Selling against the tide

A young marketer in Amman is asked to make home telephones fashionable again. The request is for something fresh, aimed at people in their twenties.

She does not own a landline. Nobody she knows under forty does. Her parents keep one in the hallway mostly out of habit.

She will work hard on it, and the work might even be clever. It will still be uphill every single day, because she is pushing against a change the people she is trying to reach are perfectly happy with. They did not lose the home phone. They let it go.

The category will not vanish. Some households will always want one, and someone should serve them well. But an effort to win back a generation that has moved on is mostly an effort to make the people paying for it feel better.

This is the misunderstanding at the centre of a lot of marketing. It is not the work of persuading people to buy whatever you have been paid to sell. It is the work of noticing what people are already reaching for, and making it easier for them to reach it. When the two point in opposite directions, the request is not a creative problem. It is a signal.

Nobody has to sign up for a long fight against something people are glad to be rid of. There are products and causes that people are already leaning towards, waiting for someone to make them better and easier to find. The energy that goes into resisting the current can go into one of those instead.

The work is better when the person doing it believes in the thing, and the people buying it are eager to believe too. Otherwise it is only a salary, paid for with our best hours.

Choosing who we work for is quietly choosing what we will spend the next few years becoming.