attention industry

The only important question:

How does this fit into someone’s life?

Whether you’re creating a product, or a service, or a marketing message to encourage people to acquire a product or service, your only question is: how does this fit into someone’s life.

For the product, this is use case / product market fit / the core of the concept. And too often, the answer is ‘because it’s awesome’ or ‘because it’s sexy’ or ‘because it says something about your identity’. These are answers, but not good ones.

For marketing, I don’t see a future in telling people how the product will fit into their lives. It’s important to do so, but that’s not what is going to, at core, drive people to make a decision that they wouldn’t have already made. Good marketing is going to need to have it’s own answer to the question, and provide value (entertainment, informational, personal, or social) independent of the product itself.

Awareness is a side effect of generating real value. If marketing is aimed at aiding awareness and translating it into intent, marketing will need to create it’s own value, not just hype and weak association.

The worst answer to ‘how does this fit into someone’s life?’ is using marketing to try to create a use case. And for most of recent history, this is what marketing has done. Whether it’s associating a car with masculinity, or a Mac with creativity, these are weak ties at best. Your message should extend directly from what you do, and how you do it.

Your marketing should extend your philosophies into action, moving with the same purpose as the product, but with a focus on spreading those core principles, rather than giving them shape as a product or service.

The key point I’m trying to make is this: the idea that marketing is about manipulation is obsolete. Marketing is about extending and operationalizing your brand, where brand is defined as the identity created by the synthesis of your process, culture, product and ideals.

[This post owes a massive debt of inspiration to Umair Haque’s The New Capitalist Manifestio, which I finished reading this morning.  Possibly the most inspirational business book I’ve read since The Rebel Sell.]