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Predatory Thinking
Predatory thinking. Street smarts. Whatever you want to call it, it's about writing the rules on your terms, rather than following someone else's; it's about changing behaviour through reframing a story or changing the context; it's about seeking unfair advantage to outmanoeuvre the competition.
Predatory Thinking starts and can only finish with the business or behavioural problem. In business and beyond, you are either predator or prey - and if you don't make the choice of which one to be, it gets made for you. Standing still is not an option.
This is where we collect examples of Predatory Thinking - past, present and with an eye on the future. Anyone can contribute, anyone can comment. Join in.
Follow us @thinkpredatory and join in #thinkpredatory
Join in
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Wet Look
Submitted by: Lawrence Beatt
A skatepark in Denmark was struggling to maintain a high volume of customers during the winter. So they decided to create this sign and planted in front of a puddle at the skatepark entrance.
This way those that debated whether or not to skate in wet conditions now had to abide by the park’s customs.
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Aidpod
Submitted by: Nick Daniel
In order to achieve the UN goals on child health, maternal health and combat HIV/AIDS, they had to overcome the fundamental problem of logistics.
Getting essential drugs and medication to the remotest or politically troubled parts of the world was proving impossible.
So they stopped asking ”how do we get our drugs there?”; and asked ”who already succeeds in supplying these regions?” instead. More…
Toheeb
A lovely idea.
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Going the distance
Submitted by: Eric Blackman
John Blake ran because he couldn’t kick. That’s what he used to joke anyway. He was fly half (and captain) to my scrum half in a Bristol team that used to run everything. From anywhere. It makes me chuckle to hear the modern professionals talking about how you mustn’t ‘play too much rugby in your own half’ and ‘field position is everything’. Well, we used to just go for it – from our own half, from our own line, from wherever we happened to find ourselves on the pitch. We got results too – over four seasons playing together, from 1957 to 1961 we played 184, and won 135 – against the very best clubs in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
So how did we do this? More…
Paul
This is an interesting story about a rugby union team adopting a rugby league training regime to beat the opposition.
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Re-inventing the wheel
Submitted by: Nick Daniel
The problem of getting clean water in regions like Sub Saharan Africa has been mentioned before. Clever ideas like playpump power wells to provide villages with a constant supply of clean water. However there is still the problem with getting the water from the pump back home.
On a daily basis children and women have to spend hours transporting gallons of water. Time that could be better spent on education or more productive activities. And, the physical impact over carrying that weight of buckets and barrels was causing significant spinal injuries.
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A lot’s in a name
Submitted by: John Smart
When Everton FC wanted to open a store in Liverpool’s new shopping centre, they needed to come up with a name.
They couldn’t just call it ‘The Everton Store’, because everyone knew that was at their home ground, Goodison Park.
Their first store, in other words.
So they changed the name of the original store to ‘Everton One’. And called their new store ‘Everton Two’.
Now everyone knew which store they were talking about in their advertising.
But there’s another reason they settled on ‘Everton Two’. And that’s because the shopping centre is called ‘Liverpool One’.
So in every advertisement, website and leaflet, the address became… ‘Everton Two, Liverpool One’.
Nick Daniel
Genius!
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The power of play
Submitted by: Nick Daniel
When you are trying to solve a problem it is easy to get caught up on focusing on the things you haven’t got. There’s always another bit of research that would really help. The predatory thinker uses what he does have.
Rural Africa is rich in a lot of things but when it comes to reliable access to cheap basic commodities, like water or energy, it’s very poor. Dirty water kills 4.5 millions children a year but any solution has to be robust. Things break, so anything that cannot be mended with the things you find in a small remote village just won’t work.
The answer comes from looking at what you do have.
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Seeing red
Submitted by: Anonymous
Every year, around this time, Coca Cola trot out an ad similar to the one above. The message is always the same… Santa Claus is coming, Santa Claus is coming. The reason they never change the idea is a bit of predatory history.
