In my previous post I talked about how my whole life was shaped and framed around bullies. This experience connects to my professional career due to a couple of mentors who have stood out in my life.
One mentor is Dave Trott; he’s big news in the advertising world in England. He won the D&AD President’s Award, he’s a Hall of Famer and he introduced me to the concept of Predatory Marketing.
Since meeting Dave, I’ve essentially become Australia’s Predatory Marketer. Predatory marketing is one of the foundations for Step Change Marketing. It’s the principle that we take to market and it’s one of those great levellers.
Fighting for the underdog
I’ve spent around ten years working for some big brand companies such as John Singleton Advertising, Ogilvy and Ogilvy London, JWT, Unilever, Coke, Sony and Nokia, but they taught me very little about fighting for the underdog. When I met Dave Trott that all changed and everything I believed about marketing clicked into place.
While we still work for some of the big brands, what excites me the most as a business owner is the difference we can make for those fast growing challenger brands who want to step up and make a difference.
When we named and positioned Step Change, we wanted the essence of Step Change to be about doing just that – fighting for the underdog. Fighting for the underdog and taking on the bullies is something that lights me up.
Entrepreneur or Entrepre-not?
Another mentor is Gavin Larkin who came into my life during an entrepreneurial phase I was going through. Although Entrepreneurs are all the buzz at the moment, I’ve got to confess, I was a more of an “Entrepre-not”. Back to the story… So, Gav and I had this great idea.
The wear and tear of good ideas
When I was out running one day I knew I was getting old when my knees went ‘ouch’ and my shins went ‘ping’. I thought, “Wow I wonder how long I’ve had these running shoes?” (Running shoe joint cushioning lasts to about 150,000 steps). I wondered why there wasn't an indicator on my shoes, like those toothbrushes that have wear indicators. The shoes still looked okay but the cushioning had gone.
After explaining the wear on my shoes to my wife I said, “Wouldn’t it be good if my shoes had a wear indicator rather than having to guess? This would be good news for shoe companies as well - wow, wear indicators for shoes, what a good idea!”
Gavin and I designed a patent for shoe wear indicators. We used electro-chromic polymers which is a colour changing plastic with an electrical charge.
Long story short… we got a patent in Australia, a provisional patent in the US and we were ready for a global rollout. We had put about a hundred grand into it when the US patent examiner gave us the news on the final throw. It turned out that around 10 years ago an article in the 'Queensland New Scientist' talked about colour changing shoes in the future. Patent denied!
So yes, that was a hundred grand hole that I managed to cry into for the next couple of years. We were so close, but no cigar!
Has anyone seen Eric the Circle?
And then there was another side creation - Eric the Circle.
Eric the Circle is the world’s most prolific cartoon. The world’s draw it yourself cartoon where anybody (and everybody can create a cartoon and a gag). We took the most prolific title off ‘Peanuts’ with over 20,000 creations, what took Charles Schulz 53 years to achieve in cartoon world, took us less than 12 months!
When I should’ve been studying at Uni, I was drawing Eric the Circle cartoons. I kept showing people and said “What do you think of this?” and they’d say “That’s great but what about one like this?” I fought for years trying to push my own Eric the Circle cartoons, but people just kept drawing their own. In the end I created a draw pattern so people could draw their own. Eric’s now just a circle with many faces - happy, angry, confused, anxious, excited - 16Bit Eric, those were the days!
There’s about twenty thousand creations of Eric the Circle now as well as a daily cartoon in MX, Australia’s afternoon daily newspaper.
The private yachts generated from Eric the Circle still stands at an even zero. But no matter, it’s one of those passions that I got really excited about, and who knows? We still might make a lot of money out of it one of these days! One things for sure, it certainly hasn’t delivered back the way Step Change has.
In a nutshell, that’s basically my background and how it led me to Step Change.
In my next post I’ll take you deeper down the rabbit hole with Gavin Larkin and the creation of Step Change Marketing.
Click on the video below to watch Ashton's entire story.
