Sitting in a café with my 7 year old son recently we got into a deep and troubled debate, “donut or chocolate cake?”  the donut’s bigger… but the cake is chocolatier…what to do?  “donut or chocolate cake?”.  In a blinding moment of clarity we realised we had been asking the wrong question it was an AND issue not an OR question. We would have “ a donut AND chocolate cake”.

It struck me that too often the OR and AND get muddled.

“Nature or nurture?” has been debated for hundreds of years.Turns out it’s “ nature and nurture”….obviously.

Another example, a nice old saying, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”….no it isn’t, it’s both, “it’s what you know AND who you know”.

This week in one of those media meetings we all have, we were yet again in the “on-line or off-line” media debate. But it is not an OR issue its an AND issue. How do we get off-line and on-line working together? That’s the point.

Our industry is riddled with the wrong use of OR.  TV or press, print or digital. Every time a new medium appears we predict the death of an old one and our predictions are usually wrong.

The problem with most marketing folk is that they want black and white answers not grey ones, hence too much OR and not enough AND.

Another analogy and a personal favourite is that of an Orchestra. Lots of instruments do their own thing in a co-ordinated way and the result is usually great music. The conductor does not analyse which instruments contribute the most and then rule out the others. “ Ladies and gentleman, having done a thorough analysis of the relative contribution of all instruments and optimised for maximum return Beethoven’s 5^th will today be performed with six triangles, three oboes and a cannon”.

The problem comes back to the fact that an awful lot of marketing communications is more art than science and just like music that requires a feel for the subject, a sense of shape, of rhythm and of aesthetic. It can’t all be done by hard analysis.

Of course, sometimes AND isn’t possible and OR is a given. What if we hadn’t enough money for a donut AND chocolate cake. Well then you have to be a bit creative.

So the question “a donut or chocolate cake?”… the answer “ a chocolate éclair of course.”