What Is Marketing Missing?
Is it just me or does marketing content feel really noisy right now? Even as a professional who loves to study other people's work, I find myself losing interest. So, what do we do when everything starts to feel the same? We look for what’s missing.
“...Ticketmaster won’t give you a beautiful ticket, and demands you use a barcode on your phone screen. They could sell magic and enchantment and deserve to be called a real Master of Tickets—but they can’t be bothered.” Ted Gioia writes in his article “The Banishment of Beauty from Everyday Life”
He continues, “The actual impact of mass production has been to eliminate beauty and (especially) care from everyday objects—which became brutally functional and disenchanted in almost every way…Will the digital world, with its much larger ambitions to dehumanize and disenchant, serve us any better?”
If big businesses can’t be bothered with enchantment, that leaves a lot of opportunity for the smaller ones. Here are some ideas:
Give Me a Moment
There’s a trend I’ve seen in design for small businesses that is counterproductive. In an effort to save time and/or money, business leaders insist on fitting as much content as possible into the available space.
In an increasingly noisy world, these marketing pieces get lost as so much of the same. Our eyeballs are overwhelmed, and so we move on.
What if, instead of trying to say everything at once, we intentionally created space for people to breathe. What if we gave them a moment of beauty? And what if they came back wanting more?
The Power of Wow
When’s the last time someone handed you a print piece that made you go “oh, wow?” Or the last time you opened your mailbox and found an unexpected piece of mail you couldn’t wait to open?
With well-designed print pieces, you can create a moment for your customers by leveraging texture, weight, form, and color in unexpected ways. You can surprise and delight. And you can give a taste of what it’s like to work with you before they even read a word.
This is especially valuable for high-end and luxury businesses where the experience is as important as the end product. Want to say “we mean business?” Don’t run your flier on the office printer. Instead, work with a pro who can help you create a piece that matches the level of expertise you provide.
Host Human Connection
“You simply can’t expect Silicon Valley to provide a warm, embracing human environment for your life.” - Ted Gioia in “The Banishment of Beauty from Everyday Life”
And yet, we know that human connection is something we crave. What does this mean for your business? If Silicon Valley isn’t going to do it, maybe you should!
What if your business provided warm, embracing, human environments in the form of in-person experiences?
Have a physical space? Plan a meaningful event that brings people together in your space.
Don’t have your own space? Partner with another business owner who does and host a pop-up!
The key to hosting meaningful human experiences is care and mindfulness. Do something just because it will delight your visitors. Obsess over the little details. Bring people together, make memories, be present, and you’ll be well on your way to creating actual human connection, a rare commodity in today’s business world.
Is Long-Form The Long Game?
I think we’ve seen peak short-form content. Hear me out: It’s been impressive to see how much folks can fit into a 10 second video, but I’m finding myself bored with trends on repeat and frustrated when there’s no actual value provided in the end.
Curious to see if I’m the only one, I searched the internet and found rumblings of other marketers and creators feeling that we might be in for a resurgence of long-form content. In the video world, 2023 saw an increase in content creators choosing to post longer videos and leverage the search engine functionality (and long-tail benefits) of platforms like YouTube. (ConvertKit’s State of the Creator Economy 2024)
I’ve also seen a rise in longer form podcasts, and ConvertKit’s report noted an increase in creators opting for written content such as emails, articles, and books instead of short form videos. And here’s the deal—if you need the short-form too, you can chop up your long-form content to fit! It’s more sustainable for you and likely provides higher value for your customer.
What’s Next?
We’ve discussed beauty in design, the power of wow in print, hosting human connection, and the resurgence of long-form content. The common thread is creating moments for enchantment by mindfully crafting the experience.
So, where do we go from here?
If you’re a nerd like me and want to deep-dive the article that inspired the series, you can do that here.
If you’re ready to start crafting experiences and not sure where to start, I’d love to help with a Power Hour Consulting Call to jumpstart your efforts.
Thoughts, questions, or concerns? Send them to me. I love good conversation!