Proverbs and marketing

Yesterday I had an intersting lunch conversation with a friend who is at the top of his game as a communication professional and a forward thinker. He was talking about ideas that stick, basedon a new book and the thought that ideas that stick tend to be like proverbs. They go beyond slogans or marketing fluff to actually say something that instructs the audience. It is a really challenging idea as we read and write marketing copy.

Beyond that, I have been thinking further about the difference between art and entertainment and what marketing means in that mix. One of the parameters that I have been seeing for art is that it is dialogical in its approach - thus coming from and "I thou" perspective. Dialogical communication respects the listener as a person. I think this is what art does. Entertainment on the other hand is a commercial enterprise where the person isn't necessarily important. This is not an argument that entertainment is bad and art is good, just a way to seperate the two so that we don't keep trying to sell slasher porn as art in film, just because it is a creative process that went into making.

What does this mean for marketing? It means that we have to consider our audiences as real people in order to make marketing an art.

(End of thought - next webisode)

Two good articles I have read in recent days that are to a large degree unrelated, and to pull them together in my head would be time consuming and a disservice to both writers.Typically, I stay away from any book that starts with “the Gospel according to. . .” unless those name following is Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. However, Christianity Today had a really interesting excerpt from the Gospel According to the Beatles. It shows in the end that everyone, no matter how creative or successful is searching for something, and I think helps Bob Dylan’s point that you have to serve something.

The other article was by Frank Deford in Sports Illustrated. I really like his writing and I think he sums up the state of college athletics pretty well in this short article. I only wish I would have had a chance to listen to him deliver it on his regular Wednesday NPR spot.

Good Stuff

Good stuff in the recent Stamats Quicktakes that came to my email inbox. There was an article by Eric Sickler "RESOLUTION #1: A ONE-YEAR INTEGRATION PLAN" that seemed to pick up on many of things that I have been doing over the past year. It is a good article and a good kickstart to the integrated marketing process. It is amazing that this has been around for a lot of years but is still such a struggle at some times to actually get done.

On an entirely other note and a bit of shameless ask for help, if anybody has a contact at Augsburg College or Hamline University if they would kick that along I'd appreciate it. I'm wondering how they work some things in the Twin Cities and need a little colleague to colleague advice.

Thanks

Hate the buzz

Last night a political figure (name protected so we can focus on the subject of buzz not party affiliation) one of the phrases used in reference to Iraq was “the centrifugal forces of chaos.” Now, I may have an incomplete education but that makes absolutely no sense. A force that brings things into a center would seem to be the opposite of chaos. Did the speaker or the speech writer really think that was going to help the American people understand what was happening in Iraq?

I recently saw a news segment on whether jargon was bad for business, and the answer was a resounding yes. I would say we are actually a step beyond that. We are bombarded with communication, but so much of it is bad communication. From advertising to political rhetoric often if feels like people are just taking several long words and stringing them together. I’m not sure if there is a centrifugal force at work, but modern communication surely reflects chaos.

As professional communicators we owe our audiences better.

Finding a Niche

Just when you thought marketing to college students was difficult, it gets a little harder. In our quest to find out the latest in marketing trends we did a little literature review and found a place where we could find out five top ads in a college bound magazine. It was a great resource and we thought by looking at the top five ads we were sure to find some trends right? Wrong.

Basically we found some big rocks that we can hang our new design on. Photography is important and a majority of the page dedicated to photography seems to work. However in type style, amount of information, number of photos, etc. we saw few trends. The students this organization chose seemed to pick the ads almost at random. Three of them I would have guessed would do well and two of them I wouldn’t have put out in a million years. Our current ad coincidentally landed somewhere right in the middle.

My working hypothesis is that this is a natural outgrowth of the increase in niche’markets and indicative of this generation’s diversity and worldview. The lesson I’m figuring out is that it is more important than ever to find something and stick to it despite what winds might blow. The campus that dedicates themselves to being unique and knowing their market well is the one that will grow and attract a core that is loyal.