Wikipedia and Misia

 

Academics the world over remain sniffy about Wikipedia. Yet it is undoubtedly one of the greatest and most valuable triumphs of the internet.

What prompted this thought was a rekindling of interest in the extraordinary life of Misia Sert. Born in 1872, she was a pianist (her teacher Gabriel Fauré), who married three times. She was a close friend of the impresario Diaghilev and became the cultural arbiter in Paris for several decades.

Proust enshrined her in two ways in his In Search of Lost Time: as Princess Yourbeletieff (sponsor of the Ballets Russes) and as the gruesome Madame Verdurin.

All this one can learn from the Wikipedia entry on Misia, which I note has doubled in length and acquired a dozen footnotes since I last googled it.

Ah well. Academia has been known to give the impression of catching up with the rest of the world – sometimes at a distance of twenty years or so…

Whose desire is it anyway?

I wrote recently about “insight” processes and their role in discovering desires we didn’t know we had.

In parallel with newly emerging desires is the capacity we all seem to have to pick up on other people’s desires for ourselves, almost telepathically.

This process, the French philosopher and literary analyst, René Girard, called “mimetic desire”. He first articulated his theory in his 1961 book (in English), Deceit, Desire and the Novel.

In it he analysed novels by Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust and Dostoevsky, demonstrating that, although characters would cling strongly to the notion that a desire was their own, in fact it was always provoked by the desire of another for the same object or objective.

In society as in literature, the “others” may be friends, family, colleagues or neighbours, or they may equally be people far outside of the personal circle, so easy to access nowadays through Hello magazine and the like.

I wonder how many innovators and marketers have studied Girard?

Seeing with new eyes

The problem with so much market research, or rather with our response to it, is that it often seems as though we have heard it all before.

I was working with a mixed group of managers from Nestlé, together with a gang of young consumers, endeavouring to find a new way forward for one of their pan-European chocolate brands. The problem seemed to be focused on the brand positioning and the advertising.

Early in the workshop, we sent them out in pairs (manager and consumer) to do some shopping together and to make notes of what they heard from each other. In the debrief, one of the managers said: “I knew that we had a problem with the communication strategy, but what my guy said just now was that he doesn’t really like the taste of our product.”

It turned out that this was a common piece of feedback from most other pairs.

“Why hasn’t market research been telling us this?” asked the international marketing director. “It has – in every study we’ve done,” responded the research manager. “We just decided it wasn’t that important.”

So every time they had heard it subsequently, they knew it could be ignored.

Hearing it with new ears, seeing it with new eyes, we were able to go with this “new” insight immediately to develop an improved, preferred recipe, which, together with a new communication strategy and new advertising, propelled the brand to double its sales across Europe within twelve months.

What the great French writer, Marcel Proust, said on this subject was: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Do you have special ways of doing this?