TO paraphrase the Apple ad, here’s to the lazy ones. The slackers. The couch potatoes. The ones who thought, why is this such a schlep? Surely there is an easier, quicker way? Because the people who are lazy enough to think that the world needs to be changed, are the ones who do.
Think about it. If it weren’t for lazy people, we’d still be living in grass huts. We’d have to walk everywhere. And food would be something we dug up or stuck spears into, whether or not the ancestors had anything to do with it.
It’s the hard workers throughout history, the people who are prepared to carry on doing things the way they have always done them, no matter how exhausting and frustrating, who have stood in the way of progress.
Six thousand years ago or thereabouts, some bright spark on the plains of present-day Ukraine realised that you didn’t have to walk everywhere: you could ride a horse and get there faster. He probably emerged from the first couple of encounters a bit battered and bruised, but it paid off in the long run. A couple of thousand years later, an anonymous Sumerian figured out that two wheels attached to an axle and a platform could make it easier to move your stuff around. And if you attached that basic structure to a horse, you had a really handy transportation device.
Nothing drives innovation like laziness.
The millennia are a litany of labour-saving devices that have helped humanity get more done, faster. The Archimedean screw, the plough, the windmill, the cotton gin, the telephone, planes, trains and automobiles: all of them, regardless of the effort that went into their invention, the product of the principles of laziness.
The principles of laziness apply to marketing, too. Many of the activities that form a part of a communication campaign can be dauntingly labour-intensive. Whether it’s a direct mailer, a CRM program or a sales incentive scheme, there’s usually a lot of time-consuming work involved. And as marketers look to make their communication more personalized and engaging, and less likely to be filtered out, it means that a one-size-fits-all approach simply won’t work get the results they want and need.
We at Wunderman face these challenges every day.
What do you do, for example, when you want to develop a loyalty and incentive programme targeting a diverse range of bar staff, waiters and restaurant owners? Consider that every one of these targeted individuals, after registering for the programme, must accumulate points by answering product-related questions via sms and then redeem them using the same mechanism in order to claim a prize. And of course to make sure that the programme is measurable, it must be tracked against sales for a whole range of restaurants, clubs and pubs nationwide.
That’s a lot of work. Repetitive, fiddly, admin-intensive work.
So, using the principles of laziness, the clever analytics people at Wunderman South Africa developed an automated system that did all of this for them. The processes of registering, answering questions to accumulate points, and redeeming points for prizes, were set up to function automatically. Sales are later uploaded onto the laptops of reps across the country and then downloaded via remote access to the Wunderman server. From here a report is generated, again an automated process.
This system took many hours to build and perfect. But now that it’s there, it only needs the input of new data to adapt to any future changes.
As specialists in relationship marketing, we at Wunderman know only too well that, no system can ever replace personal contact, because relationships are built with other human beings. The automated system for our alcoholic beverage client works so well because it functions in tandem with personal contact from mixologists and sales people. The system takes care of the time-consuming administrative side of incentivising sales, freeing their people up to do what they’re best at.
Being lazy also means never wanting to start from scratch. So Wunderman’s 9 Cell Matrix is also an example of the laziness principle at work, and one we’ve applied to . At its heart, it is a simple, step-by-step overview of a campaign, from initial brief, through creative concept, to result. Putting it in place means that we learn from every campaign that we do, in order to improve the next marketing initiative. Marketers that don’t learn from what has been done before will be doomed you to the tedious repetition of mistakes, their own and other peoples’.
These days in the corporate world, people always talk about not wanting to “reinvent the wheel”. It’s a terrible cliché, but it’s true. We might not be lazy, but we value the principles of laziness.
These include:
- Never start from scratch. Always learn from what has been done before.
- Automate your processes. Repetitive tasks are not the best use for your people. The best use for your people is providing the human touch.
- Get it right first time. Lazy people know that if a task is a mission, the best way to deal with it is to get it out of the way, without the need to re-do it.
- Don’t waste time, money or resources talking to people who don’t care about what you have to say to them. Tell someone who cares.
- Taking the time and effort to build a good system now will mean more time for a cold beer later.
See where our thinking can take you.
