Marketing: Translators Of Product Reality

Posted by Greg Bond

August 26, 2008

Going back to the apple. When we look at an apple, someone can say we have deduced it to a mere word. Apple. Yet, to look into the creation of words themselves, throws one into another complex evolution. My point being, everything around us is insanely complex, yet elegantly placed, to interact with amazing accuracy. I don’t mean to get too deep, instead I’m trying to point out how simple thoughts are relative to everything else.

We have to take the world around us and make it edible for our brain to digest. Taking in all of the complexity, and somehow deducing it into a form that is relevant, memorable, and actionable is the ultimate task for all people, especially marketers. In order to relate to someone else, we have to draw simple terms into a more complex scenario in order to create bridges in consciousness. For example:

Treat others as you would like to be treated, and simple golden rules like these have been derived from complex life situations. Yea! Great rule of thumb, but how come it doesn’t stand alone? If I riddle off a saying to someone they may think it is cool, but they rarely stick, and even then it rarely changes an action. But saying a golden rule in a story thousands of different ways allows people to capture the essence of the rule.

This begets the cycle of taking in cues from the complex world around us, defining it, summarizing it, and then retranslating it in order to pass on the knowledge. Each person looks at the world around them differently. As marketers, we need to describe the apple in the terms of whoever it is we want to buy the apple.

Marketers are the translators of a product or service’s reality. Marketers need to be birealistic. (bilingual would be a subset) What this means is that we need not only to be able to define what we are selling in one sentence, but we also have to translate what it means to each person.

As an aside: If you do not translate honestly, they will catch on eventually.