I write this on a flight back from London, which provides ample opportunity for reflection.
I’ve been thinking about my career path and chosen field and why I got into it.
Certainly, hearing Todd Newfield speak when I lived in Japan was a seminal moment. One that was further catalyzed when he instructed me to read my first marketing book, Peppers and Rodgers’ The One-to-One Future.
Intellectually, I was hooked.
But, there was a moment a few years later when I was working at Snickelways and we had a client called Quantum Cycles (I’m still in touch with one of the clients from that assignment) and they instructed us to come down to Florida to observe Daytona Bike Week. They wanted us to understand the mentality of the customer to whom they were selling.
At one point, we entered a drugstore. Not a chain, kind of a five-and-dime variety.
As I walked the aisle, I found myself behind a man who fit every stereotype there was about a redneck/biker.
Dirty jeans, long, greasy hair, worn boots and a mesh baseball cap.
He also had a jean jacket where the sleeves had been cut off, showing his arms.
On his left and right triceps were tattooed-in kind of a gothic/old English style, the words “Harley” and “Davidson,” respectively.
I was mesmerized and I felt an emotional jolt that lit up the intellectual wood which had been gathering.
I distinctly remember thinking to myself, “I don’t know what it is that motivates someone to tattoo the name of a company on their body, but that’s what I want to figure out.”
So, while the tangible goal might be to have someone so passionate about Sprinklr or Never Stop Marketing or whatever company, product, service I am marketing at the time, that they will tattoo it on their bodies, the real goal is to understand the human condition on such a deep level as to understand the Why.
It’s a long run and I’m not there yet, but that’s just how I seek to make sense of Life.
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