scott goodson's writings

Miracle Trousers

From Businessweek

I've been asked by legendary journalist and person of letters David Kiley to write a few humble and inspiring words for Businessweek. I have already posted a few of these on my blog. Here is the latest one. Summer has a funny way of loosening your energy and your marbles as you'll notice from this installment. Bizarre as it may seem it's perfectly relevant and true.

In advertising, like in life (and in business and probably in just about everything, I have found, energy definitely matters.

In advertising, many people point to competence, 50 years of case studies and brand pedigree (think David Ogilvy). But what matters most today, I believe, is the energy in the ideas and the people. Good energy matters more than we think.

There are four types of energy:

Bad energy (not good for your company).

Zero energy (not the kind of person you want in the room and DEFIANTLY not the kind of agency partner you want round your employees).

Positive energy (Ahh - this one is good for a depressed economy).

But the fourth is even more potent and potentially explosive. Super Duper Positive Energy contained in Super Duper Positive Energy trousers. People who wear these trousers have been known to design better products and make better advertising.

Some people call these Positive Energy trousers “Miracle Pants.” Pants that can actually make positive things happen like attracting better people and inspiring them during the sweat and tears. These pants have been scientifically tested to prove that a small person wearing them can fight the monster of apathy and rally people to get up when getting up and doing something isn’t a lot of fun.

Rumor has it that Miracle Super Duper Positive Energy pants were invented in Bronxville, NY during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Someone of great importance back then noted, “It’s certainly a paradox that bad economic times produce such a buoyant popular culture.” People think that the ’30s generated mass escapism, but today we know better. Positive Super Duper Energy pants were the real heroes of the Cultural Movement that fought economic stagnation and social malaise.

“Hmmmm, I try to avoid Scott when he gets in his silly moods,” says Ramesh Rajan, Head of Business Affairs at StrawberryFrog.

Everyone feels superior to the heaviness of their lives when they add a little genuine silliness. Silliness, like good energy, matters in bad times.

The next opportunity? Grill your frog

From Businessweek:

That’s right, give your Frog the third degree. Choke it. Stretch it. Lift it up and down and roll it all around. The Frog I am talking about is “opportunity.”

Stefan Persson, the son of the founder of H&M is sitting in his office in Stockholm Sweden, staring at rows and rows of pictures of models in their underwear. Staffers hustle and bustle around Persson, some carrying brochures, and some carrying in-store promotional material. But Persson just stands and looks at these small pictures of women in their underwear. To the casual onlooker, these images of women in their underwear would have been a familiar scene. Nothing special. These images were commonplace, and typically filled magazines and newspapers for Wonderbra, Triumph or Lindex and many many other bra brands. This was like every ordinary day. These images had been the same for years and were laid bare in front of him, rather average and unoriginal.

But that day something clicked in his brain. Because while Stefan Persson saw that day what every other person saw, a light went off in his marketing brain and he saw something everyone else missed. Opportunity. As a result, Stefan grabbed his Frog and decided to put up massive outdoor boards in the darkest and grayest Swedish months. Exactly the same pictures that had been around for years, but now huge and unmissable by city dwellers. From there Stefan’s Christmas campaign featuring super models went on to provoke debate and build his brand in Sweden, then Scandinavia, then Europe and then beyond.

What’s your Frog? What’s your big leap?

Be fearless and put your Frog through the wringer. Don’t panic at the thought of a changing marketplace and all the noise of marketing revolution. Look at what’s right in front of you and roast your proverbial Frog. Because your Frog may well be your big opportunity in the market. And Frogs don’t just sit around and wait. They leap without breaking a sweat. So, you need to grab your Frog and take the big leap with all your heart.

Linie Aquavit is flavored Vodka that is produced in Norway and a favorite of my wife’s Stockholm-living father. The brand Linie was created by Jørgen Lysholm over 100 years ago. He was the son of a Norwegian textile manufacturer who, after having developed a series of other moderately successful spirits brands, took a leap with his Frog. Linie was like many other flavored types of vodka at the time (and there quite a few in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland since state employees had their wages paid in Vodka). But Lysholm saw his Frog one day and decided to make his big leap. In developing his brand he decided that the mixture of special spices and seasonings needed about the right amount of time to swish together as it would take a ship to sail from Norway across the equator. Linie Aquavit grew to be one of the biggest vodkas in the region, cherish by the tastemakers and the experts. Each bottle is marketed by the date and time the ship crossed the equatorial line.

