One thing I try to do is to mentor new marketers on their journey. Aimee, is one such case and is passionate about learning marketing. Through the JRK training program of 5, concentrated and accelerated sessions, she will be ready for client work.

Here’s her summary and learnings from training session #1. Enjoy!

Jan 20 Discussion

To begin our training session today, John told me the story of an idea contest and publicity campaign that he had worked on a couple of years ago called “Color Changes Everything“. Having seen for myself the promo video for the campaign, I can attest to the striking visuals and inspiring message that he created along with his lovely wife, Brynne. What I didn’t know is that despite the dissemination of this video on a global level, John received only one contest entry. So even though this campaign was well-executed and should have been a massive success according to the calculations done beforehand, it was in fact a marketing failure–or was it?

Many times in marketing we see campaigns that receive lots of positive interaction from the target audience; these are successes in terms of revenue, growing a customer base, and earning space in the market. Other times there are campaigns that fall flat, so to speak, but perhaps these moments give us the best opportunity not just to “do better next time”, but also to learn about our audience, learn about ourselves, and practice important skills like evolving forward, staying humble, and continuing to move ahead with the agility and awareness that is always necessary in marketing.

We also spoke about a concept that is important to us both, which is the idea that even in today’s globalized, high-tech, big business professional world, the human element is something that can never be replaced. Whether you are a marketer or a consumer, all of the apps and graphs and number-crunching and robot-assisted technology in the world can never replace your ability as a human to connect with another human. Now more than ever, as we are constantly tempted to lose touch with one another, remembering our collective humanity is of primary importance.

An Important Point

Something in our conversation that stood out to me was when John talked about the importance of creating touchpoints in marketing channels. Many times, I tend to think of marketing as simply advertising, for example Coca-Cola’s Santa Claus ads, or perhaps their famous Polar Bear commercials. Of course, Coca-Cola enjoys a larger target audience than most businesses (who doesn’t enjoy a cold coke now and again?), but if you look closer their marketing is everywhere, creating touchpoints. This is the case for any company that is taking advantage of all that good marketing has to offer. Whether it is good customer service or philanthropy campaigns or even referring a customer to another business, when necessary, every interaction with the audience should be crafted to maximize the value of their experience and display the kind of excellence that creates return customers. It could be said that marketing is like learning a new language or a different culture, whether it is business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C), it’s important to express product or service value in a way that connects with the consumer and helps them to understand your message with maximum clarity. Each target audience will have their own way of understanding statements, as well as their own unique needs and morals, which is important to understand and use as a framework to create human connection and good business value for all parties involved.