David Wilkinson – Experiential Marketing

 

We are pleased to announce the unveiling of our latest project. The SDM Leadership Series is our new podcast where we interview business leaders big and small on the latest in management practices, entrepreneurial ideas and the lessons that only come with experience in this 21^st Century Economy.

Our first episode features Mr. David Wilkinson, who for the last 30 years, has been one of the most innovative marketing experts in the world. His boutique firm, the Wilkinson Group, has done work with the likes of the United Nations, Cisco, Pepsi, Best Buy and a host of other companies that I’m sure you have heard of. David has become a friend and mentor and was the perfect person to start off our Leadership series.In our interview we talk about him, his career and quite a bit about the world of marketing and how it’s changed, especially due to the innovations in technology that have come out in the last ten years.

Saying Goodbye to Bookstores

When I was in college, my mother lived in Oak Park, IL not far from Lake Ave, a walking district filled with retail shops and restaurants. One place in particular that I loved was Barbara’s Bookstore which was a block down from the entrance to the Green Line Metro.Barbara’s wasn’t a small bookshop but neither was it a huge, warehouse-like place like Barnes & Noble or Borders. There was a great collection of eclectic fiction, non-fiction, design books, local zines and poetry chapbooks. There was a generous raised area for kids books and posters of upcoming readings and publications strewn along the walls. And there was the fragrance of the independent bookshop that was the combination of wood pulp, printers ink and patchouli.Barbara’s Bookstore was an enormously comforting place for me to hide from the cold of Chicago’s winters, and I would spend afternoons wandering through the store, brushing up against the titles of authors, activists, adventurers and statesmen. And in the periodicals section, a crazy assortment of art magazines, stapled pamphlets, opened copies of the Reader (Chicago’s now defunct alternative weekly) and university press anthologies.Though it is easy to whitewash the past, those hours looking at book jackets, leafing through design magazines and attempting to delve into some of the local poetry had a big affect on my love of certain writers and willingness to have an open mind to different works. Some of how I see the world came from spending time in that store.Much like the first alternative record store that I went to in high school, Barbara’s bookstore was a cultural hub, a place where ideas and dreams could mesh with what had already come before. Though that is true in a library to a degree, Barbara’s was a store, so much of the work presented was current, relevant, and smelled of the future.As you can imagine, Barbara’s Bookstore in Oak Park is now gone. I’m happy to know that the store re-organized itself into a series of smaller, more nimble bookstores aimed at commuters with locations at O’Hare, Northwestern Hospital and the like. Like any modern bookstore, they’ve had to move with the times, and profit margins grow smaller every year. But, I miss what Barbara’s was in that time before, when independent bookstores weren’t endangered, when ideas and dreams could stand for a few hours, safe from a snowstorm among the stories.

Is it two late to name my daughters Katniss?

I haven’t really been writing that much or posting on Facebook very much recently, mostly because I’ve been reading the Hunger Games. I think this is just another way that I’m secretly trying to convince the world that I’m a 14yr old girl trapped in a man’s body.But, they truly are fantastic books. I started the first one a couple weeks ago. And the first 50 pages or so I didn’t really get into it. It was only when we closer the the premiere of the movies that I knew I Alexa, who has read all three books of the Hunger Games Series three times each, would want to see. I had decided to finish at least the first one so I knew what we were getting into before we were in the movie theater.As I got into the books, I was really amazed by the characters. Now, I will be the first to admit, this is a plot driven book, with stylistic hooks that pull you along. I appreciate that, and frankly I’m a fan of plot-driven stories. Personally, I think the benefits of plot-driven stories are often overlooked for the literary equivalent of self-indulgent navel-gazing that passes for “important” books now-a-days. I realize that comment might be controversial, but really, did you get all the way through “Beloved”?I was really taken by both the characters and the setting. Though it is technically science fiction, it has enough similarities to real events in humanity’s past history that we can make literal allusions to it in multiple ways. As I’ve continued to read the books, one reads about a culture that is both obsessed with the spectacle of the Hunger Games which is both intentionally nihilistic and entertaining, I found it gave a veiled distance to many issues that my children will eventually need to understand as they grow older. This has led to initial discussions in our house about apartheid, slavery, fascist-era Germany and, of course, modern reality TV programming.However, there are other discussions which also came. The character of Katniss, though not always a sympathetic character, shows a strong propensity for self-sufficiency, self-reliance and an understanding of her personal responsibilities. Additionally, she is never portrayed as some Norman Vincent Peale herione, with a 2-D character based on some unattainable moral hierarchy. Just her willingness to sacrifice herself for her sister, but not quite forgive her mother for her predicament, is both endearing and so perfectly natural in a 16yr old girl. She is a young woman that seems to have a grasp on the realities of the world in which she lives and also the ways to work within the confines of that world.  I think my children could do worse than to have Katniss Everdeen as a role model.So, I’ve decided that we will rename Alexa to Katniss, and Teja will be Katniss II, but we will probably just call her “Blanket”.