Well, it’s been a while, but after fixing the technical difficulties, we’re back online with the blog. So I’d like to open with Stonehenge.
Stonehenge is an incredible feat of human engineering. 40-ton stones from various places in England and Wales dragged to Salisbury and erected into a massive structure using stone-age technologies. It’s perfectly aligned with the Solstice sunrise. Awe-inspiring.
But that’s not the true power of Stonehenge. The true power is that, since we don’t know anything about the people who actually built it, we have no idea what it’s purpose is. We get to impose our own conjecture about those people onto this dumbfounding structure…it’s story carries a small seed of ourselves in it.
Theories have ranged from a temple to Apollo, to a place of healing, to a place of revelry, to a place of sacrifice. It has been speculated to be a UFO landing platform, a marker for the intersection of harmonic energy lines of the earth, a fortress, the round table and even a cemetery.
It has been supposed to have been build by giants, Celts, druids, Merlin and an anonymous civilization, since displaced by the Celts and subsequent peoples.
We just don’t know and we probably never will. Which means the power of Stonehenge will live on indefinitely.
What doest his have to do with marketing? Two things. First, if you don’t define an aspect of your business, people will fill in the missing pieces with their own imaginings and assumptions. Second, if you leave blanks in just the right places, you can allow your customers to own a small piece of your story. They become a part of it, and it a part of them.
The challenge is to fill in the right blanks and leave the right ones empty.
