Closing one loop and opening another
For two years I’ve been talking about an idea on how we might unite the forces of marketing to create greater impact for the greater good. It was, and still is, an ambitious concept—reconfiguring how to leverage brand dollars to support ideas that “market” community messages for progress as opposed to marketing services and goods. It started as an idea for a mechanism that could support any type of appeal for social change. But after hearing lots of positive feedback, I decided to put a stake in the ground, choose an issue and a location to try to bring this to life: Can the forces of marketing be used to unite the Rochester, NY community around greater understanding of our region’s poverty crisis?
Answering that question became my focus and my first year of conversations on the general idea turned to a sharing and listening tour with the people in Rochester with the knowledge and influence to support and evangelize the idea or offer guidance and steering on how the idea came to life..
This long discovery tour has been eye-opening in so many ways.
I’ve heard great reactions to the intent of the idea and constructive feedback on how to make it work. I’ve gotten helpful “watch-outs” but still with encouragement to keep pushing forward. And I’ve also received criticism on the concept and have come to see my ignorances and biases along the way. I’ve deeply appreciated the people willing to call out what I was lacking and those who prompted me to dig deeper into my own understanding of the issue and my place in helping to address it.
I also encountered many incredulous reactions to the effort and disbelief that I was spending my time in pursuit of this idea out of altruism. “Who’s paying you for this time?” (An agency marketer’s mindset I won’t name…)
At one point I thought, “I’ll just give it a go–if it doesn’t work out, I’ll take the learnings and try again another way.” After all, that is a big part of innovative ideas–trying, failing, reworking. That is the creative process.
But I eventually learned that with something so significant as giving a platform to an issue like poverty and uniting our community in collective understanding, the first shot has to get it right–or at least, it can’t fail epically.
To summarize the biggest barrier to making this a reality, the mechanism as I was thinking of it has gotten a lot of push back from the marketing community. Asking an industry to flex outside of their standard process and do things differently and with an altruistic frame of mind revealed how hard it is to change “the way things have always been done.” Basically, the same root of the problem in our perpetual poverty crisis.
On the flip side, the receptivity among community leaders and groups fighting for the anti-poverty initiative has shown me I, too, need to flex outside of how I thought this might work. I’ve learned there are necessities in getting it right that bring value to the community in ways I hadn’t imagined when I started. And those have to be foundational building blocks to the bigger idea.
So I’m closing the loop that started with an idea in the form of a question. Can the forces of marketing come together to change behaviors and mindsets for the greater good? It still remains to be seen.
When news of my progress stops, it doesn’t mean I’ve stopped looking, asking, learning. I don’t believe I’ll ever stop asking how I might use my own resources–in this case, my strategic storyteller skill set and my involvement in marketing–to help others. If I leave you with anything as I close out this first attempt at this idea, it’s a request that you do the same. Ask yourself, “If I forget how things are done, what could I do with the skills and resources I have?”
