappear.
Indulgence Is Not the Only Aspiration
The aspirational principles of magic readily lend themselves to the entertainment and luxury sectors, but their application is by no means limited to these. Antivirus software is neither entertaining nor luxurious, but in 2010, when David Morey’s client, digital security firm AVG Technologies, sought to create a successful IPO, David drew on his experience as a magician to create a strategy. Common sense tells us that digital security is a consumer need, not a luxury. Magic, however, has more to do with uncommon than common sense, and David therefore decided to focus AVG Technologies not on customer need but on customer aspiration. Consumers aspire to peace of mind in their digital lives. Trapped by Internet threats and the increasingly complicated burden of managing their online worlds, the consumer of 2010 shared the position of those who in the 1920s gaped and cheered as Harry Houdini escaped from handcuffs, strait jackets, and “torture cells.” Modern consumers want the freedom that comes with mastery of life online, so David helped to build a marketing approach that empowered and liberated AVG Technologies to deliver a message not of grim necessity, but of aspiration—more precisely, of aspiration achieved. In the jam-packed digital security sector, AVG Technologies’ 2012 IPO was a homerun.
The Aspirationals
Like magicians, today’s most innovative business leaders are at their best when they transcend and seek to fulfill their customers’ higher aspirations. For example, a first-quarter 2016 study of 21,000 consumers from twenty-one countries showed the power of “Aspirational Consumers” is steadily rising—even if half of this defined segment cannot name a “purposeful” brand they themselves feel good about. This study defined these “Aspirationals” based on their “love of shopping, desire for responsible consumption, and their trust in brands to act in the best interest of society.” The research concluded that 40 percent of today’s global consumers are “Aspirationals,” a big and powerful target market for the business leaders who are thinking like magicians.19
Because the data in this study is both new and novel, Aspirationals are as yet very much insufficiently studied as well as underserved, and even their marketplace potential is still largely untapped. We know that they are hungry for brands with a strong ethic, or what could be termed a strong “conviction.” Put another way, the Aspirational Consumers seek brands with a higher purpose, brands that know and appreciate what their founders and creators believe, and companies that know how their brands fit into their customers’ lives. The Aspirational Consumers are young, mostly millennial and Gen X populations (think Burning Man). Most live outside the United States, in emerging markets.20
Some of David Morey’s favorite clients, such as Apple, Nike, and The Coca-Cola Company, exemplify “aspirational” brands. Grey Goose Vodka is another example—and perhaps among the most revelatory. We challenge readers to a blind taste test of the three leading vodkas. Good luck distinguishing one from the other. But, of course, chemical substance is not the issue here. It is the look, feel, packaging, imagery, and aspirational fulfillment of Grey Goose that allows it to charge more and lead its marketplace. Arguably, in fact, the higher price contributes to the aspiration. After all, nothing is less worthy of desire than a “bargain brand.”
Like religion, magic often imbues ordinary things, people, events, and environments with magnified significance. The entity in question becomes, under the force of religion, sacred. Under the influence of magic, it becomes magical. Likewise, “aspirational” brands stand for more than what they actually are or do. They execute against a product perception that extends well beyond devices, sneakers, sugar water and brown food coloring, or distilled clear spirits. Among the most potent aspects of managing consumers’ perception of aspirational brands is something we call “image associations.” The world’s greatest magicians, like the world’s best marketers, understand these instinctively. The most effective image associations are distilled through something called the “One Emotion” test. It goes like this: If you had to choose to evoke only a single emotion from your audience—or your customers—what would it be? Here’s what two former David Morey clients chose:
•Focusing on male consumers, BMW chose an emotion and aspirational fulfillment associated with an automobile—e.g., “Pride”… “The Ultimate Driving Machine.”
•Focusing on female consumers, LVMH (LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE), the French-based luxury goods conglomerate, chose pocketbook brand imagery that allows the company to charge what it charges, namely prices that are exponentially higher than the cost of manufacture—e.g., “Richness”… “Exceptional Luxury.”
