HEAD BLOG

All too often marketing tries to push out a message without asking what it is the customer wants to hear.

It’s understandable. Of course it is. I want everybody in the world to know that Head First can produce really exciting and effective creative. I can shout about it. I can stop product managers I’ve been stalking for months and tell them that. It won’t necessarily convince them though. Or even interest them.

They might, for example, be a little more interested in whether we can be cost effective, or manage projects efficiently, or meet deadlines. No, no and no.

Only joking, of course we can.

The point, of course, is I can’t just force my message on them. It’s why some companies mistake this message with “brand” but that’s a topic for another rant time.

Discovering what it is the customer wants to hear means gaining insight. It means admitting that not every customer will be interested in what you have to offer because insight often tells us we have nothing in common.

But when we do have something in common, when understanding what it is they need leads to a better understanding of how our product can meet that need well that, that is exciting. That is the start of a bond, a shared value which, after all, is what brand is really about.

I’m looking for something special. Around me are the hills of Grasmere and I have my nose in a dusty old bookshop that rarely discounts, barely organises and never, ever, sells stamps.

The hills ought to be enough. Their splendour is clear and painters and poets could lead me by the hand through every life, every unique life, which has been caught in their shadow.

Instead I turn to another country as a book by Tove Jansson (of Moomin fame) shows me not the majestic beauty of Wordsworth but the ordinary lives of a tiny collection of people in a Swedish hamlet. And it is this sense of the ordinary that most captivates me because it is something I strive for whenever I write or whenever I start my working day.

Take this sentence:

People woke up late because there was no longer any morning.

How ordinary. How extraordinary. In context it is a simple sentence relating the behaviour of people caught in the long darkness of winter. This is Sweden, remember. A simple sentence gives us a simple behaviour and a complex insight into the people who exhibit it.

From the ordinary activity of sleeping in late to the extraordinary people who do so, there is always something more in every detail.

We just need to find it.