Renzo Rosso of Diesel was sitting in his office in Molvena Italy in the mid 80s working on several jeans brands. Back then Levis was the established player – the IBM of Jeans, and it’s grip on the market in Europe and the US was like titanium. In the late 80s’ Rosso was examining a pair of his extremely well made jeans when he saw something others hadn’t. He realized that the greatest weakness about the jeans industry was its insincerity. It had grown up on the back of rock stars, but the advertising had become a monster that in his mind needed to be heeled.

What Rosso did next was to grab onto his Frog and take one of the biggest leaps in entrepreneurialism. Rosso decided to hire Creative Director Wilbert Das right out of college. Next he hired a tiny fledgling ad agency called Paradiset run by a guy named Joakim Jonsson, in one of Europe’s smallest ad markets, Sweden. This agency worked alongside Diesel’s Nordic sales and marketing manager J. Lindberg (who went on to found his own brand). What came next was history and a company that not only grew phenomenally but almost put Levis out of business. Rosso’s decision to grab a hold of his Frog created one of the best companies in the fashion world, and certainly one of the biggest leaps in marketing, and probably some of the best and most awarded advertising in Cannes.

Honest Ed was a man living in Toronto. His real name was Ed Mirvish. He owned a discount store with simple displays of low-priced merchandise, ranging from vacuum cleaners and winter coats to kitchenware, toys and grocery items. One day he decided he wanted to open a restaurant. Once the place was built and the doors were opened, he realized that he needed a different tack to compete with what Toronto had to offer. He grabbed hold of his Frog and and made the big leap. He decided that he would not run discount restaurants but ones with class and style. And then he set about using a combination of marketing and PR to build up his business. First he announced that only people wearing ties and jackets could enter his premises. Then, he hired a group of men to picket his restaurants wearing Turtle Neck sweaters, protesting this insult to their fashion sensibilities and of course demanding equal prime rib under the law. After enough noise and media coverage in the Canadian press, Honest Ed acquiesced and proclaimed that everyone had the right to his prime rib, even those not wearing a tie.

So as you take pause during these warm summer months, think about your Frog. Look at your brand, your market, and your business. What new big leap can you make to set yourself up for the kind of Frog Happiness that lays ahead of you? In what ways can you transform your brand, your brand experience, your marketing to ignite the kind of business growth that can happen? How can you take one of your existing products or brands and create an entirely new and different business around it?

Shopping and selling in a Post Consumer World

I'm contributing this week to Businessweek in a series of posts about what's happening in advertising and marketing. "It's fragmenting faster than melting mountain glaciers" you say. I know, I know CHANGE IS HERE. SO what are people doing about it? My first piece looks at the Post Consumption world.

Businessweek,Posted by: David Kiley on July 13

I walked by the Chanel store in Soho again today and the sale sign is still up. That’s kinda weird. Chanel?

Consumption is what has inspired growth in the economy – here in the US and everywhere in the world. Consumption was the ideology and the doctrine.

It is hugely important when it comes to who we are as people. I wear these brands and project a persona to the world. I drive a British car and I am an English aristocrat. I buy a hybrid and I’m green. I wear French cosmetics and I have the jaunt of Heidi Klum. I buy IKEA furniture and I’m wise not rich. I wear Asics lifestyle sneakers and am cooler than East Berlin.

Consumption has been the source of identity for billions of people who dream for and desire ever-rising material standards. But consumption has changed. It happened one night in a dark, crowded boardroom in New York sometime last October. Before then, we were happy to consume just like we always had. Susie bought a pair of jeans and felt like she had all cockiness, pride and guts of a rock band. Charlie bought a Swedish Vodka and felt like he was part of the progressive urban bourgeois. The Carlsons bought a Jeep and felt like they had the right to go blasting off the road to some clam shack beside the beach at Montauk.

