Lisa Harmer
Campaign and Program Director
Flipping the Pieces: Solving the Marketing Puzzle
Marketing is a lot like a puzzle
Simple, right? You have a bunch of pieces that you’re trying to assemble into a clear picture. I have these things. I need people to buy them. Make me a flyer. Easy enough.
But what if it’s not that easy?
What if you had to do it without the box, without a picture of the end project already completed for a guide?
What if you had to do it with all of the pieces flipped upside down, so all you had to guide you was just the shapes?
What if you had to do it even though there are pieces missing?
As we move along, we flip the pieces. We look at what we have to work with. We put them in some kind of order.Â
Filling In the Blanks
The more pieces we flip, the more complete our picture gets. If we find pieces missing, we search for them on the floor, under sofas. Or we use our experience and ingenuity to fill in the blanks so we can finish the puzzle. It’s fun. It’s challenging. And there’s nothing more rewarding than a puzzle solved.Jason’s Take
Love it! Flipping over puzzle pieces, when the missing pieces aren’t on the floor, under the sofa, we use our imaginations and our ingenuity to fill in the blanks. And we stick with it because puzzle-solving is fun. Marketing—like puzzle solving—is not always linear. Everybody has their own go-to steps and tactics. But also we marketers have to change up our preferred tactics sometimes. Okay, I’m getting way too transcendental. You just got me thinking about stuff here.