An Overview Effect An extraterrestrial Perspective for Business
thank you for having me
it’s an absolute privilege to be up here
speaking in front of you guys
all my friends have stopped listening
so i’m going to start off with a story
in 1968
apollo 8 set off to orbit the moon it
was the first time
man was leaving the influence of earth’s
gravity
it was the first time man was going to
go to another astronomical object
and if you’re wondering what the term
moonshots came from it’s safe to say
this was it
the entire world held their breath as
the bravest humanity had to offer was
heading off into the great unknown the
bbc
alone was airing this event
in over 54 countries in over 15
different languages
and when they came back they were
obviously hailed as heroes
and it wasn’t so much about the
information that they came back about
the moon
that was interesting that wasn’t their
largest contribution to
to society at large
it was this for the first time
man set eyes on home
earthrise around that fourth orbit
around the moon they saw the earth
appearing
above the horizon and the entire world
set their eyes on the earth for the
first time
and while pictures of the earth are
prevalent everywhere now
picture a time when that wasn’t the case
i mean now we have three different
emojis for our planet
but picture a time when we hadn’t seen
what our world looked like
picture what that does to somebody
the picture went on to inspire earth day
the world’s largest secular observance
and over a billion people practice it
year after year till this date and it
started
it kicks out of the environmental
movement which is why
that photograph was hailed as one of the
100 most influential photographs that
changed the world
and the only reason that took place the
only reason
that something that was started off with
global conflict which is the u.s space
program which was essentially an
intellectual
and financial flex over the soviets it
changed the conversation from conflict
to conservation
as astronauts subsequently went up to
space and they saw the earth from a
completely different perspective there
was
a change in their psyche that ended up
taking place
they came back as different people
the earth was completely breathtaking
it was unbelievably tiny it was
unbelievably fragile
and essentially it was too small for
conflict
it was only big enough for collaboration
and this is what is known as the
overview effect
from space borders tend to vanish
from space human conflict becomes
trivial
and petty and the reason
this happened was because these
astronauts have
a unique perspective on earth it’s not
something everybody
can do and if you think about the
average life on earth we’re so trapped
by short-term gains right
there’s a checklist of things that you
have to do you have to
graduate from college you have to
get get your degree get a job find a
partner
settle down be financially well off
and you’re constantly trapped in
short-term gains and we forget
that we do have to take care of our
planet as well
and this is purely down to the way the
information is presented to us
societal pressures are far stronger than
something that you have to think about
every now and then and essentially if
changing your perspective can have such
a drastic impact
on your mindset the way these astronauts
had
it can do a lot for your business as
well
and that’s precisely what i do all i do
is bring fresh perspective
to clients all i do is bring in just an
interesting
perspective to the creative teams that i
work with and that’s where disruption
comes from
and so when i started off as a brand
strategist
i used to work at this agency called
ellen keys archie in sachi
in the new business department and in
the strategic planning department with
new business
week on week i’m constantly being asked
to understand a new industry a new
client
and week on week i have to kind of adapt
i have to
figure that out i have to catch up to an
industrial veteran
so how do i do that and essentially it’s
just about bringing
a new perspective in it’s something that
i can take from category a and apply to
category b
lateral thinking in that sense and
that’s why
at stone soup we’ve got
a trusty little framework to bring that
perspective into brands
and we start off with understanding a
company
understanding their objectives because
just like man on earth you tend to get
lost in short-term gains you tend to get
lost
about you get you get lost in the the
pressures of
figuring out where the next paycheck is
going to come from and you forget why
you started off the company in the first
place
so we sit down with the client and we
understand exactly what they want to do
what their short-term goals are what
their long-term goals are
and subsequent to that we challenge
everything that they’ve learned and of
course a lot of it gets validated
but we go out there and do the research
ourselves we speak to consumers
directly conducting instagram polls if
required we understand
cultural trends societal trends and the
reason this is important is because
while a joke might be really funny for
your target group
for a large part of the audience it
could be supremely unfunny
and that’s why it has the power to make
or break your company
and similarly we take that across and
see what the category is doing see what
other
what your competition is kind of doing
to gain a consumer
because eventually our job is to stand
apart our job is to differentiate
ourselves
and that’s where disruption comes from
so i’m going to walk you through
three examples and the reasons i’ve
chosen
these is because they show disruption in
different ways disruption doesn’t
necessarily have to be this
massive earth shaking thing world for
