Strategic marketing & growth guidance by South African Fractional CMO and Firejuice founder, Bernard Jansen.
The content wasteland
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Someone I know recently told me they never read email newsletters but also never unsubscribe out of fear of upsetting the sender. It got me thinking because I know this person does indeed get my monthly mailer. Clearly they don't read it, and I know they haven't unsubscribed either. It took me down a bit of a rabbit hole investigating what the trend is – it's quite stark when you explore actual engagement behaviour. People have simply stopped reading, and listening. The golden era of content is over. There was a time when we all looked at those producing and posting stuff as brave opinion leaders. No longer. The cat is out of the bag. We now know that most people have very little to say. And those that do have something useful to say are on repeat - they say the same thing in a slightly different way over and over. And AI has commoditised production, leading to podcasts and posts that are too long, and videos that are fake and views that are packaged to sound like every other opinion. I take my content seriously because I, unlike those of you who sit behind the cover of an established brand, have to promote myself. And let me tell you, it's a wasteland out there. LinkedIn engagement has completely tanked. Celebrity content producers suddenly get pedestrian engagement. Twitter/X has mostly emptied of interesting views. Instagram is now AI reels. Even websites are all starting to look the same. Where does this leave us? Firstly, we should start unfollowing, instead of merely ghosting. Unfollow everyone, and everything that you don't listen to. Including this monthly mailer, if that's the case. Yesterday I deleted all the food videos I saved on YouTube because I've come to realise I'll never actually watch them (or cook them). It is time to audit our attention, and take action. Secondly, when you do decide to stick around, it's time to re-engage. We need to actively signal what matters again, because therein lies the true engagement that encourages useful content. The era of authenticity is upon us – in what we consume, what we produce, how we act and in how we build brands. B |
Tough Markets by Bernard Jansen
Strategic marketing & growth guidance by South African Fractional CMO and Firejuice founder, Bernard Jansen.
People completely overestimate the power of marketing. It's fundamentally a weak force, as Dale W Harrison so beautifully puts it in this podcast. I've been canoeing on and off over the years, and basically the comparison works like this: The market is the river. It takes you where it takes you, and mostly at the speed of the flow. The boat is your business. It kind of floats along. Marketing and sales are the oars. They're used primarily to move the boat along the optimal path and not to get...
The initial marketing a business does when it starts isn’t marketing and sales. It’s entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is whatever you do at the beginning of a business to see if you have something viable to build a business on. It is a subject on its own and has its own course material covering things like bootstrapping, speed, spending more time out of the office than in the office, begging for money, begging for payments, listening to customers, and growing at all costs. Marketing is when...
I send this out roughly once a month. The thing that caught my eye most recently is the distinction between “growth” and “maintenance” marketing. Most marketing is focused on maintenance. The objective is to wrap an established brand in cotton wool and keep it protected until the current round of executives retire. The marketing you see daily is primarily maintenance marketing. Big brands. Big budgets. Big creative. They’re telling you they’re still around and it’s still ok to buy them. But...