The drug works. End of story

Of late I've witnessed plenty of angst amongst pharma marketers trying to discern the 'narrative' behind the product they sell.  

I've sat in too many workshops, the purpose of each is to apply The Hero's Journey to the fact that Drug A has an effect on Tumour Type B.  Invariably, inevitably the analogy collapses under the weight of the exercise.  Is it the drug that's the hero or is it the doctor?  If the drug is the hero then doesn't that relegate the doctor to the role of squire to some tumour-fighting knight-errant? Easier to agree that the doctor is hero, which makes our drug Excalibur.  But what about the competition?  Aren't they the ones we're really fighting against, even though it's poor form to describe them as the enemy?  Or is it the patient?  People with cancer can be pretty damn heroic y'know.  After a while the only thing that we can agree upon is that the tumour is the bad guy.

It's around this time that someone jokes that this exact exercise is probably being attempted by a dozen groups somewhere around the world at this exact moment.  So we take lunch.

Afterwards we agree that The Hero's Journey is a bit cliché and we cast around for other narratives and so arrive at Journey From Darkness to Light.  But the medical team shuts that one down immediately because it implies a promise that our trial data won't support.  We are talking about cancer after all.

There is only one successful narrative for pharma products: it works.  If you're lucky you might be able to say it works in a surprising way.  Say this in the right way and let the doctor see for himself (in the right patient).  After which we pretty much lose control of the situation.  The doctor either believes that it works or she doesn't.

Energy spent trying to reframe the customer's relationship with the disease in question is energy wasted.  Doctors know the condition better than we ever will because they live with it every day.  The more poetic amongst them will describe their jobs in terms of warfare ('battle') or travel ('journey') or vigilance ('watch'n'wait') or strategy ('chess game') or problem solving ('cracking the code', 'solving the puzzle') but that's them using metaphor to describe their world to us.  Medicine is all those things and many more and we do well to listen to the words used by the individual.

But it is a mistake for us to gather around a flipchart to concoct some grand narrative that suits our purpose.  In the sales situation it will add a layer of complexity, as metaphor often does, or oversimplify or distort our message in some other way.  Instead, speak plainly and let the facts do the rest.

Holidays

 One way to get to grips with the opening premise of Friday’s post is to consider our attitudes to holidays.

Sometimes your ambitions move faster than the world.  Sometimes the world moves faster than you.

Holidays are an annual ritual in paying real money to calibrate our ambitions with the pace of the world.  If you want a week of sleeping, eating and reading you buy a ‘fly’n’flop’ at a child free resort somewhere sunny.  To reconnect with your preteen kids choose Euro Disney.  Because our own scarce resources (time and money) are at stake any dissonance aggravates us so much more on holidays than in usual life; “It wasn't like this in the brochure” is a near-universal lament.

 

For eight years my family ran a 3½-star hotel on Mission Beach in Far North Queensland. I looked after the marketing on a part-time basis, which was a pretty cool job.  How could it not be when this is your workplace?

In our day Castaways on the Beach was a pretty modest operation whose prime selling point was the location.   The property had a longstanding reputation for being ‘family friendly’, offering easy access to a vast waveless beach, lots of suites with in-room cooking facilities and a short walk to a town centre that featured lots of relatively inexpensive dining options and a small supermarket.  Our in-house restaurant also offered an extensive children’s menu.  As everyone knows (or should know), ‘family friendly’ is code for “There will be screaming kids everywhere.  If this is not want you want on your holiday then best you go someplace else.” Families with younger children were consistently our most satisfied customers, not least because our business plan didn't rely on corralling our guests into the dining room three times a day.  What parent doesn't find it galling paying for a full breakfast buffet when all the kid wants is a bowl of cereal?

 

Our least satisfied customers were always honeymooners who had locked onto the picture on the website and the 3½-star tariffs but (often willfully) ignored the ‘family friendly’ signals.  Signals that included the literal words ‘family friendly’ on all our brochures, billboards, website, etc.  We accepted that our offering couldn't match the ambitions of most loved-up newlyweds and instructed the booking staff to gently warn off such customers.  Over the years we invested quite heavily in improvements to the property but intentionally stuck to the 3½-star bracket.  We were happy with our positioning at the ‘family friendly’ end of the market.

