MARKETING NOT PIGEONHOLING

When what you really want to hear is The Silence, and if still watching television these days, it’s documentaries and cooking programmes- especially baking competitions-and stay well away from anything else, you’ve pretty much changed.

You’re looking for something, and you don’t know what it is, but you know that whatever it is must be something that’s Feel Good, real- and exclusive.

It’s pulling yourself out of another repeat of Les Miserables, or anything that’s going to upset you, and the usual suspects.

We have enough of everything that we don’t want happening around us in the real world, so why want more of the same when looking for something that offers escapism?

Escaping from reality isn’t some coward’s way out. It’s often allowing Happiness in. And each of us have very different ways of feeling what Happiness truly is, something that changes with the times and whatever it is that one is going through at any given time.

Happiness doesn’t come in one size and as Sly Stone sang, it’s different strokes for different folks and all about those Everyday People. 

What was hugely awakening for me was when being asked to talk to a group of students over the weekend about advertising and marketing and the power of music in, well, everything, and which created a mind shift in me. 

Presentations differ from person to person and I am one of those presenters who doesn’t work with a script. I can’t. It trips me up, and so what I do is share stories and offer what might be some structure- but a FLUIDITY to this structure.

This has much to do with my decades in advertising and always realising that the best laid plans can be detonated if something isn’t working within and for you.

It’s like chords in a song you might be writing, and then, accidentally, going to a different chord by mistake and which takes you somewhere completely different and into the arms of something or even someone you weren’t expecting. 

When halfway through my presentation, I felt that it was starting to sound rather predictable and which I wasn’t buying, a girl/lady in the audience from Finland asked a question and pretty much opened a discussion on creativity without labels and what she called “new marketing without pigeonholing.

This had her mention what amazing music people like Jon Batiste and Jacob Collier and Charles Yang are creating and how consumers cannot and should not be categorised by, especially, the corporate world.

For my money, I hold the corporate world and the corporate media responsible for devaluing music with textbook thinking, accepting terms like “influencers” and KOLs and labelling consumer groups with farcical academia like Gen X, Y and Z. 

Nothing can advance when things are pigeonholed and which way too often leads to formulaic thinking, stunts growth and loses the interest of young people.

I don’t see this attraction for “safety in numbers” as something wrong. It’s Fail Safe marketing that is buying into the most popular names out there right now, but, surely, Beware the fickleness of today’s post pandemic consumer who very rarely knows what they want. 

They probably want to discover for themselves what works best for them- and how. 

Marketing might introduce them to what’s out there, and can make the pitch, but cannot make the sale.

Making the sale is all about having a likeable brand and a product that can never afford to be complacent and one dimensional while still trying to be seen as current.

Nothing works this way and marketing often needs to be intuitive enough to take the next step before momentum is lost.

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