Deer-in-the-headlights marketing: find your blind spots

Posted on | January 7, 2009 | 3 Comments

Mary posted a reminder list of things “we all should know” about email yesterday.

She also noted that “Mom and Pop” microbusinesses have the reputation for having too little web savvy but it’s the Big Clueless Companies (BCCs) whose emails most often grace her spam filter.

This pair of observations is just the sort of thing to make my brain head off in two different directions at once.

One of the reasons why so many microbusiness owners have trouble with following marketing guru advice is that marketing gurus (the wrong ones, anyway) often tell them to do things to their customers that they dislike having done to them.

We don’t like getting spam, so most of us prefer not to send it. For many of us, the mere thought of being fingered as a spammer is enough to make us queasy.

On the other hand, many of those BCCs have constructed an alternative universe for themselves, in which people enjoy being marketed to continually and spam isn’t spam if the company sending it is “branded” and its products are “reputable.”

The alternative universe came about because the BCCs come to the age of electronic communications from a push marketing place, and that has become their blind spot. They see everything they do within the context of how they have always done things.

So, for them, Web 2.0 is not about learning new ways to do things. It’s about having new tools to do the things they have always done in the ways they have always done them.

What’s your blind spot? We all have them, don’t we? Times and places where we waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to adapt new things to old ways because our old thinking prevents us from seeing that the new things work better with new ways.

Sometimes, options and alternatives are difficult to see when even the possibility of their existence has never been a part of your perspective.

Unfortunately, those blind spots will cause you to waste a lot of time, at best, or do counterproductive things, at worst. In fact, sometimes it’ll be both. (Think BCCs and their efforts to control the conversation online.)

The problem with rooting out blind sports, though, is that “blind” part. How can you find what you can’t see?

~ If the guru’s advice doesn’t work, maybe that’s because it doesn’t work. Don’t assume you’re not getting results because you’re not doing it right. And don’t assume that, just because you find them likable or admirable or good with words, your favorite guru knows what he/she is talking about.

~ Pay attention to the complaints, too. Don’t be defensive. Don’t delete emails or comments from your blog just because people seem disposed to argue with you. I know this can be hard but try to genuinely see what other people see. The results may surprise you.

~ Reject nothing. As soon as you find yourself thinking you ‘can’t’ do something that way or changing what you do or think is pointless because it would ‘never’ work — STOP! Take a deep breath or two, and then go back and look at that idea again. Deliberately force yourself to think that you can and then think about how you would.

Anything else? What would you add to this list? Share your ideas in the comments.

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