ALTERNATIVE MARKETING LESSONS
WHICH SHOE TO BUY? I LIKE SEVERAL.
Krav Maga learning interpretation 9
WHICH SHOE TO BUY? I LIKE SEVERAL.
This is the ninth in the series of alternative learning from Krav Maga.
TEN PAIRS of shoes in front of me.
I loved all of them, as they, me!
I could buy only one pair.
Life is not fair!
For most of my childhood, there were only two times we used to buy new clothes. One set for my birthday and another for Deepavali, the big grand festival of India. The rest of the clothes and footwear were mostly hand-me-downs from the elders in the family.
The typical middle-class way of living in the 70s and 80s was a culture of savings and making every Rupee stretch.
As I grew up, I inherited my family legacy of bunions in the feet! Broad feet with a bunion made wearing narrow leather shoes hell. My job as an entrepreneur and marketer ensured that I would be on my feet most of the day. Hell!
My close friends knew my predicament. On my first visit to the United States, they took me to a huge outlet mall. There were shelves upon shelves, rows upon rows of shoes. I was in love.
The shopkeeper, Tim, knew his work. For the first time, my feet were measured in multiple ways. It was also the first time I heard the term bunion.
Tim looked at me and asked if it pained every night. “All day too”, I replied!
It was a revelation when Tim mentioned that shoes come in different widths, and my foot width was a 2E. Who knew about all this! He told me my exact size and asked me to pick a few pairs.
For the next two hours, I was in the same shop picking up pair after pair. Until I had ten pairs in front, and I had been gazing at them for ten minutes. The complexity of choice, especially when there are so many.
I was in full-on analysis paralysis mode, unable to make a decision. The patience of my friends was running thin!
Tim was an old hand. He came up to me and said: “You have shortlisted ten pairs. Instead of trying to pick one out of ten, pick one out of two.
Wear one design on your left foot, another on your right. Walk a bit and select one. Let’s say you are more comfortable with the design you are wearing on your right foot. Retain that and discard the one on your left foot. Now, pick another design and wear it in your left foot. Repeat this exercise until you are down to the last two pairs. Pick one!”
When the decision-making framework is simplified, it leads to speed.
**
Have a simple framework. It makes decision making easier and faster.
Another key lesson from Krav Maga. You will learn a lot of moves. When there’s an attack, you cannot be evaluating which move to make!
When you keep the decision framework simple, you make the optimal move and neutralize the opposition.
In business, we revel in adding layers of complexity. It somehow makes us feel greater!
We need to kill the cliches that continuously run in our mind:
- If it is too simple, maybe I did not think it through enough.
- The client will scoff at us if we go back to him with such a simple solution.
- The management will think less of me if the solution is not complicated!
Success lies in simplicity.
Whether it is awareness, engagement or client attraction — when the product and messaging is simple, the uptake is higher.
When we have a simple framework to communicate, our clients will understand it better.
Random footnotes:
When I was in school, many proposals (as in boy proposing to a girl) were made using Cadbury’s chocolate. No letters, no words, just a bar of chocolate.Why? Cadbury’s messaging was: “A gift for someone you love.” Their sales had an uptick; I am sure, though, that they had not envisioned their role as a purveyor of romance. 🙂
We all have that one friend who loves hooking people up, either for relationships or for business (networking connections). That person, in my circle, was called NOKIA. The tagline Nokia ran with was “Connecting people”!
This is the ninth in the series of learning from Krav Maga.
Pravin Shekar is an outlier marketer, parallel entrepreneur and a raconteur.
mic @ PravinShekar.com .
For creative collusions, join: http://bit.ly/JoinMyOutlierTribe
Pravin is the author of seven books: Devil Does Care, Marketing lessons from Mythology, Getting paid to speak, a Virtual Summit Playbook, Climb your way out of hell & a collection of travel pics/romantic poems, and stories from the heart!
http://tiny.cc/PravinShekarBooks
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