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What Van Gogh should have known
A beginner’s guide to Marketing
Vincent Van Gogh is a famous painter – he’s famous for The Sunflowers, the Starry Night, The Bedroom, The Terrasse in Arles... but he’s also famous for being one of those “doomed artists” who remained poor all their lives despite their genius. Van Gogh did NOT sell ONE painting during his entire life – oh, sorry, he did sell one! Yes, one. Only one. Compared to Picasso or Dali - who lived the lives of rock stars -, Van Gogh remained in the dark all his life. He’s in the list of artists who earned most of their fame post-humously, after they passed away, like German philosopher Nietszche, Italian painter Modigliani or French poet Arthur Rimbaud. The question is: What did they lack that could have allowed them to enjoy their success while they were still alive?
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The answer will be deployed in our Marketing Course at UEF with the subtitle "What Van Gogh Should have known".
The first answer to that enigma relies in Van Gogh’s personality. He had voices inside his heads that were telling him “You can’t paint! You can’t paint!” So, to silence those voices, he would paint and paint, and paint. Van Gogh had the personality of a doer not a seller. It’s easy to divide a company into 2 main parts: Production and Sales. Van Gogh, as a painter, could magnificently symbolize the Production department. But his business lacked the Sales department. Or did it?
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Van Gogh’s brother Theodore Van Gogh was managing an art shop in Paris. Paris was during the 19th century the place to be for artists the same way the Silicon Valley is the place to be in the 21st century for High-Tech entrepreneurs. So, the Van Gogh brothers represented the two functions of Production and Sales. What then was lacking?
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One key acronym to analyze a business environment is PESTEL for Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal. Socially, the Paris of the second part of the 21st century was filled with very innovative people that are known as the “avant-garde”. They were the pro-active artists from which the future of arts would be deployed – the same way, again, the Silicon Valley decides for our technological future, even though the Silicon Valley has now to face a lot of competition from many parts of the world including Shenzen, the Chinese Silicon Valley, Guadalajara, the Mexican Silicon Valley or Yabacon Valley, the Nigerian Silicon Valley.
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The Paris of the 19th was where all the artists gathered. This is what Steve Jobs called the Beehive Effect. Beehives have this pattern made of hexagons that fit perfectly well within each other. Steve Jobs was saying that in the Silicon Valley, because everybody’s there, ideas, and skills can be easily shared. And if an engineer loses a job in, say, Yahoo, he can cross the street and apply for a job at Google!
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Technologically, the end of the 19th century saw the rise of photography. So, painters were afraid to lose their jobs. Mmh, doesn’t that sound familiar? The idea that the future of jobs would be taken by Artificial Intelligence was already in the air nearly two hundred years ago. So, what did painters do? They didn’t need to reproduce reality as it is because picture cameras could then do it. So, instead of painting what they saw, they would paint the impressions that they felt. This saw the birth of the Impressionist movement. What we learn is that people don’t lose jobs because of technology. But they have to do their jobs differently.
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Van Gogh had no choice but to jump in that impressionist trend, as a follower. Companies are often described as being either followers, or innovators, among other denominations. We can say that Van Gogh started off as a follower before, in a later stage, becoming innovative by cultivating his own unique style.
In the picture The Yellow House, Van Gogh painted his room. But, there is a twist. What is it?
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In the painting, Van Gogh painted the walls blue. But in reality, his walls were white. As for the colors of the other objects in the room, they are much brighter in his painting than in reality. In marketing, we know that when Packaging a product, we want to make it appear brighter than it really is. Or should we?
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I will leave you with this last question. You now have a glimpse of the Marketing course with the subtitle “What Van Gogh should have known”!