Communication is not the goal

FWD Edition 94

I'm gonna save the lengthy preamble this week because we have a 🥩🥓🍗 MEATY 🥩🥓🍗 Forward edition for you this week. Free from Super Bowl hot takes and references to Hot Cheetos. What a gift.

We're diving into why growth is stalling across the board, organic go-to-market is a brand new puzzle, and marketing gurus suddenly have lost their oracle. All wrapped up in a frustrating state of affairs for ventures like you.

The silver lining: It's not just you. But YOU will have to do something about it.

YES, to the first rule of marketing

If you've done any work with us ever you've heard me say this many times: "The first rule of marketing is no one is paying attention."

And then I follow with, "No, seriously, no one." This is the harsher reality of that old adage, "Tell them seven times," except that's not really enough. You can't just repeat words, you've got to create systems of meaning where your best ideas, calls-to-action, and thinking are said, visualized, and translated for your diverse audiences.

The internet was created on the idea that you could use the speed of 1s and 0s to grab attention whenever you want it. But the internet has had the opposite effect. it has diluted all our ability to attend to things long enough to actually create MEANING. And shared meaning is what creates action.

NO, to big words. 🫠

No one would love it more if all of us humans were using our "not paying attention" time to think below the surface of our decisions and actions, but we know that's not happening. The Dept of Education reports that over half of adults read at a 6th grade reading level or below.

So not only are your prospects and clients ignoring you entirely, when eventually you've earned the right to speak, they probably don't understand what you're saying.

This, of course, pisses me off. I love a good "obfuscate" and "milieu" when trying to communicate nuanced things (there I go again... "nuance"). And for the most part, our readers are above that 6th grade mark. But as I regularly have to remind myself: communication is not the goal, understanding is.

MAYBE the media is really melting down

Politicians of all stripes have played the duplicitous game of using the media for their own gain while complaining about how terrible the media is. Mostly this has been total bullshit.

But over the last ten years, the media made a calculated and fear-based bet to wrap their future around Google, Facebook, and other internet platforms. With a result that should have surprised no one, this is ending badly. Sports Illustrated is one of the latest to shutter but others are hollow shells of what they once were. Meta announced this week that it has no interest in news. After basically putting their hand on the scale (with the help of the Russians) in the 2016 election, they've decided they can't deliver news without deciding elections. What a revelation. Twitter is a hellscape, and Spotify has rebuilt the podcasting industry into a demagogue factory.

Media has always been loaded with bias, but that doesn't mean we don't need it. Centralized conduits for information to be audited, editorialized, and flow is central to an idea-rich, information-rich economy. If we remove our mediums to think critically about ideas and events, (from sports to arts to politics to economy) we open the highway to forces intent on the worst versions of our future.

SERIOUSLY, get radically clear

Coming full circle to marketing, the shortage of attention, critical thinking forums, and reading skills from the bulk of your listeners should set of a 🚨🚨🚨 Red Alarm of Risk 🚨🚨🚨 for every marketing ambition you have.

Marketing in any form comes from radical clarity. The less clear you are, the less likely you are to get results. 99% of the problems that show up in marketing are the result of upstream decisions. Decisions about strategy, product, service, how teams work together, and communication among leaders. What feels like marketing confusion is really the collusion of resistance to understanding from the listenings and resistance to clarity from deciders.

NOW where to start?

Simply, you can't make all the decisions your go-to-market needs all at once. You've got to prioritize the exact log jams that are keeping your growth stalled and your teams frustrated. They maybe asking you for a new website, but the problem is almost assuredly something else.

At CultureCraft we triage these symptoms to surface quick wins and acclerants through our 30-day test drive. You get a map to growth, we both get to decide if we should work together more. A win-win-win.

Let's talk.