I have a very dear friend who is an extraordinarily talented artist. Most of her work is in the realm of illustrated children’s books. I just love the stuff she does, but even though she is a spectacular artist, she is quite possibly one of the worst marketers I’ve ever seen. She will occasionally present her portfolio to intermediary agents, but even then, she is not very good at doing that either.
Granted, part of this is just the fact that she is a shy individual. However, she is not by any stretch of imagination an isolated case. Most people have tremendous difficulty with the concept of marketing to large numbers of people. I confess, for a long time, I had the exact same fear and hesitation. And whenever I encounter fear and hesitation, I always stop and ask myself the question, “why is that?”
Well I didn’t have to look very far to find an answer. All you have to do is consider the social conditioning of the typical educational experience.
While we tend to focus on the whole idealistic notion of “education” and all the wondrous idealism that goes all along with that word, if you break it down to the day-to-day operation, what most people experience in a school environment is the “selling” their daily output of work to a very small group of ready-made faux customers, i.e. their teachers. The wonderful thing about being a student is that it’s all automatic and guaranteed; everything that you produce is immediately “bought” by this group of academic mercenaries. In reality, of course, you the student are the actual customer, you are the person actually buying services and the teachers are the ones getting the money, but the service they are giving you the pretense of having a guaranteed customer in your teacher.
The trouble with this nonstop immersion in having one single buyer persona, i.e., this manufactured artificial customer who buys everything you make, is that when you get out of the school environment, you have no other reference. You seek one single customer to take the place of the teacher. Unfortunately, real world customers rarely even resemble these “practice customers.” It’s one thing to submit a term paper on Friday to one teacher, and have it returned to you with the “payment” of a grade on Monday. It’s quite another thing to submit a job to a client on Friday and hear absolutely nothing back for weeks at a time, and then when you call them, they tell you they don’t want your stupid term paper, as they found a cheaper one online. Huh? What? This is totally unfamiliar.
As a result of all this obsolete training, when people really should be out there looking for customers, they end up looking for a more familiar form of customer in a teacher or similar surrogate to give them the same sense of easy and quick sales and payment that they had for 12 to 18 years of school. Real customers behave in a radically different way from the pretend customers you had for so long, so it’s very easy to feel disoriented and inadequate in the face of so much confused unknown.
When you remove the fear stemming from this disorientation and confusion, marketing really isn’t all that difficult. Marketing is just trying to figure out ways to get people to buy stuff. Period. It’s not rocket science.
Of course, the jarring shift into reality becomes even more unfamiliar when you submit your work, not just to one person, but to a thousand or perhaps to a million potential consumers. What if they all read it? What if some of them give it an F and some of them give it an A? What do you do then? What if they all start discussing it? But what is even worse is, what if . . . what if . . . none of them respond to it? Can you imagine being in 3rd grade and the teacher saying to you, “I have no interest in the homework you did?” Yikes. Can you handle that sudden shift into reality where all of a sudden you just don’t matter very much to most people? These are the kinds questions that can make you freeze up like a squirrel the moment you start to contemplate marketing yourself to 6 billion strangers. You simply have not been prepared for it.
© Justin Locke
