Gorilla Marketing
You’re probably familiar with this video but if not, take a minute to watch it before proceeding to the rest of this post
The good news is that our brains are really good at focusing on a task. If we want to look for something specific and filter out all other noise, we can do that pretty easily. We can do that so well in fact that we can filter out someone in a gorilla costume walking across the screen. The flip side of this is that it means we are missing a lot.
I think there’s a lot of gorillas in marketing. We create lead scoring models with how we think the buyer’s journey works and look for actions (web page visits, email clicks, webinar registrations) that support that idea in our mind. What if something is happening along that way that we hadn’t planned for but is critical in moving leads down the funnel? We also tend to think that marketing has to include things like gated content, emails, and social media but what if there are great tactics out there no one has thought of yet because they weren’t looking for it? It’s like looking for a color that we have never seen before.
Ultimately, it’s wonderful that our brain is so precise in counting passes and that is where we should spend most of our time but what if we took a moment to unfocus our eyes and just watched the scene without looking for anything in particular?Every once in a while we should turn off the filter and just watch.
