Category: culture

Ads wars

FabrizioLeave a comment

If you create something that has a controversial reception, you have two choices.

You can try to explain what your aim was, that you were coming from a good place, that actually what you meant is not what the public understood, that it’s not your fault and that your original idea was actually to support the feelings of the very same people that are now involved in the controversy.

Or you can apologise.

Take this Dove ad from last year.

It does not matter that Dove wanted to represent female beauty in all its shades, nor that the bit under scrutiny was only a short part of a longer ad in which (among other things) a westerner-looking woman was turning asian. It does not matter what the female Nigerian actress thought she was achieving while recording the ad, and honestly after the controversy sparked, the ad itself and its aesthetic stopped mattering as well.

Dove did not fall into the trap, it understood that all that matters in these circumstances is the public and its sensitivities. As marketers (and as creators), we need to be aware that what we do today can reach a much bigger audience than in the past, but at the same time it gets subjected to unprecedented scrutiny.

There are two things that can help stay clear from this kind of publicity.

First, make sure what you do is in line with a consistent brand that you are continuosly building. This gives credibility in the eyes of the audience, and it raises the odds that what you mean is what will be understood (take the recent Gillette ad as an example).

Then, surround yourself with people that are the most diverse possible, in every achievable way. And carefully weigh in every one of the concern they might raise on your job.

 

Learning beats failure

FabrizioLeave a comment

Of all the buzzwords that permeate today’s business environment, “failure” is perhaps one of the most misunderstood.

“If you are not failing, you are not trying hard enough.”
“There is no success without failure.”
“We allow our people to fail, failure is the most beautiful thing that could happen.”

You’ve probably heard one version of those sentences, and while they all make sense, they put the emphasis on the wrong aspect of the process.

One of the things about failure is that it’s asymmetrical with respect to time. When you look back and see failure, you say, “it made me what I am!” But looking forward, you think, “I don’t know what is going to happen and I don’t want to fail.” The difficulty is that when you’re running an experiment, it’s forward looking.

Ed Catmull

Nobody wants to or can start a project thinking about failure. It goes against how our mind thinks, and it would be the end of the project itself.

A different approach is to shift the focus on the learnings. What about starting a project saying “I want to learn how this works”, or “I want to find out if A is better than B”, or “I’d be happy if by the deadline we would know something important that we do not know today”.

Organisations should leave space to reflect on what is happening (both failures and wins), to share the results of the reflection, and to give others the possibility to absorb relevant learnings from what somebody else has done (again, good or bad).

“If you are not learning, you are not trying hard enough.”
“There is no success without learning.”
“We allow our people to learn, learning is the most beautiful thing that could happen.”

Much better.

 

The theory of empathy

Fabrizio2 Comments

To most people, empathy does not come natural. It certainly does not come natural to me. For many years, I have had the tendency to put myself at the centre of the World. Everything that happened was, to some extent, because of me.

People were certainly acting in a certain way because they wanted to signal something to me. My friend had stopped calling because for sure they did not want to hang out with me any more. My boss was being cranky because she did not like my job and was about to fire me. My girlfriend was being cold because clearly she was not interested in me anymore. And so on.

This slowly built up a worldview according to which it was very difficult for me to be empathic. On one side, the others were mostly being negative. On the other, they were being negative because of me, and so I was also unworthy of their interest, friendship, trust, love.

Raise you hand if this situation sounds familiar.

I had to train myself in empathy. Here is what Wikipedia says about empathy.

Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another’s position.

Sounds intimidating just by reading it.

The first step I took was to start asking people about their motives. What I found floored me. In 99.9% of the cases, I was not the reason why they were acting in a certain way. I found, actually, that most people had feelings that I was very familiar with, or were living through situations that I had also lived through in the past.

After I started approaching meditation, and to some extent a more Buddhist take on life, one theme resonated with me. We are all going through the same distress. Even though our lives are different, even if some have more and some have less, even if some are alone and some are not, even if some live in some place and some in another. We are all challenged by the attempt to make sense of a World that is senseless.

When you understand that what you feel, what you think, what you live is an experience you have in common with other human beings, that is the moment empathy unlocks.

I am still learning, and it is easy to fall back to certain patterns, easier than one would care to admit. Real empathy is one of the most needed characteristics in today’s World, and what is incredible about it, is that it expands in a sense of belonging like no other I ever experienced before.

Good luck on your path.

I am not here for that

FabrizioLeave a comment

When I moved to Finland seven years (and some months) ago, I did that primarily to find a better quality of life for my future family.

Throughout the years, particularly during the two long periods (about 10 months at the beginning and 12 months more recently) during which I have struggled to find a job, I had to remind myself of this quite many times.

The reason why I am here is NOT professional.

There is some debate these days about how difficult it is for foreigners to find a job in this country. Indeed, if you do not speak Finnish, or if you don’t have good connections, or if you do not know how the job industry works here (for example, in terms of being bold in your applications vs being honest), it is quite the challenge to be employed. Sometimes, accepting a job below your education level will help, sometimes it won’t.

The reason why I am bringing this up, even though it might seem like a local issue, is that we often define ourselves, our lives, our satisfaction in terms of the job we have. For good reasons, of course, but we should be more careful about that.

People do not come to Finland because of its amazing economy, the infinite professional possibilities the country has to offer, the openness of its society.

People come to Finland because schools are excellent and education is free, because the work culture permits to go home at 16.00 without feeling guilty, because there is a well-maintained playground in every courtyard, because public transportation can reliably take you basically everywhere you need to go, because of its stunning nature, some also because they enjoy spending winters under 60 centimetres of snow.

We should refocus the way we think about life and satisfaction. Having a job is important, but it does not end there. If, for any reason, it does instead, then unfortunately Finland is not the best option on your list. And I am sure it’s their loss.

Emotions and rationality

Fabrizio1 Comment

If you are using emotional tools to address a rational problem, chances are you are going to struggle in the medium/long-term.

Say you are at a meeting discussing how many new hires you need for the next project. Since you know that hiring people, onboarding and training them is a lot of work, and you’d rather focus on something different, you leverage the fear of taking risks of your boss, throw some numbers in the air to make your point, and end up scoring a point. In the medium term, your team will be understaffed.

This is the same mechanism we are seeing at work with Brexit and most of the populism around the World. A real, concrete, rational problem (i.e. an increasing part of the population is being left behind) is addressed leveraging emotions (fear, anger, hatred). Good results in the short-term (Brexit was voted, many populists are being elected), but when it comes to putting together concrete acts to move past the feelings, not much can be done.

Something similar happens with the opposite. If one of your team members is struggling to share ideas and participate in team meetings (an emotional problem), and you decide that from now on meetings will feature a “let’s go around the table” moment (a rational tool), you will force the team member to speak, yet not necessarily get the best ideas out of them.

Facebook is in the process of understanding this very thing. In trying to cope with the spread of hate speech and inappropriate content on their platform (emotional problem), they have decided to ramp up the number of moderators and feed them 14,000 pages of instructions on what is acceptable and what is not (rational tool). Clearly, it is not working.

Beyond malice and opportunism, make sure you know on which level your problem is, and come up with a solution that speaks the same language. Your chances to make an impact and be trusted (forever?) will increase dramatically.