“Over the past fifty-plus years, I’ve watched the dog business grow brick by brick from a motley collection of mom-and-pop operations into a massive, million-dollar industry run mainly by a standardized way of thinking,” wrote Kevin Behan in his book, Your Dog is Your Mirror.
He goes on to add, “Today, trainers are no longer idiosyncratic, self-trained dog people; rather, they belong to standardized national associations, and attend behavioral workshops and training seminars to get up to date on the latest ideas and techniques.”
His view of the dog behavioral / veterinary / industrial complex exactly describes the marketing industrial complex.
Standardized marketing-think
Due to technology, data, social media and algorithms, we’ve become standardized in our thinking. Now we’re being told to embrace AI or be left behind.
Fortunately, I have a very strong “idiosyncratic” and rebellious streak. Instead of embracing AI, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it.
“Hi Dianna,” wrote a colleague a couple of years ago. “I’m not sure what it is about your posts, but I can never scroll past them without reading every word. I wish I could write like you do. Your posts just feel so honest and personal. Thanks for all you do!”
I’ve had this message sitting on my desk for weeks now, with a sticky note attached that says, “Trust.” As AI creates more problems and challenges in the coming months and years, old-fashioned trust is what will drive everything.
After much thought, I killed my website Resources section, which was filled with my trying to be “standardized” and “market at” people, and replaced it with the one you reading now, called Our Work.
Instead of making it a traditional portfolio of work, I’ve populated it with articles showing how my team and I think and solve challenges.
It’s a celebration of our idiosyncrasies. We’re definitely not standardized. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m pretty quirky. 😅
“What you write is so different”
Instead of worrying about how to “grow” HIM, I’ve made a commitment to focus on what makes us unique and worthy of a potential client’s trust. In other words, helping people get to know us before they take the big step of reaching out.
When someone says to me, “Wow, what you write is so different,” I take that as a complement. I want our work to stand apart from the standardized stuff you see everywhere else.
“People do business with people they trust” is why the header of my home page features people. Manufacturing is all about people and telling their unique stories versus machines or the latest marketing technique.
