The Swedish author Harald Moe is releasing his book Party Marketing on the 29th of may. The idea is simply to make life much more fun for marketers by turning work into a party:
Everyone has been to a party. Creating a sucessful party and marketing successfully a business is the same thing, and is based on the same principles. Party Marketing makes it much easier to Focus, Coordinate and Reinforce all components of the companys communications. Party Marketing by Harald Moe
This is an Shark Defense training film (1964). Credit: The US Army. It shows mankind’s fear of a potential shark attack is enormous therefore it made sense to develop a defence part in my book Sharkonomics.
Both in nature and business prey and predator share the same water. Eventually all market leaders will be attacked as a consequence of being in the same market and sharing the same water as their predators. The concept behind developing brands was to protect the original from being copied. For a long time a brand relied on its name and reputation to survive in the market. Today, however, merely the name will not protect the brand from being attacked. As the nature of business gets harder, the need for defence increases. Market leaders need to defend their products and services with deadly seriousness to keep followers at a healthy distance.
Why is defence not valued in business?
As early as in our childhood, from kindergarten upwards, we are trained to be “positive”. So if somebody in the team building the mighty Titanic had said something that was not in line with “the unsinkable creation”, that person would most likely have been put down and corrected (or at least sent off to clean the deck until he had learnt how to be more positive). Internal communications spend fortunes on rewriting information into a positive tone of voice. Initiatives such as bonus systems and stock values are popular in business because positive information can easily be aligned with payroll.
In nature there are not any parachute agreements for management.
Writing a book is like creating music: you really don’t know how it’s received until it’s played onstage. I am very pleased with the response from the first part of the tour for my new book, Sharkonomics. It started in Denmark with a lecture at The Danish Marketing Association fantastic discussions with the leading marketing professionals in Copenhagen. And with an audience of nearly 200 in Norway at Gulltaggen, I was overwhelmed by the positive feedback by representatives from iconic brands like Google and Spotify.
Here are a few things that people have said about Sharkonomics on tour in the Nordics:
Finally something new and fresh! Straight to the point! Tonje Elisabeth Aaroe, Industry Manager, Google
In this video from Gulltaggen, Norway, the audience is in a shark-like frenzy, biting into Sharkonomics. It was amazing to see business people moving like sharks and fighting for my book.
The Finnish Marketing Association stirred up their own frenzy with Sharkonomics in Finland. Before I went onstage, I was told that there probably wouldn’t be any questions… so I was shocked by how hungry the audience was for Sharkonomics. It was like the content became live “hits” and swam for itself. Experts say that sharks build their self-confidence bite by bite and I’m ready to bite into the business world.
Thanks to all of the wonderful people in the organizations and associations, panelists. I would also like to thank my sponsors, Reffekt and Smurfit Kappa for purchasing and sharing my books audiences on the tour so Sharkonomics is read and spread by the hungriest audience ever in the Nordic countries.
Moving 24/7 works well for sharks and will work well for corporations that want to move with the times and not miss opportunities. Speed and constantly being in an innovative stage of changing and adapting is what enabled companies such as Google, Cisco and Groupon to grow into global predators.
Last week at Gulltaggen I had the honor to listen to Sir Tim Berners-Lee who is the inventor of the World Wide Web. By far it was the best lecture at Gulltaggen (perhaps for ever). His humble statement in the opening of the lecture was superb:
I stumbled on an problem, in which the World Wide Web seemed like a good solution.
Over the years I have had the honor to meet some of the best innovators in the world, like the father of mobile phones: Östen Mäkitalo. When I listened to Sir Tim I released that they all have the same success formula.
They have all cracked the code: Not invented here. What Tim did when he created the world wide web was that he included existing solutions and codes so that the creators of these solutions and codes could see themselves in the solution that Tim created. That is a smart strategy because it means that other programmers could feel they where a part of the world wide web and could say: We invented it (together). Many of Tim’s points related to Open Source which basically was what the web was about in the beginning. The answer to how to crack the code could not be better expressed than in Tim’s own words:
The should be a sandbox. So everybody could play with it and develop it together and not be stuck in somebody’s head.
Tim repeatedly stated the value of collective thinking:
If everybody feels they are part of the innovation, they will contribute to the solution and spread it.
We as a spices we have a resistance against ideas that are totally new to us (it takes more energy to absorb and relate to them). The saying “no meaning of inventing the wheel again” can be questioned since new solutions often have already existed in some forms in our heads. For example, the wheel would never have been invented unless there had been earlier prototypes of it.
Big innovators as Sir Tim have many different talents in addition to their own area of expertise (technology in Tim’s case), for example they have knowledge in psychology, group behavior and tribe thinking which they use to spread innovations. Often I get the feeling that big innovators possesses the skills of at least a hundred people, but still the genius solutions these big innovators have invented has taken them years to get accepted and spread. If it takes so many years of hard work although the inventors possess the skills of hundred persons in one person, I wonder how many times we have missed solutions coming from people who do not have as many talents as the big innovators have. I believe that we as a society have to figure out how to better embrace ideas from people who do not have the skills of hundred people but still can offer great solutions. In the meantime we can all enjoy the work of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web which makes the world spin like a wheel around our future.
Best speaker yet at Gulltaggen 2012 is Marco Tempest: Techno-illusionist. His presentation material was at another level than normal business power points. Maybe because he is an awesome magician and an entertainer in world class. Normally magic is based on secrets, but Marco’s magic is based on Open Source Magic and he is spreading the magic of the crowd instead of keeping it secret.
Sharks are often satisfied with a sample chew, especially if the victim moves out of reach – but market leader tend to bleed more than moving … CIO Sweden, Nr 3, april 2012
Stefan Engeseth offers a completely original point of view — rooted in centuries of natural history — to address an age-old problem. It is sure to challenge and illuminate how you think about competing in the marketplace.
Writing a book is like creating music: you really don’t know how it’s received until it’s played onstage. I am very pleased with the response from the first part of the tour for my new book, 
Last week at Gulltaggen I had the honor to listen to 
Best speaker yet at 
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