Marketing as Poetry

Anyone who’s ever dabbled in writing a little poetry will have learnt a few basic life-skills, skills that can also be applied to marketing:

The start determines the finish.

Get the start wrong in a poem and no matter how we struggle the end result is going to be laboured. Maybe a few moments will be ‘in the zone’, maybe there’ll be flashes of inspiration, but overall there’ll be nothing but lumpen failure. Getting the start right is an Art – it’s saying ‘No’ to all those moments when nothing flows but the rational mind insists that something must be done, and it’s knowing instantly when a line of words feels ‘right’. Sometimes we have to throw away our first attempts, sometimes we have to wait for a few days until the mood feels ‘right’, sometimes we have to give up for a while – but if it’s not ‘right’ it’s not worth starting.

The Marketing Muse says:

Finding the right angle from which to market a product or website is an Art. Rationality lays the foundations, just as rationality teaches us the letters of the alphabet, sentences and how to put pen to paper, but the actual connection between us and our customers comes from trial and error, experience, our intuition and just ‘knowing’ (after a lot of practice) what’s going to work. A starting point can be an image, a word or a feeling: it’s that moment when we suddenly figure out what’s going to make a connection with our customers, what’s going to have an emotional resonance. That moment will determine the direction our marketing takes, and we build outwards from there. Get it wrong, and whatever follows will be off-kilter; get it right, and the rest will slot into place.

We can’t plan a poem in advance; it develops as it develops.

Trying to rush ahead and determine a poem’s route to fit in with our own preconceptions and desires is pointless. All we end up with is a rational and clunky collection of words with no magic behind them and zero emotional connection. Ask any top-quality poet, any painter, any musician, any sculptor and see if they plan ahead in great detail or if they set a general direction and then ‘hope’. A poem is born, it’s nurtured, it’s observed, it grows as it grows – it’s our job to recognise where it’s going and to then to let it develop as it develops. A poem reflects ourselves and our world view; if we don’t like the poem we’ve created, odds are that that’s because it’s a reflection of one aspect of ourselves.

The Marketing Muse says:

Having found our starting point – the magical connection between ourselves and our customers that we just ‘know’ is right – we then have to follow our marketing nose. Just like building a poem or a painting, or releasing a sculpture from stone or even (strangely) tidying a room – which is just as much an art as writing a poem if done with concentration J – we start in one place and work outwards from there. We build incrementally, layer upon layer, connection upon connection, point upon point, reacting, observing, flowing, fascinated. Pretty soon we get a general sense of where our marketing’s going, and from then on we have to ‘go with it.’ If we don’t like what we’re creating that’s probably because it’s a reflection of ourselves. Plenty of companies manage to start out well and uncover their marketing campaign as they go along, but look around and you’ll see that plenty also lose that magical touch and soon head for the abacus, the marketing manuals and for committee-marketing, forgetting (if they ever consciously knew) that following magical moments is an Art.

When we’re ‘in the zone’ we have to fight tooth and nail to stay ‘in the zone’.

Magical moments don’t just appear and hang around; we have to concentrate hard on touching them from moment to moment, but not so hard that we chase them away. This applies to all arts, for example music, dance, painting and sculpture. The words from a poem fall into place if we let them, if we give them just enough concentration, but they fade away if our concentration’s too weak or too forced (we can’t will poems into existence, just as we can’t will a painting or sculpture into existence). Staying ‘in the zone’ is an art that comes from experience, from trying and failing, from starting at the right time in the right way in the right mood, and from following that moment with full and willing concentration and ‘letting go’.

The Marketing Muse says:

Marketing is a flowing, evolving, ever-changing connection – an emotional connection – between a company and its customers. When a company’s ‘in the zone’ – and major corporations can be ‘in the zone’ for a decade or more before they lose the plot, whilst smaller companies tend to stay ‘in the zone’ for only a few years – then the marketing magic works. But falling out of the zone is inevitable. Few individuals can keep their concentration and sensitivity going for very long and very few companies can maintain that corporate focus either. Smart companies know that failure is inevitable, but keep chasing their elusive time in the magical moments anyway, in the process gaining both insights and meaning; but dumber companies give up and head for the abacus, the marketing manuals, the committees and gentle oblivion. Staying ‘in the zone’ for both individuals and companies is a learned art; it takes practice and dedication, and evolves from a culture of passion.

A poem is caught or it dies.

