The Search For Meaning And How Marketing Is Transformed
I could, on a dime, switch this article from a marketing and search-engine content creation guide to one designed to help you live a longer, more fulfilling life all in the name of return on our investment (ROI) effort and time versus what gain we make. Magic! Right? Except it’s not. Sure we could, if we so wanted to; separate life and work, our private and public persona, the inner world we all inhabit and the external one we all experience but that would be pointless and by pointless, of course, I mean meaningless. And when something is meaningless it has no value. And a thing with no value has very little reason to exist.
“life — your life, must have meaning.”
You’re reading this so you’re alive which means that you have value even if you’re not quite sure what it is (or maybe you already know but seek external validation in which case my statement stands true). It also means that you have meaning. And meaning is something our brains have been deigned to seek the way plants seek sunlight or we seek food and water. Quite literally, without meaning the brain will not long survive, despite the fact that it’s actually designed to help us survive without ever having to think things deep enough to actually bother about meaning.
Which means, of course, that life — your life, must have meaning. If we could understand the meaning of life or catch a small glimpse of it perhaps that would reassure us that everything that happens around us and everything we do actually has a purpose then we would be happier and everything we experience would make more sense. As it is we don’t and we can’t and things do not.
Which leaves us with the interesting situation of having to work things out for ourselves. And that, exactly is the point. Just as there really cannot be an overarching, all-encompassing, meaning of life that would help make sense of all life in the universe, there can be no meaning to life, the smaller aspects of living we experience without context.
Context transforms the noise our brain receives into signal. It allows us to filter relevance from distraction. It helps us navigate the world without becoming confused by similarities. We spend our life searching for meaning because meaning gives us purpose but both meaning and a sense of purpose are needed so we can thrive as opposed to just survive.
Apply this to how you think, act and live and it begins to make sense, at least up to the point where you remain open and honest with yourself. Apply it to business and marketing, product placement and service promotion and you begin to understand why the hype no longer works, why just spending money on ads is no longer enough, why staff advocacy and influencer marketing are much strongest brand movers than PR.
It’s taken us some time to go from strings to things, from websites to people, from concepts to actions and from ideas to meaning. The journey has not been easy but it has been both enlightening and liberating. It transforms the search for the “meaning of life” into a set of thoughts, choices, decisions and actions that in their totality compose “meaning in life”. The difference is significant. Apply it to what you do in the context of your business or life (or both) and feel the difference this makes to your ROI.
Originally published at https://thesnipermind.com on July 14, 2024.