 

I have no children and a relatively high disposable income but we never attempted to build an offering that would appeal to people like me and in 2007 my family sold a thriving business.  The new owners, who have far more access to far more capital than we did, spent an actual fortune taking the place ‘upmarket’.  They refurbished the public areas, reduced the pool size to increase the bar area, added a day spa, removed most of the in-room cooking facilities and upped the tariffs by about 60%.

 

I was back in Mission Beach last July and to my childless eyes the place looks amazing.  But to a family on a budget with a brood of young kids the whole package screams “Stay Away!”  The word around town is that Castaways Resort & Spa is for up sale again.

 

The need to purchase a world that temporarily matches our ambitions is the reason why we expend so much energy researching our holidays.  We only get to spend this time and money a few times a year and it's personal.  This is why holidaying with any but the closest of friends is rarely a good idea ("It’s my holiday too, y’know") and why most of us revisit those trusted holiday places again and again and again.

Pesky verbs

Further to yesterday's thoughts on the descriptive noun (art v. science) this week I've been dealing with an even slipperier conundrum, the verb. To whit: -

What is an appropriate euphemism for 'selling'?

For some quite understandable reasons the client has decided that the guys on the road wot talk to doctors are hereon out to be referred to as 'health solutions managers'. Because nobody likes being 'sold to' right? But there sure as hell are plenty of health solutions out there that need managing: -

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts and solutions in search of problems.

I accept that in much of the world 'salesman' is a tainted word; derisively associated with sharp practices (double glazing in the UK, used cars elsewhere) but excising it from the corporate vocab leaves an glaring absence. Accountants account, researchers research and receptionists receive. Managers either run a team of people or have responsibility for a project or process or else they do... what?

We spent much of the week exploring what it might mean to manage a health solution when the behaviours we want to see exhibited in front of the customer looked consistently salesy.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then why are we struggling so hard to name the damn thing?

As I said, the client has understandable reasons for wanting this rebrand but as the behaviours (the verbs) aren't changing then was it any wonder that we spent the week wading through euphemisms?

A week I won't get back

I live in London and mostly work in Europe.  I have a few North American clients and would like more and I have one in Asia.  The rest of the Asia-Pac business is handled by an erstwhile business partner who lives in New Zealand.  I'd like to think I'm pretty good at long-distance collaboration.

This week I've been dealing with two quite different men who want to do me the favour of taking my work to new clients.  One is setting up a consultancy in the Middle East and reckons that he can generate a demand for our IP in the region and the other needs my skills to round out a product offering that he's making (speculatively) to a Canadian company.  Both men are entrepreneurs who have identified potentially lucrative opportunities that would never come across my radar.  But each has inserted himself between me and a client and I'm unsure how I feel about that because like most Headcount: 1 types I'm a control freak.  If anyone's going to be in front of a client or an audience it will be me.

This control freakery has been going on so long that I've learnt to treat it as a strength rather than the flaw it is.  Being unable to delegate means that my business will never, ever be scaleable, ergo it will never be saleable.  And as I've said before on these pages, when I get down about this I feel trapped.  If I can't relinquish control of the marketing interactions with clients in far-flung places that I'd never meet otherwise then when can I?

Isn't this just 20th Century Thinking?  Wasn't one of the key learnings from the life of Saint Steve Jobs that an overweening sense of control is a positive thing?  Merlin Mann recently described success, apropos of Apple, as: -

You get to decide who pays you

I suspect that my erstwhile partner doesn't care who pays us for our residual IP.  He sees this incremental (and essentially unearned) income purely as a bonus, as an undiluted good, and especially in markets like Egypt and Saudi and the Gulf.  I'm not sure I agree.   I want my collaborations to enhance not diminish what I do.  I want to finish a project with a stronger brand, a more interesting product and a new set of experiences.

