In Adam Morgan’s book A Beautiful Constraint, he tells a story about fencing around a park.
The story goes that if kids are playing in a park without a fence, they’ll tend to group toward the middle. The boundaries of the park are unknown or unsafe, so they tend to cluster. Everyone kind of ends up doing what everyone else is doing.
But if you put a fence around the park, a set of safe boundaries, they’ll spread out. Kids will play different games, form different groups, and overall use up more of the available space.
I’ve found that the same is true for marketers.
If you have no idea what to say to attract your ideal clients, and you’re playing in unbounded creative space, you actually end up doing what everyone else is doing. Because you’re not sure where the boundaries are, where the structure is.
You just end up clustering, and your messages (like your social media posts, ads, or website) end up looking like everyone else’s.
But what a tool like the Marketing Rangefinder does is provide boundaries, a structure within which to fit your messages.
That boundary, that fence, doesn’t constrain your ability to be creative, it enables it. Because now you know the safe area to play, and you’re willing to stretch to use up all of it.
The problem with endless creative freedom is that it’s scary and confusing and we end up just clustering where the rest of our industry has deemed it to be safe.
Which is marketing camouflage.
Instead, we need a set of sustainable, understandable, and acceptable boundaries within which our creativity can flourish.
That’s what allows us to stand out, and do something truly new and novel.
So don’t see the Rangefinder or any other tool or framework as an inhibition. It is actually what allows you to be free.
By showing you where the boundaries are, so you can see all the safe places to play.
Kelford Inc. is the marketing team that’s never at a loss for words. If you’re struggling with what to say and where to say it to attract ideal clients, we’ll show you the way.