If you’ve found yourself staring at a blank google doc waiting for ideas to appear, you’re not alone. This might be a hot take but marketing is a creative job. Marketing at its core is finding creative solutions to ordinary and extraordinary business problems. From low site traffic to unclear product positioning, marketers come in and use a combination of skill, strategy and gut to improve problems seen by the untrained eye as mere metrics. Like many creative jobs, marketers are susceptible to burnout and creative ruts. That is especially true as economic instability increases the pressure to perform under limited budgets and demonstrate unprecedented year over year growth. To keep your creative cup flowing, you must find ways to replenish it.
Despite what you might’ve been told, you’re not going to find inspiration for your next campaign by downloading the blatant lead-generation guide from that popular CRM. You’re especially not going to find it by looking over your shoulder at what your competitors are doing. You’re even less likely to find it by watching hours and hours of youtube videos by “industry experts” with click-bait thumbnails.
You know where you just might find what you’re looking for? Outside. Outside of your current day-to-day routine, outside of your comfort zone and literally, outside in nature.
Going outside is scientifically proven to improve your mood and almost immediately helps you feel more connected to your community and the world around you. While remote and hybrid work allow a flexibility that is nearly impossible with a classic office 9-5, its pitfall lies in the fact that it can be incredibly isolating in an already pretty disconnected society.
Loneliness is on the rise, three out of every five adults in America report feeling alone sometimes or always. It is predicted that by 2025, about 22% of the American workforce will be fully remote. Despite most workers still commuting to the office daily, a great majority of the work we do today tends to be done behind a screen. This can have a particularly great effect in a job like marketing that is meant to understand human behaviors and influence action. In this article for Forbes, Kian Bakhtiari said it best, “We can work from home and speak to people via digital screens. Social interaction is a wasteful activity if viewed through the lens of cold hard numbers. But when viewed through human eyes, social interaction is what makes us inherently human.”
At the receiving end of every marketing campaign you send out into the universe is a human either rejecting or reacting to whatever it is you are trying to sell or promote. If you’re asked who your target audience is, you might reply with an age range, gender breakdown, house-hold income and even general interests. You would never introduce a friend by saying, “this is Ben, predominantly male, between the ages of 30 and 35, likely to have completed a college education or greater and has disposable income.” No wonder you’re feeling stuck, how can you speak to your audience if you don’t really know them all that well?
What if, instead, you took the time to single out your target audience as individuals. What if you immersed yourself in the reality of your average consumer? What do you think you might learn?
Say you work for a national shoe brand with brick and mortar stores across the country and you decide to pop in to one of your stores. Take a moment to observe those walking in and physically engaging with the product. You might notice that a good majority of your shoppers are also wearing clothes from a fitness brand outside of your category, or you might see that many shoppers are walking in holding coffee from a local popular chain, or that many shoppers are walking in with their dogs. In this quick interaction, if you’re paying attention, you’ve been given precious tidbits of information you’d otherwise need a LOT of first-party data to gather. You learned your shopper likes to wear athleisure and maybe even put it to use. You learned that they enjoy a cup of coffee and patronize local brands. They have a pet that they take with them everywhere. The idea for a collaboration with that athletic wear brand might come, a limited-time regional coffee pop-up might follow, and you might even toy with the idea of a pet collection. These menial details and commonplace interactions can easily be overlooked but if you’re truly connected it can open the floodgates for new ideas and inspiration. As a marketer, trust that your unique eye will see what others might not. That’s why you’re in this role in the first place.
Oftentimes you see brands within the same category releasing similar products, making similar design choices and even reposting the same memes. Who sent out the memo? This homogeneous wave that plagues many niches can very well be the result of overworked marketers expected to “keep up” with the industry instead of taking risks by way of newness. Regardless of the cause, the solve is simple: stop seeking inspiration in others. Brands that are standing out today are often inimitable and when ripped off, it is apparent. Step outside of your comfort zone. A bread ad from the 1950s, signage hung delicately over the awning of a flower shop, a conversation overheard on the street. Be open to inspiration coming in from unfamiliar places.
A survey by Deloitte that looked at 1,000 US full-time employees found that 77% of people surveyed have experienced burnout in their current jobs at least once. The same survey dispelled the myth that so long as you’re passionate about what you’re doing, you won’t experience stress. 64% of those who reported being very passionate about what they do expressed feelings of stress and burnout. Slowing down is a privilege many, especially those in high-pressure roles can’t really afford, but what is the alternative? Producing work you know to be beneath your creative potential? “Borrowing” ideas from competitors? Slowing down and stepping outside of your routines help clear the noise and restore your connection to your gut.
The debate of gut versus data will never be won as long as we need to quantify decisions in order to get buy-in. Yes, data is crucial in measuring the effectiveness of campaigns and even informing future ones. Simultaneously, your gut is constantly speaking to you. It tells you to turn right instead of left, it tells you to pair the blue jeans with the penny loafer, it points out an old faded billboard with incredible imagery and copy. You can’t abandon your gut for data, just like you can’t replace the value of human connection. Marketing is a people-centric job, despite how much technology enables what we do. Strengthening your connection to nature and humanity will help ground your work. At the end of the day, we’re humans selling things to other humans.
