Any pulpit will do Step 10. Any pulpit will do

Gurus need exposure like a flame needs oxygen. I said yes to every opportunity. Would I speak to this group. yes. Would I travel to this godforsaken place and spend a day with these relatively insignificant people. Yes. Would I step in at the last minute and make a speech at an event. Yes.
The day i was asked: Can you edit a magazine, I said Yes. Then went about finding out how to edit a magazine. I write articles for magazines. Sometimes I get paid for it.
Gaining the editorship of Australia's largest circulating marketing magazine was a stroke of luck. It was a challenge and I wrote nearly the entire issue for the first couple of years. But 20 years later my name is still on the masthead and my articles are still the most popular items that appear.
To become a guru you need a platform forf your pearls of wisdom.

I had a couple of would-be gurus try to muscle in on my patch, but I sent them packing. They had no substance and were more interested in becoming gurus than in helping people. (Oops! I let the secret out of the bag too early. Yes. A guru needs one furthe essential ingredient. A sincere desire to help people.)  ¶ 10:28 PM 0 comments

  The Land says I'm a guru
Here's proof that, when faced with a person who appears to know more than they do, the media immedioately reach for the word 'guru'. It is used twice in this article which appeared last week. Once in the caption and also in the opening sentence.
Nice article. Half a page, on page 33. Opposite a report which indicates that the current bosses of the wool industry do not understand marketing. I'm angling to take over the job. "Bring in the Guru!" they will shout.

  ¶ 3:11 PM 0 comments

  Create something out of air
Step 9. Smoke their mirrors.

To be a true guru, you have got to appear to add to the store of human knowledge.
I say "appear to" because some of my fellow (though uncertified) gurus get by with a bunch of stolen concepts that anyone could lift from anywhere. And, as an expert is someone who knows 5% more about a topic than the average person, they often get away with it. (The public is gullible.)
The easiest way to be seen to adding to knowledge is to re-label someone else's ideas. How many times has the Ladder of Loyalty been trotted out and messed with and called things like "The Ladder of Commitment"?
I hit a home run with the concept of "clutterbusters", dimensional mailpieces that broke through the clutter and disrupted the daily routine of the recipient and got great results. I lifted the idea from an old article in Industrial Marketing magazine. I added a psychological explanation for the reactions we were getting, spun right out of my head. And voila! Guru.
Another favourite of mine is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Very handy little model when talking marketing. In fact, liberal use of models denotes aspiring gurudom. Over use of them indicates tryhard.
On the path to gurudom, keep up with the manufacturers of models. They feed the punters' need for certainty.  ¶ 3:43 PM 0 comments

  Study with the Masters










Step 8. Find a Master

I found many. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi found one - Guru Dev, a nickname for the Universal Guru Shankaracharya Jyotirmath, Swami Brahmananda Saraswati Maharaj. The Transcendental Meditation people make you kneel before a picture of the "Maharshi" (the correct pronounciation) standing surrounded by flowers looking up a hill toward Guru Dev and up above him were other hairy men in dresses, obviously gurus and gurus of gurus.
If you are to become a guru, ya gotta get a guru.
My first guru was Dale Carnegie, who wrote How To Win Friends and Influence People - a book given to me by a 'friend' as a kind of insult, as one would give another a bar of soap. By the time I read it, Dale was long dead, but his teaching lived on in the form of his courses. I did one. It transformed my life.
He taught me to expect ingratitude, that humans are self-conscious and self-obsessed, and that the way to get what you want is to help other people get what they want.
The next guru I attached myself to was David Ogilvy. I joined his company and worked for it and no other except my own. I encountered DO while waiting for a bus during rush hour in Sydney's Pitt Street. He was in the window of a book shop in the form of a book called "On Advertising". He taught me that advertising could be a business for 'gentlemen with brains' and that it paid to have a 'well-furnished mind'. He taught me that if I worked twice as hard as the next person I would get ahead three times as fast. He taught me always to give my client's product a first class ticket. He taught me that a penniless copywriter could wind up living in a chateau in the Loire Valley and commanding the world's largest advertising agency and still be an interesting person . He taught me that real copywriters knew how to write direct response copy.
So I badgered the creative directors of the local office of Oiglvy & Mather Direct* until they gave me a job. It took 18 months.
After that I learned from giants like John Hancock (who called what we did for a living "flogging stuff" and who loved it when our work got 'down and dirty'). Giants like Brian Walker, recently deceased, who blue pencilled my copy until one day when I brought my copy to him, he told me "I don't want to see it. You're now flying solo." Giants like Mike Birmingham, who looked like a street person, spoke like an Oxford scholar, and wrote copy that sang; long copy ads for Mercedes Benz and long letters for the accursed American Express. When I was made Creative Director 18 months after joining the company as Trainee Copywriter, I inherited a bunch of young turks ready to wreck the joint and two 60-year-old getlemen writers who would spend time discussing with me the correct use of a semi-colon and the neccessity of the serial comma.
I was attracted to wisdom. As the editor of Marketing Magazine I put well-known industry personalities on the cover - taking my lead from the womens' magazines who know that people are interested in people and especially celebrities.
So I did this deal with the magazine - I'd put a marketing celeb on the cover and they would speak at our monthly luncheon to launch the issue. Celebs in an industry are usually celebs for a reason. They are either high achievers or self promoters. I learned something from all of them.
And a guru learns from ordinary people and children and nature, especially nature...  ¶ 8:58 PM 0 comments

