Caution : Dip ahead

The one thing every budding marketer must “have” a lot of, is common sense. And the one thing every budding marketer must “learn” is presenting this common sense in a way that it appears dramatically uncommon.

This is what “The Dip” does best. Tell you what you already know or should know without sounding very obvious. I am a Godin fan. Just because I feel his writing style is very non-flamboyant yet wins you over. This book is a one sit read. Small package, a mind grenade.

Atelophobic by nature, I have always feared mediocrity. So the pages of this book for me were like shots of adrenaline with lime and salt! Being a cut above is not easy. All through high school getting to an aggregate of 60% is not too difficult, but every single point after this is like extracting blood out of stone. This trough sets the future Stanford alumni apart from the good looking rascals. This trough is “the dip”.

The read is simple and jargon free except for the liberal use of marketing argot comprising of words like “cliff” and “cul-de-sac”. This book prescribes the clever intuitive way of gauging your own potential. Simply put - If you don't have the potential to be the best, find something else.

Being a start-up myself, I know how essential it is to pull through. But pulling through is not the answer every time. Whatever you do, if making it to the top is not your point one agenda, you are as good as not trying.

During my CPA days, I set out a different career dream for myself. Work with one of the accounting top 5 (Pre-Enron of course), start in the mail room if need be, but retire as a partner! Then I saw the “Top 5” become the “Big 4” (and that's another blog post) and advertising happened. Life's much nicer to me, and gave me a chance to actually be one of the top 5 with a little shift of industry in question. The dilemma of making it or not, is not a luxury I give myself.

This little dynamite of a book might not be the answer to all your questions, but it will definitely get you asking the right ones. Read only when you are driven, motivated, ambitious and dateless on a Saturday.

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NOTE: The Mumbai attacks left me very perturbed. I am appalled by the state of Indian democracy and am left wondering if autocracy is an option!!!

From Word of Mouth to Web 2.0

Whether you are closely or loosely related to the advertising industry, you are most likely to have been bitten by the WEB 2.0 bug and the hoopla surrounding it. If you have your finger in the WEB 2.0 pie, “Tipping point” is where you start using it! Malcolm Gladwell puts forward possibly the best way to understand the dramatic transformation of a fashion faux-pas into a trend setter.

I can never get over UGG boots (appropriately named) and how everyone from Pamela Anderson to Lola Kutty to Yellow Monk owned a pair.

You can't possibly be an swanky advertiser if you don't know what the terms “Maven” or “Connector” mean. And you can't possibly be the CEO of a swanky advertising agency if you in the flesh are not one of the two! (Maybe I should call my blog The Yellow Maven for starters! ;) 

But while I was turning through the final pages of the book, the only thing that struck me was the acute similarity between the laws of word of mouth epidemics and the freshest, fanciest “it” word Web 2.0. 

My read was followed by another. Chris Anderson's The Long Tail. The natural and technological successor to the above. The book that possibly killed 'mass' culture and gave hope to enthusiasts who believe that Guantanamo Bay Punk Rock is not a myth but a real Genre of music! I happened to read the two back to back without realizing that I had just begun to wet my appetite!

Long tail is by far the best predecessor to O'Reilly's WEB 2.0 - the term that I predict will forever transform the way any advertiser or marketeer thinks! If I could bottle the blood of some tech and marketing pundits, Tim would definitely be on my top 5 list.

I would largely recommend to buy, borrow or steal the lot together and read not necessarily in that order.

PS: And as a tribute to Mr Tim O'Reilly, I am typing this post on Open Office! Currently testing it for integration in my organization and looking forward to kicking Microsoft's monopolistic derriere! :)