Arguments, Outcomes And Marketing

The purpose of marketing is to cause change. If we’re trying to build a movement for our product or service, raise money, sell a product or service, change lifestyles, build community–these are all marketing activities that exist to change the way people act.

The project/plan usually begins with clarity. The cause is just, the harm is real, the product is better. The work is worth doing, there’s an urgent need for change, it’s real, always real.

But sometimes, the original arguments, as valid as they are, don’t work. In fact, they rarely do. People don’t all line up to work out or sign up from the very start. You can put in the energy to have your pitch get heard. It’s only as the arguments become more clear, or change, that they begin to resonate. This says keep going.

And yet we can get stuck with a certain orthodoxy. An early argument can become the only argument. The story that the group tells from the start is the right one, and anything else is a disappointing compromise, even if it leads to the action you sought in the first place.

In general, there are three things in play here:

• Status roles
• Affiliation
• Convenience

Status roles involve whether this action will move someone up or down in the estimation of their peers or competitors.

Affiliation is related to status but more specific. It’s “people like us do things like this.” In the words of Katala Osborn: He can’t be a man because he doesn’t smoke, the same cigarettes as me.

And convenience is the hallmark of all–it’s just easier.

Using these three drivers, you can look at the spread of helmets to boda boda across Kenya or T-shirts to a football team or as Nike sneakers everywhere. We can see it in the rise of a popular style of music, words used Bazuu for example Hakuna Matata, Okonkwo, Squad, Boychild, and many others.

The originators of these and other ideas didn’t begin with status, affiliation, or convenience, but that’s what ended up working.

Now let's get out there and Market.