Half of the products in your pantry now have a ‘like us on Facebook’ icon on the label. Why should you like a brand of mass produced honey on Facebook? Why does the brand manager think you should care?

Marketing is about doing great work that gets noticed. It’s about giving people a reason to care. It takes time, thought and a deep understanding of who you want to serve and how you want to make a difference. Yet we look for shortcuts. We use tactics to make people notice before creating real value. We forget to help customers to understand and experience, before selfishly telling them what to do.

We spend so much of our energy here. Crafting the tweetable headlines. Writing press releases to help us get noticed. Trying to get on the radar of influencers. Creating print advertising campaigns. Deep discounting and on and on, when what actually works is doing the thing that people want to talk about.

When you do something that makes a difference you won’t have to work so hard to persuade people to notice or to talk about it.

Don’t just ask your customers to care about you. Give them a reason.

Image by Badjonni.