As you read this blog post, you might like to listen to this ABBA song I have selected.
Life throws curveballs at us that pulls us up sharply and makes us wonder “what strategy do I need for dealing with this?” Curveballs such as a promotion opportunity when you’re not sure you are sufficiently qualified or receiving a text message giving advance notice your loved one is moving out (and taking your favourite wine glasses). What if you had a playbook of roles, plays and game plans that you could draw on? If this sounds like something useful, then read on.
Remember when you were a kid and playing (or attempting to play) some sort of team sport? There was a coach (usually a mates’ mum or dad), a team manager (in my case this was always my mum), the cheer squad (family members, girlfriends, boyfriends or ‘just friends’), the referees (this was my role), the parent who washed the team jerseys, the parent who brought the cut oranges for half-time, the parent who drove the team bus (this was usually my dad), the lady selling hot pies in the clapped-out kitchen in the club house, the other team and their hangers on, and the list goes on. There are a vast number of people who play different roles to make a team and a game happen, the same is true for life. We play many roles in life, to quote the bard from As You Like It:
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts”
The people in these roles help us to make ‘life plays’ – a move that gets us or our life from A to B. A play might be a tackle, pass or a scrum. Sporting plays can be metaphors for the moves we make in life, for instance a scrum could be getting your gal-pals together at a bar or sleep-over for advice on dealing with the office psychopath or getting teenagers to put the empty toilet roll in the bin.
When you combine a series of plays, this is called a game plan. So a game plan for getting a promotion could consist of three plays; ‘dealing with the office psychopath’ play, ‘wardrobe make-over’ play and ‘learn how to use Canva’ play.
When you combine these game plans you have a playbook. So a playbook is a way of making visible how the game roles, plays and plans combine.
Caption : Aether taking a break from marking up her playbook
Every playbook has an underlying philosophy: offensive, defensive, take-no-prisoners. Everything in the playbook reflects this philosophy. The philosophy I am choosing for my playbook is customer-centricity from the field of Marketing. Marketing is my home discipline. It is my go-to place when looking for success strategies. I have used marketing to earn an income, to inspire others, to find love (more on that later in a future blog), to ‘try’ and change my children’s behaviour and to explain why life is the way it is. In other words, marketing is amazingly flexible. Why is this? Because at it’s core, marketing is all about human behaviour. How people connect with each other and understanding how needs and wants can be satisfied. Isn’t that the very key to life?
So this blog is a series of game plans which draw on marketing theories and frameworks to provide a strategy for life.
You will notice if you look carefully that each blog post has a link to other passions of mine beyond marketing.
- ABBA – an accompanying song to play while you read the blog is noted at the top of each blog
- Cats – photo of one of the four starring kitty-cats of my daughters Brittany and Charly
- Travel – The location where the blog is written that gave inspiration to the blog post
This blog was written at the British Library in London. The British Library is the home of the Magna Carta, the greatest playbook of all time.
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A Marketing Playbook for Life 