July 2, 2006

Seem as You Want to Be

That's always good advice.

And a great example of that advice in action is Gamal Aziz's makeover of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Aziz apparently has a unique strategy for looking at businesses. He imagines what they could do, under the optimum circumstances. He characterizes the difference between what they are doing and what they could be doing as their loss. And then he alters them to conform to the model that has produced the idealized returns, and - voila - he "cuts his losses."

He took top floor suites that were being comped to high rollers, converted them into a super-high-end hotel within a hotel, and sells them now to c-level executives coming to Las Vegas for conventions. The result is a 90% revenue increase, and 32% profit increase.

He converted the hotel's theater from an EFX Showroom to a high-tech Cirque du Soleil venue, thereby increasing revenue 500% and profit 3,583%.

He even upgraded a salon, bringing in a celebrity stylist, and increased revenue 40% and profit 23%.

Who do you want to be? What's the market to whom you want to appeal? What'll it take to attract them? Most of us look at life that way, but we try to accomplish our goals by making incremental improvements to what we've got. What Aziz does is much more dramatic (and, perhaps, more risky). But it's aspirational and visionary. And it demonstrates the power of "seem as you want to be."

Five Degrees of Separation

An electrician I know has a gadget that he can point at a light fixture and identify its temperature. The other day he pointed it at two cars that were parked next to one another on the sunlit side of a street. One car was black; the other, white. The temperature on the black car was 22 degrees warmer than the temperature on the white car. That's quite a difference!

And it demonstrates that one of the ways in which we can control temperature is as simple as the colors we wear or use.

Twenty-two degrees sounds like a lot.

So, five degrees may not sound like much.

But a fascinating article in The New York Review of Books by Jim Hansen (Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University's Earth Institute) points out that if we continue what Hansen refers to as "business-as-usual," we can expect an increase of about five degrees Fahrenheit of global warming during this century.

Not significant? Guess again!!

Hansen notes that the last time the Earth was five degrees warmer was three million years ago, when the sea level was about 80 feet higher.

Fifty million people in the U.S. live below that level. In other words, with a five degree warming of the Earth, we would lose most East Coast cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Miami. Practically all of Florida would be under water.

The consequences are extraordinary. You could say "beyond imagining, " but they aren't beyond predicting quite accurately.

So, what's this have to do with marketing and communications? Everything.

The solutions to our environmental challenges are well known. They simply are not well heeded.

What's needed is will...and effective marketing and communications.

Could there ever be any greater use of our skills? And has there ever been more urgency to put them to use in service of this one enormous challenge that is staring us right now in the face? If we don't act now, it will be too late.