  You know you've made it when... A woman walks into your boardroom and says, "I've wanted to meet you for a long time, just to see what you're like."
I am breathing heavily. She says, " I came to see the guru." I think 'This is getting outa hand...' She was a stunning brunette, tall, angular. Her eyes told of a million disappointments. I was disappointed.
"You're not getting any business out of me. I'm just curious to see what you're like."
That's when you know you've made it to guru status. When they show you no respect.
I had become a sideshow freak. But freak or no freak, I was going to do some business with that dame. somehow.
And that's how it turned out. We became good friends, and I forgave her the cheap shot when we met. She was simply marking her territory, declaring her need for defensive dominance.
She needed a hundred gurus in her life just then because it was splintering all apart. I was one of them.
Last time I saw her she was dancing with a cop. He promised me he'd be good to her. Her name means 'gold' in Croatian. She is gold. Pure gold.  ¶ 3:46 AM 0 comments

  Never say "No" Step 7. Never say "No"

Early in my journey towards gurudom I chose the path of "Yes". Yes to everything - the opportunity to speak at a conference, the chance to meet important people, the chance to help people who could help me in no specific way, then or later. It was always fun.
One day I received a call from a bloke I knew from college who was editing a trade mag. He was looking to find an editor for another trade mag, called Marketing World. He knew I had written some articles for other marketing mags and for the Financial Review. I was on his list of one.
Now I'd never edited anything. Didn't know the first thing about it. WHen he said, "Can you do it?" I said "Yes!" and hung up the phone. I then rang half a dozen editors I knew and asked them all the same question: "How do you do it?" Each one gave me one good point. Put them all together and I had a 6 point plan. I wrote a proposal for revamping the magazine (it was pretty shitty and the publisher didn't have a clue, as it turned out) and I had the job. I low-balled the money to get in, became indispensabled, and then ratcheted it up, but never too high as to be a problem.
Now gurus need a platform. My friend and fellow guru Deepak Chopra*, the guru's guru, travels to be with his followers (the mountain coming to the mountaineers) and keeps an endless stream of books which recycle and restate and reinterpret and renovate, reiterate, refresh and reignite revenue streams for his ideas which aren't really his ideas. He's an interpreter of realities, a spiritual tourist guide. He's the best.
I had my platform delivered to me. Marketing World became Marketing Magazine, then Marketing and eBusiness (when a couple of flips took over) then back to Marketing Magazine. Twenty years later my column still appears up front, dripping gravity and guruvity.
Never say "No".

*Notice how we New Age gurus leverage off each other, like geese flying in formation? Better than sled dogs, where it is only the lead dog who gets the best view.  ¶ 1:55 PM 1 comments

  Hard work never killed a guru Step 7. Hard work

In our last post we decided there is no such thing as hard work when you are doing the right work - work you love, work you would do in your own time, work that is recreation, work you have a passion for. It's only hard work to an outsider who doesn't have the bug.
When you're enjoying yourself, it's amazing how you find short cuts. How opportunities open up for you. WHen I discovered Marketing was my dharma, I became a magnet for information. People gave me stuff out of the blue.
A mate working in an ad agency told me they were throwing out a tea chest full of back issues of an industry magazine. Hey presto! I read the tea chest and suddenly I knew who the key players were, what the big issues were, and where the bodies were buried.
I read 12 metres of magazines I found on a university library shelf that no one else knew existed. I found in the pages of mags like Industrial Marketing (which became Business Marketing, then B2B) and Sales & Marketing Management whole marketing blockbuster ideas that were lost to the sands of time. When the time was ripe, I dusted them down and polished them up and presented them with pinache. And was declared a 'genius'.
That's a good start for gurudom.  ¶ 1:36 AM 0 comments

  Wax on, wax off Now all you aspiring gurus, listen up. This being a guru is not some cheap trick. It doesn't come like a toy with your Happy Meal. It takes years of hard work.... and luck. David Ogilvy told me, one rainy afternoon in paris in his office at Ogilvy Defrenois, "The harder I worked, the luckier I got." We'll talk about luck later. Right now let's talk about hard work.