The greatest magicians align every single detail of their own personal brands by instinct and purpose to connect with the higher aspirations of their audience. For example, our friend David Copperfield, with the obsessiveness of a brilliant marketer, controls every element of his own show, celebrity, and image. Just try taking a selfie with the world’s most famous magician. It won’t happen. Copperfield won’t deny you a photo with him. It just won’t be your selfie. One of his staff or Copperfield himself will take the picture for you and send it along. You will have your souvenir, and Copperfield will have exercised his control over it. Nothing he does happens by accident or passive acquiescence. Like David Copperfield, rising and steadily powerful brands always play offense and never settle for defense. This is a hallmark of what we call “insurgent brands,” and today they are in every marketplace, insurgent hordes that swarm like ants—we do admire ants—around the pedestals on which traditional incumbent brands perch. The insurgent brands keep scrambling, climbing, and fanning out as they climb, until they cover whole product categories—or create entirely new ones. Like magicians, insurgent brands play by a different set of rules than the incumbent market leaders. Today, it is insurgent rules that rule markets.
Getting Ahead
By definition, aspiration focuses on the future. The Rolling Stones owe their creative and commercial success to the fact that Mick Jagger couldn’t get no satisfaction. The German Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century understood that all creative energy was in aspiration, not fulfillment. Sehnsucht, they called it—longing, yearning, craving: in other words, aspiring. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ends his epic poem Faust with the line, Das Ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan—“The Eternal Feminine leads us upward.” Thus, the greatest poem by Germany’s greatest poet ends not with a period but with an aspiration—the promise of a future so great as to be eternal precisely because Faust, the archetypal human being, can’t get no satisfaction.
Think now of the great companies and their CEOs and the way that they, at their best, focus on delivering something beyond a product or service to their customers. Apple, Red Bull, Netflix, Spotify, Zappos, Sam Adams, Starbucks, Instagram, Under Armour, Twitter, 5 Hour Energy, Big Ass Fans, and Uber, to name a few, make or sell a variety of products, but all cater to aspiration. The last thing these companies want to do is finally satisfy their customers. Mick can’t get no satisfaction. Faust follows the Eternal Feminine. The Black Eyed Peas on YouTube or iTunes just can’t get enough. CEOs like Iger and Massenet are so good at what they do that they lead their companies ahead of their consumers’ aspirations, violating outworn conventions and models to deliver more and better than their competitors. They think out of the box, like magicians, and are unafraid to imagine how to give people the solutions they want—even if their companies must ultimately plant the Sehnsucht inside their consumers by giving them a hunger they never knew they had. The furthest thing from their minds is satisfying the hunger they create. Why doesn’t the magician reveal the secret of the trick? Because to do so would end the hunger for a solution to the mystery.
Who finally gets satisfaction? Who finally stops yearning? Who finally gets enough? Answer: The incumbent brands and those who lead them. They, the incumbents, are the antithesis of the start-ups and upstarts of David Morey’s first book with Scott Miller, The Underdog Advantage.21 For everything that is stacked against them, the insurgents have all the advantages of underdogs—first and foremost, a lot less to lose and, conversely, a lot more to gain. Insurgents know how their customers think. They understand aspiration far better than the state of indolent satiety known as incumbency. And it is no coincidence that all great magicians are underdogs. They are the ones trapped in the Chinese Water Torture Cell, who are therefore super-powered by the desire to escape, transcend, and save their necks.
We Americans live in a country born of revolution, conceived by underdogs. Insurgency is in our bloodline, and it’s why we all love an underdog—because few of us need to go too far back into our own lineage to find one, whether you are descended from a Pilgrim, an immigrant from a Russian shtetl, or a refugee from the violent instability of—well, of so many places in the world that are not the United States.
Give it some thought, and chances are you will conclude that you’ve been at your best when you’ve thought and fought like an insurgent, an underdog, coming up from behind, a stranger to complacency, acutely on offense, pulling, hauling, yanking your way up; following your dreams, empowering your aspirations—and, in the process, fulfilling the aspirations around you.
