Beautiful Imbalance

As human beings, we are hard-wired to seek balance.

Our nature means we instinctively find certain concepts very attractive:

• A Balanced Diet

• Work-life balance

• Balancing the books

• Checks and balances

• Centred and balanced

• Yin and Yang

• Fairness

• Equality

• Equity

• Closing the gap

Even in the people we’re attracted to – just having a symmetrical face has been scientifically proven (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513899000148) to mean people will find you to be more attractive.

We’re innately drawn towards balance.

BUT… Commerce is driven by imbalance.

• Return on Investment

• Supply and Demand

• Arbitrage

• Leverage

• Margin

• Rich get richer

• Intergenerational wealth

Whether it’s fair or not, the rules of the game reward positive imbalance – and punish negative imbalance.

And the biggest rewards are skewed heavily towards certain types of positive imbalances.

This creates problems.

As human beings, we instinctively try to give equal attention to all of our projects, products, opportunities and marketing campaigns.

But as leaders of business and marketing, we’re better off seeking positive imbalance – and going looking for:

• the little things that make a big difference;

• the tiny tweaks that give you a big advantage;

• the one-time tasks that get reused over and over again;

• the things that cost a little bit but return a lot;

• the multipliers that turn the singular into the frequent;

• the outcomes that echo and repeat;

• the margins that grow with scale;

• the scale that grows faster than effort;

• the things that work off your power, not force;

• and doing less (but more often), rather than constantly trying to do more-more-more!

The more of this beautiful imbalance we find, the better we perform commercially.

Where’s the imbalance in your marketing? Can you read the stories in your numbers? (http://www.brenthodgson.com/blog/the-stories-in-your-marketing-footprints)