The value in context.
Image via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thewavingcat/
A few weeks ago, my wife and I were chatting about something or other and it occurred to us that one of the crucial things that sometimes gets overlooked when talking about the spread of information through networks is that people and machines are different. While a computer, router or switch can pass information along relatively untouched, it’s almost impossible for people to do the same. People inherently add something in communicating information which adjusts the meaning of that information slightly. So while machines transmit information, people transmit meaning. (Faris had a great snippet to this effect on his blog the other day.)
People add emotional context to information, and increasingly it’s this context that we’re finding value in. I think this is why Twitter search is gaining so much steam. In fact, to continue a theme I wrote about a little while ago, it seems to me that we are becoming less willing to pay for information but we are becoming more willing to pay for someone to provide context to that information.
Context is actually how we determine value. In Predictably Irrational which I’m currently reading, Dan Ariely talks about this as one of the reasons why we make bad decisions. In one of his examples he points out that we’d be willing to take a trip to save $8 on an $18 pen, but unwilling to take the same trip to save $8 on a $448 suit.
Given the importance and power of context, it’s surprising then how infrequently it is discussed as a goal of marketing. It seems to me that providing context is one of the most valuable things we can do as marketers.
- Context for how a product or service fits into your life
- Context for how a product or service fits into the marketplace
- Context for understanding different pieces of information
- Context for where you fit in the world
- Etc.
I think that part of where the trouble lies is that we often see the job of marketing as disseminating information. If you accept the framework I’ve laid out above, all this does is leaves the job of providing context for that information to someone else – your customers or possibly even your competition. In order to provide context, you have to start with understanding what people already know and work to figure out how to provide more information that helps them put that information into a different context rather than simply challenging that information head on with a new piece of information.