Fact man or think, man? In which category, you fall in?
I consider myself as a THINK MAN, but it is also a fact that I’m surrounded by FACT MAN types people. There is an absolute majority of fact man in today’s scenario. I want people to discuss it and start giving space to think, man. People should start talking about ideas, not about the people and the facts. This is the reason why I started writing about this topic.
1) When a smartphone is filled with Cache memory, it becomes slow, processing power is reduced, and then we need to delete the memory or format the phone to keep it fast.
2) If a wardrobe is filled with old clothes, we need to clean this and remove the old cloth to make space for new clothing.
Who is fact Man: – Person who is filled with so much information, facts, and past data. You just ask, and he will give u the news, and he expects the same from you too. It is something like any search engine or Google. They keep talking about figures and sharing numbers.
In Marketing They also keep on asking specifications of the product, for an example, which happened with me recently, one gentleman kept on asking me the specifications of flex, the thickness of pipe which used in signage, GSM of the poster, banner, and other printing material, printing machine name and so on.
So I intended to let you know about the fact man. Next time whenever u meet such fact man and as soon as he starts asking the facts and figures and judging your memory, just narrate the famous story of Einstein.
Great Scientist Einstein was once asked how many feet in a mile, Einstein’s reply was – I dont know. Why should I fill my brain with facts which I can find in two minutes in any standard reference book?
Any back-end guy or a clerk can do this work, keeping safe the data and producing them as and when it is required. A mind can save the data worth a few thousand bucks, but this engages his mind and doesn’t allow us to think something new and innovative.
Who is Think Man: – Think man doesn’t keep the garbage in his mind, he is full of out of the box ideas and new initiatives. He doesn’t use his energy just to remind the things and keep on repeating the past achievement.
Think man’s mind has lots of space, he explores new ideas and experiments.
Fact man’s focus on history, but the thinking man believes in creating a new account.
In today’s corporate world, we can find the fact man sitting in cabins and chambers at company headquarters and playing with statistics and excel sheets.
Think man can be seen in the market, in regional offices managing campaigns and projects and creating such facts which would be accessed and analysis by these facts men.
The data analysis is an excellent thing and necessary, I am not against data analysis and fact processing, that is also an essential and integral part of the overall business ecosystem. But a thinking Marketing professional uses this fact to improve the projects and productivity. These facts are in supporting role to reduce the cost and cost per acquisition. Facts can never be the sole reason for success but to assist in performance enhancement.
I still remember when I used to work in Nitco tiles into trade marketing, we had to send the monthly report of BTL activities at the end of the month to our Mumbai office. I, along with other regional SPOC for trade marketing, used to generate, create, and share this data with the marketing team, sits in the Mumbai office. One of my ideas was to develop new innovation corners at big multi-brand outlets.
This idea was initially rejected by most of the marketing team members because this was not a traditional trade marketing display plan, and I assumed that they were filled up with the thought of Mock-ups and display, which were so generic in nature and no innovation in that. I remember how Mr. Rahul Akkaa, then CMO of Nitco, supported me for this idea even he encouraged me for another out of the box project Non-Trade Co-branded signages, which were absolutely new to marketing in those days.
The idea of Non-Trade Co-branded signages came from an exciting incident, in an evening of December while driving from office on my two-wheeler bumped to Mercedes from the back, followed by a debate with his owner, at a traffic signal in Navi-Peth, Pune. It was a mistake by that Mercedes driver, but ironically traffic police constable fined me. I Rushed to the nearby police station – Dattawadi and lodged a complaint against that traffic constable. Surprisingly, the Police inspector called him and told him to apologize to me for this.
This all happened in 2 hours, and because of this engagement, the Police inspector became a sort of my friend. While coming out of the station, I saw the Police station signage, which was too old and faded; it was situated at a very strategically important point in terms of visibility.
I just got an idea to display co-branded signage with our logo. I rushed back to him and offer free signage for his station. He was readily agreed, and then in the next 2 days, I got it approved from Rahul Akkara and installed there. In the next 2-3 months, we have got 27 other opportunities to display our logo in co-branded signage at Police stations, Bus Stands, and Hospitals across the city. This was an excellent way of getting free of cost eyeballs because these signages were installed at busy traffic junctions and squire.
Again one fascinating story which I would like to share with you. In 2011 I used to work with Systema Shaym Teleservices LTD – MTS. I needed my driving license from Pune RTO, but due to a lack of few documents, it got delayed. In those days, RTO was full of brokers and middlemen.
Once I visited there, and I saw many empty signages, so I decided to encash this opportunity to get free eyeballs and create some curiosity about MTS. RTO is the place where thousands of people used to visit every day, and 50% of out of them are new. This crowd was also matched with our Target group as 90% of these visitors were 18+, young, and most likely to use data or internet savvy. MTS was just recently launched its data card and Android-based smartphone and CDMA blackberry bundled handsets; therefore, it was a place where I could get my customers. It was an excellent opportunity for a new brand MTS to get featured at RTO junction and inside the RTO Premises.
The next day I met the PRO of RTO and convinced him to feature traffic awareness messages with our brand logo. For any brand, the cost of advertising on billboards at RTO junction in Pune is enormous; it starts from Rs 60,000 to Rs 1,00,000 approx for a month. In the next few days, the entire RTO premise was displayed with awareness creatives with the MTS logo. My license was also issued by RTO without much trouble. 😚
All I want to say that an idea can come from any side, we just have to be positive and forward to explore this.
In big corporates – Fact Man is on the top, and they take the critical strategic decisions, but in Start-ups, THINK-MAN is given priorities in the decision making the process.
Most of the companies today, which are not in the right shapes such as kingfisher, SBI, Videocon, and other telecom companies, once were depended on a bunch of fact men, while companies like Xiomi, One Plus, Flipkart, Patanjali their management are handled by think man.
FACT-MAN are just the fat man with fat salaries, a burden for the company, but the THINK-MAN are assets of the company.
Please share more differences of think man and fact man in comment sections.