In 1930 Coca Cola decided to use Santa in their winter campaign and turned to the artist Haddon Sundblom to develop the ads. The predatory thing he did was to turn Santa from a blue or green coated man of legend into the red coated version we all know today, the Coca Cola red version. By the end of the huge global campaign they’d unified our view of what Santa looked liked; in a way they’d taken ownership of Christmas. And now anyone using the image of Santa doing Coke’s job for them.
Coca-cola’s coming, Coca-cola’s coming.
Brian Towell
Historically, Coca-Cola was not the first soft drink company to utilize the modern image of Santa Claus in its advertising—White ...Martin Shaw
Just one snag. Nobody knows that now
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Poppy Appeal
Submitted by: Nick
The Poppy has become one of the UK’s best known and most loved icons. It was first used as the symbol to remember the sacrifice of soldiers in 1920; following WWI. And, was inspired by John McCrae poem In Flanders’ Fields… …http://bit.ly/VMrgBR
As well as a symbol of national pride the use of the poppy is also predatory.
Of course the poppy itself is a gift in return for a donation but it also turns everyone who wears one into a walking ad.
Was The Poppy Appeal the first viral campaign?
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Keep it real
Submitted by: nick
Planes and birds shouldn’t mix. Problem is that the perfect design for an airfield is also pretty appealing to birds; flat, open spaces, with lots of grass and few people.
When they do mix it’s usually to disastrous effect. In 2009 Captain Chesley Sullenberger was hailed a hero when he only just managed to save everyone on-board by ditching his Airbus A320 on the Hudson River. The accident occurred when a flock of birds hit the plane and caused both engines to fail. Every year, airlines spend many over $1b repairing or replacing equipment damaged by air strike.
As a result airports spend a great deal of time, effort and money inventing new and clever ways to scare the birds away. Things like scarecrows, pyrotechnics, noisemakers, birdsong through speakers…
They even got a little predatory and like any good predatory thinker, started with what’s on the mind of the audience. And as a result created scarecrows that looks like birds of prey. They knew that hardwired into every bird’s mind, almost a genetic memory, is a fear of birds of prey. As soon as a goose, duck, crow, pigeon etc. sees a bird of prey they get out of the area quickly. Problem is though they forgot that birds can learn; after a short period of time they adapt to realise that they aren’t really in danger from the fakery. And, when they do realise it’s a fake they return to the airfield.
So, actually the predatory evolution of the thinking is to realise that natural selection generally gets things right; if you can’t beat nature, use it.
If flocks of birds are scared of birds of prey, have birds of prey at you airport.
Pearson Airport have taken this approach and the results are paying off.
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Be Sharp – Be On The Ball – Early Gillette Sports Sponsorship
Submitted by: Dave Glynn
Here’s a quick story on Gillette Sports Sponsorship.
Quite Predatory Thinking – Dominate the Sports Sponsorship and then the Shaving World:
The unusually named King Camp Gillette revolutionised shaving in 1904 when he invented the Double Edge Safety Razor.
Gillette was born in Wisconsin and spent years as a travelling salesman before coming up with his revolutionary idea to replace the Cut-Throat Razor with one that used disposable blades – more convenience for the user and on-going revenue for Gillette.
Gillette realised the potential of linking the brand with sports personalities as early as 1910 – at this time, the company was still struggling to make a foothold in the market, but within a few years, the DE razor market would explode.
In 1910, Gillette produced a print ad with images of the great Baseball players of the time such as Pittsburgh Pirates’ Honus Wagner, in ads for the Gillette Safety Razor. If it was good enough for the he-man sportsmen of the time, it was seen to be good enough for Dad, Brother, Husband.
Through WW1 Gillette regularly advertised, featuring Boxers, Baseball Players and American Footballers.
In 1942 Gillette took on the sponsorship of ‘The Cavalcade Of Sports’, buying sole sponsorship rights to most sporting events in the US and TV and Radio advertising for a whopping (at the time) $100,000.