Step 4: Hard Guru Work

Work can only be described as 'hard' when it is not interesting. If what you are doing is interesting and stimulating, and you haved enthusiasm for it, time flies. The work generates energy inside you. You have to be dragged away from it. This can only happen when you have chosen the right path, when you are 'in Dharma', as the Vedic scholars would say.
Choose well your field of gurudom.
So before we get stuck into Hard Work, let's talk about Dharma.

Step 5: Choose Dharma

Dharma means “right action”. It is both a Hindu and a Buddhist concept. (The Buddha started life as a Hindu.)
“Right action” has many meanings – the black letter theologians would say it is to live in accordance with the strict principles of their religion.
But “Dharma” has a wider universal meaning. It means to act in harmony with the forces of the universe and nature – especially your own nature. The promise is that when you act within dharma, everything action becomes effortless and wildly successful. Wow! I’ll have some of that! Finding your dharma is therefore a very valuable achievement. It means finding your true path to spiritual realisation – be it as a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, or marketing professional.
If the path in life that conforms with your duty and true nature is marketing, what does that mean? And how should you conduct yourself?

Step 6: Being honest with yourself

Gurus spend more time that the average Joe staring inwardly, hoping to find a clue.
The question of dharma comes up when you ask: “Is marketing my bag?” There are so many roles and job descriptions in the field, there is a big range of bags. But there are some general issues that unite them all. When you sign on for marketing, you find them in the bag:
Marketing is the engine room of consumer culture which is the latest version of the capitalist system which emerged when the old medieval agrarian society was transformed. Economic surpluses from agriculture were invested in new manufacturing processes which emerged at the time when steam engines and such arrived (19th century). Karl Marx complained that this process “alienated” man from his work as a productive actor in the business of getting a living from nature, and turned him into a factory cog or an unemployed rural worker. (But his alternative – or Lenin’s madcap version – was the Orwellian nightmare of the Soviets.) There’s not a lot of dharma in being a cog, but it’s at least a job.
Capitalist society – in which labour is a commodity to be purchased at the lowest price – relies on a pool of unemployed to be continually filled with recently retrenched bank or phone company workers so there will be competition for jobs and wages will be kept low, enabling fat profits for shareholders (the capitalists). This also involves moving jobs offshore to places like India where labour conditions and wages are (shall we say) more in tune with corporate greed than the trade union-dominated systems which protects the featherbedded, flabby worker. Capitalist society also finds trades union offensive to economic rationalist thought – people are lucky to have jobs. How dare they ask for a pay increase.
Some capitalists are smarter than others – like Henry Ford, who paid his worked 20% more than the average for his industry (so they’d be able to afford to buy his cars – old Hank knew he needed a mass market to match his mass production system).
If your dharma is marketing, it involves furthering the impact of consumerism in our society, including massive destruction of the natural environment to provide raw materials for factory production of goods and packaging. (Where did the forests go?) It also includes the burning of oil products to power automobiles and coal to provide energy for Game Boys and flat screen television sets. Both energy sources damage the ozone layer. Oil companies take turns leaving trillions of gallons of oil washing up on beaches and killing seabirds and fish in exotic places.
Most companies have an environmental policy, but recycling is as far as many go. The planet’s future as a home for humans is such that secret plans are being made for an American colony on the moon. (Sorry – the capitalism stuff will have to stop. We’re evacuating Earth at 5pm Tuesday.)
Dharma also requires that you be honest. How can an advertising copywriter (or anyone in advertising for that matter) claim to be strictly honest with consumers? They (we) deal with illusions and dreams, because consumers demand them. It’s all in the bag. Honest ads? (Death Cigarettes in the UK used a skull and crossbones as its logo and used government warnings as headlines for its ads. Clever, and dharma-tically correct. But selling the stuff?)
Marketing in a competitive economy means taking food off the table of the workers for competing companies. Marketing is warfare – and in wars, people get hurt on the other side when you win market share. So dharma-wise, there’s no room for the merciful.
It sounds pretty dismal for the karmic bank balance of marketing professionals. However, marketing is a skill set, not an ideology. Like Superman’s mighty powers, it can be used for good or evil (as I am sure the cause-related marketers, fundraisers and other do-gooders have been thinking, if they read this far.) Dharma or damned? You decide. See you on the plane (astral, that is).

Next; Step 7: Hard Work Revisited...  ¶ 1:08 AM 0 comments

  Becoming a Guru: First Steps There is no text book to plagerise, no website to lift ideas from. This step-by-step guide is coming our of my guru brain.

If you follow these steps religiously, I can guarantee you'll look and act like a marketing guru. But you may not be accepted as such unless you pay me for aspects of this training program that will not be free. (This is your first lesson in Marketing Guru Economics.)

