BIG QUESTIONS
Do you know what your customer had for breakfast?
As marketing leaders, we all know that it’s important to put yourself in the shoes of your prospects and customers. But how far would you go? The bare minimum, it seems, is to speak directly to them and listen very carefully. But when was the last time you did that? Yesterday? Last year? Three years ago? Would you spend an entire day dedicated to living their lives? If so, how would you do that? How about a whole week? You may have logistical concerns, but imagine the payoff – a deep, intuitive, high-fidelity sense of the people that you’re trying to sell to. Not only would it help you run marketing, it could help you run the entire company. Pinwheel’s perspective: when it comes to knowing your customer, too much is never enough.
TOOL JOY
Buyer persona generators
Where does your buyer hang out? What does their purchasing journey look like? Who influences their decisions? What do they read? By zeroing in on the buyer’s habits, journey, and psychology, buyer personas help your team focus and get a lot smarter about the communication they’re sending out to your company’s audience. They help you segment, understand and target your audience more effectively. If you know who your audience is and just need a little help putting this together, then these tools can help organize your thinking:
Think of it as your mental model of your buyer’s mind.
DESIGN WE ❤️
Superpower personal health
Healthcare in the United States is, well, you already know. Broken. Imagine a digital platform that contains everything imaginable about your health and wellness, current and historical trends, all wrapped in a beautiful user experience. From this platform, you’d be able to access actionable data about almost every aspect of your health: metabolic, cognitive, sleep optimization, disease risk, action plan calendars, prescriptions, health records, the list goes on. This is what Superpower aims to do. They will undoubtedly require some serious superpowers to survive the inevitable attacks by the incumbent gauntlet, and we wish them godspeed.
BEEP BOOP
Culture = Math: “Your organization’s culture is the sum of all the wanted behaviors that you celebrate minus all the unwanted behaviors you tolerate.” — Danny Meyer
Stimulation sans information: What is pink noise? And how does it help you relax?
Charge it, baby! Consumer credit has grown by 3.2% in Q124 vs. Q123 due to wage growth, excess savings, and low debt-to-income ratios. Things must be looking up. ?
Yearn for the burn: What’s behind our sudden love of hot sauce? Probably the show The Hot Ones, but also social media and the natural virality of spicy foods.
SPECIAL FEATURE
Is data making us too myopic?
It’s hard to argue with data. Most marketers treat it like bricks of solid gold truth. But what if clicks and conversions and such are only a microscopic sliver of the truth? “I’d rather have a small sliver of the truth than no truth at all,” most would say. And surely, that makes sense. But does that small sliver of the truth make us incurious about what the rest of the picture might be? Does it trick us into thinking that the small sliver is the whole truth? Perhaps we’re losing sight of the fact that what we’re actually doing is developing and nurturing relationships with humans. These relationships are centered in the human body and involve things like neurochemicals and memories. Central to relationships, trust can only be built through the ongoing conversation you’re having with your audience over a long period of time. And marketers don’t have a metric for that. But they do have intuition and common sense, and oftentimes that is plenty.
WORD TO THE WISE
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.”
— Ira Glass, host and executive producer, This American Life
ICEBREAKER
If you were to design a summer camp for adults, what would it look like?
Melissa: I would have great food, all the beverages you want, swimming, yoga, massage, and glamping tents. Gotta have luxury and a comfy bed.
Todd: After going to Melissa’s camp for a week, I would develop a camp on finding your creative process – structured workshops, hands-on activities, and reflective sessions.
John: For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to participate in some kind of vision quest, like the American Indians used to do. I know this isn’t a summer camp, but if there were an organized event where people came together and then dispersed on their own to face the deprivations of the unforgiving wild for a few harrowing days, I’d be all in. It’s like the opposite of Melissa’s summer camp.
Sarah: My grandparents are long gone, but I loved my summers with them. My perfect camp would be Camp Grandparents. A place where you can spend time learning to cook, bake, fix things, knit, play cribbage and bridge, garden, and maybe watch some General Hospital reruns on rainy days.
Laura: Private cabins. A communal old school mess hall with new school meals. A stack of books by my bed. Long trails. Tall trees. Cold creeks. No kids. No husbands.
Marielle: My summer camp would take place in Big Sur, so you’d get the woods and the water. There would be treehouses fitted with suspended zero-gravity sleeping pods so campers would drift off weightlessly. Days would include hiking, 3 hours of massage, rigorous creative self-actualization sessions, and meals prepared by a clean-food chef. I’m so California.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Search Engine Craziness
It’s an interesting time for those working to elevate the visibility of their company’s websites in search. This past March Google released their latest core update and it was a doozy. And now Google Gemini is out there with its AI generated “overviews” and such. We broke down what these changes mean for companies in our recent Lunch & Learn (video).
If you’d like to be included in future Pinwheel Lunch & Learns please email todd@pinwheelagency.com. We’ve covered video scalability, content marketing 201, SEO, and the Art of Noticing as a precursor to creativity.
FALLACIES, PARADOXES & THEORIES…OH MY
Technology overload effect
Starting about 50 years ago, the pace of technological development began to accelerate. With today’s rate of change in “whirlwind mode,” human beings are unable to absorb new things fast enough. There are steps, after all, that we must go through in order to adapt to new things: awareness, understanding, assessing need vs. value, learning how it works and how to apply it, etc. It takes time. So the bombardment of change is creating an overload effect whereby our cognitive resources are strained. In that state, we have trouble concentrating, multitasking, making decisions and staying on-task – all of which lowers our performance. It also likely further hinders our ability to adapt to the technology, leaving us even further behind.
