Volume 16: Fiddling while Rome burns.

Volume 16: Fiddling while Rome burns.

March 9th, 2020

1. World’s funniest comedian retires just when we most need a laugh.

Tl;dr: Yes, this headline is just an excuse to share some funny videos.

On Friday, the world’s finest comedian, Billy Connolly, announced his retirement at age 77. His battle with Parkinson’s disease means he no longer feels he has the brain necessary for stand-up. “The Big Y’in” as he’s affectionately known was my first illicit thrill as a child. When visiting family friends, we used to sneak his LPs onto the record player and listen along. While I didn’t understand most of it, the laughter, the swearing and his banana boots were the beginning of a life-long love affair. Since, like millions of other people, I can’t panic sell my stocks because the RobinHood app isn’t working (guess they’re pretty much done then), I figured you might want to relive a little of Connolly’s genius with me instead. Warning, if you’re one of the few people not working from home today, put your headphones on. He swears a lot:

Incontinence pants | Plane to Australia | Toblerone | Wildebeast

2. Is there a design-thinking solution for design-thinking blowhards?

Tl;dr: I wish it was Post-It Notes we couldn’t get hold of and not toilet paper.

Design thinking is fine. It’s a useful approach/set of tools/mindset/methodology/whatever (practitioners can’t seem to agree on what it is exactly) for solving certain kinds of problems that aren’t easily resolved by the kind of silo’d groupthink that occurs inside most large organizations.

But what I find astounding is the arrogance with which so-called design-thinking experts confidently state they can solve literally any problem. A perspective that reached peak Post-It Note delusion with this article stating that design thinking can solve the Coronavirus pandemic. I mean, come on.

I know, I know, the world is packed with people without expertise who claim they can resolve major multi-faceted problems in five easy steps, but in this case epidemiologists, virologists and public health experts have modeled pandemics and their implications for years. A couple of fevered days in a room inspired by your brilliance and fueled by 25 packs of Post-It’s and a vat of lousy coffee isn’t going to magically achieve anything profound. The experts already know what to do, it’s just that our governments have been woefully under-prepared for years. (This isn’t a black swan event, it’s what’s referred to as a grey rhino).

So please, design-thinking blowhards, stick to your knitting and let the people who actually know what they’re doing stick to theirs.

4. Sequoia Capital says cut now, cut hard & start with marketing. Maybe we should cut Sequoia Capital instead.

Tl;dr: VCs persistently clueless about marketing.

Last week Sequoia Capital sent a letter to their CEO’s. Handily I can summarize the gist in a single sentence: Things are going to get very, very bad, so cut now, cut hard, and start with marketing.

I get the overall reasoning, but the marketing stuff deserves push-back. They state that as demand slackens, you should reduce marketing expenditures to sustain your ROI percentage. I’d have thought that they, of all people, would understand that ROI as applied to marketing is a measure of efficiency and not effectiveness, but clearly, they do not.

When you cut marketing spend, ROI does indeed go up as spend goes down, but you also accelerate negative effects on sales that might be happening to your business. Even more so if competitors aren’t cutting, or not as deeply. This is why in recessionary times the winners are typically those businesses that invest in marketing as a critical driver of cashflow, as opposed to those that cut marketing as a cost. The winners aren’t accelerating the efficiency of their ROI, they’re too busy accelerating the demise of their weaker competition instead.

So, please don’t follow this terrible advice from a field of finance that’s proven to be persistently and willfully ignorant about marketing. What companies should do instead is take a deeper look at the market, their strategy, how they’re positioned, and where they can apply their marketing resources most effectively in maintaining cashflow and putting themselves into the best possible position for success.