When is The Right Time?

As you may have seen in previous posts, I am a huge fan of many CBC radio shows. One of the best these days is Terry O’Reilly’s Under the Influence, as well as its predecessor The Age of Persuasion. In show’s website, O’Reilly states:

 “As the marketing world shifts from a century of overt one-way messaging to a new world order of two-way dialogue, we leave the age of persuasion and enter the era of influence.

The first 50 years of modern advertising was hard-sell. The next 50 years was persuasion through creativity and media tonnage. But advertising is no longer a loud one-way conversation. It's a delicate dialogue now. The goal is no longer to triumph by weight, but to win by influence.

Welcome to Under the Influence. An exploration of that critical shift."

I think his view of these paradigm shifts relate to more than just marketing. In some ways education is in the midst of similar changes.

I was listening to an episode a few weeks ago while ferrying my kids between Oakville and Toronto on Saturday and was quite captivated, to the point of rolling down my back window and turning up the volume so I could listen while filling up with gas.

The show was focused on the often forgotten fourth question of marketing. While defining what to say, how to say it, and to whom it should be said are commonly recognized as the key tenets of a successful marketing approach, O’Reilly suggested that  there is a fourth that can be just as powerful.  He went through a number of striking cases of the success of a marketing efforts being almost entirely based on their timing, either through deliberate planning or simple good luck.

Here are a few of the compelling examples he cited:

·         Those of you who fish will know Rapala lures. When I was a kid at camp on Georgian Bay, “the Rapala” was reputed to be one of the best lures (together with the “Red Devil”) to catch the really big Northern Pikes. Rapala was a modestly successful Finnish lure company until 1962, when there was an article in an August issue of Life Magazine on the Rapala Wobbler. Little could anyone have predicted, but Marilyn Monroe died just before the issue and it turned into a memorial to her. In modern parlance, the issue went viral and became the best-selling magazine of all time – and along with it soared Rapala. The two-person Rapala USA company received orders for 3 million lures over the subsequent few weeks, and its status in fishing was forever changed. This is why Rapala inducted Marilyn into its fishing hall of fame in 2008.

 

·       Target has developed an algorithm to identify which customers are pregnant. Apparently expectant mother change their buying habits in their second trimester of pregnancy as they have a tendency to load up on things such as unscented lotions, vitamin supplements, cotton ball and wash cloths. Target has had great success in using this predictor as the basis of focused marketing pitches. The only problem is the fallout when Target’s materials tip off family members who weren’t yet aware of the big news!

 

·       One of the US Navy’s most successful recruiting strategies was when they set-up booths at movie theatres aimed specifically at men leaving Top Gun full of inspiration to be the next Maverick or Iceman.

·       The thriller The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas, dealt with a television crew’s chance discovery of a nuclear melt-down at the local power plant. 12 days later, North America’s worst nuclear disaster took place when there was a nuclear meltdown at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania. The compounding impact of the sensational movie with the unlikely plot and the real-life accident caused a sea-change in the public attitudes towards nuclear energy. At the time of the accident 70 new nuclear facilities were being planned. Since that week, none have been built. 

·       O’Reilly opened my eyes to why many women really go to washroom in clubs. He featured a Dr. Scholls ad that is placed in many women’s washrooms in dance clubs. The ad asks the question about whether the women are really in there to take a break from their uncomfortable high heels? It goes on to promote the benefits of the super-comfortable Dr. Scholls fast flats shoe inserts. Once again, the campaign had huge impact.

O’Reilly’s point in all of these examples is when you say something has everything to do with whether your message will hit its mark. More specifically, understanding the mindset of the listener based on their experience at a given time can as important as what you say and how you say it. When the listener in the right mental zone and open to what you are trying to get across, then your chances of success are multiplied. Conversely, if the audience is mentally in a far-away place, there is no point delivering your message.

It all makes perfect sense, and it poses two questions to schools. The first is the institutional question: when is the best time to approach prospective students and their parents? When are these people most open to think about the possibility of independent school education and the Appleby experience? Once you understand the when, then the how becomes a bit clearer.

The second question is a pedagogical one but also applies to parenting. We have many important messages and themes we are trying to share with students. Sometimes it is frustrating because the arrow doesn’t seem to hit the mark. While we tend to plan out the “whens” according to the school timetable, the interesting question is when are our students’ minds most receptive to these messages? What are the times of the day or week or year or relationship with specific experiences that provide the most fertile “teachable moments”? And are they different for different kinds of messages?