Olá!
Shoutout to the woman at Azul Brazilian Airlines whose job it is to herd passengers from one end of the São Paulo airport to the other when they have 20 minutes to make an international flight.
Or that seemed her only job last week, when she rushed me down secret back stairwells and into unmarked vans. We sped across tarmacs to catch my connecting flight home to the US.
She didn't speak English. I don't speak Portuguese. So I don't know her name.
But I silently named her Ronaldinha (after the famous Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho), because she was like a midfielder charged with an impossible goal... finesse the ball (me) from impossibly far away through all kinds of obstacles (crowds, security checks) into the net (plane) before the whistle and the end of play (takeoff)!
I didn't think she could do it. But remember, she was Ronaldinha—threading through the crowds, sidestepping around anyone who got in our way, throwing a little elbow. I stumbled along behind her trying to keep up. I felt her refusal to fail.
I made the flight with 4 minutes left on the clock. (Four! Minutes!)
I fell into my seat shaking with adrenaline, soaked with the stress and sweat.
Impossible. But that's what happened.
* * *
We live in a world that's increasingly tech-focused and AI-driven.
Where algorithms decide what we see on social media and suggest we watch on Netflix. Where we're codependent on our phones. Where robots do surgery. Where (if we wanted to) we could give each of our socks a unique IP addresses and never mismatch them again.
Which is why it's astounding how often success and failure in life STILL comes down to One. Single. Person. Not just in airports... All the time.
How you feel about a brand or an experience often comes down to one individual who either cared deeply… or who didn't give a flip.
* * *
Earlier that week in Brazil, I'd heard my friend Jacco van der Kooij talk about how we all have a "freebie," a thing we're better at than many other people.
"Your freebie gives you the ability to lead," Jacco said on the main stage at RD Summit in Floripa, Latin America's largest marketing event, a 3-day extravaganza hosted by the incredible people at Resultados Digitais.
"Leadership has nothing to do with hierarchy," Jacco said. "It has everything to do with sharing your freebie with others. Everyone is a leader in something."
I don't know if Azul-Ronaldinha's "freebie" was the ability to drive passengers straight down the field and into the net. I don't know if she had a natural talent for single-mindedness. A gift for navigating secret passages and dark stairwells and unmarked vans.
But I do know she had a gift, a freebie: her capacity for caring deeply about the task at hand. Ronaldinha used her freebie to fuel an unstoppable drive to lead me and others that evening, getting us to where we needed to be.
Here's the thing: Ronaldinha's goal was actually my goal.
I desperately needed to make that flight to Florida. I needed Azul (the brand) to help me (the customer) reach my goal. I would have failed without that help.
What if we approached our marketing in the same way?
What if we all were like Azul-Ronaldinha—single-mindedly focused on helping our prospects and customers drive down the field in pursuit of what they need? Not to reach our goals—but to help them reach theirs.
How:
⚽ Change the focus of your footwork.
⚽ Move away from just selling more stuff and raising awareness about yourself.
⚽ Move toward helping your customers reach their own end zones.
P.S. To Azul Brazilian Airlines: Please find Azul-Ronaldinha for me? She met the incoming delayed Floripa flight 2978 and sent me sailing onto the 8704 flight to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on the evening of November 8. She left me there and vanished before I could thank her. I'd like to.
* * *
Here are 4 things worth sharing this week.
1. Breaking the Spell ☠️
The root cause of so much bad writing is "the Curse of Knowledge," says author and psychologist Steven Pinker: our difficulty imagining what it is like for someone else who does not know what we know.
The Curse of Knowledge is doubly a curse in marketing, where writers often have to translate subject-matter-expert-speak into something resembling English.
I'm writing a piece now on a few ways to break the spell of the Curse of Knowledge. But here's a sneak peek at a powerful antidote potion you can use:
👉 Add Backup Singers—a few words of explanation to big words, technical phrases, and acronyms.
Why: You need to use a word, a piece of jargon, or a technical term some readers might not know. That's fine: Use it—but add a few words around it as support, just like backup vocals support a lead singer.
Back-up singers make a vocalist's performance stronger, more nuanced, more powerful, helping it make a greater impression. So too those few extra supporting words, by giving a technical word or jargon much-needed context—clarifying the meaning, aiding reader understanding, making the intended impact.
Example 1: Write "Arabidopsis, a flowering mustard plant," rather than the bare "Arabidopsis." [Steven Pinker] [h/t Kerry Gorgone]
Example 2: "Ricki was released in the final phase of guide-dog training for having 'hackles,' or a shark-fin-like fur on the ridge of her back that sticks up and can be seen as a sign of aggression." [Mel Magazine]
2. A Robot Wrote This
