There's passion in almost everything if you know where to look.
Over Thanksgiving, I read Gladwell’s latest book – What the dog saw and other adventures – an anthology of his favorite New Yorker stories. I was reminded of why he’s such a captivating writer, because he’s able to find what’s interesting in the most seemingly obscure and mundane things. I realized this is exactly what makes him so appealing to planners like me, because I think this is also what we strive to do at our best.
It seems to me that one of the better results of the fragmentation and specialization that has taken place in culture is that many jobs or tasks that once might have seemed banal or trivial have been reinvented into highly skilled professions. Take, for example, the transformation of bartender into mixologist. Fields that once were quite rote, linear and prescriptive have either been taken over by machines or they’ve been re-mixed (pardon the pun) into something far more human and interesting. I’d guess that many more areas of human endeavour are areas of passion these days. The trick is finding where the passion really lies.
As a result of this, I think that our job as marketers has become the discovery of that passion. Rather than finding the deep, hidden secret(s) in our customers’ lives, I think we’re often better served by looking for the area(s) that truly excite and motivate them. It’s through these that we can create relationships based upon shared goals and values rather than relationships simply based upon transactions.