Where Are You Looking For Your Keys?
Where Are You Looking For Your Keys?
An old man who lived in a remote village arrived home late one night and realized he’d lost his house keys. Turning every pocket inside out he figured he’d dropped his keys somewhere, so he got down on his hands and knees to search for them in the light of his front porch.
Twenty minutes later the man’s son arrived home. The son asked his father what he was doing down on his hands and knees in the glare of the streetlight. To which the old man said “I’m looking for my keys!”
So the son got down on his knees to help his father find the missing keys.
A few minutes later a neighbor strolled by. He asked what the two men were doing and was given the same answer, that they were searching for the old man’s keys. So the neighbor got down on his hands and knees to search for the missing keys.
Finally, after an hour of searching and scrambling, the son stood up and said “Father, this is hopeless! When did you last have your keys?”
The old man replies, “I lost them in the town this morning.” The neighbor looked at the son and then said to the old man “If you lost your keys in the town, why are we looking for them outside your house?”
The old man looked surprised and said, “Because this is where the light is!”
Far too many business owners think they’ll find the keys to their marketing success in the pool of light shed by their inventory.
Or by their product, their ideas, their hiring of the best employees, by improving their cash flow. Some think they’ll find the keys by creating better in-store displays, or by a host of other things.
Although these things are important, they’re not as important as a business owner’s ability—and more importantly a business owner’s willingness—to adopt mental elasticity when it comes to their marketing.
By this I mean their ability to develop targeted, benefit-rich messages that address people’s specific, niche-related problems and that offer those same people genuinely valuable solutions to their problems.
To be effective, marketing by its very nature must be elastic, it must be able to stretch without pinching, it must be able to thwack and twang when needed and be able to spring back into shape.
When it comes to the keys of marketing, most business owners are down on their hands and knees, searching for success and profit in the dim pool of light shed by traditional, brand-based concepts of advertising.
Why?
Because that’s where everyone else is searching: where the light is. But this picture is not just skewed, it’s inside out and upside down. By looking for the keys to growth and profit, in traditional advertising, businesses large and small are simply searching in the wrong place.
When a business owner channels and directs effective marketing, they create all kinds of hidden surprises, not least of which is the addition of new streams of income. But to pull this off, they’ve got to look for the missing keys to their business in the right place.
Thanks for reading.
