We often hear these words from clients who know (roughly) where their target audience lies, and what they want, but who are afraid to rock the boat with their marketing material. The fact they say “the same” indicates their desire to align with the competition and fear of taking risks. And for “different”, read “better”.
I am a numismatic (cough, cough). As any collector will tell you, it’s the unusual attributes that make an item more valuable. Take banknotes for example: sometimes there’s a serendipitous flaw (e.g. a spelling error), sometimes there’s a planned special treatment (e.g. unique design with a limited print run), and sometimes life just puts a spanner in the works (the chief cashier dies, rendering the signature a rarity): I tend to think of these as the banknote’s own USPs.
I wish I could tell you that I am a nerdy collector. By that I mean I wish I knew every factual detail behind every banknote and coin I possess. My brain struggles to crystallise information that’s presented in cold facts and figures such as print circulation dates, monarch reign dates etc. But my visual and experiential memory is very strong, so I will recall the design, the visual detail and the anecdotal history of a piece much more readily (for a definition of FLUID v CRYSTALLISED intelligence, visit Wikipedia). My mind will start to imagine … How many hands has this banknote passed through to reach me (if any)? Was it a payment of a debt, or a bet, or given as a gift on a 10 year old’s birthday? Did it buy the last loaf of bread for a family? [Any of you who've read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance will know where I'm heading with these ideas. ]
As you know, I often digress with my musings (can you be in a creative profession without doing this constantly?), but today I can bring the text back to my original point: much of Robert Persig’s writing discusses quality and context, and those two key aspects affect – in fact drive – what we do: we present online and offline communications that fit well into a context that is economically, socially and empirically based, but the true ‘quality’ is the thing that separates the product from the rest; that makes it stand up and be counted. Sometimes that takes courage, particularly in the shooting season.
Entry: Traci Rochester
