I’ll bet you’re a marketing genius

Marketing is a good idea. Except for the way most of the world does it. Most marketing starts with the premise that people are total idiots so you need to pound stuff into their heads with a 2×4. They still don’t get it? Buy more CPMs and pound some more. 3% clicked and 1% bought? Great job! Gold star and 100 Twitter followers for everyone!

What drives marketing is research. Market research identifies the problems that people have and points the way to products and services that are designed to fix them. Except for one thing. Most market research is not real research. It is total b.s. designed to gin up evidence for conclusions that marketers already have reached. Market researchers look into our souls and see shit. No wonder Steve Jobs thought it was a load of crap. No great product was ever created by asking people what they want, but people will always be happy to tell you what they think if you pay them fifty bucks and give them some M&Ms and a stale sandwich.

When we receive RFPs from marketing departments we throw many of them in the trash because we are unable to detect signs of intelligent life. Marketing people are good at taking things apart but they are terrible at putting things back together. They are the vanilla men: If ten people need to agree on one flavor of ice cream, you know it’s going to be vanilla. “The market research said most people liked this one.” That’s what happens when the end goal is agreement instead of making cool stuff.

If you want the good stuff, but you want to feel comfortable and safe at the same time, that is just not going to happen. Look at all the companies that really turn you on. None of them are driven by a fear of offending people or pissing them off.

But where do you start and how do you pull it off? First of all, you need to strip away all the things you’re supposed to do so you can get to what’s really important. When your goal is waking people up instead of pleasing everyone and going along with the current, everything changes.

Instead of a pile of research, you begin with a point of view and the idea that things usually are not what they appear to be. The problem you are initially looking at may not be the real problem. So you need to create a situation where you can put these feelings and ideas on the table and examine them. What do you believe in? Who are you really after? How are you different? It’s okay if you don’t have all the answers, no one does. And if they tell you they do, they are full of shit.

What makes this approach more powerful is that research will never tell you to take a chance. That has to come from your gut. The big idea: figure out how to think about the problem. When you base your marketing on things you really believe in, everything flows. Don’t act like one of the trees in the forest and then spend the rest of your marketing budget trying to stand out.