The P That Survives Longest While Wrong
Say you buy the outfit a model wore, because it looked stunning on him. Put it on — do you look like the model? No. The clothes are the same; the person is different. But here is someone more stylish than the model: the person who digests that outfit in a way its own designer never imagined, and takes it further. There are those who copy the original, there is the original, and there are those who surpass the original. What that last person does, I call second creation.
Ideas work like clothes. Hand someone the best idea and the best information, and if he lacks the ability to digest them, they never become strategy. An outfit on a hanger does not become style on its own.
So where does digestion come from? The eye. To follow anything, you first need an eye that can read what you are following — because what enters the mind enters through the eye. Show two people the same thing, and the one who cannot tell the difference will not create either. He becomes a blind man with open eyes — able to see the object, unable to know it. This is why the same thing, placed in different hands, produces different results. Benchmarking is not copying. It is borrowing an idea from elsewhere, digesting it as your own, and developing it into your own marketing. Without a reading eye, benchmarking becomes copying — and copying is buying the model’s outfit.
Nowhere does this absent eye cost more than in hiring. When a Las Vegas casino or a luxury condo gallery decides to do Asian marketing, the move is always the same: hire a “bilingual Asian.” But there is something the resume line “Korean: Native” does not tell you — where the owner of that fluent Korean was educated. The bilingual professional who came here as a child, or was born here, inherited the language from his parents; his mind was built by American schools. Language is learned at home. Culture is formed in the classroom. Bilingual is not bicultural.
Now look at your own market. Is the broker responsible for selling your condo tower, your new-home community, in his twenties or thirties? Unlikely. Forties, sixties, beyond — because you know seasoning matters. You know, as common sense in the mainstream market, that across generations the codes of language and empathy stop working. Yet in front of the Asian senior buyer — the buyer facing the most expensive decision of his life, the hardest buyer to read — you post a twenty-something with one bilingual line on a resume. The principle you keep in your own market, you abandon only in the market you do not know. None of this is the young employee’s fault. For second-generation buyers, for English-speaking buyers, they are the best people you have. The fault lies in the eye that read the language on the resume and could not read the culture that education built. And the reason owners and executives never even think of this — they have never packed the immigrant’s suitcase, so the difference does not exist on their list of thoughts.
But before the eye, there is a more fundamental gate. The ear.
How a person responds to a good idea reveals the person. One receives it, digests it, and develops it into his own. Another hesitates, or refuses — not because the idea is bad, but because accepting it feels like admitting he did not know. An inferiority that dreads showing its bare face closes the ear. The idea rolled in free of charge, and pride turns it away at the door.
And the price of a closed ear is not paid by that person alone.
In my last essay I wrote that there is a hand that cannot let go of the wrong ruler — and that what the hand covers is not only its own eyes. Let me finish the sentence now. What that hand covers is the owner’s eyes and ears. In an organization, market information travels upward through that seat. The moment its occupant decides to protect his past reports, he stops being a channel of information and becomes its filter. The new map stops in his drawer; only the old map travels up. The owner holds the authority to decide — and never receives the material to decide with. When the ship runs aground, it is not because the captain is incompetent. It is because the navigator, protecting the old chart he drew, never shows the captain the new one.
Why is this a marketing story? The textbook teaches marketing’s four Ps: Product, Price, Place, Promotion. But after forty years on the ground, I know the list is missing one P the textbook never wrote down. People. Because not one of the other four decides itself. People decide them all.
Now stand the five Ps side by side. When the product is wrong, you recall it. When the price is wrong, you change it. When the place is wrong, you move it. When the promotion is wrong, you pull it. Each of the four announces its own fault. But when the people are wrong? Nothing happens. Of the five, only people can hide the fault — to keep the seat. And so people become the P that survives longest while wrong.
Remember why the person entered that seat: to fix the wrong product, to fix the wrong price, to fix the wrong promotion. If he cannot see the fault — a blind man with open eyes — or sees it and cannot accept it — the closed ear — or knows it and sits on it to preserve his seat, then the ship called a company sailing for the mountains is a foregone conclusion.
A company is a wheel. To turn engaged with that wheel, harmony must be completed — and harmony requires yielding, opening the ear to hear others, and digesting what is heard into one’s own. The person whose ear is closed — not for lack of ability, but because inferiority sealed it — is not the person a company needs. Stepping down from the seat is what serves the company.
At the end of an earlier essay, I threw down a challenge. If you are certain, bring that certainty to me. If you are right, I learn; if not, you gain a market. An invitation with nothing to lose.
Now consider what it takes to accept that invitation. A rebuttal? No. It takes exactly one thing — the confidence to withstand “there may be something I do not know.” A person with real pride in his expertise does not avoid such a table. If he is right, he wins; if he is wrong, he learns; either way he gains. Avoiding it is not pride but its opposite — the door stays shut for fear the room behind it is empty.
So the challenge is also a test. Not of logic — of the ear. If someone accepts it, he is exactly the person this essay says a company needs. If no one does — that silence is this essay’s final evidence.
The key to marketing, to brands, to success, is in the end people. And the qualification is neither degree nor career. A reading eye. An open ear. And the power to digest what is received into one’s own and surpass the original — second creation.
In your organization, which P has survived longest while wrong?