Mise en place is the French culinary term for everything in its place. Working in kitchens throughout college, I heard this term over a million times since beginning my apprenticeship under the legendary chef Jean Robert de Cavel. I learned to live and die by this philosophy, often tempted to get the words tattooed on my arm (I didn’t, thank goodness). Mise en place entails everything from cutting chives to conducting pre-service meetings. It’s the painful organization of perfectly straightening your rubber spatula on your clean white towel. It’s the belief that a well-organized kitchen cannot fail. In a mise en place kitchen: Cooks become ballerinas and dance their way through service. Instead of worrying about where the olive oil is, cooks can focus on the art. Perfection and growth triumph over stress and exhaustion.
Finding the similarities between bone stock and marketing is not as far-fetched as one might think. David Ogilvy was a chef before he ever picked up advertising. All work requires organization and a readiness to execute. The trick is to find your own dinner service. Determine what you are preparing for and break it down into its fundamental steps. Find what will take the longest, what can ride on the back burner, and what your sous chef can get a head start on. Focus on the small steps that help enable bigger projects, tools like props sheets, budget trackers, and status reports. And never forget your pre-service meeting.
No matter how prepared you are for service, a humid day could force your macarons to not set correctly. This is when you think on your feet and use that meringue for something else. With an ever-growing amount of content and consumers’ shrinking attention span, marketers need to think on their feet, adapt to the times, and pivot their ingredients into other dishes. Applying the can-do mentality of chefs to marketing will make tasks like editing deliverables and adding last-minute deals a lot less daunting. Rainy days happen, but mise en place is all about bringing an umbrella.
This summer was my first time in an agency, so I needed to pull skills and knowledge from every facet of my life. As someone who still has a lot of learning to do, I have come to realize the importance of my hobbies. I never thought peeling beets, trimming artichokes, or kneading dough would have prepared me for the agency world, but damn, was I wrong. I pull on these skills more than the ones learned from my marketing degree. The tedious tasks of the kitchen taught me the patience of combing through budget reports line by line to ensure accuracy. Relentless fast-paced dinner services trained me to stay agile in the non-stop world of retail advertising. My degree taught me the four P’s, but that’s the easy stuff. I encourage you to think that none of your past experiences are irrelevant. Hobbies are worth investing in. You never know when those unique skills you bring to the table might be the secret ingredient to a campaign’s success.
