At least 35 of you Facebook friends came to me as fans of my work. This is for you, or for others who are interested in my work, some of my thoughts on marketing, and me. The rest of you should resist this like a flu vitus. Meg Cook: On a rare occasion in life, you get a big surprise. I wrote a Blog post about a must read Book called “Selling the Invisible”. When I posted it, I had no plans or intentions on getting to talk to the New York Times best selling Author, Harry Beckwith. On February 3rd, 2014, I tweeted about my blog post, and mentioned Harry Beckwith as the author of the book I had reviewed, and said it was the only book I posted on my blog. I did not expect Harry Beckwith to respond. But he did: “Happy to do an interview if you’d like Meg.” I looked at my twitter feed. Interview with me?– does he mean me?–I wish I had a picture of my face when I read that. Here is the interview: Meg: I am interested in hearing about your beginnings. You have this star quality about you. Were you born with it? Harry: No one has ever asked me that and that idea never has occurred to me. I may have that quality to you, Meg. Thank you the compliment. With that said, I usually lead whatever group I was part of, starting in fifth grade as the newspaper editor, sixth grade as the school’s first sixth grader as Boy of the Month, captain of my football team, lead in the school play, vice president of my freshman dorm, sports editor of my college paper paper as a second semester freshman. On top of that, I am a terrible follower. I lead or or I leave, I guess. That’s probably not a lovely quality overall. M: I am curious about how long large audiences have been drawn to you. H: Initially they weren’t. I was a C+ speaker--not even the best speaker in my first ad agency group of seven. I probably ranked fourth. Then I watched Neal Burns present and made a leap. When I started the big public events, I faltered, too. Then I watched Kevin Spacey present once and made the next leap. The final leap has come from the transformation in my life about six months ago. I sometimes got standing ovations in the past but now the places seem to throb. My exhilaration--my sincere passion, not necessarily expressed in rah-rah--seems to reach into people. M: You left your law practice and seemed to steer to the creative route. Tell me about this transition. What led you to do that, and how did you gain the momentous success that you had? H: I loved words and competing, and that led me naturally to trial law. It led just as naturally to advertising as a copy writer. In each profession, you take a complex set of facts about your client and translate them into a theory of your case and a story that you sell to a group in a way that beats your competitor’s story. I quit law and took nine months preparing a portfolio of ads for products that I understood: Nike shoes, the Portland Timbers soccer team, Tower Records, Kneissel Travel, gun control, The Letterman Show. Looking back, these were among the best work I have ever done. My actual work as a first and secondoyear copywriter was worse. I narrowed down my cities to Boston and Minneapolis after eliminating Portland, which was a one-agency town then. Dan Weiden started Weiden + Kennedy while I was interviewing in Minneapolis and invited me to come talk with him about being his new agency’s sixth employee. When I got back to Portland, I visited him and said that I had loved Minneapolis and thanks for his interest. So instead of creating Nike ads for a living, I ended up creating ads for lawn and garden tractors, motor homes, banks. I don’t regret it, though. I learned a lot here and love the city including the winters. I walk every night. I don’t think my success has been momentous. I became a good but not great copywriter. And I don’t suffer fools so some relationships failed. And my ADD and dyslexia are not assets. M: During your time with Carmichael-Lynch, where did you get your creative inspiration? H: Great question. Perhaps from nowhere. Everything back then was following the mold of the wordplay style that was winning award shows. It all was derivative right down to the extra bold condensed typography. And only three people seemed to care about, much less understand, brands and brand building. Three. Occasionally we would get a fresh idea and we would story board it. But the commercial didn’t look familiar enough to enough people--it didn’t look like anything that had won an award before--so it didn’t get approved. Did a truly killer TV spot for Musicland, Two of them--killed. Damn they were good. Today, my inspiration comes from music--Phosphorescence, The Killers Lana Del Ray, The National--and my travels. Spotify is worth tens of thousands to me. Movies and documentaries are an inspiration for story telling and framing an image. I love how Ron Howard shot and edited Rush and there are six scenes in Wolf of Wall Street as great as any put on film. Jennifer Lawrence is an inspiration because she creates from her heart and soul, the most natural and passionate actress alive. (Meryl Streep obviously is gifted but is more guarded.) My writing inspiration is Kurt Vonnegutt, Jr. and I do appreciate Malcolm Gladwell’s gift for story telling and Fitzgeralds’s gift for odes. Reading Whitman and Yeats can help, too. And my inspiration comes from life itself. I consider it a miracle. M: What special skills have you studied and mastered to have accomplished so many things? H: My God, are you married? If not, would you be interested? You deserve my best and most honest answer. I have studied writing and great writers although I have not read a lot of fiction: some Fitzgerald, Cheever, Roth, Updike, Vonnegutt. The opening of Lolita is dazzling and enough to discourage any writer for continuing. The end of Gatsby makes me shudder. For speaking, I have been struck by the talents of Paula Poundstone and Kevin Spacey. I followed Bill Clinton at an event in Miami and admire his ability to speak from his heart. I like Jerry Seinfeld’s gift for observation and I try to insert some wit when I can. And I liked John Kennedy’s use of white space; he mastered timing. My special talent may be for endurance. I sometimes work from 5 45 am to 6 15 pm without eating or getting up from my desk more than twice. My mom had it; she could do ten hours of work in seven and on four hours sleep. My dad had it, too. It’s what helped me run national-class marathons. My visible achievements come from putting words together. I’ve loved doing that since fifth grade when I attempted a novel and edited our fifth grade paper that became more popular than the one produced by the eighth graders. And I remember distant events vividly. M: I saw on a speech of yours that success comes from all different kinds of people, but that they must take a risk of some kind. They must have courage. What was your risk? H: Philosophers concur that the greatest virtue is courage because without it, you often cannot act consistent with the other virtues. It takes courage to speak honestly sometimes, to accept blame and responsibility, to follow your heart when