Need help passing the marshmallow test?

EVERY MONDAY MORNING we sit at our round table and “start the week.”

Our chats always begin with a review of the weekend’s main events - be they personal, political or cultural (often centring, it has to be admitted, on football woes and Netflix chit-chat.)

Inevitably this Monday’s roundtable began with reflections on the world’s own roundtable at COP26… or as The Economist labelled it “COPOUT26.”

We contemplated its failings and reflected on how we had got into such a “fine mess” in the first place.

We revisited a roll-call of the usual villains – oil companies, rich people, the Americans, the Saudis, the UN… SMERSH, SPECTRE etc.

So far, so normal Monday.

Then we got more serious.

The failure, we concluded, was our OWN (mankind’s that is, not Electric Glue’s).

Our failure is a failure of foresight, a failure of empathy (for the future), a failure to imagine the world for our children and their children.

In short, a failure to think LONG in a short-term world.

There is no doubt we now all suffer from the tyranny of the short-term. And not just in marketing!

The challenges we face in business lives are a function of powerful forces in our everyday lives, be they economic (the relentless imperative of quarterly earnings reports) or political (a consciousness of the next election is an ever-present driver of public discourse) or cultural – not least in the world of social media.

Our social platforms feed us with short-term dopamine hits. The clock is the next click.

But, as this last point tends to bear out, the forces of short-termism are, let’s face it, essentially an inherited strand of our psychological make-up as human beings.

As anyone knows who has distracted themselves with “The Marshmallow Test” on YouTube, the human brain is trained by evolution to eat the marshmallow in the hand, rather than wait for the deferred reward of marshmallows later.

So far, so truism, I hear you say.

But the next part of our roundtable chat got us, inevitably, inexorably to the hard part… so, what do we do about it?

In particular – how might Electric Glue help our clients think long-term in a short-term world?

After all the brands we help build are, by definition, “cathedral” projects.

Indeed, the very exercise of brand valuation is rooted in the security (or not) of long-term revenues.

Certainly I have never encountered a brand that was built in a burst, nor even an annual media plan!

And it is a truth not always acknowledged that achieving true effectiveness tends to be a slow process, incremental and cumulative over the long-term.

So, here are the seven ways the EG team have come up with to help us all “think long-term in a short-term world”. Or at least attempt to balance the tyranny of the short-term.