Harsh Reality
The great operatic and symphonic conductor Arturo Toscanini recalled in an interview, “When I was a young boy in my native Parma, I heard people from the audience say, ‘Tonight, it’s Rigoletto. Let’s go boo the tenor!’ They went to the performance with this intention already in mind…”22
Face it: A great performer can never afford to phone it in. The most dedicated opera fans, at least at one level, attend to the performance with the expectation that it will merit an attack. The diehard NASCAR fan watches hour upon repetitive hour of cars racing around a noisy track in the expectation that a fiery, bloody catastrophe is just around the next bend. Harry Houdini drew crowd after crowd because the exhilarating pleasure of vicarious escape and transcendence was always counterbalanced by the possibility that this time—this time—Houdini would fail, fall to his death while escaping from the bonds that suspended him from the skyscraper or drown when he just couldn’t hold his breath long enough to get out of a locked trunk submerged in the murky, icy river. Or maybe Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers will finally trip and fall and break their necks tap dancing on some fantastically polished floor. Or the man on the flying trapeze—maybe he’ll fly off and end up in a broken and bloody heap. Or Blockbuster, or Tower Records, or Radio Shack, or the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, maybe these venerable institutions will take their eyes off the prize just long enough to be mowed down by new technology, new markets, new interests, or even animal rights activists. The brilliant singer-songwriter and satirist Tom Lehrer—“Don’t write naughty words on walls if you can’t spell”—walked away from a successful career at the height of his popularity at the end of the 1960s. When asked why, he reportedly replied: “What good are laurels if you can’t rest on them?”
Tom Lehrer, who is a spectacular eighty-nine in 2017, may be quite happy today, and he may have been perfectly pleased for the last forty-seven or so years in which he was out of the public eye. As he put it on the liner notes of a retrospective album released in 1997, “If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.”23 But most people, most business owners, CEOs, and shareholders cannot content themselves with such rewards. The harsh reality is that in business or magic or any reasonably high-stakes endeavor, you are either on the attack as an insurgent, or on the defensive as an incumbent—you are either rebooting your aspirations, or you are not. The truth is incumbents who rest on their laurels typically end in obscurity. (When is the last time you even thought about the once-ubiquitous Circuit City?)
It’s no accident that history’s greatest magicians—Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, Howard Thurston, Harry Houdini, Max Malini, Harry Blackstone, Doug Henning, David Copperfield, Lance Burton, Jeff McBride, David Blaine, Criss Angel—never stopped acting like underdogs, and never stopped rebooting their own aspirations. They performed as insurgents, even after they were universally acclaimed as “forever” among the greats. They continued or continue to cut new paradigms by carving out their own territory, often playing by their own rules, and by doing so, continually fulfilling their audiences’ highest aspirations.
As for brands and businesses, God help you if you are playing by incumbent rules without the incumbent’s balance sheet. For the harshest of harsh reality is that for every Netflix or Uber, there are eight start-up flameouts. While there is magic in insurgency, there are no miracles.
That 8-to-1 failure rate has held true for many years. Eight out of ten start-ups fail. Period. Council on Foreign Relations military historian Max Boot, in his incredible book Invisible Armies, delivers a scorecard for global political and military insurgencies since 1775. The stats? Sixty-three percent failed. As with escaping from a Water Torture Cell for a living, revolution is risky business.
Failure, by the way, need not be abject, let alone final. Even in failure, insurgent brands can change markets and fulfill aspirations. They often lead or empower others to more successful developments. For example, David Morey’s and Scott Miller’s company was advising board members and top executives of Deja.com, a promising newsgroup and product review service in 2000—the year that saw the tech bubble burst. Time ran out for the terrific CEO Tom Phillips, who the Internet Capital Group had sent in to rescue the company—unfortunately, a few months too late. We found ourselves helping Tom with the mundane but morose details of renting out the company’s office space and selling off its used furniture and supplies. One day, Tom called with a final, brighter note: “I was able to sell the software,” he told us.
“That’s terrific. Who bought it?”
“A little company called Google.”
