What bananas can teach us about content marketing

Photo credit: livescience.com

In case you haven’t heard, the world’s supply of bananas is under attack. According to The Washington Post, bananas may be going bye bye altogether because of a disease called Tropical Race 4.

But fruits and vegetables face diseases everyday, right? Is this simply a case of the media hyping a story for the sake of attention?

This time, I’m afraid not.

The disease is a problem because almost all of the world’s bananas are not only grown in a relatively small geographical area (most of them are grown in Latin America), but they are almost all the same variety.

The same thing that makes our bananas reliably healthy and abundant — that they are essentially all clones of each other, according to The Post — is the same thing that makes them all vulnerable to the same disease.

What’s happening with bananas is that growers removed variations to simplify things for themselves, reduce inconsistencies and make more money. But, those variations were the very thing that protected their crop — their livelihood — from disease.

How on earth does this relate to content marketing?

While this is very sad news for those of us who love bananas, those of us in marketing should take a lesson from this pending disaster and try to learn from it. That’s what marketing is all about, right?

Even though brands today have access to tools that enable them to create and publish their own messages, many of us are still doing the same things. It’s not quite as bad as the banana issue (yet), but as marketers continue to follow each other with the same messages, the same infographics, the same videos and the same blog posts, they risk extinction.

Why?

Because consumers like solutions. They already know what the problems are and they really don’t have the time or patience to connect the dots between what they need and what you’re offering. They want someone to help solve their problems so they can get back to living their lives.

So stop talking about what you do and talk more about how you can help people. In other words: use more #contentmarketing!

Brands like Blendtec are a great example. Could they have done the standard product promotions about how fast their blenders spin and how much torque they can deliver and all of that? Sure.

Would anyone care? Nope.

Instead, they chose to show how they can help by blending just about anything they could get their hands on. Do most folks really need to blend a cell phone down to a pulp? Of course not. But when you do need to blend something, aren’t you going to consider the one that can? You bet you are.

There are many other great examples of content marketing, too. I'm sure you've seen many of them.

The point here is that, while most brands can’t rely solely on content marketing, the vast majority of brands can benefit from using content marketing more as part of their overall marketing mix.

This is the point of the banana analogy…content marketing can help by providing your brand with needed variety.

And we all know people like variety in their lives. And bananas.