And before we've even gotten to a proper pitch meeting each relationship has gotten bogged down in a separate legal morass.  I've spent the last week proofing licensing agreements and drafting cautionary emails.  The last seven days' efforts have been about protecting what's mine now instead of creating a better, cooler something for tomorrow.

My business is such that I can't license my way to wealth and I certainly can't sue my way there.  A week spent neither developing new ideas or delivering existing ones is a week wasted

Not an elephant. Not in the room

I finished up in Seoul on Friday afternoon and will be back in London for dinner with friends on Saturday night. The programme, a 'how to coach' session for a sales team's first line managers (FLM's), went better than I dared expect.  The translation on slides and workbook wasn't risible and whilst interpreters unavoidably lessen my impact this one, despite an unedifying pre-game battle of wills, wasn't too bad.

The long-term efficacy of the session won't be determined by the guys in the room but by the one who wasn't.  The newly appointed National Sales Manager (NSM) didn't grace us with his presence for more than a few minutes over the two days.  The subliminal damage to the supposedly high priority given to my project is potentially fatal.  As engaged as the actual attendees were, some corner of their collective brain registered the absence as commentary of sorts.  When I ran into him in the corridor (the session was staged in the client's offices) he didn't look especially busy and his English was certainly on par with anyone's in the room.  He declined the offer to close the session on Friday afternoon even before the General Manager, a far more assured character, jumped on the opportunity.

I'd say that he's either totally contemptuous of my project or shit-scared of his FLM's.  Manipulating your new boss such that he's wary of you is a necessary skill in many organisations and low-ranking sales managers often hunt as a pack in this regard.  Korean sales teams have an uber-masculine sensibility and the NSM missed the perfect opportunity to assert the necessary alpha male status by either: -

1. Taking total ownership of my ideas, which is of course fine by me; or, 
2. Openly challenging the foreign 'expert' over how little he understood the local market. This would have been less fine but nothing I'm not paid to deal with

Instead he stayed in his office down the hall whilst his subordinates challenged me anyway.  He stayed away, seemingly unnoticed, as his boss loped in and claimed the last word.  To be fair, his is a lovely office.  He should enjoy it while he can.

Disappointed Bridge

Disappointed Bridge was the dumbest company name I ever came up with. The business in question was going to be the TV production arm of a theatre company we'd been running successfully in Sydney for a number of years. As part of this move the three founders invited Bryan to join us as a partner. He was a friend with a strong background in television but I suspect he really only came on board because of our cool offices.

And they were so, so cool; a former dance studio with a massive sprung wooden floor in a converted pier with panoramic views of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The space was far too big for our meagre needs when we weren't actually rehearsing but when a friend offered us the chance to sublet, the wow factor was such that we couldn't turn it down.

Immediately after Bryan joined us we settled into the artfully spaced sofas and started brainstorming ideas for the new venture as a matter of urgency. Nothing so workaday as ideas for an actual television show mind; we needed a cool name for the business itself. And only a name as cool as our offices would suffice.

We ran an unsurprising gamut of obliquely clever and archly fey suggestions, including the obvious but taken 'Pier Productions', when I hit upon it, "Disappointed Bridge Productions!"

This was met with a predictable silence. I'd been reading James Joyce's Ulysses (which tells you everything you need to know about who I was at the time).

"There's a great joke in Ulysses: 'What's the definition of a pier? A disappointed bridge.'"

Genius, I thought; a company name that was apposite, witty and just a little off the mainstream. Just like the TV we planned to make.  Bryan, who knew me less well than the others but TV far better was withering in his sarcasm, "Yeah, because it's going to sound great when we're waiting in the lobby of Channel Nine and the receptionist calls up and says, 'The guys from Disappointing Bridge' are here to see you".

Bryan now makes lots of TV. I do not.

