A few times on Gary Vaynerchuk’s podcast I’ve heard Gary repeat a very simple phrase: “you can’t hope for consumer reality.“
His push is related to marketing, and particularly to social media. You may be comfortable using Facebook, but if your audience is teens, then Facebook promotions would almost certainly fall flat. You might love Instagram and use it a lot, but the consumer reality for your customers might be different. The more quickly you can face the reality of where you audience really spends time, the better off you’ll be.
I see it similar with my push for blogging (I think most people should write every day) and for the use of RSS readers (they’re the path to avoiding algorithm bubbles). I want everyone reading this post to start blogging every day and to use RSS to get most of their information, but it simply isn’t going to happen. I’ll continue to push for it in the hopes of convincing a few people, as there are huge advantages to both, but the reality is quite simple — most won’t do it.
When it comes to marketing, what you “hope” that users will do is irrelevant. Dig deep for some empathy to understand what people are passionate about and meet them there. Anything else, even well-intentioned, is going to be a waste of time.