others scoff. I risk almost every time I write. Someone might be offended. Someone might criticize. I might be wrong and learn it immediately. My great risks have been to leave my career in law and home in suburban Portland to become a Minneapolis copywriter and sacrifice, among other things, the income. I’ve risked by falling in love 15 times and getting married twice too often, and by choosing to bring four children into the world. Beyond that, I risk every day by saying exactly what I feel. M: Warner Books published Selling the Invisible. How did you get this first book published? H: I’d written two successful articles in a Minnesota business publication. The area’s top literary agent saw them and suggested that we put together a book from that existing material and new material. The existing material was 8000 words of Selling the Invisible and from my article titled Why Plans Fail, an article that attracted letters from all over America. We put together about one-fifth of a book and a proposal and my agent pitched it to Wiley, Warner Books, Harper Books, and a couple others. Wiley and Warner kind of jumped. Warner offered $25,000 to print it as a trade paperback and not a hardback. But when they got my final manuscript, they decided to go to hardback instead. They were pleased apparently. M: When they published it, how did you get people to know about it? H: I did 25 radio interviews around the country, and I appeared on CNN and a local New York City business show. Warner might have placed a small ad in USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, But the book exploded immediately. It made the best seller list in San Francisco four days after it appeared. Part of the success must be its convenient size; books that compact were not that common then. Now they are widely copied. And the title catches lots of people--it has an element of surprise that always works in communication. And it’s honest: People who sell services really are selling something that we cannot see. Their invisibility dictates your necessary strategies and tactics. M: As you know I absolutely adore the book and will heed its advice more closely than any other student of the book yet to come. That said, I noticed that while reading it, the ideas came in short snippets, that were unnumbered. I have never read a book in this format. I wonder whose idea that was and how it came to be in this format? H: Harvey Pennick’s Little Red Book of Golf, written by Bud Shrake, seems very similar. Robert Townsend’s wonderful Up the Organization does, too. They were influences. You might look at them and tell me if those books seem different from mine. The writing style is mine but it definitely has been affected by Kurt Vonnegutt and the Peterman catalogues and by my ADD and dyslexia. They force me to write as simply as possible just to ensure that I will understand what I have written, No one in business wrote that way then, but it felt natural to me. Seth Godin thinks more and better than I do but he’s taken some of my style, as some readers have pointed out. Seth didn’t write that way before Selling the Invisible appeared--close, but not the same. Incidentally, Seth was the first person to write me a letter about that book after it appeared. I had no idea who he was. Now five people know him for every one who knows of me. M: When the book became so immensely successful, how did that feel? Did this kind of success change you? H: Startled. My childhood friend Geoffrey Moore called our home to tell me that I’d moved him down a spot on the Business Week bestseller list, which came out about five weeks after the book debuted. I cried. I’d seen that list for years and it never occurred to me that I would write a book, much less make that list. The success made me a lot of money, for better and worse, and it sent me all over the world, for better and better. I feel beyond grateful for that. People say I dress well and expensively. But eventually most of the new wears off and you return to the pursuit of trying to become a good man. I lost ground during those peak years. I dated some gorgeous women and drank some unforgettable wine, but I postponed too many other things and gave far too little time to my four children. But looking back on some of your character deficiencies is a good education. M: What is your advice to a person that wishes to be a successful businessman in a service industry, but has virtually no resources, and the crummiest ugly office on earth? H: Can you become great at what you are doing? Are you willing to make the effort to get there? Will it produce the rewards you want without too many of the costs you want to avoid? And for that matter, how will you define success? People screw that up all the time. Hence, “Beware of what you wish for.” Having practiced law, is there any lawyer who you would say does an outstanding job at marketing? I like Howry and Simon’s old approach. And frankly, the class action aggregators do a great job of aggregating plaintiffs. M: Are there any marketers from 2014 that you admire? H; I pay far less attention to what others do I haven’t plugged in my television since I moved to my new place four years ago. I rarely read newspapers or magazines; I read all day long on line. I don’t want to be influenced by what others are doing; I want to be influenced by what I believe must be done. But Apple still rocks. It’s in their DNA. The best marketers, however, are those you do not think about. They thrive with little or no advertising because they do everything else so well. The goal of marketing is to reduce your costs of marketing--particularly marketing communications--toward zero. The great ones do that. M: What is the fastest way on earth right now to get an audience to pay close attention to you? H: Have a wardrobe malfunction. M: Last question, its a selfish one. Mr. Beckwith, from the little you know of me, do you think I will succeed at having a profitable website someday? H: You have asked among the best questions of anyone who ever has interviewed me. That’s because of several skills and talents that you have, including insight. I don’t know what it takes to make a website profitable, but special skills ultimately find ways to make money. And you had the guts to ask me. Lots of people never would. You can monetize guts, too, you know. M: Again, please do not let me be a burden. Any time you offer on any of these questions is more than I could ever ask. H: Like almost every woman I meet, you are too modest. Meg: Harry Beckwith told me that I could edit this interview, and that it surely wasn’t the best of his writing. I found this hilarious, as the answers consisted of better writing than I can compose in a year of redrafts. This is a rare author–one who heeds his own advice, admits to mistakes, under promises and over performs. What I mean to say is while his book “Selling the Invisible” is outstanding and unforgettable, the Author himself is even better. -Meg Cook, February 13, 2014
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 19:41:00 +0000
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