Fixing pharma

Matthew Herper writes at Forbes about health care.  Last week he wrote a piece entitled Big Pharma: What Went Wrong?  Much of the article is a direct quote from Peter deVilbiss an ex-employee of Merck, who makes the obvious and off-stated point about pharma R&D: -

It takes a lot of profits from the few approved drugs that make it to market to pay for all the basic research and failed development candidates that lie beneath the surface and out of view of most people

Herper and many others are calling for two key reforms to 'save' Big Pharma: open source sharing of trial results and an end to direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising.  I have no problem with either suggestion as either or both would improve the bottom line via a reduction in expenses and, in the case of DTC, improve the industry's American reputation.

As a consultant that works mainly outside the US (although regularly in Canada) and usually in more rarefied therapy areas like renal disease and oncology it strikes me that a lament on the evils of DTC is an analysis that is looking at the obvious rather than the important.  DTC is as much a symptom of the Blockbuster era as a cause.  I doubt that medical advances will ever again be as simple or as widely beneficial as the advent of the statins, COX-2 inhibitors and erectile dysfunction agents.  You won't see much DTC advertising of monoclonal antibodies because they're targeted therapies and the ROI on that sort of ad spend won't be there.

This is not to say that commercial medicine is about to get all classy: get ready for a massive increase and unedifying in TV ads for genetic screening: -

Did you know that you could be one of the millions of Americans who have cancer and don't even know it?  Call this number now...

Embracing ever-increasing complexity

I've just finished Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants.  The central thesis of the book is that technological advance is an inevitable extension of the natural development of, well, everything.  Kelly grandly posits that technology ('the technium') should be seen as the seventh Kingdom of Life, alongside archaebacteria, eubacteria, protista, fungi, plants and animals.

Kelly describes a number of key trajectories for his technium, one of which is 'complexity': -

This arc of complexity flows from the dawn of the cosmos into life.  But the arc continues through biology and now extends itself forward through technology.  The very same dynamics that shape complexity in the natural world shape complexity in the technium.

Kelly, p.287

I've spent my entire career working on product launches; i.e. trying to anticipate the Next Big Thing the consumer wants, building that thing and making it available.  I've always believed this drive for novelty to be one of capitalism's fundamental impulses but I'd not before seen it as embedded in the very fabric of the universe.  It makes sense: increased variety engenders complexity thus life will get evermore complex, be it in the jungle, supermarket or hospital pharmacy.

Last Thursday I was discussing an upcoming oncology launch with a new client.  I made the pedestrian observation that ever-expanding choice in cancer treatments added complexity to the medicine and therefore to the marketing task also: -

Once upon a time there was no treatment for cancer at all.  Then there was surgery.  Then chemotherapy.  Then radiotherapy.  Then tumour-activated monoclonal antibodies.  And so on.

The oncologist's job has gotten more complicated at every turn, especially as alongside a dizzying variety of potential combinations, sequences and so on, the original option (do nothing at all) is still on the table and must always be entertained.

Me

Marketers charged with launching a new drug must acknowledge that they are automatically complicating the customer's working life.  Doctors understand that part of the job of medicine is to understand all of the available options, which in a launch-heavy specialty like oncology can seem like a full-time job on its own.  Time-poor doctors will often actively resent the advent of a new therapy, especially if it doesn't represent an immediate and obvious medical advance.  There has to be clear communication that this additional complexity is justified by a worthwhile improvement in clinical outcome for a sub-cohort of patients.

Inexperienced marketers tend to focus on the novelty of the treatment (hence the proliferation of messages around 'mode of action', etc.) whereas the key word is sub-cohort.  Because we now know too much about genetics to take an undifferentiated approach to therapy disease, no cancer drug will ever again be right for all patients.

We are in the business of increasing complexity in the world and we need to embrace it.  It is the inevitable consequence of a defined population of cancer sufferers getting better treatment today than yesterday.