Silly name! Hard as it is to believe, Google was pretty much a start-up in 2000. In his classic 1782 eyewitness commentary on America at the close of the American Revolution, Letters from an American Farmer, Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur describes the first frontier settlers, the backwoods pioneers, as “a kind of forlorn hope, preceding by ten or twelve years the most respectable army of veterans which came after them.”24 “Forlorn hope” is eighteenth-century military jargon for the advance guard or shock troops, who are calculatedly sacrificed to secure a position for the main body of soldiers in a major attack or invasion. Crèvecoeur uses the term to define the semi-barbaric state of the first pioneers, who chose to live far from established civilization and were therefore lost to civilization in the very process of securing the frontier for the expansion of civilization. The sacrifice of such pioneers is real and maybe even tragic, yet it makes possible the spread of civilization into the unknown. It makes possible the growth of a revolutionary nation. Think of the Internet flameouts like Deja.com, Napster, or Netscape, all of which faded or failed entirely, as the “forlorn hope” whose sacrifice enables the transformation of a revolutionary wilderness into a viable marketplace for even more revolutionary and insurgent businesses. Those flameouts light the fires of change.
It used to be that the big market leaders competed only with other big market leaders. It was incumbents versus incumbents; superpowers versus superpowers. And they played by clearly understood rules. Sure, there was competition, and there were the occasional Pepsi Challenges or guerilla campaigns, but even those were played according to the well-understood rules of incumbent engagement. The campaigns may have been insurgent, but the war itself was strictly conventional. Today, to believe that insurgent brands will play by traditional market rules is to believe that ISIS will adhere to international law and the Marquess of Queensberry Rules to boot. Insurgent brands hold the cards today, and they shuffle the deck.
Magic Lessons From the “Founder/Performer” CEOs
Magic legends such as Robert-Houdin, Thurston, Houdini, Malini, Blackstone, Henning, Copperfield, Burton, McBride, Blaine, and Angel call to mind the recent and current crop of Founder CEOs, such as Uber’s Travis Kalanick, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Alibaba’s Jack Ma, and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, all of whom have literally invented new industries. The success of these magicians as well as the Founder CEOs is based on five strategic drivers:
1.Discovery: Allowing early fans—early adopters—to find your brand themselves, on their own aspirational terms, and then
to harness the most powerful marketing force on earth: word
of mouth.
2.Craft: Today, millennials are leading U.S. business trends, both in the B2C and the B2B marketplace. Millennial consumers expect products to be as simple and as natural as possible. They demand what you might call “Honest Farmer” quality, just as they expect their favorite performers to be totally real, honest, and genuine.
3.Authenticity: Truth is the best propaganda. Brands must be transparent and aligned in terms of message throughout their development, packaging, distribution, placement, promotion, and pricing. Similarly, great performers show their true colors in every small detail on stage. Any deviation dilutes the brand’s power and meaning, and any differentiation must be relatable, credible, and simple.
4.Founder/Visionary Narrative: Consumers these days
associate new products with individual entrepreneurs and passionate visionaries. They want to know their “story,” especially the parts that explain why they developed their product, for whom they developed their product, and what marketplace “pain” it is designed to relieve. Today’s audiences are looking for the story that explains who the performer or the product is, what it (she/he) does, and how it (she/he) is different, special, and better than others.
5.Quirky/Un-Marketing: Mass marketing is over. The collapse of the effect of advertising in the U.S. is epic. Today, your target audience of early adopters seeks “un-marketing”—ideas that possess—or appear to possess—the purity of passion and conviction. From businesses to performers, today’s audiences want to follow their own bread crumbs to the apotheosis of their own aspirations.
Conviction
You cannot be a world-class magician unless you know—and deeply understand—why you are performing magic. This has always been true of magic, but has only become true of business and brand leadership in the new era of “un-marketing.” Like the best magicians, today’s business leaders cannot mount an effective campaign without a clear definition of how they see the world and how they intend to commit to achieving their goals in that world. This means defining the moral imperative driving what you do. Companies such as Nike, The Coca-Cola Company, and Disney have successfully defined their conviction and applied it as a powerful competitive advantage in their marketplaces.
