A lesson from 60s style marketing

This week, we revived what was probably the very first movie about marketing the Garden Route – a 40-minute ‘short’ from the early 1960s that was produced, directed, written and shot by William Smith (the maths master William Smith, remember, from the Learning Channel?).

It was a privilege and great fun to be associated with the project – but it also gave me a bit of a professional wake-up.

Bear with me, and I’ll tell you why.

William shot ‘The Garden Route’ in his student days, and it was the second project he’d tackled. In those days, a visit to the pictures was an ordered and formulaic affair: you watched a short, you took an interval, and then you came back for the main feature, and William needed a short to accompany his already completed feature film – ‘Dinamight.’

For the curious ‘Dinamight’ was a story  about a hunt for treasure which Dina thought might have been hidden in the Drakensberg. It was a student project, and it was set in the ‘Berg because William was studying for his PhD in Chemistry in nearby Pietermaritzburg. Surprisingly, he never got the doctorate. (Although one of Dinamight’s reels has been lost, William did find a recording of the title song – called, um, Dinamight – which now features in a video about a couple of beautiful Knysna loeries at Featherbed Nature Reserve. Watch it here.)

The short, which William called ‘The Garden Route,’ tells the tale of two young lovers who meet for a weekend in the area, spend a couple of nights at the Fairy Knowe Hotel in Wilderness, and the Royal Hotel in Knysna, and visit places like Fancourt (then a private residence), the Knysna forests, Featherbed Nature Reserve (before it was open to the public), the Beacon Island Hotel, and, of course, the Storms River Bridge Tea Hut.

The actors were Pieter Snyman and Carol Malan (now Carol Sachs – and she’s in tourism: she and her husband, Feo, own Treehaven Self-catering Accommodation in Plettenberg Bay).

The amazing thing is that Carol had never seen the movie: it was shot in January, immediately before she’d gone off to college, and, as it does, the excitement of beginning real life got in the way. So when she met up with William after all these years – at (of course) a tourism get-together – she asked him about it, and he dug it out, had it digitised, and re-recorded the commentary (the magnetic strip of the original had deteriorated and was very difficult to hear).

And then he asked me to help trace the male lead – which wasn’t difficult, actually because, it turns out, Piet’s a retired airline pilot now living just round the corner.

With all the players present and accounted for, the idea of getting them together for a showing of the movie was impossible to resist. So we didn’t (resist, that is).

And this is where I had my ah-ha! moment.

Sitting at the back of the upper deck on the Featherbed Company’s Paddle Cruiser  (fitted with black-out curtains specifically for conferences and events), I couldn’t help noticing how rapt people become when you tell them a story.

No major break-through from a marketing point of view, but definitely something to think about in tourism: I thought – how many times do our marketing messages get through, when all we’re telling (or yelling) is how wonderful we are? How often do our advertisements or our Pee-Arrr campaigns entertain prospective buyers for longer than a few seconds? Offer them what THEY want, rather than what WE’RE so desperate to sell?

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Stew Friedman, author of Better Leader, Richer Life, said “Leaders gain trust and teach people what’s important to them by telling stories. But these days there’s so much to attend to — now! — coming at us so fast. You might be tempted to let slide your soft skills, like how to tell a useful story. Just get to the point and move on to the next thing on the list. No time for fluff.

“Even President Obama, who masterfully demonstrated his storytelling skills in the campaign, was recently described as shuffling from one crucial issue to the next, like an iPod listener flits from song to song. No time for albums.

“Trying to do too much, too fast, and on too many fronts can be risky, yet today’s environment requires that we get better at doing so.

“All the more reason, then, for giving attention to how you get others to pay attention.”

In tourism, which is probably the most story-rich industry there is, are we taking our time to tell stories that people want to hear? Because – hey – if we do, people will listen.

It might be a slow process, but it’s the most effective in the long run.

Here’s some of the original footage edited into a video of interviews with Carol, William, and Piet:

To buy copies of ‘The Garden Route’ on DVD, please mail martin [at] barefootclients.co.za.