How to be boring and succeed, according to Aretha Franklin.
Next week will be our 300th Provocation newsletter. It represents a word count of Moby Dick proportions (literally - it’s about 200,000 words).
If we could ask one thing in return, it is to encourage your friends, Board Members and colleagues to sign up. Then you can all talk about the ideas together, and get so much more out of them. They can sign up here :
When you write so many words and release them a little at a time, there’s uncomfortable truth. No-one has read all the ideas, and most people haven’t read the majority of them.
Far more still don’t even know they exist. And they don’t care. Words sent out into the wind.
There’s a lesson there for you if you lead others:
Don’t do what we do. Don’t talk about something different every week. Most people won’t have heard the last thing you’d talked about before you move onto the next.
You see, the key to great leadership and team success is to communicate repeatedly about the same, single idea.
It sounds boring. Yet it’s the key to success. People’s memories are short, and when they’re busy (like they always are in a school) their memories are even shorter.
If you don’t believe me, here are two examples.
First of all, chip (fry, if you insist) masters McCain.
They are incredibly boring in their communications strategy.
They have done the same thing without change for the last decade .
McCain’s are not the cheapest chips on the market where most frozen chips taste the same.
But by keeping the message the same, they’ve managed to reduce price sensitivity amongst consumers by 47%, meaning customers are happier to pay a bit more.
And then McCain increased their pricing by 50%.
And the customers barely cared about that. They kept buying.
Eventually McCain enjoyed almost $50m a year in extra profit with the same potatoes making the same chips, but just with marketing that communicated one thing.
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The second lesson comes from Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul.
If you went to an Aretha concert and didn’t hear her sing (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman you’d have been disappointed.
She moved President Obama and me to tears singing it for songwriter Carole King’s Kennedy Center Honor in 2015 (I’ve put the clip in below).
But it wasn’t always like that. Franklin was a singer and songwriter who was always experimenting, writing, trying new things. We don’t remember the things that didn’t work out today.
In 1966 after six years at Columbia Records she owed them money, because she’d not been as successful as expected.
She had a string of hits with her new label, but by the mid-1970s she hit a near decade of hitless doldrums.
She popped up on 80s films and television series to pay the bills.
Only in 1988 - 16 years after her last hit - did she get her “big break”, filling in for Pavarotti at the Grammys at the last minute. Nessun Dorma. A standing ovation. Six years later she entered into the Kennedy Honors Hall of Fame.
Most of her life, she wasn’t viewed as being ‘successful’ by traditional means, as she flipped from soul to gospel to jazz to funk (briefly) to television ditties to opera and back to soul.
Maybe she’d have been more successful by traditional means had she stuck to one message. Maybe not.
You can do different things, talk about different ideas, and sing different songs as long as you stick to your purpose, stick to what you know you’re there to do.
The Queen of Soul wasn’t the Queen of Soul until she recognised that Soul was where her soul was.
The most important lesson after that is this, said Franklin:
“You cannot define a person on just one thing. You can’t just forget all these wonderful and good things that a person has done because one thing didn’t come off the way you thought it should come off.” — Aretha Franklin
So even if you’ve not read all 299 Provocations written so far, thank you for reading this one, and encouraging your colleagues to sign up for the 300th .