We still have a landline phone at home to make it easy and more economical for elderly relatives overseas to get in touch. It rings at lunchtime and at around 6pm every day. We don’t pick up, because we know these particular calls are not ones we want or welcome. I often wonder what the telemarketers will do when the last landline disappears. What’s their strategy for the day when literally nobody picks up the phone?

For as long as any of us can remember, and long before that, sales and marketing has partly been opportunistic and not in the positive sense. In medicine and opportunistic infection only occurs when a person’s resistance is lowered. The day is coming when our resistance will never be lowered. A lifetime of interruption has conditioned us to be wary—always on our guard for the moment when someone might try to steal our attention, or worse still our time.

Imagine a world where as marketers we stopped working so hard to interrupt people and devoted all of our resources to creating the thing they sought out instead.
How we reach out to people is a choice and it’s ours to make.

Image by JohnJoh.