An early advertising slogan (long before ‘the best a man can get’) was ‘Be Sharp, Be On The Ball – Buy Gillette Blades’
They dominated TV and Radio sports advertising for the next 25 years or so.It’s a bit ironic that a blade that was sold for a penny a time through most of the 20th Century now costs upwards of £2.50 for a single blade – maybe it’s the huge amounts paid to sports personalities that contributes to that cost.
Dave Glynn - 4th aspect
Thanks for posting the article guys :-) It's also important to note that although Gillette's invention was mainly seen to be ...
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An ad on wheels
Submitted by: Nick
Car designer Colin Chapman was best known for founding the car company Lotus in the 1950s. Behind everything he did was a guiding idea, best summed up by his quote “adding power makes you faster in the straights. Subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere.” Compared to his peers at the time, it was a predatory approach.
But where he really got really predatory was when he went into racing. He went into F1 as an advert for his brand but he knew that it was moving from a rich “gentleman’s” game to one of big business. F1 was becoming a highly competitive and technical enterprise; and it was becoming too expensive. Chapman realised that since cars raced in their national colours by desire and not as a result of a rule, he could turn his colours to his advantage.
Chapman took a different approach, he went out and sought a partner, in this case Imperial Tobacco, with the offer of turning his cars into an advert on wheels. He even changed the name of the team to John Player Special so that announcers would have to say the brand name in their racing commentary. Effectively he got Imperial Tobacco to fund his team and in the period 1962 to 1978 he (Lotus) won 7 F1 construction titles and 6 driver titles.
He also sold thousands of cars.
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Window Shopping
Submitted by: Nick
Dressing a store window is an art form. Everything is aimed at achieving the one goal of getting the passerby, the window-shopper, off the street and into your store.
But what if they no longer need to leave the street to start shopping?
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That’s not cricket
Submitted by: Anirban Roy
As England prepare to take on India on Indian soil, the selectors have hand picked an Indian team which does not include a single spinner for the practice matches. The England team is crying foul because it would have loved to get used to Indian conditions (read spinning tracks). But MS Dhoni and company thought otherwise – give them no spinners and wait for the games to begin. Smart predatory thinking at its best.
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Wifi Wars
Submitted by: Richard G
How do you use predatory thinking to stop people stealing something desirable you own? Make it appear undesirable.
Hence the growing practice of people renaming their wifi network names to deter their neighbours connecting for free.
Names that have been reported include:
Terror Network
Virus Detected Shutting Down
FBI Surveillance Vanand something you probably don’t want your family seeing you connect to:
The Porn Hub
One question remains though. As with other internet trends, will we see brands climbing onto the bandwagon and seeing this as a new medium for advertising? So amongst the BTOpenZones and TalkTalks we’ll see the likes of
I Love Coca-Cola
KFC meals half priceor even
Vote Cameron
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Medium as message
Submitted by: Nick
Cutting costs when recession hits is a natural business process but deciding what to cut isn’t. There is endless research that demonstrates that cutting advertising may have short-term benefits but causes significant longer term damage and hinders a brands effectiveness post-recession too. However, it’s always one of the first things to go; it’s emotionally a lot easier to cut ad spend than tell a colleague, you know and respect, that you have to let them go.
The FT, famous for their business insight, wanted to inform business leaders of the error of cutting ad spend, the Copy in the ad asks the question “Global downturn. What’s the first mistake businesses make?”. But they wanted to do more than communicate this as a straight ad. They felt that since “media” was the message, they should get a bit predatory and change the way they used the actual ad space to deliver the message.
Of course it’s harder to cut projects or staff than something like advertising. And yes, a media owners’ business relies on advertising so they would say “don’t cut ad budgets”. But look at the data and you see there’s more to their message than pure self-interest.
Sadly though the latest IPA Bellwether survey would suggest the FT may need to re-run the campaign very shortly.
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Maybe design should win a Nobel prize for peace
Submitted by: Nick
History is a little unclear on when the first toilet was invented. There’s evidence of a water drainage system at Skara Brae, Orkney, from the 31st century BC. And a flush toilet has been found from the 26th century BC in the Indus Valley.
