The marketer's bias: An error of judgment almost all marketing folk make
Your job as a marketer is to find an eliminate all of the elements that prevent this growing accumulation of customers from happening.
Brands.
How often, and how deeply do you think about them?
Even the famous ones: Coke, Apple, BMW, Chappies?
Exactly.
Even though they are everywhere, we don't actually think about individual brands that often. And even when we do consider them, nobody really studies a brand deeply to assess whether or not it's making their life better.
But this isn't how marketers think.
Marketer's think that people care. Marketer's are under the false assumption that their brand 'may just resonate with a particular person's personality' and if there is a perfect match of values - that person will fall in deeply in love with the brand and buy it unconditionally.
This of course is complete bullshit.
Nobody actually gives a damn about brands and nobody is loyal to a brand without a significant amount of coercion. Yes, there are a few freaks out there that will only buy Levi's and will always own a Smith & Wesson, but they are statistical outliers.
But even though logically most marketing folk probably know this to be true, they continue to follow traditional marketing 'best practice'. The desire to tick boxes is stronger than the motivation to be truly effective by actively questioning the usual paperwork pageantry that goes along with the function.
The remedy is simple.
By accepting that people don't really care about your brand, you are actually freed up to work more creatively with it.
Knowing that nobody reads your copy, nobody carefully analyses which words you included in your positioning statement, nobody will actually notice if you go out of business tomorrow - should give you the creative licence then to take chances, choose bold ideas, commit to consistently doing something remarkable everyday...rather than worrying too much about whether or not the kerning on your forgettable headline is correct or not.
The purpose of marketing and innovation is to create the conditions under which a business is able to easily acquire and keep customers.
Your job as a marketer is to find and eliminate all of the elements that prevent this growing accumulation of customers from happening (which includes being ruthless with processes and thinking that generate inertia).
Good marketing is a practice that is rewarded by good, ongoing output. You start from scratch everyday, because nobody can remember what you did yesterday.