Around my house each of my family members has some odd eating habits. I am sure you can relate, right? Several of my kids could eat barbecue sauce on just about everything. They love it. When my wife cooks peas, she loves to drink the pea juice afterward. It turns my stomach just thinking about it even now. A couple of my kids eat Ramen noodles with a fork. That makes no sense to me. Obviously you need a spoon, right? I mean, it’s a bowl of liquid with some noodles in it, so the only way to get juice with each bite of noodles is to use a spoon. Makes perfect sense to me. One kid eats the salad first, then the rest of the meal, while another eats the meal first and saves the salad for last. But hey, to each his own.
Which brings me to my confession: I eat salad with a spoon.
Say what? Yeah, it makes so much more sense. Have you ever tried to use a fork to get the last bits of salad and the accompanying accoutrements? You know what I’m talking about… the bacon bits, the cheese pieces, the small little pieces of lettuce, the remaining splatterings of dressing scattered across the bowl. Trying to use a fork for that stuff is maddening and you might as well try to lick them out of the bowl. Using a spoon suddenly doesn’t seem so crazy.
So I was eating my salad the other night, enjoying my spoon-experience, when it suddenly hit me: too many people and organizations never even think about doing something different. You are spinning your wheels doing the same marketing… hiring the same type of people… doing the same fund raisers… same old, same old.
If what you are doing in your social media outreach isn’t getting you anywhere, here’s an idea… stop doing what you are doing. Try something different. If you are only talking about yourself and how many great coupons you have, why not start talking about someone else, like your customers? If your product could be used for other purposes besides what most people think it could be used for, why not try marketing that?
Sometimes you need to do something different not because it goes against what everyone thinks or what traditional thinking is, but because it just makes more sense. So the next time you are eating salad, do me a favor. Pick up the spoon instead of the fork. Then when you are happily shoveling all of those tasty little bacon bits into your mouth, think about what you could do differently in what you do. Trust me. It works.