Interlinked levels of branding

When a pharmaceutical salesperson sits in front of a prescriber there are three interlinked 'branding' interactions in play: -

1. Corporate: doctor's opinion of the pharma company
2. Product: doctor's opinion of the product
3. Personal: doctor's opinion of the individual representative

Product is by far the most important of the three; the doctor's main priority is to his patient so this is where he focuses her attention.  As most doctors will tell you: -

What makes a good drug rep?  A good drug

No rep ever wants to hear this.  She wants to believe (must believe) that her specific input makes a difference.  How the hell do you get about of bed every morning otherwise?  The thing that every experienced salesperson cherishes most and discusses least is her credibility, aka her personal brand.

The very embodiment of 'passive aggression' is a roomful of salespeople, arms folded, listening to a marketer some outline some brilliant new 'brand building' initiative.  The lens through which they view everything the marketer asks of them is this: -

If I undertake this activity will my personal credibility (brand) be enhanced or diminished?

Any product manager who treats a sales team as merely an especially expensive comms channel is a fool. If the team fails to execute the clever, agency-wrought strategy it's not because they didn't understand it but rather they didn't bother executing it at all.  Marketing activity must enhance the credibility of the individual salesperson or it's a waste of time and money.

What of corporate branding?  Would a doctor shy away from trying Horizant (a new GlaxoSmithKline treatment for restless leg syndrome) because of concerns over Avandia (its diabetes drug linked to increases in heart attacks and subject to $6 billion in law suits)?  Not if Horizant is as good as the data seems.

But will the GSK rep selling Horizant have to work that bit harder to establish her own credibility in the face of all the negative Avandia headlines?  Almost certainly.

In a perfect world these three branding level complement each other; a credible salesperson selling a valuable drug made by a respected company.  That alignment happens regularly.  Even so the salesperson has to earn that credibility just as the company has to earn that respect.

That begins and ends with honest, straightforward conversations about a new, needed therapy drug that does some genuine good.

What is it that you do again?

Recently Pfizer announced that is shedding European jobs in R&D in order to expand its sales/marketing operations in China.  Leaving aside the basic business motivations for this, the existential implications are worth exploring: -

Remind me again, what does Pfizer do?

For well over a hundred years the raison d'etre of every pharma company has been the scientific development of medicines that assist in mankind's fight against disease.  As obnoxiously as the pharmaceutical industry has behaved over the last few decades (although certainly less so than, say, finance), it has been broadly tolerated because the fruits of its labour have to led to us all living longer, more pleasant lives.

Pfizer's move is a hard-headed reaction to the bleak news that the salad days of the 1990's and 2000's are past and unlikely to return.  But is it the right reaction?  Sure, the industry believes itself to be in trouble: at the front end, ever-deepening legal exposure and a pickier FDA have massively increased the cost of getting a drug to market whereas the enthusiastic championing of generic manufacturers by insurers and governments has severely curtailed ROI at a minute past midnight on the day of patent expiry.

All of which may mean that the profitability of a sector which has historically outperformed the wider economy will come back to the pack somewhat.  Individual companies will perform better or worse but pharma as an overall sector won't be so profitable nor its stocks be seen as such a safe bet.  Yet this unpleasant fact isn't reason enough to toss all the toys out of your pram.

Pfizer, once rid of all but the safest prospects in its pipeline, will join the evermore frantic hunt for the next small, sexy biotech with decent clinical trial results, pull out its chequebook and pick up ownership of a product that's ready to launch.  This is not an entirely negative outcome because Pfizer does global product launches better than most, many people will gain access to important drugs.

The long-term consequence is that Pfizer may be seen to have opted out of the (noble) pursuit of science in favour of the (unseemly) business of marketing.  And what is marketing if not the shaping of how you are seen by the customer: -

You used to be one of the good guys, beavering away in lab in the hope of one day cracking the code, using science to help relieve the suffering of millions.  Now you're just a big company with a lot of cash to spend.

You don't innovate any more

You're Dell not Apple.  You're Disney not Pixar.  You're GM not VW.

Which is fine for now but the only genuine advantage the West maintains over the developing world is a superior genius for innovation.  Throw that away and what are you left with?

Live stand-up? I went once...

