If I were to give PR and Marketing a 'personality', I would have to say that they were like the famous Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture, Erno Rubik. In 1974 Monsieur Rubik invented his now famous 3-D mechanical puzzle, Rubik's Cube. In a classic Rubik's Cube all sides can be rotated and each is divided into nine squares, the moving pieces allowing the cube to be rearranged. The goal is to get the colored squares aligned so that each side of the cube has a face of exactly one color. If you're over five years old, and assuming you can read, you should have a pretty good idea of what I am talking about, because by 2005 Ideal toys had sold over 300,000,000 of Rubik's frustrating invention, once named German Game of the Year ! The key word in there is 'frustrating' because, just as you think you have solved the puzzle, you turn the cube round and there it is starting defiantly back at you …… a single orange square sitting in a sea of red squares, somehow saying "you have not solved me yet". And so it is with PR, Marketing or any line of business you happen to be in. You can spend a lifetime working in an industry and still not know everything, however, hard you try. And everything has changed so much and continues to do so every day. I'm sure you could quickly have a dinosaur if you took a two year sabbatical!
I remember walking into a museum with my niece and looking at a series of domestic settings from the 60's, 70's and 80's. When I got to the 1980's room I looked on in horror to discover that the very manual typewriter I had first penned copy on was staring right back at me. My life had been cataloged by a curator and I was still alive! "I used to have one of those," I said. My niece immediately wanted to know how this contraption worked and looked both concerned and sympathetic at how difficult it must have been in the "olden days!". I'm 47! But, in the 'olden days' – I was working on a newspaper at that point – we used to have pieces of 'jotter paper' which were torn in half to produce small squares of paper slightly smaller than A5. A piece of carbon paper was placed between two sheets which were then fed into the typewriter and used to write our stories on. Nowadays we look at these rituals and consider them outdated. But, you know what? The newspapers still seemed to get onto the streets faster that their modern equivalents and the typewriter did not 'hang' every half hour other than the printing presses 'crashed'!
Seriously I'm amazed at how everything has moved on. When I moved into freelance reporting – the forerunner to my career in PR – we used to write a story then ring every national newspaper newsdesk and dictate our copy to typists at the Sun, the Daily Mirror, the News of the World and so on. …. until we had phoned every newsdesk. It took hours. Imagine my amazement, therefore, when the first portable computers came out. Each had two tiny sponge pads which went over the telephone receiver and simultaneously transmitted copy directly into national newseditor terminals in a matter of seconds. One phone call and everything was done. New technology not only saved us time but created more space for story writing and, theoretically, more income generation time, although it never seemed to work out like that because pay rates when down as competition from things like the internet and TV increased!
Staying ahead of your game is one of the challenges of working in the modern world, but you should never lose sight of where things have come from because an appreciation of the past can often help you work more effectively in the present. That said, it is dangerous to live in the past too much because you never move on and that's when people start to smile at you generously and observe that you are probably preparing for retirement!
Top 10 Tips for Staying Ahead of the Marketing Game
– Subscribe to marketing industry magazines
– Never be afraid to learn from someone younger than you
– If you do not know, ask. There is no shame in saying 'I do not know'
– Attend marketing training courses to update your skills
– 'Attack' those things that scared you most
– Do not get in a rut.
– Continually break the mold
– Avoid negative people. Work with optimists
– Try new things. Expand your knowledge base
– Be confident in everything you do and never be afraid to say 'sorry' or 'I got it wrong'.
And remember, the more you know the more you're worth but, more importantly, the nicer you are and the easier you are to be with, the more people want to work with you …… and that, my friend , makes you a very valuable commodity indeed. Be nice ….. and as you get older learn to delegate!