Noise…
This week, I have retrieved this quote from Gary Vaynerchuk “We are living through the biggest cultural shift of all time. You have to capture (people’s) attention in the noisiest world we’ve ever lived in”. Gary is considered one of the world’s leading minds when it comes to culture, relevance and the Internet. I had the opportunity and fortune to attend one of his lectures at the IHRSA Congress in San Diego in 2014. When you are watching Garyvee live, you know he is a person who stays with you for life. It was very inspiring. As inspiring, as is his quote with which I open this week’s post.
And, as he rightly points out, noise invades our lives, from the moment we wake up to the moment we sleep, with that inner voice that never stops telling us things. People talk loudly, cities are noisy and in the world of advertising, communication and social networks there is a lot of noise.
If I use one of the meanings of the word “noise”: “commotion or confusing mixture of sounds”, and we substitute the word “sounds” for any other word, we can apply the definition of noise to many of the contexts we live in today:
- Clutter or confusing mixture of….announcements, messages, ideas, campaigns, fashions, news, promotions, supposed trends, methods……
I like to ask myself the question: “With the amount of noise out there, why should customers take a chance on us?” and I include the word take a chance because I need to apply the necessary tension to make the value proposition really visible and differentiating amidst all the noise.
Since the publication in 2005 of The Blue Ocean Strategy, which basically tells us the need to create new spaces in your market instead of making proposals to steal customers from your competitors, many companies have succeeded, but the sectors are becoming increasingly competitive and when you analyse some of them you realise that most of them are still in the red ocean, in the noise, and standing out there is extremely complex.
So how do you stand out and be chosen? The key is still innovation, innovation in value, lowering costs, standing out and looking for those who don’t know you, the “non-customers”, looking for new segments, getting closer to their consumer behaviour, listening, and being really relevant to them, showing a solution to their problem. Standing out among all the noise.
I have chosen the great Joaquín Sabina and his song Ruido, to accompany the reading of today’s post.
