While visiting an orphanage in Tanzania a few years ago, I realized how small my world really was. Or, at least my perspective on the world. As part of a group helping bring solar powered wells to orphanages, we filled our suitcases with toys and crafts we thought the children might enjoy. One of those items was colorful sunglasses. We dutifully chose a variety of colors, making sure that we had an equal number of boy and girl colors. This was the beginning of my education. As we passed out the sunglasses, I learned that the notion of “pink and blue” is a concept embedded into my belief system, a dogma if you will, that did not translate around the rest of the world. The boys LOVED the pink sunglasses and scooped them up.
This was the first of many humble “awakenings” for me. Throughout the trip, and subsequent trips around the world, I realized how often I projected my own belief systems on other people, thinking THEM odd or eccentric.
I realized I was living out a lesson from Mark Twain, who said one of my favorite quotes of all time.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
So what does this have to do with your marketing and branding efforts? How often do we project our own dogma, what WE believe to be true, onto our target audience? How often do the subtleties of our messaging create distance between our objective and what customers really believe? Without a true understanding of THEIR world, have we become irrelevant?
Here are a few ways, YOUR jaded point of view might be affecting true growth:
- You might be developing a product that you find fascinating or solves a problem that you believe is critical, but your customers don’t.
- Your content, even with a slightly wrong slant, might be deemed irrelevant.
- Attention-grabbing headlines, which you think are hilarious and witty, might fall on deaf ears.
- Creative that you might love, may not be as appealing to a different type of trained eye.
Relevance is everything. It’s the foundation of your brand and what will set you apart from all competition. Simply put, consumers don’t have time to put up with dogma that your little world created.
Okay, so you can’t send your marketing team on a junket around the world, but you can:
- Conduct surveys on a regular basis, providing relevant insights.
- Talk to your customers. Take the time to ask questions about their customer journey.
- If you have a retail presence, watch how customers interact with your products and brand.
- Allow your creative team the ability to truly immerse themselves with your customers, deeply understanding their wants and needs.
- Provide customers the opportunity to give feedback to your marketing efforts.
Understanding your customer’s belief system and world is much harder than you might think. Whatever marketing decision you make, be careful not to eclipse your efforts with your own dogma.
Needing to find ways to uncover what matters to your customers? Call us and we can help set up a process that will uncover those important truths to create relevant and powerful messages.
