Best recommended TED Talks for marketing folks
“Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.”
As a marketer, one couldn’t relate more to this famous saying. Over time, marketing has progressed and changed drastically. Each day we see brands coming up with new and innovative ideas to sell. However, the basics remain the same — create value in your offering and people will come to you.
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TED is one of those institutions based on the same value system. Ideas are what they create and share from every discipline of life. There’s a plethora of TED resources that reflects upon marketing and different aspects of the business function.
What is marketing? How to choose a target group? How to brand or rebrand a product? These are the conventional answers which you wouldn’t expect a TED Talk to answer. However, if you are looking to redefine your ways of marketing while sticking to the basics, you are in for a treat.
Here are some inspiring ideas for marketers to ponder upon:
Give your customer a choice
In this famous TED Talk; Choice, Happiness and Spaghetti Sauce, Malcolm Gladwell changes the way you think during product development. An author and writer at The New Yorker, Gladwell has written a lot of content on breaking the stereotype and inspiring people to achieve the zenith. In this talk, he mentions a man called Howard Markowitz who gave people the freedom to choose and embrace their variability. The key to this is knowing what the customer really wants and developing product s around it.
Connect to bring about a change
We have moved to an age of mass marketing average ideas and lots of ads. In his fantastic presentation, The Tribes We Lead, Seth Godin speaks about his ideas on branding and leaves us thinking about how we can use mass media to reconnect with people and form ‘tribes’. Since the foundations of such groups are based on shared ideas and values, they give people the courage to lead.
Perception is everything
A masterstroke from the OgilvyOne Executive Creative Director, Rory Sutherland, is his TED Talk, Life Lessons from an Ad Man. A take on rebranding and advertising, Sutherland’s talk asserts the importance of understanding that value is but perception. He shares his life lessons in this humorous and candid talk, mentioning how much the modern means of communication can do in creating and sustaining perceptions of brand.
Get your message right
Sebastian Wernicke, a motivator by profession, uses statistics to build this eye-opening TED Talk, Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics. He takes this opportunity to reveal smart tips on selecting topics and words and how they to lead the mood of the people who you are addressing. As marketers, it is of the utmost importance to pick the right words and say them in the right manner, and Sebastian does the magic for us.
Customer is the king pin
Amy Lockgood pours her life story in the brilliant four-minute TED Talk: Selling Condoms in Congo.
She calls herself a reformed marketer. Her trip to Congo to sell condoms broke the shackles on marketing for her. She realised the stark distinction in the target group. She realised that it doesn’t matter what you are selling; you should just focus on your end consumer.
The beauty of these TED talks is that besides shedding light on marketing mantras, each speaker urges the marketers to touch the human spot, sometimes reconnecting with the self and sometimes touching the lives of the many customers.
