If Yoda’s advice can bring down Emperor Palpatine, imagine what it could do for your customer engagement.
For anyone tasked with getting close to their audience, there are still lessons we can learn from that most viridian of sages, Yoda.
Yes, he garbles his sentences a bit and yes, he talks in riddles and yes, I prefer the Jim Henson version to the CGI one, but he also has a lot to say if you choose to listen.
Listen you may, but choose to hear will you decide? Hmm?
“Do or do not. There is no try.”
Luke Skywalker initially struggles with the Force. Standing upside down in a swamp didn’t help him concentrate on the task at hand.
But life is full of disruption – at work or at home. If you’re going to attempt a new tactic or strategy, just get on with it. Chances are you already have the tools to do what you need, and needless delay merely paves the way for others to take the opportunity you’re staring at.
“Mudhole? Slimy? My home this is!”
It’s all too easy to get hung up on appearances. You’ll find worth and opportunity in the strangest of places.
The classic small family business might not have massive databases or sophisticated marketing techniques, but will more than make up for that in good will and loyalty from its customers and suppliers – things that many new entrants to a market struggle with.
“If you end your training now — if you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did — you will become an agent of evil”
If the Force is the art of persuasion through understanding people, then the Dark Side can easily stand for the uncompromising analytical view.
It’s super tempting to sling all your customers in a single silo and apply blanket decisions and activations, but there’s no subtlety to that, no skill or art. You need to use the tools at your disposal to segment, attribute…and understand.
“Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.”
Prophesy is hope until it comes true.
You can make as many predictions as you want, but there are no guarantees.
And mistakes happen.
Markets move.
Instead of pinning your hopes on circumstances aligning for you, the trick is always to act – and react – with the end goal in mind.
“Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.”
Transformation – digital or physical, personal, or commercial – is a path fraught with anxiety. It takes more than work to get where you need to be. You need vision, direction, and the right culture of agility and innovation.
Yes, change can be painful and scary, but if you can divest yourself of the fear to change, you’ll be ready. And as we all know: “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
“Faith in your new apprentice, misplaced may be. As is your faith in the dark side of the Force.”
When Yoda fronts up to Emperor Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith, he’s warning him that he is putting his faith in something with rotten foundations – and an imperfect solution. It’s the same for us.
A solution is only as good as the philosophy behind its implementation. And if you put all your faith in the efficacy of one single tool, it can quickly come crashing down around you.
I mean, the Death Star must have seemed like a pretty good idea at the time, but look what happened to that.