Every now and then something happens that makes you realize we are all thinking way too small. I had one of these moments earlier this month thanks to a group of enterprising young people I met in Sao Paulo, Brazil. They reminded me that the worst thing we can do is lose track of what makes our human species unique – we all have big plans, big visions, and big dreams.
The team from Box 1824 invited me to a conversation about what makes young people tick in Brazil. What impressed me most about wasn’t the polling data or the depth and breadth of their interviews. It was all extremely professional. What most impressed me was what the group was trying to discover – what was the collective “dream” of the youth generation of Brazil. Talk about a big question! This was a project that was unique as it was ambitious.
We already know how to figure out what young people want to buy, how they act, how they communicate, and who they say they want to be. Marketing departments around the world have conversations like this all the time. But it’s not every day that you find a serious study on what will be the dream of an entire generation.
Their study focused on what was unique about young people in Brazil, what they shared with youth around the world, and how their unique answer to “what’s your dream in life” related to their parents, their younger brothers and sisters, and everyone else around them.
The folks at Box 1824 reminded me that you cannot design anything in public relations or communications without remembering what is driving your target audience or clients. This is of course a lesson from page 1 in any manual around the world. But the scope of the question “What is your dream?” reminds me that far too often we are looking at our customers and our partners as people with an agenda or a pattern of behaviors instead of as people with a dream. There’s no such thing as thinking too big when we are thinking about that question — for others and for ourselves.
You can learn more about Box 1824 here.