attention industry

Quality is Insufficient.

Signal is noise, sad but true.  There is enough good content, enough good products, that merely being good, or merely being great, is insufficient to guarantee success.  Being excellent is a bare minimum, I would hope.

You also need to be visible, be interested, be remarkable (as in, worth remarking on) and be continually refreshing.

Don’t tell me that advertising, marketing, or PR are meaningless.  Because if that was the case, format wars would be won on quality, fashion would collapse on itself, and the modern concept of a luxury brand would be drastically different.

Meaning is a mixture of what is innate in a thing, and what is attributed to that thing, what qualities it is imbued with, whether due to the efforts of the brand, or the efforts of the public.

Pretending you don’t need to take an active role in building awareness, in making that meaning, indicates you’re still trapped in the ‘build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door’ mentality.

It doesn’t hold up so well when there is a nearly unlimited number of established pest control options out there, even if yours is vastly superior.