Step One: You can't simply come out of the closet and announce that you're guru like you can announce that you're gay. (Though I guess you can't simply be gay on your own. You're not really gay until someone else lets you be gay with them, in a gay sort of way, if you know what I mean...)
Bad analogy. The point is that one does not confer guru status upon one's self. It must be conferred upon one by others. This is the important first point. A few people saying it is not enough. You must reach critical mass in public opinion. So it's a kind of brand job that you do on yourself. (Now you can see why they call me a guru.)

Step Two: To become a guru, you must have the desire to be a guru. It is true that some have gurudom thrust upon them. but if they cannot stomache the thought of assuming the onerous duties that come with the title, they quickly slip off into comfortable obscurity. A guru is a professional celebrity and must enjoy being on stage 24 hours a day. Every word you say is inspected for "guruvity" (which is the origin of the modern word "groovy", first applied to the original guru of the atomc age, my friend the Maharishi - pronounced "Maharshi" - Mahesh Yogi, who was a physicist before becoming a guru. I studied advanced guru with him.)

Step Three: Once you have established your intention to become a guru, you must look for a model to emulate. (Or you can follow the posts on this blog. Before this course, aspiring gurus had only the example of others to follow.) Either way you can learn a lot from models. My first model was Hugh Mackay, social researcher who appears on radio telling us what "mum" in the suburbs is thinking about all sorts of issues. If you asked the average 'mum' in the suburbs to name a social reasearcher, they'd name Hugh. That's the model I followed. Instead of quarterly reports from the frontiers of consumer society, I had my column in the only serious monthly magazine in my industry. Other models reveal other ways to guru status. David Ogilvy wrote a book called "Confessions of an Advertising Man" which was mostly fluff, but in the 60's people were fascinated by the subject and there weren't many books about it. And Ogilvy was a copywriter and wrote wonderfully. He admitted to me afternoon in Versailles that he wrote the book solely to attract clients and appear serious. That's an educated Englishman's way of saying "I wanted to become a guru." We deal with he book as guru tactic in a later post. Choose a model from any field. Look around. There are so many to choose from.

IN OUR NEXT POST: Point 4, etc.  ¶ 1:19 AM 0 comments

  Who says I am a Marketing Guru? AM I A MARKETING GURU?

We asked a randomly-selected sample of leading marketing figures, and 9 out of 10 agree Michael Kiely is a Marketing Guru:

Jeff Sanders, MD, RappCollins: "Michael Kiely is a marketing guru."
Simon Van Wyk, MD, HotHouse: "Michael Kiely is a marketing guru."
David Whittle, Head of Digital, M&C Saatchi: "Michael Kiely is a marketing guru."
Sam McConnell, Editor, Marketing Magazine: "Michael Kiely is a marketing guru."
Mark Warren, General Manager, Australia Post: "Michael Kiely is a marketing guru."
Linda Jones, MD, Recruit Direct: "Michael Kiely is a marketing guru."
Rob Edwards, CEO, Australian Direct Marketing Association: "Michael Kiely is a marketing guru."
Peter Evans, Senior Manager, Marketing, Toyota Motor Corporation Australia: "Michael Kiely is a marketing guru."
Brendon Tansey, CEO, Euro RSCG: "Michael Kiely is a marketing guru."
Deane Russell, Corporate Affairs Manager, AGL: "Michael Kiely is a marketing guru."
Some idiot whose name we forget: "Michael Kiely? Never heard of him."

SO STATISTICS PROVE I AM A MARKETING GURU.

Let's take a look at the curriculum vitae:

"Michael Kiely is a well-known commentator on marketing topics, having appeared many times on national radio and tv programs. He has been editor or executive editor of Marketing Magazine for more than 20 years. He is also a multi-award winning direct marketer, and was inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame in 2001. Michael was for 13 years executive chairman of Boomerang Integrated Marketing & Advertising, a brand and relationship marketing consultancy and managing director of Professional Interactive Media Management (PIMM), a CRM outsourcing operation. His long-standing clients have included Macquarie Bank, Lexus, Toyota, Fuji Xerox, the Health Insurance Commission, and Australia Post. He has served on the judging panel for many awards programs in marketing and speaks regularly at conferences and seminars. He is an award winning strategist, copywriter and creative director. He is a national director of the Australian Direct Marketing Association and is as flash as a rat with a gold tooth."

AND HOW DO PEOPLE REFER TO MICHAEL WHEN INTRODUCING HIM TO AN AUDIENCE:

"Michael Kiely is a marketing guru."

NOW TO BE ALLOWED TO CONTINUE VISITING THIS BLOGSITE YOU MUST BE ABLE TO COMPLETE THIS SENTENCE:

"Michael Kiely is a m________ g___."  ¶ 1:16 AM 0 comments