Of what could come of dreams and planning

A few days ago, I found myself in a meeting with the GM, Finances for the Suwalka and Suwalka Group. He's a widely recognized name, and an outstandingly wiser man for that. As I got up, I couldn't help myself to ask him what his philosophy on life was. He gave a short albeit meaningful essence to his words. He asked me to,

Dream big. Dream on, but whatever you dream, never let it be small. Dream the biggest you can and you'll have nothing but success in your hands.

This reminded me of Clotaire Rapaille, a French marketing consultant, whom American corporations pay top dollar (read: $200,000 which is approximately Rs. 1,37,25,000) for correcting their marketing misdemeanors.

Dr. Rapaille was once hired by Jeep, the leading SUV manufacturer in the United States, to hunt down reasons for a rapidly declining revenue from sales. What he came up with, was a bizarre theory. He wanted Jeep to switch back to their earlier designs which featured circular headlamps instead of rectangular ones. Jeep executives agreed, albeit reluctantly, but thanks to the prodigy, the world once again saw sky rocketing sales from the automobile manufacturer.





I read an interview of him at PBS, which you can read here. He started out as a teacher, helping autistic children to learn to speak. When he was delivering a lecture at Geneva University, one of his student asked his father to attend it with him. At the end of the lecture, that student's father came up to him and said, "You know, doctor, I've a client for you.". And he said,"Is it a little boy, little girl, doesn't speak?". "No, no, this is Nestlé.".

Dr. Rapaille was taken aback, but he wasn't scared to live a dream, or as NY Times puts it, he was about to live a dream life which Freud would have envied. Nestlé had spent some of its time conducting surveys in Japan. They handed out free samples of coffee and asked consumers how they liked it. This had been going on for over an year now, and the reviews came out to be positive. Nestlé then decided it'd be safe to invest in the Japanese market and it started with them opening up cafés. Aghast, not a single Japanese soul was to be found wandering inside these newly opened coffee parlors. So, they had asked Dr. Rapaille for assistance.

According to him, marketing is all about gut-thinking. He tells us that when you're born, you're born with a reptilian brain, and after 7 years of age, we have in place the cortex, what most of us think of as being "intelligent". And it has been seen that children usually start learning a foreign language after 7 years of age, and yet they still continue to hold on to their accent. So, for example a child who has been brought up in wartime France, may learn the English language when he grows up, but his imprint of English would be different from a child, who's been brought up in a contrasting environment. If you're, thus, to create an imprint, it'll be best to do it before the cortex starts developing.

How could thus Nestlé expect a child who's been brought up in a culture which favors tea over coffee switch to coffee once he grows up. Dr. Rapaille told Nestlé to start selling sweets that were based on a coffee flavor, coffee flavored toffees and books for children that encouraged coffee drinking. Decades of careful execution of planning, led to wonderful results; between October 2015–September 2016, Japan was the world’s 4^th largest consumer of coffee.

What it took was dreams, and careful planning that spanned decades.