on the way home last night I found myself listening to interviews with the late Russell Ackoff the system theorist who among other things coined the phrase F Laws for incompetent management practice - there's already a couple of books here's one: book of F Laws out and another due out in the next couple of weeks time.
What I found most interesting about Ackoff was his radical views on education. He quoted a study he had done which found that teachers learned more than anybody else in the classroom. The reason he claims why teaching is so ineffective is that teaching and learning and treated as symmetric - and teaching is a far more efficient way of learning than being taught! I can vouch for this - as someone who trains my grasp of the material increases noticeably the more I do it because the interaction with those I train forces me to clarify and to sort out my thinking. So village schools were ideal learning environments according to Ackoff because the children taught one another and the teacher acted as a resource. It is a paradox that in changing the educational system as often as they have with frequent initiatives - the politicians have proved themselves to be great educators. Unfortunately they are mostly educating the teachers who have to revise and rework their approaches every year.
I want to apply this to marketing. Creating advocates has long been a mantra for CRM and loyalty enthusiasts. It has also become core to word of mouth marketing. Why try to sell to people if your most loycal customers are willing to do the job for you? I have said before that the WOM mechanism is an important one even if it is ineffective in drawing new users because of the effect it has on the person making the recommendation who is reinforced in their belief in the product - it may be this which encourages the advocate to buy or consume in even greater quantities. The pareto ratio of 80% of sales being consumed by 20% of customers would seem to bear this out.
What Ackoff's insight suggests to me is that as advocates recommend products they are actually reinforcing and clarifying what they have learned. Recommendation may be even more powerful than usage in forcing people to conceptualise why a product is good and what it has done for them. Compared with the average marketing message which is so obviously artificial and which has no personal endorsement behind it advocates would seem to me to be worthy of more study. We usually try to eliminate heavy users from research because they are not typical. Perhaps heavy users and recommenders have something to teach us because of the way they have learned to organise their material.
I suggest if you want to benefit from this that you respond with a comment. If Ackoff is right I've got more from writing this blog than you from reading it. Go figure!!!
