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Towel Day. May 25. A day long remembered. A day that’s…wait. The empire fell on a Thursday.  A while back… any way…

Every year, if I have a class on May 25, I take a few moments to instruct my students in the way of the Towel Day. (Life, the university and everything is covered in the usual format).

This year, we were stuck in the Business to Business marketing class in the middle of CB. So I ignored that topic entirely, and ran with thelessons out of this quote…

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Today’s metaphorical reinterpretation of the lesson of the towel was branding.  How marketers can effectively stand in front of the marketplace of consumers, look cheerfully, clutch our metaphorical towels (ludicriously pretty brand names), and the market will loan us absolutely any credibility we might need, because we’ve got a towel.  The psychology of a towel is the psychology of assumptions. If someone is carrying a towel, then they’re assumed to have the rest of what’s needed, and you don’t mind loaning them the spare bits.  For us over in marketing, it’s quite likely that we do have the soap, tin of biscuits and the ball of string.  But if we don’t, there’s this thing call customer co-creation of value which is where you loan  a marketer carrying a towel quite a bit of the product they probably should have brought with them anyway…

Happy Towel Day to you all

To Douglas Adams (@DNA), whereever in the giant plain of universii that you may be…

Thank you.  For going first (second or third, or whatever you were in), for paving a path for me to follow, for being willing to be willing to try new things, for having ideas, and for being bloody silly at times.  So long and thanks for all the fish.

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