January 6, 2010Comments are closed.attitude, marketing
If I asked you if, as an animal welfare worker, if you were in education or sales, I’m pretty sure you’d know the answer;
You’re in education.
Of course you are. ‘Sales’ are often the cause of a perversion in the animal industry, which leads to greed which takes precedence over animal welfare.
But here’s the thing.
I’m working with a cat group who are putting together an education campaign about desexing. Seems simple enough.
However when they start to think of putting together an ‘education campaign’ they start to think hard hitting, shocking and “things that people don’t want to see but should be made to” .
(If you find yourself using terms like these, step slowly away from the brainstorm)
There’s a very good reason why only a handful of modern ‘hardhitting, shocking campaigns of things that people don’t want to see but should be made to’ have ever been attempted, and even less could be clocked up as actually successful.
And that’s because people are now becoming amazingly good at discarding information they don’t want to hear. From Seth Godin.
FIRST TRUTH: Clutter
80,000 new blogs every day.
19,000,000 different beverages at Starbucks.
19 flavors of Oreos.
172 professional sports teams in the United States
On September 28, 2004, a search on “podcast” in Google turned up 24 matches.
AS I write this, the number is 17,000,000.The amount of noise we’re living with is exploding. There’s an exponential increase, but we’re not noticing it because it’s happening a little bit at a time. If it were suddenly turned off and we were transported to a three network universe, a world with three car companies, six radio stations, two kinds of laundry detergent and two newspapers, you’d go crazy looking for something to distract you. Just because you’re used to the noise, though, doesn’t mean it’s not there.
And it is changing everything.
When you apply for a job, so do a thousand other people.
When you see a house listing, so do a thousand other people.
When you bid on a grilled cheese sandwich on eBay, so do a thousand other people.
And when you want people to come to your blog or your website, so do a million (ten million, a billion!) other people.You’ve just read that, but you didn’t really believe it. You are almost certainly living in a different world, a world where you expect that some people actually care about you. Your boss nods her head when she hears about clutter, but turns right around and builds stuff and markets stuff as if it were 1969.
No one cares about you. Almost no one even knows you exist.
See how he reiterated the point about not really believing that people don’t care about you? We have some idea in our heads that people will watch things that make them uncomfortable, because we feel it important. That people will be engaged by messages that speak to us, even though we’ve never asked them what’s important to them.
It’s not about you
No longer can you drive a message home because you feel it’s important that other people know about it. No longer can you shock people with images that upset them, but don’t speak to them, simply because it’s the truth you deal with every day. It is no longer your right to talk at people and have them listen.
Because they will just tune you out. As one of the thousands of messages from people demanding their attention every single day.
Suddenly, you’re not in education; you’re in sales.
You have to sell your ideas.
You have to sell you beliefs.
You have to sell a change in behaviour.
And it will make an enormous difference to how effective you are, if you realise in this new world you have to ‘pitch’ rather than ‘bombard’.
