Make value
Being a creator demands responsibility
Hi! This week, I’m going to dig into some old notes. Most of these are at least a few years old, if not five or ten. They resonated with me at the time, and some still do today. I’ll explain more with each note.
Today’s sticky is:
MAKE
VALUE
Being a creator
demands
responsibility
This sticky was featured prominently on my desk when I worked as a content strategist at a tech company. This was pre-pandemic and I had a permanent office space, my own cubicle, and lots of room for sticky notes. The note wasn’t for me as much as it was for striking up conversations with people who visited my desk.
At the time, I was super interested in jobs-to-be-done and what makes something valuable. It can be easy to get caught up in the inertia of making stuff, losing focus of the value that needs to be there in order for it to be worth both the business’s resources (e.g. employing the creator) and the audience’s time and attention.
I particularly liked the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) which was commonly understood language in tech but usually applied to product, not marketing. In my view, marketing is a kind of product. The stuff we made didn’t have to be the absolutely most perfect, highest quality possible, but it need to deliver value.1 At it’s most basic level, it’s got to work. It’s got to do what it’s supposed to do, which is create value for both the business and the recipient/audience/user. We usually understand what value the business needed to get (clicks, form fills, etc), but what about the audience? What makes it worth it for them?
While I still agree with the sentiment of this message, I think the “demands responsibility” is a bit righteous and limiting. Yes, we ought to make value. But it doesn’t have to maximum value all the time. And sometimes we have to try things that might not work (not valuable) in order to get to value. More on that tomorrow.
What do you think?
Love,
Kate
“Deliver value” is business jargon that I actually quite like in this circumstance. It’s a shorter way to explain that a recipient/audience/user/customer/etc finds the object/item/product/service/etc to be worth it / more than worth it. Value (worth it) was delivered.