The authorial waterborne hairstyle Roger Deakin once wrote “I’m only interested in everything”. Although he didn’t coin the phrase, it’s no coincidence it resonated given his prior career in London ad agencies.
Behind the pithy delivery there’s an important truth about how good marketing gets made – it needs to be interesting to the audience, and to get to that point the thinking behind what you do needs to come from an interest in the audience and the world in general.
As such, the strategy behind marketing communications is the business of connections – linking a brief to a weird, obscure insight or concept that gives a campaign a distinctive but resonant edge. And the more apparently random, unrelated information you already have in your brain, the higher the chances of finding something that fits – the better the odds of this fuelling a great creative idea. Without it, you’re often setting the creative team up to fail.
Good strategy relies on finding a different view on things, an insight that helps to spin a subject in your favour and away from the well-trodden path. The more input you sling into your brain, no matter how tenuous it might appear, the more chance you’ve got of dredging up something that provides the unexpected link; that lights up a sequence of neurons that hasn’t been tried before.
So to push the Deakin theme further, you need to plunge into the lake, blunder through a few thickets and risk the odd tick bite in the long grass. This requires having a passion for hunting your own information when you’re only doing it for the pure pleasure of learning something new. It doesn’t tend to work if you know what you’re looking for – because if you follow the logical path it’s going to be the path that every other bugger has trodden first. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a path.
In fact, the more contrary the information the more you might find your brain gets comfortable with how and where contrasting information fits and the easier you find making those weird but invaluable connections.
It’s easy to think this is less relevant for B2B marketing, but the opposite is true. In an industry where potential customers are bombarded with technical details and bullshit messages about “industry leaders” and “effective solutions”, you’re going to get lost in the noise if you just follow the pack. Not to mention being bored as hell with churning out that kind of hogwash.
Spending time at the start of a campaign to work out what might land with your audience on a human level is one of the most effective ways to set up better ROI later down the line.
But it has to start by only being interested in everything – having a passion for learning about stuff, whatever that stuff may be. Because you never know when it might make a big difference.
