REVIEW: Predatory Thinking by Dave Trott

I will get around to returning this to the bookshelf in the office kitchen, I swear, just let me read it one more time.

Predatory Thinking: A Masterclass in Out-thinking the Competition. An eye-catching cover design with more imagination-capturing stories inside. Dave Trott is a famous adman. The whole book is a series of short stories (plenty of non-adland ones in there, but enough to make any marketer grin knowingly) that demonstrate predatory thinking. Which is very much needed; what is predatory thinking anyway? The title of the book and the blurb on the back might make you think its all about besting someone else, outfoxing and winning. But Dave's view is broader than this. For him its about creativity, changing the context of a problem until it is a problem you can solve and applying your thinking in ways that no-one else has thought of.

Here are some pf the stories that made me think, and what exactly I thought of them:

• A city man one day achieved his dream of buying a farm with sheep. The sheep started to get fatter and fatter so he thought he was overfeeding them. He cut down their feed until, to his dismay, they all died. They weren't getting fatter, their wool was just growing longer. Dave's point is that our experience is the only tool we have to interpret a situation. "We think its a sign of strength to have an immediate opinion on everything". I've definitely noticed that at work, and I've even felt occasionally that its not okay to just say I don't know. But those three words can instantly unlock new possibilities, the experiences of others that can bring me closer to an answer.
• The story about a woman who was abused by her alcoholic husband and decided that the only way to get peace was to kill him. For months, for a few hours every day while her husband was at the pub, she dug up a pit underneath her kitchen floor until it was big enough to fit a man in it. One day he came home drunk and she murdered him and neatly folded over the linoleum, making believe to her neighbourhood that he had one day left her out of the blue. Dave Trott declares what she did as "real creativity", dogged determination and self-starting. "Unless we make it happen, it never exists. It just stays as another good idea that never happened." Titillating as it is, I think this example is just a little touch of drama to spice up the book and I have yet to work out how to apply that principle to my life!
• "When was the last time you saw a brief that identified where we'd be taking sales from?" Dave draws parallels between business and human liberties. If you give everyone the right to freedom for healthcare, everyone loses the right to spend their money how they want (as the state needs to take taxes to pay for the healthcare). This translates to, if you want customers to spend £20m on your new health food brand, what are you diverting their spend from: a rival health food brand they currently buy, their gym membership, their Saturday night takeaway? Those are the hard questions.
• Last but not least, my favourite story is about a man who briefed an agency to create a brand and identity for his new range of puddings. The agency downheartedly revealed that in their scoping of the project they had discovered a terrifying competitor in the desserts market, someone with the exact same product idea and with an outstanding brand: Gü. Shiny, black, classy yet fun, they were sure to be a success when they launched. Its exactly what the pudding entrepreneur wanted for his own brand and he was devastated by the pending competition. Suddenly the agency revealed that all the concepts they had showed him were created for him and nobody else! Happy ending. What Dave took from this story was not the clever pitch (although it was clever) but that the sense of urgency to enter the market and beat the competition is what helped the man accept the proposed branding straight away. Had it not been for this, he may have requested 5 more rounds of refinement to the creative instead of focusing on getting what was 95% right out the door and to his awaiting customers.

Overall, whilst the book is entertaining, by the second third of the book Dave has gone off piste and back to his familiar territory of advertising, with most of the anecdotes lecturing about what good advertising is and what it isn't. He's a little bit guilty of doing the very thing he says the best advertising doesn't do: talking to ourselves [advertisers] rather than the people, and believing the people should listen. If you are okay with a little bit of creative agency lecturing from a legendary director then go right ahead, its worth it for the stories that are about real life - kids, accidents and dreams.

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