When you are not around

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.

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.

Enough data

A little data is always better than no data. Because no data is the realm of opinions, hearsay, gossips, and past experiences.

A lot of data is sometimes better than a little data. Because a lot of data can be confusing, irrelevant, misleading.

A good amount of data is difficult to strike. Because when you start getting data, you want more, and that’s when you end up with a lot of data and the problems from the paragraph above.

The point is that data is useful and should be used, as long as, at some point, you can say “enough!”.