Who Drives Your Marketing?

Marketing for the new decade will be greatly influenced by what type of thinking is driving your marketing. Marketers need to really pinpoint their top brand strengths and match them to their top prospects to meet the new business flow that is required to stay
in business, regardless of what industry you work in. As you search for new ways to design your brand strategy and messaging, it is critical to understand how most marketing comes into existence. Frankly, the type of thinking you bring to the planning process is what makes your marketing relevant or irrelevant. Boring or exciting.

What type of thinker are you?

Left-brain thinkers are logical, sequential, rational, analytical, objective and enjoy looking at parts in detail. Sound familiar? Most individuals who think in this linear fashion are great with details and project scoring. They usually prefer a statistic over a feeling.

Right-brain thinkers are intuitive, random, holistic, synthesizing, subjective and look at wholes. Aesthetics, feelings and creativity are the primary focus of righties. They relish creating something new and exploring ideas for their own sake.

The problem with organizations’ marketing efforts often boils down to the fact that the person most responsible for marketing decisions is strongly skewed to either one or the other side of thinking. That’s not good. Most successful marketing is “whole-brained” in its orientation and has co-joined excellent strategic thinking with high creative energy. The skills of imagination are not usually present in a lefty and sadly much of today’s b2b marketing is decided by someone with that analytical bent.

The solution is to ensure that your marketing team has both thinking types represented—and equally weighted, I might add—to guide the formidable task of creating a strategic direction and coupling it with excellent creativity. One without the other is usually a snore.