INVERTING

 

 

Charlie Munger was one of the richest and most successful investors ever, his investment company grew to be worth $1.09 TRILLION.

He credited his success to a tactic he called ‘inverting’.

Munger says he invented the tactic years before he began investing, when he was a lieutenant in the US Air Force.

He was a meteorologist, specialising in physics and weather patterns and controlled the routes that pilots ferrying supplies would have to take.

He says he boiled his job down to a simple question: How would I kill these pilots?

Then he’d make sure his absolute priority was to avoid doing that.

He didn’t have to be clever, just work out the surest way to kill the pilots and do the opposite.

For instance, the most certain ways to kill pilots was either to send them where weather would ice up the plane and make it crash or send them on a route where they’d run out of fuel and crash.

Either of those would mean certain death, so he must avoid them even if it meant a longer, slower, route.

In the short term, other routes might seem more efficient, but over the long term Charlie Munger’s routes showed a better return, more of his planes arrived safely, more pilots lived, simply by inverting the question.

He says he brought that same thinking into investing, he’d invert the question.

Don’t ask: how could I make money?

Ask: What would I invest in to kill my company?

And by doing the opposite he ended up as one of the richest people on the planet.

So we know his system works.

The question for us is can we bring Charlie Munger’s ‘inverting’ tactic to what we do?

Well, let’s ask the question “How could we kill our advertising?”

Obviously, the easiest way to kill our advertising is make sure no one sees it.

It couldn’t possibly work if it was invisible.

As Bill Bernbach said, “If no one notices your advertising, everything else is academic”.

So what would make our advertising invisible?

The best way to make anything invisible is to camouflage it, make it blend into the background so it looks like everything around it.

That’s why insects disguise themselves to look like twigs or leaves, fish are the colour of the sand they lie on, lions are the colour of the brush they hide in, snakes are the colour of the grass, and so on.

The surest way to disappear is to blend in, so the surest way to kill our advertising is to make it the same as everyone else’s ads.

And if we followed the inverting principle, the best thing to do would be the opposite.

To make sure we didn’t blend in, to make sure our advertising stood out, to make sure it looks different.

But that’s not what we do, we don’t invert our thinking.

We do the same as everyone else in our sector: perfume, food, cars, fashion, drink.

We do the same research amongst the same consumers, we uncover the same generic insights, so we end up saying the same things that could apply to anyone in our sector. We make sure our ads say the same as all the other ads in our sector, then we run them in the same media as everyone else in our sector.

Same planning, same media, same creative, as everyone else.

And we end up with the same solution in the same place looking exactly the same.

Our ads are invisible because they’re camouflaged: they blend-in with the environment, so they don’t stand out, so no one sees them.

Instead of asking “what would kill our advertising?” and doing the opposite, we use it as a brief.

Because we don’t ‘invert’ the worst possibility, we use it as something to aim at.

We think how could we make our advertising the same as everyone else’s?

Then we do that.