Control Tower: ‘Maybe we ought to turn on the search lights now?’
Kramer: ‘No… that’s just what they’ll be expecting us to do.’
Most of business is run according to conventional logic. Finance, operations and logistics all operate through established best practice – there are rules, and you need to have a good reason to break them. But there are other parts of a business that don’t work this way, and marketing is one of them: in truth, it’s a part of business where there’s never best practice, because if you follow a standard orthodoxy your brand will become more like your competitors’, thus eroding your advantage. The above joke from Airplane! (1980) appears when the air traffic controller is trying to follow protocol, by turning on the lights on the runway for the approaching plane; Kramer, a war veteran, is frightened of being too predictable.” It underlines a serious point.
Excerpt from: Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense by Rory Sutherland