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Welcome to the second edition of the newsletter. My readership has almost doubled since I sent out my first newsletter last September. Thank you so much to those who have signed up over the last few months. It means so much. Articles:My latest article, Adland is an Island, was published in February. It argues that those of us who work in advertising and marketing lead completely different lives from the audiences we seek to sway. It argues that we have different demographics, attitudes and personalities. It argues that we consume different media and consume it on different devices. It argues that we spend our working lives differently, our downtime differently and that we even shop at different stores. This article was nominated for February’s Post of the Month on Neil Perkin’s site, Only Dead Fish. I was, however, pipped to the post by a double entry from the excellent Phil Adams. Do give them a read. He was undoubtedly the deserved winner. Threads:Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow The psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002. His book Thinking Fast and Slow distills his work on human decision making. In doing so, it highlights both the brilliance and limitations of the human mind. I summarised the book as a Thread on Twitter. If you’d prefer, you can read it as a single post over on my site. The B2B Institute, The 5 Principles Of Growth In B2B Marketing Back in 2019 The B2B Institute commissioned the first-ever business-to-business cut of the IPA Effectiveness dataset. In the report that followed, Les Binet and Peter Field explored the five principles of growth for B2B marketing. Again, I summarised the report both on Twitter and on my site. Links:After publishing The Forecasting Fallacy, conversations with Bruce Clarke, Associate Professor of Marketing at Northeastern University, and Dr. Raj Thamotheram, encouraged me to dig in to the field of Scenario Planning. Here’s the best four pieces I read on the subject: The use and abuse of scenarios: Scenario planning is concerned not with what will happen but with what might. The idea is not to predict the future but to explore multiple possibilities and plan for them accordingly. It expands your thinking, uncovers inevitabilities, protects against groupthink and allows conventional wisdom to be challenged. McKinsey & Company Overcoming obstacles to effective scenario planning: McKinsey outlines the five biases that can derail scenario planning: Availability bias, probability neglect, stability bias, over-optimism and social bias. Avoiding these biases should lead to more effective scenario planning. McKinsey & Company Scenario Planning, A Tool for Strategic Thinking: A good, thorough overview of scenario planning from MIT Sloan School of Management: Define the scope and major stakeholders. Identify known trends and critical uncertainties. Prioritise variables and check for consistency. Conduct research and create scenarios. MIT Sloan Management Review Living in the Futures: 85% of all scenario planning is based on the process developed by Royal Dutch Shell in 1965. This article gives a good overview of the company’s key principles for the discipline. Harvard Business Review Talks:I have no new talks to share with you in this edition, so I’ll reshare the two from the last newsletter. You can see me speak about The Pitfalls of Purpose over on IsolatedTalks and, if you’re a member of Julian Cole’s Planning Dirty Academy, you can see me presenting a deck we collaborated on called The Art of Questioning Clients. Whilst I’m at it, if you’d like to catch up on the last edition of this newsletter you can read it, in full, here. It covers forecasting, pricing, purpose and memory. … Thank you again for being among the first subscribers to sign up for this newsletter. If you enjoyed the edition, feel free to share it with those who may find it valuable. You can also follow me on the social links below to get more frequent updates. As always, please do let me know if you have any feedback. I always love to hear from you. Until next time, Alex
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