The Importance Of Marketing Earnestly would be a play I'd like to write in the spirit of my wordsmith hero, Oscar Wilde.
The full title of his most popular play is The Importance Of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy For Serious People, and I've always been intrigued by it.
But only recently had I "realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest".
On one hand, with this title, he is inviting us to treat the play as a nice distraction from life while on the other hand he is hinting at something more, lurking in its depths.
And so, here we are in 2019, where another of Wilde's insightful quotes is being lived out in the chattering noise of mass media and social media marketing:
“He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid.” – Oscar Wilde
The world is facing many dark and dangerous challenges at the moment, with political discourse shallow, brittle, and bitter, so it should be no surprise that many of us seek comfort in the trivial.
Popular distractions like Tik Tok and Married At First Sight are granting us escape from facing the fearful decisions we need to be making as a society.
From a marketing perspective, especially in the case of Talked About Marketing where the essence of our work is to get clients' work talked about, we need to apply ourselves to the task more earnestly than ever before.
The importance of marketing earnestly in an era of distraction
The noise and the sugar-hit cuteness (or banality) of most mass media programming and social media content (another pretty picture of a antipasto or model in activewear, anyone?) means marketers need to go more deeply into the realms where a client's product or service intersects with a propsective customer's wants or needs, and then dose these insights with heavy helpings of creativity, if they want to get seen and heard amid the bustle and noise.
This is why just lining up the usual social media calendar of quirky quotes, specials, and pats on the back, are becoming less and less effective, and less and less noticed.
Your marketing mindset, and that of the marketer by your side, needs to be one in which you are not only prepared to roll up your sleeves and craft useful, surprising, relevant content during business hours, but to also keep a weather eye on life about you, day in, day out.
It means you need to be earnestly applied to your marketing journey so you can see how your brand can join dots between where your propsective clients are and where you are.
Ideally, people in your target audience should be able to substitute your marketing activity for "my diary" in this quote from Wilde's The Importance Of Being Earnest:
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
Perhaps we could swap stories some time to see if we can market earnestly together?