Swing Your Hammer.

Today’s Marketing Cookie is about finding new ideas by challenging conventional thinking and looking beyond the usual places.

In marketing, our strategies can become limited when we keep looking at the same reports or repeating the same methods. Sometimes, we need to break down a few walls to discover new opportunities. This could mean shining a light on every step of the customer journey to illuminate and eliminate friction points. Or, by developing new analytics reports, we can highlight what’s really working and what isn’t, allowing us to optimize strategies for better results. 

Please allow me to illustrate this point with a little story.

I remember on the first day of an English literature course in college, our professor told us that we each live at the top of a tower with one tiny window through which we view the world. Standing on a chair with her fist in the air, she proclaimed that literature is a hammer. With this hammer, we can smash the walls of our tower and create picture windows in every direction, revealing perspectives we never knew existed.

It felt like she was speaking directly to me. I grew up on a dirt road in a house without a TV, and we weren’t allowed to go to the movies. Our only radio, in the kitchen, was tuned exclusively to an AM news and weather station. I attended a small, one-room schoolhouse where my mother was the teacher, and I graduated high school in a class of three.

Though my view of the world was limited as a kid, I hadn’t noticed. My neighborhood friends and I had a huge forest, streams, ponds, and a swamp to explore. We built three tree houses, got pretty good at archery and fishing, invented new board games, and camped out in the woods most of the summer. I didn’t know what I didn’t know and enjoyed every minute of it.

My college professor handed me that hammer, but I wasn’t quite sure how to use it. Then I met a girl who changed everything. She was confident, intelligent, and sophisticated, with a perspective on life that was completely new to me. She introduced me to foreign films, art, culture and rock music. Conversations with her were like swinging that hammer, breaking down the walls of my narrow experience and letting in more light, expanding my view of the world beyond anything I had imagined. We were married one year later, and after thirty years, she is still teaching me to see things differently.

To truly excel in marketing, I’ve learned that you must be willing to swing your hammer and break down the walls of conventional thinking. As you smash through the barriers that limit your view, new light can flood in, revealing opportunities previously hidden in the shadows. With each brick you knock away, a world of possibilities expands. With each newfound clarity, you'll realize, it is as today's fortune says, "Opportunities surround you if you know where to look."