Creativity through the years – 1988
Over the next 25 posts, ending on my birthday, I will be covering an incredibly creative moment or idea from a year of my life AND one creative moment in either the marketing, advertising, technology or media world.
Some of us need positive reinforcement, others only understand punishment. I only understand positive reinforcement. Luckily I learned this when I was just 3 ½. I started kindergarten in the middle of 1988. From the very beginning, I was a handful. I liked to talk, and had a very active imagination. The rest of the story from today is as told to me by my father since it is one of his favorite stories…“Every day Kirsten’s teacher, Mrs. Gitlin, had a pond of water drawn on the board. In that pond were fishing poles for each student, and fish in the water with each students name on it. Above the fishing poles was a table and then a frying pan. Every time you did something wrong, you moved up the ranking, from the water, to the pole, to the table and to the frying pan…and by gum, you were in the fishing pan every day! Well, the problem was, you thought it was a prize…(apparently I thought I was winning every day??). So, we [my parents] came in and talked with the teacher and explained that you [Kirsten] needed positive, not negative reinforcement. Once she changed how she rewarded you – giving you stars when you did things right instead of punishing if you did them wrong – you became a stellar student and she never had problems with you again”. This lesson has stuck with me forever and I believe is one of the most important things I remember when working with clients. Some people need positive reinforcement, some negative (reminder emails for getting their things done vs congratulatory notes when they are done). Some people learn by listening, some by doing (sitting in workshops or hands on training). The overall point is that not everyone operates in the same manner, and the sooner we learn that, the more effectively we will work with each other.
In the marketing world, 1988 marked a turning point for U.S. advertising overseas. Prior to 1988, Soviet TV had never allowed any American advertisements, but on May 21st, 1988, Pepsi debut it’s commercial to over 150 million Soviet TV viewers. What was even more important was that Pepsi translated their logo into the Cyrillic alphabet so that the Russians would be able to understand the commercial and the logo. This was a turning point because after the opening of the Soviet Union to American commercials, many companies began researching changing their logos into more multi-cultural forms, and planned on how they would release their products into new markets (remember the disaster of the Chevy Nova in Hispanic cultures?). It is important now, more than ever, to remember that with channels like youtube, your commercials have basically no limit to the people (and the countries) that will view them.
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