Another example is Starbucks. From the beginning, the company put neither its faith nor its resources into advertising or other aspects of traditional marketing. Its communications have been singularly focused on the meaning of coffee as a total experience—not just a jolt of caffeine, the twenty-five-cent “Cup of Joe” defined by traditional market leaders like Maxwell House. In fact, faced with diminishing consumption of coffee by the rising generation, coffee marketers began diluting the beverage’s meaning in a desperate attempt to reposition it closer and closer to soft drinks, for which the young had a seemingly unquenchable thirst.
Starbucks took a different path, the path of conviction. It made coffee magic by elevating it beyond a bitter hot brown fluid that delivers a jolt of caffeine. Coffee became a source that instead delivered a magical—that is, quasi-sacred—experience. This redefinition of the coffee experience revitalized the product by bringing back to the fore its core meaning: not the bright, quick, effervescent, youthful refreshment of soda pop, but the slow, flavorful, contemplative experience at the heart of coffee’s tradition. It is not a refreshment but an elixir that depending on the aspiration of the consumer, engenders social conviviality or quiet contemplation. Either way, it conjures up an experience of an oasis of unhurried pleasure in a world moving faster and faster around it.
Competent magicians appeal to the mind. Great magicians move the heart. Move the heart of the audience, and their minds will follow. Psychologists believe there is no such thing as a rational decision. Unfortunately, most CEOs can’t quite bring themselves to believe this. They do not readily accept the necessity of understanding and embracing the power of aspiration and emotion in decision making. This is remarkable because, presumably, most business leaders accept that great performers—actors, musicians, magicians, and, for that matter, political leaders—appeal first and foremost to the heart. The truth is that aspiration and the emotions associated with it are just as critical in business as they are in performance or politics.
David Morey’s business partner, Scott Miller, tells a great story about how back in the 1990s, he was asked to help with the strategy for Billy Graham’s then-forthcoming autobiography. He was summoned to meet with the Billy Graham Evangelical Association in Minneapolis. There, the association’s CEO, John Corts, was trying to be polite by demurring and deferring to marketing guru Miller.
“We’re sure glad to have you here, Mr. Miller. We don’t know anything about marketing.”
“Oh, bullshit!” Scott replied.
He knew—and, what is more, they knew—that American evangelicals virtually invented the most powerful form of aspirational marketing, what today is called viral marketing. In the process, they gave the lie to the clichéd admonition, “Don’t just preach to the choir.” Evangelicals revel in preaching to the choir—and then in turning the choir into missionaries. Early on, before anybody, they perfected inside-out communicating—and always with high emotional and aspirational content.
A competent CEO is a good manager, much as a competent magician is a good stage manager. Both make themselves fully responsible for everything the audience sees. But a great CEO, like a great magician, must also be a leader—one who addresses more than the senses and the brain, and who also uses aspiration and emotion to lead the aspiration and emotion of the consumer or the audience. In the First Coming of Steve Jobs at Apple, he was a maestro of corporate aspiration and emotion. Under his leadership, Apple put millions of dollars into the production of corporate meetings to rally the troops and feed the aspirational emotions of the company’s Dolphin vs. Shark battle against IBM. And Jobs’ Apple not only developed the Macintosh, but also Windham Hill Records to provide appropriately emotional theme music for its meetings.
Or think historically—back to the desperately dark early days of World War II. Winston Churchill did not rally his small island nation to victory in the fight for its very life by inflating the chances of achieving that victory. Instead, with unparalleled eloquence, he painted a chilling and realistic picture of the fight ahead, pledging on behalf of his people:
We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…
The reality was that, as of June 4, 1940, when Churchill delivered his
“We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech, Adolf Hitler was winning. France was falling (it would surrender twenty-one days later) and, as Churchill had written on May 15 to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose America had yet to join the fight, Poland, Norway, and the Netherlands had been smashed “like matchwood.” That was reality at that point, and Churchill compelled his audience—his customers, his fellow countrymen—to see it, feel it, and believe it. But then he turned their focus toward a far more powerful reality, the reality of aspiration, of the future. Winston Churchill worked magic by making that reality appear more real and more significant than the reality Hitler had actually wrought as of June 4, 1940.