A Birmingham promoter named James Cook writing on Chortle: -

If your first experience of live stand-up comedy is a night at your local where you've paid a fiver to see eight comedians, only three of whom looked like they knew what they were doing, there is a very high probability that you will never go to see live comedy again.  Not just in this venue, but in any venue, even the big ones.  Not only that, all the punters at these sort of gigs are likely to tell their friends.  'Live stand-up? I went once, it was shit.'

My point exactly.

Strong ties

Last October Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great piece in the New Yorker about the strengths and limitations of Twitter and other forms social media. He compares the (successful) American civil rights movement of the 1960's with the (generally unsuccessful) colour revolutions of the last few years.

Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist

Gladwell's argument is that Facebook and Twitter are all very well for establishing the 'weak ties' that are great for disseminating information but no replacement for the 'strong tie' relationships needed to ferment political change. Tweeting your dislike of the government is not the same as occupying Tahrir Square. Friends are only of use to you if they're by your side. You need to bear witness to each others' commitment.

High-risk activism... is a “strong-tie” phenomenon. This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

So what we know can be expanded by 'weak ties' whereas what we do is rarely influenced in that way.

Last week I was in Birmingham helping a client refine their strategy for a new breast cancer treatment. The sales team has successfully established almost universal awareness of the product but the number of actual sales (prescriptions) has been disappointing. Cancer is a grim business and oncologists are thus quite conservative. Whilst no one wants to be the last person to start using a new therapy neither does anyone want to be first. This leads to chicken-and-egg scenarios, which is where my client finds itself.

The sales team is frustrated by doctors' reticence to make what they see is a very low-risk change to prescribing. Every rep I spoke to believes passionately in the product but that's just what they're paid for. They don't have any 'skin in the game'; no pharma rep will ever get the 3am call saying that a terminally ill woman has been admitted to hospital with an unexpected side effect that no one on staff has any experience of handling yet.

So what can my client do to get this group to act differently (ie start prescribing the drug)? By discovering and cultivating any 'strong tie' relationships that exist between the less conservative members of the population. The sales team has to act on the answers to two questions...

1. Which doctors out there believe in our product?
2. How do we connect them; first to each other and then to everyone else?

This is a well-established path in pharma marketing. The client will stage a series of educational meetings where less believing customers are given the chance to bear witness to the testimony of their peers. As non-peers, the sales team's role in all of this is peripheral; they have no real role in these 'strong tie' relationships. Frequently they get in the way at the worst possible time.

On the flipside of my life Andrew Watts is starting up a comedy club in the wilds of Wiltshire. He's been musing over best way of promoting what will undoubtedly be a consistently high quality night. Hopefully he'll dodge the all-too-common reliance on facilities like Facebook and Twitter to drag in the punters.

It's no Tahrir Square but many people find the idea of a night of going to live comedy stressful. The most cited reason for this is a terror of being singled out / picked on. I suspect that this is a polite misplacement; the larger, usually unspoken fear is that the acts will just suck. A night spent in deep sympathy for an audibly sweating twentysomething comic dying in an otherwise silent room is a highly unpalatable prospect.

One of the hallmarks of a (newly) successful comedy night in a rural or even provincial setting is a large number of group bookings. In Gladwell's parlance this is a 'strong tie' phenomenon in action; punters are less likely to view the night as stressful and so more likely to attend if encouraged to go as a group.

My advice to Watts is to offer a heavy discount for larger group bookings, at least in the early days. Once punters have come to the opinion that it's a quality night their stress level will dissipate and they're much more likely to return in twos and threes.

Of course it'll also help if he doesn't book comics whose acts rely on picking on the more unfortunate looking individuals in the crowd. That sort of behaviour's the height of rudeness down Devizes way.

The dangers of easy money

Instapaper pointed me to an except from Anthony Bourdain's new book Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook.  The piece is a very funny and obviously heartfelt attempt to discourage all but the genuinely obsessive from attempting a career as a chef: -

Nobody will tell you this, but I will: If you're thirty-two years old and considering a career in professional kitchens?  If you're wondering if, perhaps, you are too old? Let me answer that question for you: Yes.  You are too old.

