This Post Should Have Been a Beer

To quote Sexy Beast - it's hot, boiling, roasting, but I wrote this instead of having a beer about the things we do...

I started writing this sitting outside, on possibly the warmest day of the summer, a UK summer which has given us 5 subsequent heat waves; it hasn’t rained in two months; it is scorching hot.

You could say that sounds pretty sweet, but if I am honest, my laptop is hot; I’m squinting to see the screen, and I am not entirely sure my brain is fully functioning.

My home office isn’t air-conditioned, but the position of our house means it’s cooler and in it I have two screens, a comfortable office chair, and a nice setup.

Oh, and it’s just over there.

By any measure, my chosen workspace is sub-optimal.

When my wife and I moved to the US for the first time (I’ve done two tours), we would go to restaurants in Virginia and Maryland in high summer and sit outside for lunch, while the locals would, more sensibly, sit inside in air-conditioned comfort.

Why did we do that? And why am I typing this in the blazing heat?

It’s what Seth Godin says: “People like us do things like this,” and the opportunities we choose to take, based on this deep-seated feeling.

Many of us Brits, brought up on rainy summers and months of winter misery, feel compelled to take this opportunity to “make the most of it” and be outside in the sunshine, regardless of context.

If you live in Southern Spain or California, it’s different; you are pretty sure it will be sunny tomorrow, you would make a different choice - but in the UK, I need to make the most of the sunshine now.

However, my “make the most of it” decision is compromised by having this burning laptop before me, as I feel the need to work. If I were truly making the most of it, it would be a book and an ice-cold beer.

And how often do we, as marketers, do something similar?

Those choices we make despite the data because that’s what people and companies like us do, mistaking them for opportunities we can’t decline.

And then we do them, not with the va-va-voom of seizing the moment, but with a compromise, and we are not all in.

We pay for a booth at an event, because that’s where all the competitors go and we’ve done this event every year for as long as anyone can remember.

But we compromise because, in our heart of hearts, we know it’s not going to generate leads, so we don’t run an activation to drive traffic to the booth or book a speaker slot, because we’ve spent enough.

And of course it fails, but we did it because we always do, even though that budget could have bought a lot of cold beers for the team.

I might be slightly delusional about cold beer right now… I mean some effective marketing.

My point is, if we are going to do something, it needs to be all in - or not - and not because we are confusing opportunity with a feeling that people like us do things like this.