Useless absurdity will define you more than useful practicalities

The first law of this pillar focuses on capitalising on brand messaging without dedicated budget. For Bartlett himself, as a young CEO he made a choice – what seemed like an ill-advised choice – that paid off dividends.

Having just secured $300,000 investment from his biggest client and moved his team to a new, huge office, Bartlett then blew $13,000 on a big blue slide, connecting his mezzanine floor to the ground floor and depositing people into a matching ball pit.

He had no sales team, and he confesses that his team hardly even used the slide. However, the slide’s effectiveness was as a marketing message — it told the world that his company was a young, innovative, creative, and disruptive business.

Even without a sales team, that big blue slide became a marketing tool on its own and graced the pages of many a newspaper, magazine, and blog. It created an ethos for Bartlett’s team, and company as a whole, that others were fascinated by and gravitated towards.

Think of Tesla, world-renowned home of innovative and eye-wateringly priced ’super cars’. Now think of what you know about Tesla cars. I bet it wasn’t a list of practical, useful things these cars do or have, was it?

More likely, a veritable feast of weird and wacky Tesla features popped to mind, such as dog mode, caraoke, or perhaps even rainbow or Santa mode. Bartlett points out that a company’s public story is very rarely defined by the useful things they do and sometimes not even by the main features of the flagship products.

However, the useless absurdity that companies come out with are far more likely to be what’s remembered, and will be what your brand name is associated with. For Tesla, these absurd features generate far more conversation, more articles, and more headlines, than any of their useful features.

Back on the level of most of us mere mortals, there is a tendency for people to lean away from absurdity, because they don’t understand it or believe in it. Bartlett suggests that appointed CEOs are typically more risk-adverse than company founders, who are more likely to believe in and act on the power of absurdity.

But whether you’re a CEO, a founder, perhaps a team leader, or even ’just’ a sales rep, what you do and say conveys a message about who you are, or what you aren’t. In today’s saturated marketplace, normality is ignored — it’s too polite, too vanilla.

Absurdity, standing out from the crowd, and being different are far more likely to draw interest, and ultimately that’ll be what sells, not the number of boring certificates on the wall, or the number of airbags in your run-of-the-mill car.