 By the time you get out of school—at thirty-four, even if you’re fucking Escoffier—you will have precious few useful years left to you in the grind of real-world working kitchens.  That’s if you’re lucky enough to even get a job.

At thirty-four, you will immediately be “Grandpa” or “Grandma” to the other—inevitably much, much younger, faster-moving, more physically fit—cooks in residence.

To a someone who took up stand-up just before his fortieth birthday there are obvious parallels (the key word is 'grind').  The older you are the more you've gotta want it because so much of life is more appealing than another night of long car journeys and indifferent audiences for very little money.

I also love the way that Bourdain describes his industry's attitude to chefs who took the 'safe' option of a hotel kitchen or country club: -

If it matters to you, watch groups of chefs at food and wine festivals—or wherever industry people congregate and drink together after work.  Observe their behaviors—as if spying on animals in the wild. Notice the hotel and country club chefs approach the pack.  Immediately, the eyes of the pack will glaze over a little bit at the point of introduction.  The hotel or country club species will be marginalized, shunted to the outside of the alpha animals.  With jobs and lives that are widely viewed as being cushier and more secure, they enjoy less prestige—and less respect.

The analogue here is with 'hotel chef' and 'corporate comedy'.

Of late I've caught up with some of the wonderfully talented alumnus of Scenes from Communal Living.  In the eleven months since our last UK show they've almost all gone on to the 'next stage'; winning awards and competitions, getting both agents and amazing reviews of their sell-out shows.

At least two of them have started fielding offers for corporate gigs; Christmas parties mainly and the occasional after-dinner slot at a sales conference.  This is the top of an extremely slippery slope.  The money will seem mind-blowing at first, especially coming on top of all that travel to cool and exotic places but it doesn't take long before a reputation for being a corporate comic means that you 'enjoy less prestige—and less respect.'

And if your peers don't rate you then those fickle, easily influenced people who commission television won't even know you're alive.

Corporate money now = no TV deal later.

A good meeting

Had a meeting yesterday with a consulting client to follow up on a session I ran in August.

As part of that programme I'd introduced a couple of new terms to help them get to grips with a specific strategic issue.  Yesterday my terminology was used acutely and properly yet in an entirely unselfconscious manner.

Happily, someone else reminded the group of the provenance of the terms.

Creating conversations

This week I enjoyed a very interesting conversation with an up'n'coming comic en route to a far flung gig.

When not doing comedy he 'creates and maintains an online presence for bands'. Meaning that he uses Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and blog posts to create a conversation between artists and consumers (aka 'the fans').

If cliches like 'unlocking the power of new media' have meaning then presumably my friend would be seen to be at the forefront of this new way of doing marketing. But often he's just an old-fashioned ghostwriter and happily admits as much.

The Holy Grail of his craft is the 'high involvement response'; the fan who, of her own volition, remixes a bands' latest song or creates a mash-up or cuts together a new video and posts it on YouTube and then Tweets the link to her fifty followers who each re-Tweet it to fifty more. The payoff comes when the band emails the new music guy at BBC1 saying that their Facebook group has 2,000 UK fans and the YouTube link of the song (MP3 attached) has been hit 3,000 times in the last month. A quantifiable number of fans, presumably your listeners, have endorsed us already so get on board.

But it all begins with an authentic act of homage and my friend sees his job as to create an online environment where that might occur. The operative word is 'authentic'; something a ghostwriter can never be. He admits that he's only ever achieved this 'high involvement response' with acts that got personally involved ("they touched the keyboard"). Those clients who leave everything to my friend get mediocre results. No Facebook, no fans, no buzz.

The gods of cyberspace help those who help themselves.

I asked him who were the most successful acts to follow this marketing model and he rattled off a dozen names that of course I'd never heard of,

"But why would you? You're 43 and you're never going to pay to see them play live so you're no good to them anyway."