we are animals

What do you learn from walking on another world? We sat with Charlie Duke, the youngest man to step on the Moon to find out.

Chaco recently had the privilege of helping tell one of mankind’s greatest stories by designing and building general’s Duke brand new site, the best designed and most comprehensive site of any astronaut.

90 Seconds of Wisdom

1- “It’s hard to balance your life on a two-legged stool”

Charlie came to the conclusion that we are “three-legged stools”, made of one body, one mind and one spirit. It is important that you develop not just one or the other, but each of them to the best of your ability. 

Just like you can exercise to improve your physical body or get the best possible education to sharpen your mind, one benefits equally from developing a sound spiritual side. “I try to keep my life in balance in that way”.

2- Understand the personalities

As you’d expect, team-work is crucial to any project: it is essential for all to be on the same page and eventually become one.

But how do you become one with team members you didn’t get to personally chose?

“You need to understand each other’s personality and dampen your own, until you meld together. You have to say OK let’s figure this out so we can, in our training over the years, develop an integrated personality for the crew. That took some work, but eventually, by the time we flew we were as one”.

3- Focus

One of the most difficult things is to prevent your mind from wondering, losing sight of long term objectives as well as the immediate tasks at hand.

It is important to learn to stay focused throughout. Boresight focus is essential to the thorough planning, preparation and execution needed to overcome unforeseen circumstances, which then lead to outstanding performance.

”you had to have almost boresight, tunnel vision if you will”.

Quick Bio 

Born in 1935, Charlie Duke is the youngest man to walk on the Moon, where he spent a record 71 hours. As an astronaut he participated in 5 Apollo missions, and it was to Duke that in 1969 Armstrong said “the Eagle has landed”.
Before joining NASA, Charlie was a USAF fighter pilot stationed in Germany, a test pilot in California and earned his masters in aeronautics at MIT.

This interview is part of Chaco’s 90 Seconds Of Wisdom series: our mad attempt at countering oceans of information with drops of wisdom.

Positioning Puma, the sponsor of half of the African teams to make the most of the FIFA World Cup

OBJECTIVE boost awareness in the lead up to the FIFA World Cup

CHALLENGE Nike and Adidas had famous campaigns, enormous budgets and legendary athletes. Puma did not even have a positioning.

SOLUTION interviewing players we learned that consumers’ perception of Adidas and Nike’s was strikingly similar: the tough American/German coach driven by success with an almost militaristic approach discipline (just do it/impossible is nothing). Puma on the other hand was seen as more easy going, the coach that reminds you to have fun.

Semiotically, Nike and Adidas have both, for years, been using the language of Duty as the path to Glory (much as “the few, the proud, the Marines“). By talking to players we learned that all that hard work is just the cost of entry for any competitive endeavor: after that, what makes the difference is how much you enjoy yourself, how much you love what you do.

Like our competitors, we decided to tap into the Belonging instinct that rules team sports. But instead of insisting on the cost of entry (fulfilling a duty), we claimed Love, its chemical reward,  awarding Puma the emotional high-ground.

RESULTS brilliantly executed by Syrup, the Love strategy became a viral sensation giving Puma more visibility than Adidas -the event’s official sponsor- in the weeks leading up to the World Cup.

Even after agencies changed, the brief kept paying off and lead Droga5 to Cannes Gold.

Imitation is certainly  the highest form of flattery: today there are no fewer than 3 agencies and a dozen portfolios claiming credit for this work. If you encounter them, ask them about it. It’ll be fun.