To provide background for those of you who don’t smoke pot, there are two main ingredients in cannabis (or marijuana): CBD and THC. The former doesn’t get you high, instead providing all the benefits such as reducing pain and inflammation. It’s the reason many jurisdictions are legalizing marijuana now or considering.

THC, on the other hand, is the compound that gets you high and hallucinating. It’s the reason marijuana is illegal in the first place.

In other words, if you’re a pothead, THC is why you smoke pot; CBD is the reason you tell others why you smoke pot.

Many beverage companies, including Coca-Cola, are trying to get into the wellness drinks market believed to be worth tens of billions of dollars, by infusing the healthily beneficial CBD into their drinks. It is still mostly a preparation stance at this point, though, since marijuana is not yet legalized at federal level in the U.S., the main target market.

On the other hand, Heineken has a craft beer brand, Lagunitas, that has been infusing THC into its drinks and selling them in California. Legally, of course, since the state allows marijuana.

I see an interesting parable in this. It reminds me of a few things simultaneously.

1. Irvins Salted Egg

If you’re marketing on a positive benefit (e.g. “it’s good for your health!”), you’d better have the authority behind you. And that tends to require WAITING for the authority to come on board. But if you’re marketing on a ‘negative’ benefit, your hands are ‘tied’ and you have to disclose and disclaim. Like “Warning: This WILL Get You High!”

Kinda like Irvins Salted Egg snacks that warn on the label: “Dangerously Addictive!” Good stuff.

2. Breakthrough Copywriting

The book says:

You want to make an emotionally compelling case… The one response you don’t want to get is, “Interesting idea. That’s really good copy. You write well.” The response you want to get is either “We’re going to get one of those,” or “You can’t do that!” You want to get them one way or the other. You want to get a negative reaction from the people your offer is not right for, and a positive reaction from the people who it is right for. That is what an emotionally compelling case does.

It certainly feels like Heineken’s approach to marijuana-infused drinks invokes a lot of “We’re gonna get one of those” and “You can’t do that!”

3. Thinking in Bets

Another book. This one, poker champion turned management consultant Annie Duke preaches exactly what the title says. Most things in real-life decision-making hinges upon certain future. And the future is always uncertain. When every decision is viewed as a bet, oftentimes the smart move is to not engage in one. In this example, will the health benefits be enough to warrant a legal endorsement? Maybe, eventually. But why not remove the dependency altogether and promote the health risk?

So where’s the theme Productivity, Creativity, and Expression in this?

For one thing, this post isn’t necessarily about – or not about – getting creative from smoking pot; I don’t make judgment! But it certainly has something to do with productivity in making decisions in bets, because it tends to make you avoid taking sides. Since eventualities take time to unfold, taking sides can paralyze you in the mean time – like Coca-Cola and other brands do currently. If you take an option that removes the bet, then you don’t have to wait, and can act now. Heineken’s Lagunitas has been able to sell its cannabis-infused products because it chose a positioning that doesn’t depend on the legality of adding CBD to your drinks.

There’s also a lot to do with expression. Effective expression is where some folks will be necessarily alienated, so that the target audience feels exclusive. If you write for everyone, you write for no one. If you speak to everyone, no one hears. If you try to please everyone, no one is pleased.
Instead, pick someone. Address them at the expense of alienating everyone else.

That’s expression that will get effects.

Here’s the story (Thai version here):

A lottery merchant told a story that someone had bought lotteries at his stand that ended up winning 90 million baht. The patron, a regular, left the lotteries with the merchant. But the merchant was an honest man and brought the winning to the rightful winner.

Business was booming immediately for him. On one of the early good days, all of a sudden the famous graphologist came to pay a visit, to commend the merchant for his honesty, give a calligraph that spells “rich,” and pronounce the location of the lottery stand was auspicious. All was good.

Except…the whole thing was bogus. A PR stunt. And merely a week had passed by before he was found out as a sham.

And now, the social media table turned on the famous graphologist. He’s been hiding from limelight.

This story rings close to home for me, because, just days before this news broke, and my girlfriend, along with three other lady friends, had contacted this very graphologist to design their signatures for them (for a price). He’d asked them for their names, dates of birth, et cetera et cetera. I’ve got the pictures of the signatures he invented for them (though I’m not allowed to show them here) – they all looked uncannily similar to one another to me. Nevertheless, the ladies have all been practicing signing their new signatures to perfection.

A lot of people believe that signature, and handwriting, reveal a lot about the owner. The characters and the state of mind, at the very least. The future, but that’s a stretch. And this is found not only in the old and the classics either, but also in the new. I was amazed to see this one ‘analysis’ of the signatures of famous tech people. Jobs. Gates. Bezos. Dell. I wonder what it would say about Travis Kalanick. :p

In the old and the classics, graphology is of course featured prominently in detective stories. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a true believer of the art (or..science?) himself. He describes Sherlock Holmes with unnatural ability to interpret handwriting. Holmes supposedly can tell the gender and the character of the writer. He can compare two samples, and not only tell if they are by different persons, and whether they are related! (For prominent cases featuring this mad skill of his, check out The Reigate Squires and The Norwood Builder.)

All wonders Holmes could perform with mere handwriting are too good to be true, except one. Signature and handwriting verification is performed all the time, even in modern days, as a forensic measure. True, it’s not an infallible measure, as both signature and handwriting can be forged well with a skillful con artist. In this sense, Holmes was lucky, and not because the skills of the con artists supposedly improved over time.

I’ve had to forge my parents’ signatures a few times, friends’ handwritings at least once, for a prank. I did not do a good job. It was hard, but not impossible. What’s impossible is to forge well and with speed too. And that is where I think the modern-day real-world counterparts of Holmes are having a tough time. Back in the old days, pens were fountain and feathered quill; slow strokes would have blotched ink on the paper. Today, with all the ball-point pens, forgers can take time to mimic similarity in the outcome only.

Coming back to what your signature reveals about you, one thing that I think might be worthwhile to explore is to think back to when you invented your signature. Why do you sign it the way you do now? Any story behind that? To get started, here’s my story.

I was obsessed with money when I was younger. Back in high school, someone told me a Chinese superstition that in order to have a lot of money, my signature had better begin with a pouch. A money pouch. Open up, so that it can keep money. For both first name and last name.

Not an ounce of artistic creativity in me, I found the requirements difficult to try to fit into my full-name signature. So I went up to this buddy of mine, a band drummer who later became an architect. (Some traits show since young age.) When he heard my needs, he said “easy peasy,” and just invented one for me right there. It looked amazingly good and simple (enough for me to replicate). So I took it and practiced and still sign it till this day.

Later when I was going abroad, I had to sign in English. I’d shaken off that Chinese superstition by then, but not the obsession with money. So I invented my own English signature…with a big $ in it!

What’s your story?