Put the Lawn Mower Down, and Walk the Hell Away

This is a simple, but useful, analogy a friend of mine brought up at lunch this weekend:

A good gardener* walks into a garden and thinks “Well, I need to get a new row of flowers planted, reseed that strip of grass, and figure out how to make that corner more colorful.” Only then does he select the tools and techniques required for the job.

He doesn’t walk into the garden armed with a shiny new mega-horsepower lawnmower, weedwacker, and Super-Grow formula, and think “Now…what the hell can I use these for?”

That’s the challenge that pervades the tech community, and marketers in particular. There are so many shiny toys that everything from conferences to campaigns to hallway conversations tend to become dominated by discussions on how to use the tools, rather than how to make the garden better.

Photo via Flickr by Larsz.

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