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MarkEATing Newsletter example – Vicars’ Game
Paul Gustard is a former flanker who played for Leicester Tiger and Saracens, but is now better known as the defence coach for the national England side.
Aside from all the technical aspects, Gustard has proved particularly adept at getting his message across by putting players into the right emotional frame of mind.
Which usually means thinking outside the box.
The wolves were on two boxes behind me as I spoke, with handlers and on a chain, giving off this real feral smell….
David Milnes of KyteMark Solutions presented a selection of Case Studies detailing how research had worked in practice for a selection of KyteMark’s clients, notably:
Then, as it was Christmas time, a little game for the group to try to convey the value of research….which, erm, didn’t work out quite as intended!
Aristotle was credited as the first person to write about the ‘Wisdom of the crowd’, in his work titled ‘Politics’.
-J K Rowling, ‘On Monsters, Villains, and the EU Referendum’
Yup, those are the words of the very same author who was only recently writing about Hufflepuffs, Muggles, and Golden Snitches.
It shouldn’t come as a great surprise though – all great childrens’ books, at some point, deal with death, danger, the darker side of life, albeit usually hidden under a more palatable veneer for younger readers. For example:
When questioned upon her reasons for writing the film ‘Fantastic Beasts and where to find them’, J K Rowling was quoted as saying:
The obvious stuff really:
Banking: Never reveal your PIN / if contacted by ‘the bank’, always call back on the official number from a different phone line
Online payments: Book with a
credit card
Open questions – how do they work, why do they work, and when do they work best? (see, there’s a couple of open questions right there already!)
Examples of open questions in business:
So, let’s have a quick look at the theory and how to put it into practise.
We love to buy, but hate to be sold to
This observation draws upon 3 different areas of the brain:
It takes 32 repetitions to pass from the THINK to the FEEL (instinctive) stage of a process
When buying, it is necessary to move a person from THINK to FEEL (hence the old adage, “People love to buy but hate to be sold to”)
Peak performance happens in the KNOW (subconscious) stage
Open questions are vital to this emotional transition
Probably the most vital part to writing a good Case Study, is to know in advance what outcome you are looking for, hence the need to ‘interview’ your client first.
I always find the 5 W’s a useful reminder:
Furthermore, if your client can provide you with a thumbnail sketch of each interviewee, it will save valuable interview time and give you a heads up of the type of questions to ask.
It’s also preferable if the client emails the interviewee (and cc’s you) to confirm that you’ll be carrying out the Case Study interview as:
Canny bunch eh, the Romans?
Since then, over the past couple of thousand years, science has sought to prove this theory, but has generally come up short:
“All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
However, a recent research study (*) managed to shed some more light on the issue, concluding that:
BUT
The thinking man’s philosopher, Edward de Bono, called it ‘creative pause’; i.e. the state of mind which limits our conscious thinking whilst allowing our unrestricted, deeper thoughts to flow.
The Daily Telegraph obituaries column has only been in existence for 30 years, having been set up in Sep-86 by Hugh Massingberd.
Prior to that, obituaries appeared irregularly and only for the most important people as a formal list of accomplishments, rather than the current crop of colourful and humorous mini-biographies concerning a wide range of characters.
Massingberd’s vision was essentially a comic one – a formal, detached style, but deadpan and alive to human frailty, aiming for sympathy rather than sycophancy.
OK, spoiler alert – the title ‘The Boris two-way and implications for Trump’ was taken from a recent BBC online article , but I thought it was such a great opening that I just had to re-use it.
Just to recap, for those of you not familiar with the ‘Boris two-way‘, ahead of this year’s EU referendum Boris Johnson wrote two articles for the Daily Telegraph, one arguing in favour of ‘Remain’, the other for ‘Leave’ (note: the ‘Remain’ article was drafted in February and probably never meant for publication, but was recently leaked to the Sunday Times in Oct-16).
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