A moment never returns, and a poem that’s been put aside will never recapture the original essence that it had that day. Instead, it captures the essence of another day, the day when it’s next worked on, and a skilled poet can blend a seamless whole out of all those different days (though other poets might see the joins J). No doubt this is the same in all arts: music, writing, sculpture, painting, dancing. Each day there’s a slightly different mood, a different feeling, a different approach to the art and it’s impossible to go back to the insights and feelings of previous days.

The Marketing Muse says:

Your brilliance of yesteryear is irrelevant. Yesterday was yesterday and today is today. Each day is a new day, and each day your marketing angle is very slightly different. Use your skills to capture today’s insights and blend them seamlessly into your existing marketing.

There’s a time to stop.

We stop writing lines of poetry when it’s right to stop, when we suddenly ‘know’ that if we go any further we’re just going to write crap that’s going to take time and effort to remove. Often we stop when we reach the limits of our concentration and sensitivity. I suspect all arts have this moment. Certainly, teachers will recognise it, though in their case the time to stop is just before the student gets out of ‘the zone’ and is thus no longer capable of absorbing any more. After that it’s time for a break. When the magic stops it stops and it’s time to take a rest – then, when the break’s over (and it’s over when it’s over) it’s time to start again from a slightly different angle.

The Marketing Muse says:

Every marketing campaign and every marketing angle comes to a finish. Knowing when to finish – before it all goes pear-shaped – is an art. Carry on too long and ultimately a whole marketing campaign or marketing angle can be destroyed. If you’ve got an interest or hobby or speciality which gives you a certain amount of inside information it shouldn’t be too difficult to think of a product or company that went from hero to zero because their whole way of doing business, their whole marketing angle suddenly seemed outdated and irrelevant – and they didn’t notice.

Over-analysis destroys imperfection, and imperfection is perfection.

Every poem has to be edited. There’s always something not quite right about it. But editing is as much an art as the original writing of the poem. It’s done with a different mind-set, but that mind-set is still artistic. Editing is done with a lightness, a touch, an intuition that comes from plenty of practice and plenty of failure. Over-edit and over-analyse and a good poem can be reduced to mediocrity. The paradox is that the moments of imperfection in a poem give it an edge and depth that it wouldn’t otherwise have – imperfection creates perfection.

The Marketing Muse says:

There’s no such thing as a ‘perfect’ marketing angle or marketing campaign. You create what you create. Over-analysis will reduce your marketing to mediocre. Go with it, and once you’ve got plenty of experience – provided you’re still fascinated by what you’re doing – your decisions will usually be right.

Each day that we practice writing poetry, the writing of poetry comes a little easier.

If we stop for a while then it takes a little while to recapture where we were. Practice makes proficient. Our skills don’t die – if they die we never really had them – but they can gradually walk away. It pays to keep in practice, even if only infrequently.

The Marketing Muse says:

Marketing a product is a unique thought-process and set of feelings, not a superimposed bog-standard template. We need to keep practicing marketing so that we don’t get rusty. It takes a while to get back in the groove if we stop practicing for too long.

Be inspired by others.

Great poets approach poetry from loads of different angles. Each poet has a unique way of looking at the world, and a unique way of putting their words together. By reading and trying to copy the great poets we incorporate a little bit of what they had into our own skills and world-view. If you’re a poet then reading great poetry will improve your abilities. Your curiosity and questioning and your attempts to emulate them will open your mind and lift you. You’ll find the same thing in all arts; painters will be fascinated by great painters, musicians will be fascinated by great musicians, dancers will be fascinated by great dancers. By getting absorbed in the minds of the Greats we start to echo a little of what they had and literally start to think for a while in the same way that they thought.

The Marketing Muse says:

Great marketing is all around us.There are the copywriters who know all about emotional resonance, the politicians who know how to communicate and sell themselves and their policies, the corporations that happen to be hitting a home run and are (for a while) ‘in the zone’. Look to the various arts for communication at an emotional level; listen to your children trying to pitch you an idea of something that they ‘need’; read newspaper headlines; watch the spread of positive and negative ideas around the globe; assess T.V. adverts and the messages they’re selling; look at shop fronts; observe how people present themselves. Great marketing is everywhere, and there are endless amounts to learn.

It takes years of experience before we can touch the magic of a poem.

We won’t find it in a day’s creative-writing course. If it was that easy there would be a million poets in the world.

The Marketing Muse says:

Get on with it! Learning comes from ‘doing’. Learning about marketing involves ‘doing’ marketing. Read the books for a few days, then get started. Experience and failure are par for the course, so start failing now!

Read more posts like this

Friday May 28th 2010

You can leave comments by clicking here, leave a trackback at http://www.alchemweb.co.uk/marketing-as-poetry/trackback/ or subscibe to the RSS Comments Feed for this post.