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Vice Blog

LONDON - MARKETING PROVERBS

Thanks to so many of you for leaving positive comments last week. Much appreciated. And special thanks to the reader who emailed me with the name of the exact Harvester where Sandi Thom is now working.

You know, to me, the power of marketing comes from its eternal basis in powerful philosophical ideas. As Sun Tzu himself said: "A proverb is a seed in the hearts of your soldiers." When I'm teaching marketing, I use a lot of proverbs from Oriental wisdom, because Oriental wisdom is really well turned-out—it all mostly hangs on these cute little paradoxes about seeds and winds and stuff. But this week I've pulled together a list of Western proverbs and applied each one to a marketing situation. See if you can find your own too.

"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." —Jesus/Bob Dylan
Simply put, put yourself in the shoes of your customers. Like if you'd want to have a campaign involving free digital downloads at all Ladyhawke concerts supported by a social networking site done unto you, then that's what you need to do to unto your potential customers. It requires a degree of self-knowledge. Everywhere you go, you need to get into the habit of thinking, "What do I want done unto me right now?" Try making voicenotes as you go about your daily business.

"A stitch in time saves nine." —wary mothers and seamstresses
Sometimes you've gotta do something quickly. Like if you've got to sack the arse who screwed up your Powerpoint presentation. Yes, you're sacking him today. And that means snot and tears and yeah maybe changing all the passwords on the office servers (again) and cutting new keys and all that. But it's still only one stitch's worth of expense. That's a net saving of eight stitches in terms of Powerpoint presentations he will not be around to screw up for you tomorrow. You can go home at the end of the day and people will ask, "What've you done today?" and you can be like, "I achieved net savings of eight stitches."

The parable of The Ant and the Grasshopper —is this Jesus too?
This is definitely the kind of thing Jesus would've been into. Basically there were all these ants who partied all summer long. Then winter came, and the grasshopper, who'd been working all through the fun times and booze and sex, had put a lot of money aside—a wedge of real capital that he'd probably sunk in property. And the clever guy still had money left over. So he went back to his house for winter and probably watched a lot of The Wire on DVD. A useful analogy might be Fred Perry, a brand that clearly doesn't have much lifestyle-capital anymore. And then the grasshopper is American Apparel. You can bet at their headquarters there's a big vending machine with a lot of free soft drinks and iced teas and smoothies. That's a company that still knows the meaning of success. I bet if you go to Snapple they've just got some shitty vending machine that a janitor has to come and kick every now and then to get your money back. I bet there's someone in the office who sends round little emails advising everyone to economise by bringing their own tea-bags into the office. I bet if you went into their canteen, there'd be a whole load of little stickers on everything in the fridge going "This Belongs To Louise" or whatever. I bet there's someone called Louise in their office. It's a low-class name I personally associate with middle-management failures.

"Ne'er cast a clout afore May is out." —traditional
I had to look this one up because I had no idea what its about. Apparently it is actually written in English. I spent about twenty minutes putting it into Babelfish. This seems to mean something like "don't count your chickens before they hatch," except the eggs is your winter jacket and the unborn chickens in them is the possible bad weather. Er, or something. In other words, if your scouts tell you that the big thing in music in 2009 is going to be jumbotronica, don't plan a campaign around jumbotronica until it actually happens. If you fly DJ Willy Warmer out from Miami to put on a jumbotronica party, and the only people there are other jumbotronica DJs, then don't fucking go with it. You'll lose a lot of money. You'll look stupid. DJ Willy will never return any of your calls again. Then when jumbotronica does take off, you'll have to get one of your friends to book DJ Willy under an assumed name. I cannot emphasise this enough. DJ Willy doesn't have time to play shitty half-empty parties populated only by music industry dweebs. STANLEY COOK