Paul Isakson

Help Me Make This Better

I've not been writing here nearly as much as I would like to.

Lots of reasons excuses, but none of them really worth spelling out.

I'm considering a number of things to get back to writing more.

As I work through this, I'd love to know what you'd like to see.

No holds barred. Just tell me what you think. What can I do better? More of? Less of?

I really want to know. It's the only way I can truly make this better.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Paul

Why So Serious?

Flickr // AJoelle_xo / CC BY 2.0

In reading an article earlier today on the alleged death of method acting, I was reminded of Russell's thoughts on pretending and of an observation I've noted repeatedly as it relates to the business world.

As marketers, we can often take ourselves and what we do far too seriously. When this is true, in many ways we become method marketers. We begin living and breathing our roles and the challenges we face in them at home, at the grocery store, in the bar, at the coffee shop, etc.; always looking for ways to sell more of whatever it is we sell. We forget how to have fun in our work and that people may actually do fun things with or around our products and services.

I realize this might not sound like a problem to some, but what's wrong with this is that it far too easily becomes about us and how well be play our role instead of being about the people who actually buy our products and services. We get focused on how well we can assume the identity of the character we think we should be to impress our boss/clients, get a promotion or maybe win an award. We get very serious about digging into piles of data and creating more piles of data to support that data so we can prove we're right.

All the while, we should be considering how we could better engage and inspire the people using our products or services. In the absence of actual observation, we should be pretending we're the person who buys our product or service and think about what their life is like. We should pretend we're at home watching TV when our commercial comes on and ask ourselves, would I actually watch this if I were our customer? We should pretend we're having a problem with our product or service and find out how easy or hard it is to get a satisfactory solution.

All this to say that there are times to be serious at work but we should never do so at the expense of remembering who actually is on the receiving end of the marketing we create and what they do with the products and services we sell. And, as Russell noted, there is a lot of power in pretending and we should use that more often. Not only in putting that power to work in the work, but also in our approach to creating it.