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Competing for Mindshare or Meaningshare

Mindshare is top of mind (so to speak) in most marketing and sales conversations. How do we capture the hearts, minds and imaginations of customers?

We want to capture mindshare with consumers. Creativity in commercials, advertising, leveraging social platforms, increasing volume (figuratively and literally) all aimed at getting the attention of the consumer.

We want to capture mindshare of corporate buyers. We race to create more content to have more to share with them. We diversify channels of communication, we leverage every tool or technology we can, we increase volume to capture the attention of the business buyer.

There is lots of stuff around focusing on creating mindshare.

It seems, however, we are talking about the wrong thing. Shouldn’t we be focusing on creating meaning for the customers? If we focused on creating meaning, we probably wouldn’t have to worry about mindshare.

The problem with focusing on mindshare is it’s usually all about us. It’s about who we are, what we do—even well-crafted.

Maybe meaningshare is a bit of wordsmithing, but it might force us to put the customer at the center of what we do. We create meaning by focusing on what the customer cares about. What helps them improve? What helps them address new opportunities? What helps them learn and grow? What helps them solve their problems?

But this means a change in approach. Not every customer has the same problems. Not every customer faces the same issues or has the same priorities. Casting a wide net is meaningless, it creates noise. We’re forced to reduce the meaning, consequently the impact. The broader the audience, the less relevant and impactful our message.

If we are going to create meaning, we have to be relevant. Rather than massive “blasts” and broad campaigns, we have to narrow our focus and our messages. From a marketing point of view, tools provide the capability for Mass Customization. Sales is where we are very focused and specific.

So mindshare becomes easy if we focus on meaning. What does what we communicate mean to the customer? How is it relevant specifically to the issues they face? What are their specific goals, and how do we help them achieve them? What opportunities are they missing, how do we help them recognize them?

Are you focusing on mindshare or meaningshare?

This article was originally published by Partners in Excellence

Published: June 24, 2013
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Dave Brock

Dave Brock is the founder of Partners in EXCELLENCE, a consulting and services company helping to improve the effectiveness of business professionals with strategy development, organizational planning, and implementation. Dave has spent his career working for and with high performance organizations, ranging from the Fortune 25 to startups, including companies such as IBM, HP, Nokia, AT&T, Microsoft, General Electric, and many, many more. The work Dave does with business strategies is closely tied to personal effectiveness of the people in the organization. As a result, Dave is deeply involved in the development of a number of training and coaching programs.