Yes, I’m talking about zombies again.
As a fan of the AMC series “The Walking Dead,” I’ve also enjoyed its spinoff, “Fear the Walking Dead.” For those of you not immersed in zombieana, “Walking Dead” started a few weeks into a zombie pandemic while “Fear” started just before the event.
Your tax dollars at work!
What do all these living dead shows have to do with marketing strategy? Simple. “Fear” has reminded me of one of the key elements of marketing strategy: work around what you don’t know and with what you do know.
In “Fear,” we see people struggling to make sense of a world in which they realize they don’t know a lot of key things. At the start of the show, they don’t know how to kill zombies (hint: aim for the head). They don’t know how zombies behave, something we’ve come to learn in “Walking Dead.” At the very beginning, many people simply think the zombies are in the grip of drugs or some terrible virus.
So, what do they know? They know something very important, something that also pertains to marketing strategy. As Satre said, “hell is other people.”