Is your marketing boring? In the B2B space there’s a lot of boring marketing, and guess what?

No one is paying attention. No one cares about your HyperScotchaMatic 5000, or its 5 terabit backplane. No one cares about your products or your company. Because they’re boring. You’ve always been suspicious, and now you’re thinking, maybe we are boring, but we’re in a boring industry, we’re in the left-handed Crenznuts industry.

I have a belief that B2B marketing should be more like B2C marketing. That doesn’t mean you have to have an over-weight middle-aged guy dancing and making a fool of himself on your website (never did understand that). But unless you are interesting, you are wasting your time and effort. There are too many other fascinating things that compete for our attention. Let me give you a classic example of “not boring” from back before the “InterNets.”

A small local communications company wanted to send digital files from Customer A to Customer B. It was a business-to-business sale. They didn’t have a lot of resources and needed to get noticed in a noisy marketplace. The first thing they did was pick purple as their corporate color in a time when everyone else was staid. The second thing they did was reduce their value proposition to a simple saying that defined everyone else. It was, “FedEx delivers overnight, we deliver over lunch.”

Trite as it sounds now, the third thing they did was order 6000 pairs of purple high top tennis shoes.  Were they ever in style? At their first trade show, they had a booth many times smaller than others. It was mostly filled with tennis shoes and a display of their product. The product didn’t do much, it just sat on display, there was no “demo.” All the sales people at the booth wore purple tennis shoes with their suits. A little weird, but not boring.

When asked why by the press and prospects, they simply explained their value and  gave everyone a free pair of purple high tops. You see walking around a trade show can be tiring on the feet. Soon people were seeing purple tennis shoes on others and asking what they were and where they got them. After four hours, every one of 25,000 attendees and the media knew of the little company.

The quality of grabbing attention is the opposite of boring. It’s called fascination. Fascination helps us grab attention. There are as many ways to be fascinating as to be boring. There are also quite a few ways to go over the top. Being different by itself is not enough. But it’s a choice.

Things that fascinate are genuineness or true honesty, humor, unique voice, provoking an emotional response, creation of advocates, standing for values, creating controversy, focusing on others rather than yourself, and many more.

An output of fascination is “coolness.”  After we have been fascinated, and engaged, we then seek the confidence and social connection commonly referred to as cool.  Cool creates the longing to belong to a group. For example, Apple creates cool through design and marketing… don’t you secretly want to be cool with that new Apple i-watch.  Or perhaps you’re cool because you got the pair of purple tennis shoes before others.

It’s easy and safe to be boring. It’s hard to be fascinating and develop cool. You can’t fake it. But the last questions to ask of your B2B marketing department are… “Are we being boring?  Are we too comfortable? Will anyone notice or care?”

You know there was a reason you didn’t throw out those green leotards. You can be fascinating at your next company party. Or not. It would be cooler to wear them on St Patrick’s day.

Do Great Things!

Lee Hobart Stocking
Founder
Prairie Sky Group
Hobart@prairiekygroup.com
651-357-0110 (C)

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As marketing and sales people, we live in a world where we have access to email, phone, social media and cloud based work applications on a 24×7 basis.  Even with these tools, there are demands for increased productivity, and the drive for us to do more.

But few of us have positions or jobs that are simply task-based.  Doing more activities or tasks is a tough way to increase your personal productivity.

We can also think of productivity as being dependent on creativity.  Figure out a new way to do something, and productivity can increase.  But here’s the problem.  You can’t be creative by answering email and being on call 24×7.  You’ll never win that race.  You will never out compete your colleagues and suddenly be recognized by the CEO or the board for your diligence.  This doesn’t mean that you don’t work hard.  But if you want to succeed, stop hitting your head against the wall and try being creative.  Easy prescription, but how?

The Greek, Archimedes of Syracuse (circa 287 BC to circa 212 BC), was a brilliant scientist and mathematician.  Some of his inventions are still used today.  There is the story of him and the golden crown.  He was faced with the difficult problem of figuring out if a gold crown was pure gold or an amalgam.  He was not allowed to scratch or assay the crown.  The more he thought about it, the more he thought the problem might be impossible.  But one day, as he was relaxing and stepping into his bath, he absently noted that the water rose as his foot went into the bath.  He had discovered the principal of displacement.  He realized that he could calculate the volume of the crown through displacement, and if he knew its weight, he could calculate the density, and thus tell if it was pure gold or not.  When he realized this, the story goes, he was so excited, that he ran naked into the street yelling “Eureka!” (I’ve found it.)

One key to creativity is letting your mind be occupied by something else.  We need down time and relaxation for our brains to come up with new ideas and solutions to problems.  Even simple ones.  Have you ever noticed that when you are trying to remember a name, or the artist for a song and can’t, that as soon as you stop trying, it comes to you.

Next time you’re faced with a tough marketing or sales problem, step away from the email.  Let it go.  Plan some down time.  Try doing something that occupies your head in a mindless way.  One irony of creativity is that the more you try to generate it, the more elusive it becomes.  Creativity is the Chinese handcuffs of thinking.  So go take a bath.  But stay out of the street.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
Prairie Sky Group
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7, except when I’m bathing)

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