Love is Like Oxygen

If you are one of the lovely people who are subscribed to my Rockstar CMO Newsletter, you may think I’ve got my days confused. As on that newsletter, the subject line is always a song title, and Love is Like Oxygen is, of course, a song title, by a band called Sweet from the year of our lord 19 bloody hell that’s ancient.

But, when I thought I’d write about the oxygen of attention in a category, the song popped into my head, and I thought I’d go with it, as it gave me an excuse to blatantly do the thing all of the cool marketers do and cross-promote my shit.

With that done, we can crack on.

This week, as I often am, I am inspired by my chum Mr Robert Rose, who is kind enough to be a regular on my Rockstar CMO podcast (see kids, doing it again), who mentioned this idea on his rather splendid podcast This Old Marketing with Joe Pulizzi .

The idea is that content marketing does not just impact your own top of funnel or dark funnel awareness, but also consumes the oxygen of attention away from your competitors.

It turns us from thinking about content marketing as fairly passive and lovely, build it, they will come, being useful and helpful, singing kumbaya - the sort of thing that puts it into the cross hairs of the hard-nosed always be closing commercial types - to being an offensive move.

You are damaging your competitor.

As I type this, and explore this type of language, I am getting flashbacks of sales kick-offs from a couple of decades ago, when I genuinely saw our competitors, in tribute to the first Gladiator film, dressed up as slaves (yes, really), but I’ve digressed.

But… “Oorah” - or whatever it is the US Marines say, we are in a fight for the hearts, minds, and cash of our prospects.

For example, can anyone talk about B2B buying trends without mentioning 6Sense? They have a machine of a content marketing engine, that is based on research, is plenty ungated and has a bonefide, no BS, thought leader from Forrester leading that charge.

If you are their competitor and your buyer is fumbling around in the dark funnel, they will know 6Sense.

It’s not a new strategy; in 2006, HubSpot kicked its way onto the dancefloor by showering the market with free digital marketing educational content that got us all hooked on inbound and the value of content marketing. Meanwhile…. Eloqua….. errrr…. who?

Well, for the purposes of this analogy, their lips turned blue, and I don’t suppose being acquired by Oracle helped their breathing any.

It seems you don’t just become a category leader by selling more and grabbing market share, beating your competitors on the field of procurement. Sure, it helps, but that flywheel starts with awareness and attention, claiming more than your fair share in the category, as like land, they ain’t making any more of it.

And, as I bring this home, back to the title, for all the players in your category, love (or attention) is like oxygen.