Have you noticed the rise of the term “tone deaf”?
I thought I had. So I gave it a check just now on Google Trends. Turns out my suspicions were correct: the use of “tone deaf” has shot up three-fold in the past three weeks.
It’s an ugly epithet. Unsurprisingly, businesses are tripping over each other not to sound tone-deaf and instead, to sing a sweet-sounding corona-themed lullaby to soothe their stressed customers. The lullaby is titled, “During these uncertain times.”
But let me stop with these tone-deaf jokes, and let me give you something useful:
I’ve got this theory that predicting the future is really hard. That’s why I’ve ignored any advice coming out in the past month about how to prepare for the “new normal.” That doesn’t mean all this advice is bad — I’m sure some of it is spot on — but I’m not smart enough to figure out who’s right and who’s just very persuasive.
There is an alternative though. There have been plagues before and there have been economic collapses.
So if somebody came out with a bunch of advice, say, during the 2008 economic crisis… and this person survived this crisis and emerged from it better off… then this advice might be worth listening to.
And that’s what I’ve got for you today. It’s a talk given some 11 years ago by Dan Kennedy. I listened to it yesterday and it was one of the most enlightening marketing talks I’ve heard in a long while — and not just during these uncertain times.
Only thing is, if you’re easily offended by tone-deaf marketing, you’ll definitively want to skip this talk. In fact, Dan Kennedy says at the start that, out of the thousands of talks he’s given in his life, this was the only time he got a complaint letter ahead of the talk itself, and not just after.
So consider yourself warned. If you’re still up for it, here’s where to go: