This is Not a Marketing Blog

Oh dear, I've dropped off the top 25 marketing blogs (yet again). I hang out with a lot of marketing bloggers and I like to write about marketing from time to time.

One could argue quite effectively that Kathy's #3 Creating Passionate Users isn't technically a marketing blog either. It's much more. (And Kathy recognizes that this is much more a marketing blog.)

Actually I don't consider this a marketing blog. I have to even remind myself of this because it's easy to get off-purpose if I listen to what they say.

I started this blog (my second attempt) to have a space to chronicle a pilgrimage-to-become-a-book around the world to the creative class centers of the world. What makes certain regions hot-beds for art movements, renaissances, fecund proliferation of profuse creativity and growth?

It was also an exploration in what Peter Drucker calls the two basic functions of business: "Marketing and innovation produce results, all the rest are costs."

I changed my mind about the yearlong journey, but my original passion around innovation, visionaries and the synergy of collective creation has never waned.

I always feel like I am writing for and talking with...

entrepreneurs (including social entrepreneurs), marketing veeps, CEOs, small business owners, advertising creative directors, inventors, big picture thinkers, visionaries, iconoclasts, filmmakers, screenwriters, writers, poets, sculptors, mavericks, musicians, performers, explorers, weavers, pilgrims, philosophers, conductors, yogis, journalists, research directors, designers, developers, activists, ministers, essayists, actors, dancers, synthesists, monks & passionate creators and innovators everywhere

Once I wrote:

I overheard Robert Scoble last week explain, "Blogs are aggregators for passions." Envision that.

That's why blogs are like places for me. Places for people. What is the place like? What types of people would hang out there? (Nope, not demographics, perhaps ethnographics work here.) For instance, I picture this blog as a salon, or an artist's colony (and I define art broadly). And many tech blogs evoke a sense of BarCamp or FooCamp all year long.

Most creators and innovators actually have a instinctual knack, a very good gut level instinct for marketing. I picture Phil Knight, Howard Schultz, Steve Jobs when I say that. Lately I picture Colette, the owner of "the most progressive boutique in Paris, if not, on this ever shrinking globe:"

"Colette’s sharp wit and scrutinizing eye, which unmistakably picked the “it” items season after season since 1997..." - "Colette: The Fashion Trailbrazer", Factio Magazine

Bottom line, creators and innovators just are not fast followers. We blaze our own trail.

So I notice that the number one culprit that gets in the way, for me, maybe for you, is second-guessing ourselves. "But the SEO consultants says...," "But Advertising Age says..."

The muse strikes 365 days 24/7. Ignoring the muse because it doesn't appear at first glance to sing in lock-step with the rest of the world tune is the real challenge for most artists, designers, entrepreneurs.

"We're so lucky we don't have to create the brand out of thin air. We just tell the truth and the brand builds itself." - Thomas Mahon, English Cut from Hugh's gapingvoid's "Case Study: English Cut"

So if this blog does have anything at all to do with marketing it will be to remind over and over and over again because it's easy to get lost in the noise that it's simpler than you think. Just listen to wee voice.

images Flickr photo by chellyc

 

Comments

[Tom Asacker]

Not a marketing blog? Thank God! ;)