Tuesday 2¢ - Curiosity

This week I risk sounding like a bit of a cock - we need to make time to be curious

This week, I’ve noticed the word “curiosity” cropping up in a couple of podcasts I listen to regularly, which has been rattling around in my head.

The one that made me go “huh” was the view from an evangelist for us all hanging our own shingle and doing our own thing, rather than working for the man. They suggested that salaried employees lose their curiosity as they get deeper into their tenure.

I don’t agree. Especially in marketing, as marketers need to be naturally curious and pretty much lifelong learners. While I would die on the hill that B2B marketing fundamentals don’t change, the world in which we market to is constantly changing.

However, I have empathy for this view, as many of us get strapped to the hamster wheel of being short-order cooks (see, I get curious about how many analogies and metaphors I can strangle), and marketing can become a production house, rather than a centre of innovation.

The argument that being an entrepreneur and doing your own thing, even if it’s a side gig, means that you are forced to be curious.

So, maybe we need to be purposefully curious.

Typing that gets me dangerously close to my threshold of sounding like a bit of a cock in giving personal development advice that everyone who writes anything like this for a while thinks they are qualified to give, but yes, we need to be purposefully curious.

In the same way, we need to allocate time and budget for marketing experiments; we also need a bit of space to be curious.

And I see this in the conversation about AI.

Yeah, sure, there is a lot of talk about how generative AI can replace what we do today, and yes, you could get ChatGPT to synthesize the marketing day job from strategy to writing copy.

And of course, the AI SDR hobby horse I rode around on a couple of weeks ago, we are just doing the same, but faster and at scale, for better or probably for worse, as we can’t be trusted with nice things.

But, that’s like the old Henry Ford quote of his punters wanting a faster horse, not the automobile; that is not the next generation of marketing.

For example, I’ve been paying attention to the synthesis of market research, specifically the work of Evidenza, whom I have probably mentioned before, and how we can do this ourselves on a smaller scale with standard LLMs.

The faster horse approach would be to get AI to create surveys, find an audience, send at scale, and essentially be a highly automated version of what we’ve always done. This is not that; this is one example of getting curious about what this thing can do differently.

I’ve heard a couple of interviews with Peter Weinberg, one of the founders (most recently, one of the other co-founders, Jon Lombardo, was on Drew Neisser ’s CMO Huddles / Renegade Marketers Unite podcast), and, of course, they face some headwinds regarding the credibility of the data and all that.

Which, if I continue with my automobile analogy, reminds me that here in England, in the early days of the automobile, we had the Red Flag Act that required self-propelled vehicles to be led at a walking pace by someone waving a red flag.

Not meaning to delve too deeply into this one example, it is fascinating, and I encourage you to listen.

However, there is a lot of talk about how AI might replace you, or perhaps someone using AI will replace you. But I don’t think the robots are curious.

We need to make time to get curious.