That’s right.  Doctor Emmett Brown.  If his career as a hairbrained inventor didn’t work out, he would’ve made a perfect marketer.  Reason being that sales and marketing is all about bringing the future to right now.  Consumers live in the present; they only know what they know.  It’s the marketers job to help those consumers see what their lives would be like in the future if it included ___________. (fill in the blank with your product/service/brand)

When you constantly live in a different time as those around you, you forget that they don’t know what you know.  Around our office, we refer to what Dan and Chip Heath call the Curse of Knowledge.  As they put it in their book, Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has ‘cursed’ us.  And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our ‘not-knowing’ state of mind.

At Matchstic, we deal with it on several levels, two of which are:

• Helping organizations understand how fixing their branding problems will bring focus and clarity to all levels of their business.

• When giving presentations, helping clients understand how this brand identity will live in the real world, and not just on a piece of paper or in a photo of the “real world.”

But the challenge remains the same to us all.  Try to forget what you know.  Put yourself in the shoes of the other person.  Think like they think.  Try to remember what they don’t know.  Make it easy.  Walk them through it step by step.  Get out of the future and back to the present for the sake of them.  Afterwards, you can go back to the future.

(full disclosure: Back to the Future is my all-time favorite movie, so anytime I can find an analogy that fits with it, I am very happy.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under brand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.