What is certain though is that the day after it was installed, and every day since, an argument has raged between the sexes. Seat up or seat down.
For nearly five millennia the argument has raged until some bright designers used a bit of predatory thinking. They realised that for blokes to put the seat down regularly, it had to become something our automatic system controlled. i.e. an action done but not thought about. And they also realised that after 5,000 years making this automatic in its own right was never going to happen.
So they merely made the process of putting the seat down part of something already automatic to all blokes; flushing the toilet. They put the button controlling the flush mechanism behind the seat. Now, if you want to flush you have to put the seat down.
john p woods
Maybe men will think of the environment and save water by not flushing either.Alexandre Lamarre
Being a man, I can predict that men are gonna stop flushing.
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A USEFUL ERROR
Submitted by: dave
When you try to access broken or dead internet links a message appears: 404 Not Found.
There are standard ways of setting up a ‘404 Not Found’ page, but increasing numbers of websites are customising theirs to redirect web users.
‘Missing Children Europe’ wants sites to add a snippet of code to those customised pages to display data about missing youngsters.
This information will be supported by a strong introduction:
“PAGE NOT FOUND, NEITHER IS…”
Once sites have signed up and added the code supplied by the NotFound project, every time the page is displayed it will contain information about a missing child.
So far, about 480 sites have signed up to the NotFound initiative and reconfigured their 404 page to help. -
One giant predatory leap
Submitted by: John Smart
In 1961, the Soviet Union were so far ahead of America in the space race that they were almost out of sight.
The Russians had all the firsts: First artificial satellite. First man in space. First probe in solar orbit.
America’s pride was at stake. Worse still, with the apparent ‘missile gap’ in ICBM capabilities, its safety and very survival.
President Jack Kennedy urged his advisers to find something – anything – to eclipse the Russians in space and snatch the lead from them.
But Bob Gilruth, NASA’s Director of Manned Space Flight, knew trying to beat Russia at its own game would mean spending the next decade playing catch up.
Instead, he recommended something completely new: a programme to put men on the moon by the end of the decade.
Not because he was confident America had the know-how. But because he was pretty sure the Russian’s hadn’t.
“Going the to the moon will take a new rocket and new technology”, he told The President. “If you want to do that, I think our country could probably win because we’d both have to start from scratch.”
Kennedy endorsed the plan. And Gilruth made sure that this time, America was first of out of the blocks.
Eight years later Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the surface of the moon. But by redefining where the finish line lay back in 1961, America was already half way to winning the space race before a rocket even left the ground.
John Smart
Help yourself Dave. I nicked it from a book called 'The Race' by James Schefter. He was a reporter for ...dave trott
This is a great example of predatory thinking John. I will definitely nick it. Which is, in itself, another example of predatory ...
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Sometimes the old ones are the best
Submitted by: Richard G
A fortnight ago my 5-year son was nearly run over when he dashed into the road. The incident shocked me into looking for a way of drumming some road sense into him. I searched online and found http://talesoftheroad.direct.gov.uk/
It’s a really well put together government website, with lots of road sense games and some really smart animation. My son really enjoyed interacting with it. However by the next week he seemed to have forgotten the lessons on the website. Indeed, he seemed to have forgotten the website full stop.
Having chatted to him I discovered that, although the website was well put together, with all the elements that kids enjoy, it was too much like the hundreds of games websites for young kids. This meant that his brain just shut off when he started playing. Nothing stuck.
This led me to a predatory thought. More…
Matt Sharper
distinctive not different the messages where both the same they where not different
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Kicked into the long grass
Submitted by: Ed Birth
In 1990, John Beck was appointed manager of Cambridge United. Languishing in the fourth tier of English football, this was a modest club with a squad of committed players with limited technical skills. The club expected Beck to get the team promoted but couldn’t afford the new players necessary to guarantee promotion.
