122: Imagining the future through the past
[During - Persuasion & Marketing] Thanks, Blois!
There’s a quote about building a college or university—ideally, the first thing you’d construct would be a cafeteria, so the students had a place to eat and most important, a place to talk with each other. Then if you had more money, you’d build a library. The last thing you’d consider would be hiring instructors. (If anyone has the source for that quote, please let me know!)
But the most important thing is to get the students talking with each other.
This week we had a real debate!
Thank you, Blois Olson
“Normal people don’t talk about politics.”
Many thanks to Tuesday’s Persuasion and Marketing guest, Blois Olson (LinkedIn), for helping elucidate the many sides and complexities of the current ridesharing situation here in the Twin Cities. And I thought we were just going to talk about how to persuade CEOs and elected officials.
Instead, we evaluated claims, asked important questions about fairness and equity, and otherwise engaged each other on an important issue. I don’t know if anyone changed any hearts or minds, but I do know we all learned a lot from each other. Through that process we discovered a lot about the patient business of relationship- and coalition-building. And the massive role data now plays in organizing and targeting specific points of view.
Blois wrote a wonderful reflection on his classroom experience. As he puts it, “The highlight and always rewarding part is to hear from the students. To understand and hear their perspectives and opinions is very insightful and is important to get a sense of their generation.” Considering his own 30-year career, Blois concludes:
“So as those students sat in the seats, I wondered what the world, design, public affairs and ‘our industry’ might look like in 30 years. Yikes.”
Yikes, indeed.
I’m almost done listening to the Acquired podcast episode on Microsoft—it’s nearly four hours, and we haven’t even gotten to the arrival of the Internet. (Apparently there will be an episode 2.) But the biggest take away, besides learning Apple funded 50% of the marketing costs to promote Excel when it launched—because Excel launched first on the Mac 😉—the biggest takeaway was how much has changed in our world since April 4, 1975.
When Blois and I got out of college and into marketing concepts like corporate websites and email didn’t exist. (I got my first email account in 1995, three years out of the University of Cincinnati.) Even the personal computer, now de rigueur, was a rare anomaly. My first ad portfolio was drawn by hand. As Blois notes, how we persuade has gone through and continues to experience radical transformation.
But so much has not changed.
Like the critical nature of relationship.
In that context, persuasion remains an illusive art, resisting easy automation. This is good, right?
We also listened to Mr Scruff on Tuesday (thanks for the tip, Heath!).
Once Blois bid us farewell, we shifted into final project mode. Students are working towards delivering expressions in response to: “How has your understanding of both persuasion and marketing evolved?” and “What aspects of persuasion and marketing appear salient and useful to you?” They’re allowed to work in video, text, multi-media, or create a presentation.
Remember, this course is new. It’s an experiment. We’ve journeyed through centuries, read a lot, and met all kinds of fascinating people engaged in the persuasive arts. I’m curious to see how the students took in the scope of what it means to persuade, and how they’ll make use of it over their next 30 years.