The People in Your Area

Getting people to move to an area is a marketing problem.

Think about a town on the water, filled with wooded areas and good hunting, but not many restaurants or stores. That town is going to have to appeal to outdoorsy types. It’s going to filter out the urbanites.

Consider the opposite of that. A city, without many geographical features left, but filled with restaurants and stores. It’s going to filter out the outdoorsy types.

Both of these places can benefit from developing things that are interesting to the audience that would be served by moving to the appropriate area.

When thinking about the kinds of things that attract people to towns here is an example:

That imagery captures my imagination right away. I wonder what else a town like this does to stand out. It may inspire me to take a vacation there, which may further inspire me to move there.

I wrote this to make a point, not about towns, but about the people that surround us. Often, it seems as if there is no choice about the people who are around us and what they believe, yet that’s not the case. I’ve often looked at marketing through the lens of filtering: here and here and here for example.

A direct result of this is thinking about the people in your life. If you are surrounded by loving, supportive people helping you, that is great, and some self-reflection about the filters around you that created a large number of positive types can be beneficial. Just like the interesting road above, it’s likely there is something about you that interests these types of people. Understanding this can do wonders in case that ever changes.

If you are in a bad situation, surrounded by negative influences, it’s an opportunity to think about what filters are in your life that keep the good people away and the negative influences around. Figuring this out may be the same thing as turning your fortune around.

This applies to so many other things, so it’s worth giving some thought about how it applies to your life. As Jerry Seinfeld once pointed out, “When you go to a restaurant, all the people there look like you. They are dressed like you.” That’s because the ambiance of the restaurant is a filter and another example of the power of this phenomenon at work.