What Advertisers Can Learn From Two Janitors

The subway suddenly stopped. Something had gone wrong with the signaling system and now we were stuck while waiting for everything to come back online. I’ve always liked observing other people, and now I really had the time to eavesdrop on people whom I might have otherwise missed. After being stuck for 10 minutes or so I started noticing two janitors who were caught up in a conversation. They had their cleaning cart with them and were going station to station to make them shiny and new again. This was their cleaning route, and they were on duty.

Assuming that many of you, dear readers, are marketers or other consultants of some kind, I’m guessing that you would perhaps not consider changing careers into cleaning up subway stations, but these two janitors really seemed to enjoy their work. They looked happy and energetic and had passionate discussions about how best to clean up worn in fingerprints on glass (glass polish with a dash of alcohol, let react for a few minutes before rinsing) and how to battle graffiti. These guys were enjoying their work.

Why was I so surprised by this? I suddenly realized that I had unknowingly carried around a subconscious stereotype that janitors hate their jobs (blushing when I think of it). OF COURSE you can both love and hate any job depending on your attitude to it. And OF COURSE you can have the drive to improve your skills regardless of if it’s about window-cleaning or iPad Objective C programming. These two janitors in particular had a lengthy discussion on different specialist cleaning courses they had attended for instance.

For us working with communications consulting we always have to be aware of this type of subconscious prejudice. We have them all the time about all kinds of things, and they are in a way a necessary as a part of our imagination, but if we just carry on in our little circle of advertising colleagues, advertising friends, advertising parties, and advertising award shows, it’s easy to forget that we have them, and THAT is dangerous.

You may have heard some time that research is the mother of all strategy, and that that may be true. But participation and attendance, travelling around and seeing for yourself, is the mother of research.