Lessons from Disney's CEO
Straight from the mouse's mouth
Mehdeeka is for solo marketers or small teams working in the B2B, SaaS, startup, and tech spaces. Check out the previous issue: an interview with Lauren Stephenson. Help me grow Mehdeeka by sharing it with a friend or colleague!
In Bob Iger’s memoir/business book, The Ride of a Lifetime, he discusses (among many other things) his interview process for the role as CEO at Disney. After the announcement that he was a candidate, brand and political consultant Scott Miller gave Bob some advice.
Despite being about a job interview, the advice is so incredibly poignant for marketing of any kind. I’m going to give an overview of the advice (and keep the original context and examples), but I strongly encourage you to read the book, I absolutely devoured it!!
I think these ‘rules’ are useful whether you’re running a political campaign, interviewing for a job, or doing something like product content, customer engagement, or brand/crisis management.
Identify who is in your corner, who would absolutely never give you a chance, and who your swing voters are. Focus on your swing voters.
You can’t rely on the past, you have to focus on the future. Being defensive about what has already happened is useless.
“This is a battle for the soul of the brand”, focus on the value you already hold, and how you can leverage that to create more value.
If your list of priorities is longer than 3 points, they’re not priorities, they’re distractions. A long list means divided attention and ambiguity about the order of those priorities.
You need to convey your priorities clearly and repeatedly.
Obviously I wanted to put my 1 min summary first, but you can actually read the whole excerpt on Scott Miller’s website, here.
If you’re wondering what Bob’s priorities ended up being (and what has driven the strategy of Disney for 15 years), they were 1) high quality, branded content 2) embracing technology to enable higher quality content and reaching wider audiences and 3) becoming a truly global company.
And now due to covid19, they’ve made the announcement that they’re going to be focusing way more on Disney+ which hits all 3 priorities!
Calming clicks
A few years ago, I found this little flash game and I come back to it every now and then when I need a hit of innocent mind-numbing mouse clicking to calm my brain down. You play as a giraffe and click your mouse to change the neck length to kiss other giraffes of varying heights.
I attended a webinar (kind of dry so not worth recommending) between Which-50 and Sitecore and there was one slide that really caught my attention;
We all know best practice, but sometimes it’s just nice to be reminded. Personally I have been doing a lot of very deep content lately and seeing this was like a sigh of relief that the extra steps I was taking were for the right reasons.
Last week I shared The Long and the Short of It which is co-authored by Les Binet, and now I’ve found an on-demand webinar about reviewing your media mix with Binet, Mark Ritson, and Paulsinkinson, run by Google - watch here.
If you’d like to submit a link (work you’re proud of, a question, a resource, anything!) just leave it here:
Coming up next week…
An interview. But with who?