Blog posts tagged adapt

Travel the world and steal some ideas

One of my heroes is Murray Raphel, a brilliant, inspiring speaker and a most excellent marketer.

If you see any of his books, buy them. They're all good, practical, down-to-earth stuff bereft of meaningless jargon.

This is hardly surprising because his family ran (and for all I know still runs) a retail business in New Jersey. That's a bit like direct marketing. You know the next day if something has worked.

Murray once said something I have never forgotten: “Search the world and steal the best".

I do this all the time. And I advocate it for two reasons.

1. I can never have enough ideas, but they are hard to come by. So I belong to the W.A. Mozart School of creativity. Mozart said, "I never tried to be the slightest bit original".
2. Contrary to what many, maybe most imagine, what works in one country very often works in another.

So wherever I go I look out for ideas I can steal and transfer — particularly America, where customers have the most money and the most highly-paid people trying to take it off them.

I see many examples in all sorts of places. Some have been transferred; some haven't. And I am just amazed at how poorly multi-nationals exploit this potential synergy.

One instructive case was a few years ago when I was running (or at least failing to screw up) the O & M direct Amex account. One of my main objectives was to move good ideas around the world.

We were selling an accident insurance policy with a pack that was doing OK in the UK (sounds like a song title, doesn't it?) and they had another doing as well in the US. Both were typical long-copy sells.

Then I saw some copy in our Singapore agency. A client had the idea of just letting people have the policy for a month at no charge, then they could decide to keep it or stop it.

The mailing looked like crap — and pulled like crazy. (Moral: good ideas matter more than fancy execution).

We tried it in Hong Kong. It worked there. Then in Spain. It worked there too. Then in London — and so on.

It was always hard work getting local markets to accept ideas from elsewhere because of the not-invented-here syndrome, but it made a lot more sense than starting from scratch.

The golden rule to bear in mind was laid down by Confucius: "Men's natures are alike; it is their habits that divide them". 

If there is no cultural reason why something won't work, try it. Don't change it except where absolutely necessary.

Drayton Bird is a renowned direct marketing teacher, speaker and author. Find out more about him on his profile.