As 2008 begins, learning to overcome the omni-present curse of knowledge is perhaps the best advice for marketers.


Face it. Just when you think you know everything about your brand, your industry, or your customer, you get blindsided. So instead, let us learn from the findings of Next Level Strategic Marketing Group (published in the 12/31/07 MediaPost Marketing Daily), and the top way the surveyed 80 marketing executives would change their current strategy: "Spend more time and money understanding my consumers and how to better meet their needs."
I second and third that. Yet, a funny thing can happen on the way to good intentions. Seasoned marketers may be in the most danger of getting lazy, and assuming they can pull the answer out of their personal in-brain database - and come up with the ultimate approach. But, as Peter L. Bernstein recently wrote about the economy in the New York Times: "To Botch a Forecast, Rely on Past Experience."
If the article's title isn't enough to make you think, here's a more pointed quote from within:
"As we have learned again and again, we seem to have great difficulty recognizing a changing environment (though it looks so easy in hindsight). Humans cling to early experiences and what they have understood, even when something different is directly in front of them."
Is that why it took marketers so long to realize that women were key consumers, and that learning to serve their higher standards was a wise move for reaching ALL consumers in the long run? Something different has been directly in front of brands for a good long while, but marketing humans have clung tightly to their earliest experiences in many cases. No matter how many reams of expensive research is left over from the 1950s to 1990s, how the shoppers from those eras bought is no longer relevant. So... let go.
As Janet Rae-Dupree, also writing in the New York Times, presented her similar to Bernstein's get-over-yourself advice: "...the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience."
Her point - in a well-written piece that quotes Chip Heath, co-author of Made to Stick, and Cynthia Barton Rabe, author of The Innovation Killer - is that experts in a given field can really benefit from an outsider's perspective. Maybe that outside perspective is input from consumers (as per the Next Level study), and/or perhaps that new perspective comes from a thought leader who connects the dots of a broader world with your brand. Remember that saying about seeing the forest for the trees?
Anyway -
While history or years of experience certainly serve a purpose in the future of marketing, the most powerful results often occur when history and experience are combined with a little humility and acknowledgment of limitations - whether individually or within a marketing team. With such an understanding, you can then get out of your own way to gather the great insights that come from consumers and outside-industry thought leaders.
So, you could learn from Bernstein's slightly cynical closing words about relying on history: "...the best lesson from the past is to forget it before it shoves you into trouble - and remember that surprises and ruptures surely lurk ahead."
Or, as Ms. Rabe more positively concludes Rae-Dupree's piece on seeking outside expertise: "Look for people with renaissance thinker tendencies... Make it possible for someone who doesn't report directly to that area to come in and say the emperor has no clothes."
Or, you could choose to approach marketing in 2008 with this in mind: "In seeking wisdom thou art wise; in imagining that thou has attained it - thou art a fool " (Lord Chesterfield)
Happy New Year. I mean it.