Almost 5 years ago, Seth Godin wrote a post about the challenges of marketing climate change. In that post, he said:
“It doesn’t matter what you market. Human beings want:
– totems and icons
– meters (put a real-time mpg or co2 meter in every car and watch what happens)
– fashion
– stories
– pictures
95% of the new ideas that don’t spread–even though their founders and fans believe they should–fail because of the list above.
So thinking of Seth’s list (which I only recently came across) here’s what I see are some of the ideas we “mediators” market today and thinking ahead, a few others which I think it might be worth our while to market:
| Common today | Common tomorrow? | |
| totems and icons | Justice system scales | Community circle |
| meters | Settlement rate | Dispute to resolution time |
| fashion | Alternate Dispute Resolution professional | Resolutionary |
| stories | Access to mediators | Citizen apps |
| pictures | Human intermediary | Virtual learning agent (human or machine) |
Looking ahead… what ideas will you be marketing? (they may be todays’) And will you be giving human beings what they want?
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Photo credit: Tambako the jaguar
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Interesting thoughts Ben, there is actually quite the conversation happening at Adrhub.com right now under the ADR Book Club (reading ‘The Tipping Point’)
What I have just started to do is let people know that they are the drivers through mediation. I think most people would rather be a driver then a passenger. That’s one thing I’ve been thinking about lately.
Hey Jason, thanks for pointing me to ADRHub book club… I’m a bit of a book worm and would probably enjoy those conversations. I liked your recent post re: driver/passenger. One thing that fascinates me about choice… more control vs. less control… is there’s so often a paradox… at times giving up control can give you more control… I think its another skill of us mediators to know when to suggest/hint to a disputant that giving up control (eg. on one negotiation issue/item) might actually be a good thing on the path to finding a settlement.