When all of the pundits were opining on Gov. Mark Sanford’s erratic behavior, one wise observer nailed the source of it: “He is madly in love with someone new. That is always a form of temporary insanity.”

The first rush of new love is so wildly intoxicating that it blurs one’s judgement and prompts the kind of giddy optimism that makes it feel as if everything is possible. A sitting governor can vanish, lie about his whereabouts, fly off to make passionate love to an Argentinean mystery woman, and no one will know a thing about it.

Temporary insanity.

In the strange brew that life is, we can fear and pursue something simultaneously. Do you want to be insane? Of course not? But wait. Do you want the joy of a sensation that is so powerful and exhilarating that it liberates you, momentarily, from the laws of physics? So that the impossible becomes absolutely within the realm of your control?

Of course you do. This brand of temporary insanity that springs from new love, is so deliciously intoxicating that it has driven a King of England to abdicate his throne and prompted millions who barely know each other to tie the knot at Vegas drive-in chapels.

The fact is, the same “insanity” that we fear, we embrace when it is the kind that leads people who believed such days were behind them to carve their initials together into the barks of trees, encasing their love within the treasure box of a crudely drawn but passionately etched heart.

Harvard Business School doesn’t teach a single course on love. Nor on the temporary insanity it can create. A shortcoming of immense proportions.

At a time in my life when I might have gone to Harvard, I went to a far superior university known as Paris. In my brief time living there, I fell in love a dozen times. Each one was forever. In every single case, I was magnificently, temporarily insane.

Many years later, as I built my marketing firm and began to fuse the experiences of my life into a business methodology, I reflected on how important it is to have customers and prospects make the transition from like to love. If they simply like your products or services, you will fail. The goal, must be to lavish what you do with so much attention and innovation, that they fall in love. That they become temporarily insane. And believe that they cannot or will not live without the offerings you are making to them.

People didn’t care that Walt Disney was a high school dropout. They fell for the films and the Magic Kingdom head over heels. Women don’t slip on a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes and feel like they made a good purchase.

They are sure they just had the best sex of their lives. They are temporarily insane. They will spend $750 and thank Mr. Blahnik for the privilege of letting them do so.

Great business is the art and science of romance connected in some wonderfully mysterious way to commerce. Every day you go to work you must have one overriding goal: to get your customers to go insane. Over and over again.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Images courtesy: 1, 2

A billion women came before Marilyn Monroe. A billion have come after.

But she has never shared the stage, the life stage, with anyone. She is a timeless beauty, an exotic wonder woman, a sexual shockwave, an object of universal lust. And an extraordinary business lesson.

No woman ever stood in a room with Marilyn and felt beautiful. No man ever shared her presence and felt sane. She stole the heart of the most heroic athlete of her time, Joe DiMaggio–himself an American icon. She captured the soul of the greatest American playwright, Arthur Miller. She married them both and then she moved on to Camelot and wrapped the Commander-In-Chief, JFK, around her finger.

Marilyn is of no distinct period in history. She is known to teenagers and seniors alike, urban and rural, Elton John (who sings beautifully about her) and Vladmir Putin, (who has watched her films). The world loves Marilyn. Even those who pretend they are too smart and sophisticated to admit they do.

Marilyn Monroe is irresistible.

I watched a news story this morning on CNBC reporting on crowds lining up in the wee hours to buy the newly discounted iPhone. Why would they do that? Why did thousands do the same when the product was first introduced. Why have so many millions bought them when they already had phones?

Because Steve Jobs has always understood Marilyn Monroe. He has spent his entire career making sure he wasn’t selling things people liked.

Like is a commodity. Love is a force and a barrier to entry. Great marketing always finds a way to transition a product, a company, from like to love. If the marketing fails to do that, the marketing is just a glorified way of going through the motions.

I want to live in a world surrounded only by people and things that intoxicate me. Unfortunately, there are no such pure plays, but I am bored to tears when I have to spend time in the land of like. So I search out the people and things I can be passionate about– and like a soldier carrying his girlfriends picture into battle–I think of them. Amazing how they cast a glow that makes everything more beautiful.

Every time you wonder how you can make your business better, resist the temptation to read a treatise from Harvard Business School.

Look at a picture of Marilyn Monroe.

Mark Stevens

CEO