Have you ever noticed this? The people who talk most about innovation are those who are least likely to practice it — to apply or be receptive to imagination and creativity. And the people who talk most about disruption are those who are most averse to alternatives to anything — the least likely to consider, favor, embrace, or adopt change. Strange, isn’t it?
It actually freaks us out a little bit. That’s not to say it terrifies us or leaves us full of morbid dread. Rather, it leaves us with a feeling somewhere between the willies and the the heebie jeebies. But, on balance, it doesn’t go quite so far as to be accurately classifiable as the screaming meemies. Maybe the best thing to say is that it causes us to experience a vague queasiness. Lip service always does.
As it turns out, the aversion to change — almost always accompanied by relentless rhetoric to the contrary — spawned a determinate diagnosis that was previously unbeknownst to us. We found it in the Book of Marketing Breakdowns (BOMB), formally codified as the fear of change by the causal corroboration of its symptoms: Changes Or Little Departures Feed Extreme Economic Terror (COLD FEET).
In its more malignant manifestations, COLD FEET presents in response to doing something, anything, in any way different from the ways in which one’s always done it. More specifically, marketing types are especially susceptible to COLD FEET (hence its appearance in BOMB) because they believe the things they’ve always done will continue to work, even though none of those things ever worked before.
Oddly enough, the most reliable cure for COLD FEET has proven to be comics. That’s right. The effectiveness of comics has been demonstrated so definitively it’s also been codified, categorized, and classified as a remedy for anemic marketing in BOMB. It’s referred to as SOCKS (Select Original Comics Kindle Success). In fact, one company that employed original comics in its marketing program improved awareness, recognizability, and memorability of its brand by 5,647.80 percent (rounded to the nearest hundredth of a decimal point) in the first year, according to a survey conducted by UFO.*
It’s proof positive that if you’re looking for alternatives to innovation, disruption, and lip service, all you need is comics. And we’ll create all the original comics your marketing will ever need.
While this may come as a BOMB, comics can be SOCKS for your COLD FEET.
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*Utterly fabricated output.