I’m Not A “Sub”

I love data. For example, most (like almost all) photographers view what they produce as art and rightfully so, but I look at my photography as exposing what is already there. It’s like a physics project. In photos my subject is ALWAYS light. It could be green light represented by grass or blue light represented by the sky, but without light my photo and every other photographer’s would merely be a big black scene filling up MB’s on our hard drives and wasting photo paper. Light is really nothing more than data. Each color gets a unique wave length that strikes our eyes and our brain produces the colors we see. Of course, that is a gross over simplification of the process, but you get the idea.

So, how does this apply to marketing and social media strategy you might ask? Well… I’m glad you asked, you did didn’t you? As much as I love data and this holds true in my marketing practices as well, there is a human element to marketing that the numbers will NEVER represent. We as marketers can drag up an unbelievable amount data, especially in the interactive/online world and much of it is beneficial and needed. But, what about the soul of marketing? I used work for a large national wireless carrier and it drove me absolutely crazy when we would sit around the strategy table with the executives from the key business units and terms like subscribers, subs, MINS, NAI, customers, pops, etc were used to describe those individuals that were our bread and butter. Not only were they that, but they were our sisters and cousins and our aunts (sorry to my Gilbert and Sullivan fans I couldn’t resist). I always found it a little disheartening to talk about the customer experience and use a term like “sub” in place of a more genuine term. Sure, I understand that it was part of our corporate culture to shorten terms and use more generic descriptors, but I also think we as businesses and marketing strategists can begin to look at our target audience as simply numbers and if the target market is reduced to numbers then we have lost the soul of what we do and our audience.

Do you have an opinion or a similar experience? Let’s discuss.