Last fall, I sat down with Mike Giambattista right here at Customerland for a conversation about “The Collapse of Good Enough.” That conversation sparked more conversations with podcast listeners and colleagues about what they have been seeing in their own businesses. Here’s a distillation of what I heard about how to market in our changing landscape.
It Ain’t Just AI
It’s fun and easy to blame AI, especially ChatGPT since it was the first to hit the world in a really public way, but attitudes were changing before ChatGPT ate the world. The pandemic forced many businesses to rethink their approach to tasks across their business, and made people much more comfortable with a more “down and dirty” approach to various types of content creation and other marketing activities.
Our tools were changing, too, and DIY became a more viable option for many businesses. Nothing new about that: businesses never considered creating their own newsletters before “desktop publishing” software hit the scene and put real pressure on graphic design firms. That was back in the 80s and 90s.
Those design firms did alright in the long run, though. The internet came along and the need for visuals exploded, though of course, designers had to learn a whole new set of tools. They also had to reconsider their model if they priced their value based on time. The new tools made it possible to turn out more work faster, changing perceived value.
More powerful tools also made it possible for people without a whole lot of design skill and knowledge to turn out “design” files pretty easily. Coders faced the same pressures as development tools made it possible to create web pages without really knowing HTML, JavaScript, or CSS.
Fast forward to AI and people who wouldn’t be able to tell the five Ps of marketing from a bowl of pea shoots are creating marketing plans and content editorial calendars. They’re more efficient, but not necessarily more effective.
The Evils of Efficiency
That’s not to say that efficiency itself is the problem. (Or even the often mediocre output of an untrained team.) The real problem is the loss of differentiation that a relentless focus on efficiency often leads to.
In addition to efficiency not always correlating with effectiveness, efficiency is often at odds with creativity. So when efficiency becomes the primary driver of marketing—or other areas of your business—differentiation becomes more difficult to achieve.
In other words, when everyone is relying on the same set of ideas for their inspiration, everyone starts to sound just like everyone else.
Finding the Creativity/Efficiency Balance in Your Marketing
Keeping a reasonable balance between efficiency and creativity is key to avoiding the cookie cutter sensibilities that come from a template-driven, surface-level approach.
One way to keep from pushing too far toward efficiency even as you’re using tools to help you do more with less is to maintain focus on the things that “good enough” can’t do.
Those things almost always center around the kind of thinking that makes us human: judgement, perspective, empathy, and strategic thinking. Templates, AI, and other efficiency-focused tools can get us to, let’s say, 80% of what an experienced and creative human can. The last 20% we have to bring to the table ourselves.
Which is why there’s such an opportunity for those of us who learn how to use these tools well: our domain expertise allows us to use our experience and perspective to use these tools to solve problems more quickly than we can without them. They can’t come up with the idea for great marketing on their own, but they can help you craft your ideas incredibly well and incredibly quickly.
The key is to ask the questions that your tools aren’t smart enough to ask. That’s still a differentiator and while I’m hesitant to say it always will be, I haven’t yet seen AI or templated solutions that are coming anywhere close to what real experts can do.
Lean into that in your marketing and re-evaluate your product and service offerings to be sure they deliver on your marketing’s promise of strategic advantage.
Photo by Colin Cassidy on Unsplash
