I’ve been reading an interesting book by the name of “A Whack on the Side of the Head” over the last many months. One of the interesting concepts that I’ve tried to leave myself open to is that of “Cross-fertilization”. This would be the theory that you can learn many concepts from areas of expertise outside of your own. A software engineer can learn things from a gardener. A professional sports player can learn things from a grade school teacher. Well, I have been involved with my wife in team teaching 3 year old children in Sunday School at my church.
Now, I must give a lot of credit to my wife who is an excellent teacher for children. She is absolutely fabulous at grabbing the attention of children and teaching them at the level they’re ready to learn. She loves to do it to. And to watch and participate in that instruction and activity is inspiring on so many levels.
What occurred to me today, however, was that ties can me made to the concept of knowing your audience, and communicating to them only what they are prepared and interested in hearing and learning. So much of the time in marketing campaigns this concept is largely underestimated. Many campaigns focuse simply on age range and/or gender for consumers or company size and revenues for businesses. However, most cold calling and mailer campaigns (not to mention email campaigns) I’ve heard of usually have many more people simply ignore them than actually respond or end up converting into a sale.
However, it’s not just the marketing department that has a tough time at truly understanding their audience. In fact, they probably understand that concept quite well given that they deal with it in such an intimate fashion. Many other business units suffer from the problem of being unaware of their audience’s needs and interests in and how to communicate with them about them regarding those topics in a manner that both parties understand. For example, how many times does an IT department truly understand where the executive team wants going with the business. What if the IT departments took the time to learn how to communicate ideas and capabilities of technology to executive teams that were business savvy rather than tech-savvy? What if engineering teams took the time to work with materials acquisition experts to understand the costs of their designs? (to be honest, I’m not sure the good ones don’t)
My point is that many benefits of efficiency would be realized. Costs would be reduced, businesses would be more nimble, marketing campaings would be more effective and less annoying. These are just some examples. I could probably do better at explaining HOW to find out more about your audience, but I’ll save that for another post. Something about suppliers and consumers being willing to engage in open conversation about their products and services and consumers valuation of them… Yeah, that’s a topic that I think I need to explore more about.