all was one of the first ngos to
digitize animal adoption
and essentially they used to use
to do this every once in a while
they put up a picture of a sorry looking
puppy or a sorry looking kitten that
they rescued
and asked for help and this
stopped working after a period of time
and that’s when they came to us and they
said what can we do
so we went to the framework and we
understood that
that on the left is what they were doing
and there is a sense of fatigue that
comes in if you’re constantly asking
people for help
you’re not going to be successful in the
long run so we took
that and flipped it on its head because
the cultural insight was the internet
was made for cats and dogs it’s
something that
transcends borders it’s something that
transcends languages
it’s something that everybody loves and
therefore is incredibly share worthy so
we
memified those pictures we put up
pictures and videos of these animals
doing their own thing
and essentially that made it very
shareable and
it took their leads from an average of
one a week
to five a day
this next brand that i want to look at
is noah which is a standard pad
subscription service
and it’s in a category which is
dominated by two brands
stay free and whisper and those those
brands have
deep pockets so you do have to do
something different to stand apart
and at the other end of the spectrum
there were a bunch of startups that were
doing the exact same thing as you know
which was customized standard pad
subscription boxes
and therefore it was a rat race at the
bottom so we took it to
our framework and we try to understand
what the larger conversation around
menstruation was
when it came to a consumer it was
it’s a product which simply cannot fail
so the risk of trial is really high
you can’t have this product fail on you
so it was
difficult for consumers to switch the
brands that they were used to
and when it came to culture it’s such a
hush-hush topic it’s
there’s so much taboo around it
and therefore there was a need to start
a conversation there and not just
something that you do as a one-off or
something that you keep
going over a period of time over a
sustained period of time and with the
category that’s what was happening
people would have campaigns centered
around yes we must talk about this
but nothing over a long period of time
so at the center of that this
the strategy was about disruption and
building
building a community for women to come
out and talk
and essentially we looked at what goes
into making a community and essentially
it was about
information it was about starting a
conversation
with women about what they wanted to
know we would get
specialists on board we would get uh
gynecologists do instagram takeovers
we’d create memes so overreact would be
a good example of that
and we’d be constantly debunking myths
because
because there was no conversation there
was a lot that people didn’t know
there were a lot of problems that they
didn’t really know about in that sense
and in terms of what else goes into
community it’s
engagement right so we may share with
the content in terms of something that
you can send to a friend of yours so
that meme vocabulary would be one of our
best performing posts
in that regard
the last bit was also inspiration which
is we started taking
period stories and pms stories which
which eventually became a crowdsourced
piece of content the minute somebody saw
one of those
they’d come in and share their own
stories and that led to
noah getting a second round of funding
the last form of disruption was
something short term it was a campaign
we did for dottenke
which is a skin care brand and when we
looked at what they wanted from us they
wanted us to launch
a serum for them and essentially
this was a category where the consumer
was really well researched
before they’d apply anything to their
face what they would do
is really dive deep into the product
they’d look at the back of the bottle
before they look at the front of it
and essentially that’s something that
that we were well aware about and that
led to
a templatized launch campaign for
every brand in the category they would
start off with the ingredients
to talk about the benefits to talk about
the problems they would solve
and it led to a degree of sameness that
that the category had for all of its
communication
but when we looked at culture what we
realized is
all of these campaigns are very reliant
on influencers because
they want selling they were recommending
so
here’s what we did
we created a blind sale we didn’t reveal
anything about the product
and we launched it with just 100 bottles
and we introduced paucity into the
equation the fact that there was just
100 bottles
and nobody knew anything about the
product completely polarized everyone
we also harnessed influencers to kind of
recommend the product and
and figure out and review it so they
would actively use it
and they would just keep their fans and
followers updated about how their skin
is reacting
and essentially that’s all it took the
demand for this was tremendous
in 52 minutes we managed to sell 100
bottles off and
and that led to a higher demand for when
we were actually launching
so subsequent to this we’d hit people
with
the ingredients that go into it uh we’d
hit people with
the problems with good solve for and
when it did finally hit the market
it was the top selling sku on nika for
three days straight
nika is the biggest marketplace for
skincare products in india
and all it took was taking the category
narrative and flipping it on its head so
essentially there’s a lot of power that
comes
through perspective a simple change in
perspective can do a lot
for disruption and you don’t always have
to go to the moon for it
thank you