So Beck couldn’t follow the standard rules, he had to change the game to give his players an advantage over better, more skilled players. Beck realised that a physical long-ball game that didn’t rely on finesse would give his team the best chance of winning because finesse players weren’t used to it. The football would be brutal and ugly on the eye – but Beck didn’t care. After all, it’s better to win ugly that lose pretty – the trophy cabinet at Manchester United is bigger than Arsenal’s.
Beck began to find modest success, but observed that one of the problems of punting long balls in to the corners of the pitch for his strikers to run on to was that a large percentage were over-hit. Too many hopefully balls rolled out of a play and gave possession back to the opposition. He struck on an ingenious solution: to not only adjust the playing style to suit his players but adjust the playing environment to shift the odds in his team’s favour. He instructed the groundsman to let the grass grow long in the corners of the pitch so his team’s frequent long balls would be caught up and stay within the touchlines.
The methods drew criticism from outside the club, but nobody could argue with his success. In three seasons he had taken the down-and-out club up to 5th place in the Second Division – the club’s highest ever league position.
ritchie forster
but what about the away games? for me it's not about winning but how you win, that's why the all ...
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Speeding = Hospital
Submitted by: Nick
Using radar technology to calculate a driver’s speed is nothing new. Nor is reporting that speed back to drivers in an attempt to modify their behaviour. But Elm Grove Police department felt that simply reporting back to drivers wasn’t having the desired effect, so they went a bit further.
New radar screens suggest to drivers the number of days they’ll have to spend in hospital if they have an accident at the speed they are travelling.
It’s a fudge, the statistics aren’t true, 46mph does not really mean 46 days in hospital BUT it does make divers see the real cause and effect. i.e. speeding = hospital.
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THE PRIMARY PURPOSE IS PREDATORY
Submitted by: dave
In 1968, Eugene McCarthy stood in the New Hampshire Primary.
He wasn’t taken seriously.
He was the anti-war candidate and his support stood at 10 – 20%.
When his supporters knocked on doors, the doors were shut in their faces.
The anti-war message wasn’t working.
So his supporters tried making the case in a different way.
By explaining what was in the self-interest of the voters.
They knocked on those same doors and explained that one day of the Vietnam war cost more than all on New Hampshire’s taxes for a year.
This time the doors stayed open.
By the end of the campaign Eugene Mccarthy’s support from those same people stood at 42.2%. -
Come out fighting
Submitted by: Richard G
Boxing in the 1980s was far bigger than it is today. Glitzier, more glamorous and with hardly any trash talk outside the ring. This was a time of big personalities – Haglar, Hearns, Spinks, Berbick and Holmes – and huge audiences.
Then along came Mike Tyson. A street kid from Brooklyn. And before the bell for the first round even rang, Tyson was displaying his predatory side. Instead of wearing a robe with his name embroidered on it, he walked to the ring bare-chested. Instead of colourful shorts with stripes and patterns, he wore simple black shorts. And instead of white socks that looked like the boxer’s mum had just taken them out of the wash, he wore black trainers and no socks.
It was if he had just stepped off the street. Those mean Brooklyn streets where he had learned as a kid to literally fight for his life. Title fights in Las Vegas watched by millions on TV were transformed in his mind – and the minds of his opponents – into the street fights of his childhood.
When Tyson entered the ring, the cameras, the VIPs, the noise and the hype vanished. His millionaire opponents had nowhere to hide. Tyson had beaten them already.
Tan
@Andy I have to disagree - Muhammed AliAndy
Love this article, feels very motivational. There will never be another boxer to get the media going in the same ...
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You’re late
Submitted by: Nick
For people running a nursery, parents picking their children up late is a real business problem. Unlike other businesses, they can hardly just shut up shop and go home. To solve this, most nurseries set up a fine system; if you’re a few minutes late you pay for a full hours nursery.
Jelly Tots, a Surrey based nursery, found that parents response to this was to see this as a service not a fine. They could get another hour of child care for a fee, they’d paid for an hour so wouldn’t rush to pick up their child. So instead Jelly Tots charge by the minute. And as a result parents tardiness has dropped by 45%.
what does it say dude?