Where do you find inspiration?

Content Marketing - Where Do You Find Inspiration?

Each week on the Marketing Homebrew podcast we pick a single word topic as a conversation point. Mark Masters and I then offer our views on the importance of that topic for the modern marketer.

This week we chose ‘inspiration‘. Where we each find inspiration to do what we do.

Usually I record the podcast with a good understanding of the points I want to draw attention to. A page in front of me with a few simple key points I need to emphasise. This week was different. This is stuff off the top of my head… I thought

And it wasn’t easy.

It was a bloody struggle.

There’s the shallow level of inspiration and that’s what I covered. The books and blogs you read. The work you see taking place. The videos and conferences you watch.

So I reeled off a few of the hubs that I always find interesting.

But do they really inspire? Does the format inspire? Does the presenter or writer inspire?

Or does the story that’s presented inspire?

For me, the latter. It just took me a 15 minute recorded conversation to figure this out.

I’ve just finished the book ‘Take A Chance To Be The First’. It’s the autobiography of Warren Avis, the founder of Avis. His quest to build a rental car company that changed the way we rent cars… This is the guy who unleashed an advertising campaign announcing ‘we’re only number two’ in the car rental market. An advertising campaign that connected with it’s audience on an emotive level. So very smart. You can read more about it here. There’s also a brilliant documentary about Paula Green, the DBB copywriter who coined the slogan here.

That’s the kind of story that inspires me. How and why people do things. Not necessarily what they do (or did).

It’s the demonstration of how people make others do things. How we connect people with people that I find inspiring. It’s never the medium. That’s the point I wish I’d made during the podcast. That’s the point I need to make now.

That’s the reason I’ve built my own consultancy work around the question:

What if you shifted the entire emphasis of your marketing away from what you make to why what you make matters?

The things that inspire me are the things we do, as humans/marketers to focus on the latter.

That brings me to the point of this short post. Take ownership of a vital question you pose to your own market. The ownership of that one question will frame what inspires you in your own work. It sets the mission for  your work. It’s the reason you do your work and enjoy your work.

The things we make (not necessarily the product) are often the emotive triggers that connect what we create with the reason it’s consumed or purchased. We make things happen.

The task of the marketer is to figure out what makes those things happen. That’s the field that inspires me. The work of behavioural economists such as Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler and the Malcolm Gladwells, Robert Cialdinis of this world that provide their own unique slant.

Their work shows how people think and do things. When we understand that our job, as marketers, is far easier.

Be inspired by a question that captivates your learning. A question that drives your learning. That’s what I meant to say. I just didn’t know it until now.

Thanks for your time.

You can listen to the points Mark and I made in Show 49 ‘Inspiration’ below:


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Ian Rhodes

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First employee of an ecommerce startup back in 1998. I've been using building and growing ecommerce brands ever since (including my own). Get weekly growth lessons from my own work delivered to your inbox below.

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