Why Relevance Matters
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Are you really listening to what other people are saying? Here are some lessons I’ve learned about relevance after years of marketing.
Even after a long career in marketing, I’m still amazed at how many times I tell intelligent, conscious people what I’m saying and they don’t get it. Within months senior executives and I were taking notes on previous conversations, and people asserted that this was the first time they had heard the topic.
what was going on?
Overcome Mental Gatekeepers
The reality of communicating with customers, colleagues, friends, or family is that most of what we see and hear is not registered. It’s background noise. Attention is a scarce resource. To avoid being overwhelmed or sidetracked, you need to choose wisely how you use your assets. According to Dr. Judy Willis, a neurologist and former educator, our brains have a useful editing function called the reticular activation system (RAS), which is the brain’s response to incoming sensory information (sights, sounds, etc.). is the first filter in the , which determines: What comes in and what doesn’t.
Our mental gatekeepers limit our precious attention to what is relevant. Relevance means being closely connected to something important. What matters are potential threats (e.g. pain, loss, dire consequences), anticipation of pleasures (e.g. food, rewards, loved ones, relief from suffering), and curious new things.
Related Article: The Most Effective Marketing Tactics Modern Marketers Ignore
Relevance requires personal connection
The stronger the connection and the more important the association, the more relevant people will find your message. Clients who have returned to discuss with me repeatedly have clearly recognized that the topic is important and have shared social connections from previous interactions. , was not relevant enough to stick with. As an analyst, I may have been so absorbed in my ideas that I ignored the client’s mental environment. My research became more relevant when I made an effort to connect to their world.
Relevance, like beauty, is in the brain of the beholder. More specifically, I found that to gain relevance, someone had to connect to previously acquired knowledge. Otherwise people struggle to find a mental container to plug in what they just heard. If they can’t find that connection quickly, the mental gatekeeper will miss the message.
Do Marketing Business Partners Understand You?
I once conducted a workshop for a client who was looking to strengthen their collaboration with their marketing business partners (IT, Finance, HR, Sales, etc.). The client had to explain a lot about marketing. Before delving into them, we decided to discover what participants already knew. To encourage honest answers, we asked people what they thought others didn’t understand about marketing. The floodgates opened and covered the walls with marketing jargon that viewers thought would confuse them.
The client was amazed and humbled. The language they thought was simple and self-explanatory (content, leads, personas, segments) was like Klingon to his business partner. This game-changing feedback changed our plans for the afternoon, and we spent time answering audience questions rather than explaining what we had prepared. During the conversation, the group invented common metaphors to clarify misunderstandings on both sides. While we didn’t cover as much as we hoped, our collaborative interactions created a bond and a knowledge base to build from.
As new neural connections are established, previously irrelevant messages become clear. I noticed this reaction in my clients with the concept of “customer journey”. Many marketers have struggled to separate the marketing/sales funnel (the internal business process) from the customer journey (the cognitive path to buying decisions that occur in the customer’s head). Then the new experience will trigger an aha moment and the person will understand the essential difference. It is incomprehensible and requires you to come back again and again to build a richer picture.
Related Article: 8 Tips for Building a Successful Customer Experience Strategy
Relevant things change all the time
Gaining relevance is not a one-time activity. Important things evolve. Some situations change rapidly (emergency, serious breakdown, starvation, etc.). Other situations change slowly and may be overlooked by complacent managers. Nearly everything eventually loses its relevance (e.g. last week’s TikTok sensation, Blockbuster, Oldsmobile, iconic brands like Palm, reading a paper map or dialing a rotary phone no longer matters). obsolete skills).
Branding expert Allen Adamson, former managing director of Landor Associates and author of “Shift Ahead: How the Best Companies Stay Related in a Fast-Changing World,” says be aggressive when it’s your advantage. By shifting, businesses can avoid losing relevance, he said. For example, during the pandemic, his Butterfield Market, a New York food retailer, set up the equivalent of a fast-food window, linking fresh, delicious food brands to the new need for social distancing and related food. gained sex.
Relevance takes effort — and honesty
Did I really know my customer, or did I guess, guess, or trust my past knowledge? Talk to people, listen to their concerns, their interests, their joys Things helped bring me together, but I wasn’t always happy to change my message to suit their needs. hindered. This is the mental bias of irrationally overvaluing what one owns, invents, and invests in compared to how others value it. Sometimes I found it hard to accept that my clients didn’t share my enthusiasm for what I had been working on for so long.
But relevance work is worth it. That’s what I discovered. When the hearts are connected, great satisfaction is born. Only relevance can create worthwhile change.
As former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said, “We cannot achieve anything in this world alone…and what happens depends on the whole tapestry of life and the individual threads.” is the result of weaving one after another. Something.”
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