legal sanity

In previous posts on Working with Meaning and Lawyers in the Conceptual Age, I discussed a recurring theme in business and marketing forums these days: how can people infuse their work, product or service with meaning? The theme has a broad reach. I’ve seen it thread through expert commentary on creating meaningful customer experiences, employee engagement and work-life synergy, among other topics.

I recently came across another interesting take on this theme in a Brains on Fire blog post called Marketing that’s Meaningful. Highlighting winds of change in the marketing and advertising worlds, the post notes that people today are looking “to be a part of something bigger than themselves.” So, when trying to connect with consumers or clients, service providers need to shift their perspective and strive to make their company meaningful. And, according to the post, forging this kind of consumer-meaning nexus is all “about empowerment. Ownership. Starting a real, honest conversation. Making friends instead of customers. And making your company or product relevant.”

David Maister and co-author Lois Kelly also pick up on this theme in a Law Practice Today article titled Marketing is a Conversation. Maister suggests that it’s high time “we stopped thinking of marketing as a one-way propaganda campaign.” Instead, marketing is best viewed as a conversation in which we openly invite our business prospects or clients to share their “ideas, beliefs and perspectives” with us person-to-person. In terms of existing clients, Maister doesn’t see this as a one-shot proposition. Rather, there needs to be an ongoing exchange that compels clients to regularly share their core “concerns, issues and needs.” Maister notes, however, that this person-to-person dialoguing doesn’t have to be face-to-face. It can be promoted and nurtured through company-sponsored online client communities, interactive Web sites and blogs.

Meaningfully connecting to clients in these ways helps businesses stand apart from the competition; competition that blogger John Jantsch attributes to a marketplace tendency to see all businesses as indistinguishable commodity providers. In a thoughtful post from Duct Tape Marketing called The Business You Are Really In, Jantsch asks us to step out of the commodity-provider mindset and reclassify our business offerings in terms of four key values: “information, community building, experience and transformation” – values all driven by our clients’ and employees’ hunger for meaning in their lives.