Its not ad men that make brands famous now – it’s their customers.

What people say and what people do are two completely different things in life and in marketing.

People also don’t know what they want, especially if it has never existed before.

People confuse the data and it ends up being the blind leading the blind.

Certain methods of customer research are like shooting in the dark.

No one cares about why your ad ended up not performing.

No one cares that the client changed it all.

No one cares that some guru told you to do it.

No one cares that you were unlucky.

The customer doesn’t certainly care about all the marketing logistics that happen behind the scenes.

Because at the end of the day – the only thing that is left is your brand and the customer.

The relationship between those two things and ultimately – the customer – decides if that brand or piece of marketing you created is worth keeping around.

Not your excuses.

$15.73 is not $15.73 for everyone.

What money means and what it represents is different for everyone and is relative to their own life experiences.

But what is even more interesting is that $15.73 feels different in different situations.

Is it $15.73 when spend $15.73 worth of my rewards points?

Is it $15.73 when I count out each coin to pay for my coffee or is it $15.73 when I tap it quickly with my card?

Is it $15.73 when I just spent $200 and shipping costs $15.73?

Marketing deals with perceptions – and numbers are bent and distorted in those perceptions.

Not everything has to be custom in marketing you know.

Many marketers and advertisers put stress on themselves and others when creating “big ideas” but they tend to think that big ideas mean – never been done before.

Instead marketers need to shop around more and see what is already on the market – what is happening, what has happened – and how they can learn from it.

Creativity is not about “newness” or “oginallity” – its about combining things in effective and interesting ways.

I don’t know why but most industrys regress to the mean – the become generic.

It happens in every field from water bottles to dentists.

Existing organizations are scared to innovate and are scared of creating innovative marketing.

Some customers don’t want to keep going to the cheap, consistent and generic brand they are shopping for in an industry – they want more.

One of the purposes of the marketer is to serve the underserved and to make the generic – anything but generic.

Brands don’t succeed because of timing or types of posts.

Brands don’t succeed from solely color or form.

Brands perform from deep truth and rich insight that are congruent for both what the customer desires and what the brand offers.

Vision is where the customer and brand move together.

Real marketing starts here not anywhere else.

Amatur marketers or people that don’t really subscribe to marketing tend to think of marketing in terms of memos.

The thing with memos is they are sort of selfish. It starts with what the person writing the memo wants to communicate to the recipient – and is more of an announcement rather then a marketing message.

Yet this is how most websites create their text. It starts out with: this is what we do and this is why you should do business with us – instead of trying to speak to the soul.

Speaking to the soul means – creating feelings in the customer – for the customer. Solving and soothing the fears and desires of the customer – and this happens in a much more subtle way then a memo.

It starts with having empathy for what the customers soul desires – then thinking through words that connect to that soul rather than creating words (memos) that are shoved and forced into the customers mind.

Brand is just human perception and overtime that perception will be pulled to reality.

Your brand has to to be congruent with the real value that it adds in reality or it won’t last.

Perception will always be at the forefront of branding but reality will be what separates it for other brands.

“I think we could say that the creativity of an idea works in inverse proportion to the amount of time available and the number of people involved.” – Howard Gossage

As more people enter the conversion of a marketing topic – it inventibly starts regressing to to the mean.

It may not sound right to Mary, it might be to edgy for Jerry and Bill doesn’t like the whole idea all together. More and more compromises and time go into building this project till at the end – all you have is mediocrity.

One person or one small team has to be responsible and diligent for this excellence of the project – or creativity can’t happen.