Warren Buffets side-kick Charlie Munger repeats a story in his 2007 USC Law School commencement address which he tells often. The key part is from minute 28, that I think absolutely applies to the practice of marketing.
“I frequently tell the apocryphal story about how Max Planck, after he won the Nobel Prize, went around Germany giving the same standard lecture on the new quantum mechanics.
Over time, his chauffeur memorized the lecture and said, “Would you mind, Professor Planck, because it’s so boring to stay in our routine. [What if] I gave the lecture in Munich and you just sat in front wearing my chauffeur’s hat?” Planck said, “Why not?” And the chauffeur got up and gave this long lecture on quantum mechanics. After which a physics professor stood up and asked a perfectly ghastly question.
The Planck stand-in speaker said, “Well I’m surprised that in an advanced city like Munich I get such an elementary question. I’m going to ask my chauffeur to reply.”
The point is that knowing the name of something, does not mean you understand it.
As it is with the practice of marketing.
Many out there know the names, the jargon and new age tools with fancy labels. Unfortunately, that is not enough to be truly useful. You have to know how they work, how they interact with each other, and ultimately, how their use adds value to those with whom you are engaging.
Real knowledge and wisdom comes with doing the work, earning the right to make the claim of expertise over time gathering the experience necessary for insight.
The brother of this dictum is simplicity. Those who really understand how something works are able to go to the heart of it, and explain it in simple terms such that a non expert will understand. To quote, again, Einstein: ‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, no simpler”
Albert was not the best mathematician around, he could not even get a job teaching at undergraduate level in a university. His enormous ability was imagination, and the capacity to explain hugely complex ideas in simple terms. He could sort out the important from the unimportant, determining what was necessary to an outcome, and what was superfluous, and come up with what he called ‘mental models’ that demonstrated the explanation in simple terms to others. The mathematics was a secondary skill to the creative insights that led to the need to develop the mathematics that explained it.
Again, as it is with marketing.
Header cartoon courtesy Tom Gauld at TomGauld.com
