Guest Blog

Before I hit the ‘apply’ button to become one of Marketing Eye’s interns, I familiarised myself with the company through reading this blog. Half way through the first post, which was written by Mellissah herself, I stopped for a brief moment and thought to myself: ‘Hang on, this sounds rather familiar… This sounds A LOT like something I would write.’ Like Mellissah, I had always envisioned myself as an entrepreneur because I enjoyed the idea of working for something I believed in, which was a difficult standard to meet if you worked for someone else or another company. I was able to relate to Mellissah’s posts on a personal level, which was something I had not expected from a marketing blog. I only learned later that we owned the same pair of Tiffany & Co. glasses!

It occurred to me that Mellissah and I had rather similar personalities – both perfectionists, visionaries, intuitive, idealistic and determined. Of course similar people would be attracted to the same jobs. That was expected. What I hadn’t expected was to experience this first-hand. It had made me question my individuality, but more importantly, meeting Mel helped me confirm that marketing was an achievable career choice for me.

In Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point, he popularised the theory of The Two-Step Flow of Communication (Lazarsfeld & Katz, 1955)¹ by explaining how innovation and information is spread in a two-step flow, from mass media to influencers - and then onto the masses via the influencers. Gladwell renamed this theory ‘The Law of The Few’ and colourfully reworded it as, "The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts (the ability to influence others)".² If you can overlook the blatant plagiarism, Gladwell must be congratulated for bringing the principles of the original theory back into the mainstream almost 50 years after its original publication, at a time when understanding influencers is more important than ever (if you're in marketing or politics).

‘Every risk is worth taking as long as it’s for a good cause and contributes to a good life’ Sir Richard Branson

It’s been a while since my last post when I decided to ditch my un-planned plan of travelling, chilling out, having some ‘me time’ (as the self help books would put it) and taking a breath. Let me tell you; I’ve been taking a lot of deep breaths in the last couple of months (into a paper bag at times) and it’s not that I haven’t thought about posting it’s just, well, I haven’t quite known how to articulate what’s been going on.