Context. Or, more accurately, lack thereof.
Lists of ideas and tips on anything abound. They’re easily digestible. They often offer useful advice. Items are easy to track with a simple checklist. People love lists, and marketers (advise to) use them.
- 5 marketing ideas you can use today
- 10 reasons why we love making lists
- 25 fun tips to go green today
- 50 ideas on using Twitter for business
All good and useful stuff for sure. I’ve learned a lot from lists. Hey, my Sunday most-helpful-posts entry is essentially a list. But it too, lacks context.*
Take the quintessential list, your grocery shopping list. First you plan what you’re going to cook and when and for whom and who is vegetarian and who dislikes cauliflower. Then you think of the ingredients and processes each meal requires. You write them down on the list. Next, you picture the shopping timing and route, from home to supermarket to farmer’s market to ethnic grocer’s. You shop. You store the groceries, in the fridge, in the pantry, in the cupboard. You cook and enjoy the meal. The shopping list and items on it are but small parts of a big process.
My learning from lists involved evaluating the utility of items for my or a client’s business, taking the applicable pieces (if any), tweaking them to apply it to a specific organization or situation, and then inserting into whatever was already in place or in the works like a puzzle piece. Random pieces of the puzzle do not picture make. What about the missing pieces? What about the space beyond the puzzle?
People or organizations don’t work in lists, they work sequentially, in narratives. In making decisions they take into consideration past experience, environment, plans, other people or stakeholders or organizations, and a number of subconscious factors. In other words, context. Taken out of context of your organization’s marketing or your customer’s life, lists are compilations of random information bits. The tidbits can be applicable and useful and helpful, but what are the links among them? How do they relate to the big picture? What are the implications and consequences? What does it all mean? Context creates meaning creates context. List items are but pawns in that game.
Now, take writing. How-to lists will give you a few pointers on the writing process, and best-of lists point you to models or inspiration. It isn’t until you start writing your piece that you discover the process of writing is unveiling new layers of meaning, new storylines, new possibilities. The journey becomes the destination. Lists deprive you of discovery and its joys and benefits.
How does this apply to sustainable marketing? First and foremost, the triple-bottom line is a complex system. Excessive focus on one pillar takes away from the other two. It’s no use producing environmentally clean products if you’re always in the red; there are no jobs on a dead planet. A triple-bottom line mindset should take care of the context issue for you. More specific to marketing, placing any information in context of a bigger picture that’s relevant and meaningful to your customer will increase retention, recall, and actionability of that information. I could list at least five reasons why.
P.S.: James Duthie, Ken Jones, Ian Peatey, Chris Pirillo, and Angela Robson have compiled their own lists of valid – and impassioned – reasons about why lists suck. Check them out!
Update: Therefore, as of this post’s week, I’m discontinuing the “This week’s most helpful posts” series.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Peter
First of all, thanks for the link!
And I really liked this article and the whole idea of the blog. What especially stimulated me was the idea that lists are out of context and, only when we take the context into account can we make meaningful decisions.
This resonates with much of my own views around narrow, out-of-context thinking and behaviour being a major cause of violence (in all its forms). If we can get people to look up, look around and look ahead I think we’ll have a much more sustainable way of living (and more peaceful too).
Great post! It’s interesting, I’m currently working with e3bank, which is a new triple bottom line bank. One of the issues that we have run into is how to serve all three pillars of the triple bottom line in a way that makes sense to our potential clients. As a bank it is really difficult to strike the proper balance, since money is always an important topic when discussing a bank, but when you swing too far in the sustainability direction people accuse you of not having a solid business plan. Sometimes I wish it was as simple as making a list, but I agree that it really isn’t.