Thoughts

I’ve written before about the importance of understanding your customer and the fact that a startling number of people run businesses and organisations without taking the time to do so. The reality is that humans in general often prefer to focus on the broadcasting side of communication rather than the listening side. We could share this time considering the woes human kind suffers as as result but lets focus on the positive instead. Invest time in understanding those you seek to serve and you will, if it is the first time you have tried it, find yourself suffused with confidence when making choices, illuminated by the light of understanding when working out what to do next and enriched by the results of your new found appreciation. Honestly questions that you’ve pondered (and guessed at before) will almost answer themselves.

Too much to fit into an excerpt. Suffice to say that this is raw. A shrouded but raw look at brand and trying to say something without saying it.

No, not that creation story or in fact anything related to religious belief systems and the origins of our existence. We are going to look at the story of creativity in marketing. Think about an advert that you have seen at some point in your life, think about a brand that you actually like – what is driving that memory and that affection? It’s almost certain that, in the case of the advert, it isn’t the particular place or time that you saw it, say the TV or a bus stop at 10pm. Nor, in the case of the brand, is it likely to be the core benefit of the product the brand provides, after all the commodity provides that too. It’s something else. Something less tangible, more difficult to quantify but no less powerful for it.

Search your soul and you will find that the reason you remember these specific things is creativity.

In a recent article called ‘Decisions, Decisions’, I wrote about research that enlightens us about how humans make decisions and how influencing those processes are really what branding is all about. Powerful stuff. The research, not the writing. In this article I’d like to write about some more powerful stuff. Not how humans make decisions but why they behave the way they do to get what they want. More powerful stuff wouldn’t you say?

Let’s start with a question.

Even some of the most enlightened and cool people I know talk about marketing as ‘getting the crayons out’ which, with the exception of one case, demonstrates that they don’t really get it.

Then there is the even more esoteric area of marketing known as branding, which brings a far away stare to the face of many a senior leader in pharmacy.