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Women who are shifting the world

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The above image was created by Eduardo Bertone of AGoodson Management.

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The Best Kids’ Books Ever

Ahead of summer vacation for some much needed StrawberryFrog re-energizing, I came across this article by Nicholas D. Kristof of the NY Times. It's a smart read ahead of your time off.

So how will your kids spend this summer? Building sand castles at the beach? Swimming at summer camp? Shedding I.Q. points?

In educating myself this spring about education, I was aghast to learn that American children drop in I.Q. each summer vacation — because they aren’t in school or exercising their brains.

This is less true of middle-class students whose parents drag them off to summer classes or make them read books. But poor kids fall two months behind in reading level each summer break, and that accounts for much of the difference in learning trajectory between rich and poor students.

A mountain of research points to a central lesson: Pry your kids away from the keyboard and the television this summer, and get them reading. Let me help by offering my list of the Best Children’s Books — Ever!

So here they are, in ascending order of difficulty, and I can vouch that these are also great to read aloud.

1. “Charlotte’s Web.” The story of the spider who saves her friend, the pig, is the kindest representation of an arthropod in literary history.

2. The Hardy Boys series. Yes, I hear the snickers. But I devoured them myself and have known so many kids for whom these were the books that got them excited about reading. The first in the series is weak, but “House on the Cliff” is a good opener. (As for Nancy Drew, I yawned over her, but she seems to turn girls into Supreme Court justices. Among her fans as kids were Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.)

3. “Wind in the Willows.” My mother read this 101-year-old English classic to me, and I’m still in love with the characters. Most memorable of all is Toad — rich, vain, childish and prone to wrecking cars.

4. The Freddy the Pig series. Published between 1927 and 1958, these 26 books are funny, beautifully written gems. They concern a talking pig, Freddy, who is lazy, messy and sometimes fearful, yet a loyal friend, a first-rate detective and an impressive poet. These were my very favorite books when I was in elementary school. A good one to start with is “Freddy the Detective” or “Freddy Plays Football.” (Avoid the first and weakest, “Freddy Goes to Florida.”)

5. The Alex Rider series. These are modern British spy thrillers in which things keep exploding in a very satisfying way. Alex amounts to a teenage James Bond for the 21st century.

6. The Harry Potter series. Look, the chance to read these books aloud is by itself a great reason to have kids.

7. “Gentle Ben.” The coming-of-age story of a sickly, introspective Alaskan boy who makes friends with an Alaskan brown bear, to the horror of his tough, domineering father.

8. “Anne of Green Gables.” At a time when young ladies were supposed to be demure and decorative, Anne emerged to become one of the strongest and most memorable girls in literature.

9. “The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be.” This is a hilarious, poignant and exceptionally well-written memoir of childhood on the Canadian prairies. (Note, if you prefer sweet to funny, try “Rascal” instead.)

10. “Little Lord Fauntleroy.” This classic spawned the Fauntleroy suit and named a duck (Donald Duck’s middle name is Fauntleroy). An American boy from a struggling family turns out to be heir to an irritable and fabulously wealthy old English lord, whom the boy proceeds to tame and civilize.

11. “On to Oregon.” This outdoor saga, written almost 90 years ago, is loosely based on the true story of the Sager family journeying by covered wagon in 1848, in the early days of the Oregon Trail. The parents die on route, and the seven children — the youngest just an infant — continue on their own. They are led by 13-year-old John: spoiled, surly, often mean, yet determined and even heroic in keeping his siblings alive.

12. “The Prince and the Pauper.” Most kids encounter Mark Twain through “Tom Sawyer,” but this work is at least as funny and offers unforgettable images of English history.

13. “Lad, a Dog” is simply the best book ever about a pet, a collie. This is to “Lassie” what Shakespeare is to CliffsNotes. The book was published 90 years ago, and readers are still visiting Lad’s real grave in New Jersey — plus, this is a book so full of SAT words it could put Stanley Kaplan out of business.

You can post your own suggestions for best children’s books on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground. My own kids have the temerity to think they know better than I which books they’ve enjoyed, so I’ve deigned to post their recommendations there. But listening to one’s children is dangerous: I advocate reading to them instead.