Make Your Mark

Pear and squash (Charcoal on paper)

I can never accomplish what I want―only what I would
have wanted had I thought of it beforehand.

― Richard Diebenkorn

Drawing classes have taught me something.

A plan means little, unless you make your first mark.

The plan says, "This is about perfection."

The blank sheet says, "This will never work."

The hand says, "This is beyond me."

The brain says, "This is embarrassing."

But as the generals know, no plan survives contact with the enemy.

You will never accomplish what you want; but what you want doesn't matter.

Your first mark matters.

Know Nothings

Every once in a while, crusading nativists have their day. But it's only a day.

In 1854, the “Native Americans,” a political party better known as the "Know Nothings," skyrocketed to national prominence, capturing scores of congressional seats, state legislative seats, and governorships. The party so grabbed headlines that candy, tea and toothpicks named after it suddenly appeared on grocers' shelves.

Party members were doggedly anti-immigrant, begrudging in particular Irishmen, who were streaming into the country by the hundreds of thousands to escape famine. But members denied the fact, claiming they "knew nothing" about the secret anti-Irish rallies they loved to stage.

The officials the Know Nothings put in office hoped to take steps to purify the nation of any influence by the Irish, who they labelled "foreign criminals and paupers." But they accomplished little—except to stir violence. Catholic churches were burned and deadly riots broke out in Baltimore, Louisville and New York (the latter the subject of Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York).

Because it was ineffective, the Know Nothing Party's life-span was brief. Within only a year, its members found themselves at odds over slavery; most defected to the newly-formed Republican Party. Their presence in the new party troubled one member, Abraham Lincoln, who wrote to a friend:

"I am not a Know Nothing, that is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equals, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to that I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty, to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

Your Bad Marketing Content is an Eye-Sore

At a point in The Accidental Life, writer and editor Terry McDonell compares bad marketing content to "joke taxidermy."

When it's bad, it's really bad.

Good content marketers are publishers.

By way of example, consider the blog post "Say 'So Long' to Silos" (from e-learning provider Cornerstone).

The post's author immediately lets readers (HR managers) know she's trustworthy, by acknowledging that, in truth, silos are natural, inevitable outgrowths of any organization. She goes on to list the costs silos impose (low productivity, high turnover, etc.), and offers tips for curbing those costs. She closes promising more tips in a follow-on post.

Good content marketers have learned to be publishers―a necessity in today's digital-first marketplace.

Bad content marketers are joke taxidermists.

Bad content marketers stuff their content with feature-talk, keywords and dubious links, barely departing from old-school advertising.

By way of example, consider the blog post "How to Organize Your Docebo LMS Users for More Targeted Learning" (from e-learning provider Docebo).

Without a beat, the post's author plunges into feature-talk. He tells readers they can build an organizational chart with his company's software, but not how; and devotes the rest of the post to a bulleted list of more features, linking every item to a page on his company's website. He closes by telling readers to "Start your free trial."

Bad content like this isn't only a throwback to interruption marketing; it's an eye-sore.

Corporate Cargo Cults

If you've spent any time inside an American corporation lately, you've seen the executives abusing their young employees.

I refer, of course, to the damage being done by hotshot leaders bent on manufacturing cool corporate cultures.

They're victimizing the youths they recruit, in the same way European colonizers did many natives in the South Pacific during the years before World War II.

Unprepared for their encounter with wealthy and powerful white men―just as many of today's college grads are―those natives took refuge in bizarre religious cults anthropologists later called "cargo cults."

Although differing in local details, these cults all advanced one central prophesy: the world is about to experience a terrible cataclysm, after which dead ancestors will reappear and usher in paradise, by giving all the survivors electrical appliances.

Today's executives aren't manufacturing corporate cultures, but corporate cargo cults.

The natives, given their pitiful wages, can only pray the appliances will arrive soon.

Ashley is Done with Your Stinking Personas

Human beings are too important to be treated
as mere symptoms of the past.

― Lytton Strachey

Persona-based marketing―marketing automation's linchpin―is kaput, says Ernan Roman in CMO.com.

In 2016 his research firm witnessed "a surge in the number of companies disappointed by the lack of a significant increase in response and engagement from their traditional persona-based segmentation."

Customers are knottier than marketers allow―which comes as no surprise.

Roman quotes a Fortune 1000 CMO: “We are using new CRM technology to automate old bad behaviors. The result is irritating and brand-damaging spray and pray.”

Persona-based marketing is flawed, Roman says, in large part because it ignores customers' opinions about competitors' offerings.

Marketers' crude attempts to apply personas to personalize communications irritate customers, waste marketing dollars, and tarnish brands.

It's time for them to nix their trite imaginings and "establish human partnerships and relationships" with customers, Roman says.

"Consumer relationships require authentic and relevant communications and interactions.”