How To Become a Marketing Guru
Thursday, April 13, 2006
  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...
 
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Michael Kiely, CMG., is Australia's only official Marketing Guru. His guru status has been certified by the International College of Certified Marketing Gurus. He is the only marketing practitioner qualified to use the letters CMG after his name. Beware of cheap imitations. To sign up for "Guru Michael's Marketing Thought For The Day" -a free email service - visit www.michaelkielymarketing.com.au.

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