by Masingita Mazibuko. It’s a common refrain, “If only I had turned left instead of right, I’d be happier/richer/healthier…”, and also the concept driving the 1988 movie, Sliding Doors. In the movie, a woman’s love life and career both hinge, unknown to her, upon whether or not she catches a train. The audience sees her life play out both ways, in parallel. So, choices — they impact us upon personally. They also impact upon us as marketers.
For those of us living in the world of marketing and communication, the right choice can put the brands we curate on the road to prosperity. Sometimes that road is smooth and can be travelled quickly. At other times, it can be harder to navigate with pot holes and speed bumps along the way.
It can also be straight and endless, mind-numbingly boring. And, once in a while, you can round the bend only to discover the road ends in a cul de sac.
Werner Herzog1 states that “there is nothing wrong with hardship and obstacles but there is everything wrong with not trying.” In other words, as brand managers, we should expect the going to get tough every now and then. What we shouldn’t do is give up on the course we’ve chosen. Who knows? Just over the rise may be a long downhill.
Herzog also states that making a decision is a prerequisite for “creative mastery” in the future. By this, he means that you can only be creative about how you take the brand on the journey after you have decided where you want to go.
In other words, you cannot plan, you cannot prepare, you cannot move forward without having taken a decision, without having made a choice. I’d like to add that a firm foundation and clear vision are vital if the choice to be made is a well-informed one.
Bryon Sharpe2 highlights that building distinctive assets and reinforcing these consistently entrenches the brand and what it stands for the consumer’s memory to create an “enduring” brand. Yet, how often do we marketers get bored and veer off on a tangent to fix (recreate) what ain’t broke?
Sibusiso Vilane, the first black African to summit Everest, told me that this achievement required extreme patience and persistence. He revisited and revisited and revisited the same mountain paths over and over and over again to acclimatise to the varying altitudes on the journey to soar to the heights of the Himalayas. His was a journey of clarity and focus on the end goal, and not veering from the chosen path. Yes, he got bored, but he stayed the course.
The choices marketers make are not necessarily as adventuresome, but ensuring we do not succumb to our own boredom along the brand’s journey is critical.
And, yes, we will falter or come to a dead stop along the way; that is inevitable. The challenge at these times is not to pack away our failings into a trunk to be engulfed by cobwebs and never to be seen again. Instead, we must reflect upon the failing, and use the reasons why to inform our future direction. And, when it is time to start moving again, we must ensure we stay true to what has informed our brand in the past and what should inform it going forward.
Marketing is about choices and being relentless in peeling back the layers to ensure that our brand remains distinctive. This is ever more important as our consumers get inundated by multiple messages. Can you recall the brands featuring on the billboards you pass driving to and from work each day? Do you even know that you are passing billboards?
Maybe that should be your wakeup call to stay true to that which made your brand famous in the first place.
Sources:
- www.brainpickings.org/?s=werner+herzog: Werner Herzog on creativity, self-reliance, making a living of what you love and how to turn your ideas into reality.
- Sharpe, Byron. How Brands Grow — What marketers don’t know.
Masingita Mazibuko is a marketing director at Unilever. The views expressed within this monthly “Africa Style” column are, however, entirely her own.
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