Your legacy is not how much you will be missed when you are on holiday, when you are not in a meeting, when you will leave the company.
Your legacy is how much things can happen when you are not around.
Tag: customer experience
Mindless
A father buys a package of snacks and sees a funny promotion printed on the cardboard.
“Give your child a superhero adventure!”
What they want:
- Spend a few carefree minutes bonding with their child.
What they don’t want:
- Fill in a form asking for their gender, email address, telephone number, home address, and a few other personal information.
- Give consent for sharing data with third-parties and receive further marketing material.
- Be pressured into a meaningless deadline (two months from the current time) by which they need to submit their child picture. Or else … ?
- Realize that “giving their child a superhero adventure” actually means having their child’s picture mindlessly inserted into a soulless cartoon frame.
- Be informed that the final deliverable (the soulless cartoon frame) will be available within 15 working days.
- Get to know that they can check the status of the deliverable by logging into their personal area (what personal area?).
- Be given a 8-digit code that identifies the deliverable.
- Get all the information from a very sketchy sender (fornimascheremarvel23.kinder.com).
- Receive a link to download the deliverable from their personal area (?) 24 hours later, when they (and their children) have already moved on to other things.
Guess what they get?
Distinction
There are two ways to build awareness.
One is top down. It’s about putting your face (your logo) in as many places as possible. It’s about press releases, awards, events, ads. It takes money.
One is bottom up. It’s about engaging with a niche audience wherever they are. It’s about commenting, posting, liking, and sharing common experiences. It takes time.
It’s an important distinction, because the tactics and resources that refer to one strategy cannot be employed for the other.
It’s an important distinction, because most don’t understand it.
Human matter
We have made marketing a commodity. We have made it about scale, repetition, numbers, algorithms. We have made it a matter of point-to-point measurement and one-way funnel.
And now we worry that a machine can take our job?
AI will replace you if you think that marketing is a “if this then that” statement, if you look at a blog post only in terms of keyword density, if you consider an ICP something to bend at your own need.
For all the others, we still very much need you.
It’s not the rise of the robots that frightens me.
It’s the rise of all those corporatists who have forgotten that humans matter.
George Tannenbaum, Rising. Falling. Choosing.
Boxes
Most companies want employees to not work in silos. And then, they organise their work in little, hierarchical boxes.
They split the workforce in departments. They assign managers and middle-managers to each of them. They give them goals and agendas and salaries and development plans that are unique. And they get mad because Product doesn’t talk to Sales, because what Marketing promotes is not the story that Customer Success tells, because the Leadership Team meetings are just a battle for budget and recognition, and because their Customers are sick of waiting for the promised improvement.
So, the opportunity for you is to become the person who looks at problems horizontally. To learn about others priorities and spot lateral developments. To become the glue that delivers and the light that shines on colleagues.
If you’ll just stick to your box, you’ll be part of the problem, not the indispensable solution.
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