I promised myself I would update our blog everyday (or at least…on the weekdays). I surfed the internet a bit and read through some of my favorite marketing materials trying to select a topic, but today, i’m just so “anti-topic”.
Sometimes it’s so hard to write about gamification or monolinear trends vs. polyrhythmic trends and so on when your just simply amazed at the plethora of information there is in today’s marketing society. I love it all and it’s so hard to choose….so I chose to write about how much I love it.
Here I go….
I walked around for a few years exploring the world of marketing and advertisements and branding and shopper science and promotional strategy and you name it. I knew it interested me and so I observed. Then I realized something. I couldn’t stop observing. I was mesmerized, infatuated, completely in love. I love the idea of “strategic balance” (I apply it to my life!) and I love that marketing influences so much of the atmosphere we live in: the colors we see, the music we explore, the smells of our favorite shampoo, our “funniest” Superbowl commercials, the malls we wander, the discounts that excite us….they are all littered with the masterpieces of creative minds & marketers. I wanted to create those things. I yearned to. I thought maybe it was a phase. I was wrong. It’s a permanent love and it’s now my everyday life. Tribu has never felt like work, and sometimes, that actually feels weird. It’s like experiencing a never ending youth. I know that there’s an air of skepticism floating around this industry but I believe that passion comes from ideas with true meaning, and I’m so passionate about Tribu & our industry.
I believe that marketing is a process in which we communicate to our world’s citizens, a way to share simple things like “hey check this brand out” and “this is new!” and “didn’t that make you laugh? I hope it did!”. Marketers leave little gifts behind for everyone to enjoy. I think as a marketer, our reward doesn’t come from manipulation, or seduction, or psychologically altering a group of targeted minds – it comes from genuine positive response. Our highest honor and the reward we strive to create for our wonderful partners is that moment when an individual looks at a brand and decides “I really like that and It truly represents a part of me, I think I’ll show it to my friends”.
I watched a Coca-Cola documentary the other day. They interviewed a past CEO and he was discussing the blunder they faced when they presented the world with the “new Coke” quite some time ago. He claimed he recieved a phone call from an elder lady that seemed very stressed. She asked him why he took away her Coke. He asked her when was the last time she had one. She told him something a long the lines of “20 years ago or so”.
Bewildered…he asked, “why do you care?”
And she responded, “because you took away my youth.”
He said that was the first time he realized that “Coca-Cola” was much more than a name.
That’s why I love marketing. As a marketer you are constantly giving meaningful gifts and the size of these treasures are endless. Imagine, somewhere in this world a Coca Cola marketer produced a name so powerful that one individual was proud to identify it as her youth. What a gift…Youth.
