I want to experience the best and find the brightest and the most interesting things in life. I want to learn and experience something new. I want to be delighted. I want to live versus just existing.
And who doesn’t? So let’s stop boring each other.
It’s obvious. Excitement is still often reserved for our play times or our non-work lives. But work and life have blurred together. Everything should be exciting. Being exciting should be a mandate for good marketing, business and advertising. Right?
To paraphrase Ogilvy: “you can’t sell anything by being boring.” The fact of the matter is nobody chooses to be boring. Nobody really knows when they are boring. And we sometimes miss the fact that our marketing, brands or products are indeed … boring.
Look at one of the in-flight magazines the next time you travel. It features page after page of brands spending tons of money delivering embarrassing melba-toast, vanilla, flat experiences. Hundreds of corporations share clichéd and fuzzy brand values. Copycat products pale in comparison to the category leaders. It all reduces down to a collection of things that are not memorable and not relevant. And in our cluttered over-connected world, being like everyone else will not cut through.
Why do we do it? Boring is safe. It takes less energy to do the conventional than the unconventional. It’s faster to repeat than it is to reinvent. Painless to remain relaxed as opposed to exerting effort. And it is much simpler to copy than to create.
Being relevant and exciting takes time, vision and energy. And it takes courage and bravery.
We need to be mindful of defining what would delight our customers, clients or even ourselves. If we create plans, businesses and advertising that made a bigger difference, connected more intensely and in the end are more memorable, we would all be living better and feeling more.
