I love survival skills TV shows—as I believe many other 30-something white american males do, judging by the unending YouTube videos of caucasian arms wearing paracord bracelets and detailing the contents of “bug-out bags.” For the uninitiated, here’s a sampling.

On several episodes of my favorite show, Discovery Channel’s Dual Survival, co-host and survival skills instructor Dave Canterbury has emphasized that if a piece of gear cannot be used for at least three things, he doesn’t waste energy carrying it. I tucked this nugget of wisdom into my mind’s survival file for later use during the apocalypse.  I didn’t realize I’d recall it while thinking about marketing.

Survival Marketing

I was brainstorming recently about the marketing challenges entrepreneurs and small businesses face, trying to find fodder for a new batch of Fame Foundry podcasts. As I often do, I looked at my own experiences as a small business marketer and realized that my greatest challenge is usually how to get more marketing done with limited resources.

I wrote “efficiencies” on my dry-erase board and soon remembered Dave’s sage advice. Both the survivor and the small business marketer have in common the need for efficiency. For every unit of effort exerted, you want to maximize the benefits toward achieving your objective, be it rescue or revenue.

Multi-Purpose Tools

For Dave, being multi-purpose focused means prioritizing items like rope, which can be used for making shelters, making snares or making a million other things that could help keep him alive in the bush.

For the marketer with limited time, staff and/or money, it means constantly thinking about how resources like content and collateral can be reused, repackaged or repurposed.

For example, writing this post required time (the most valuable asset anyone has), concept exploration, writing, editing and fine-tuning things like keywords, headers and links. That’s a good bit of effort for a reasonably short post. To maximize the impact of this work, I’ll very likely write a podcast episode focused on the core concept of marketing efficiency. The wording will be different, of course, as will the style, so there is some additional effort required. But the concept is ready and the thoughts have been thunk. (I know thunk is not a real word.) And that is a big energy savings.

Future-Purposed 

On Dual Survival, when Dave and his partner Cody Lundin find trash or other “resources” in the wilderness, they often hang on to items with a future use in mind, like finding a plastic bag and saving it for a canteen when they find water later.

In like fashion, I’ll probably also tuck away this idea in an Evernote notebook dedicated to ebook writing. When the time comes to create my magnum opus of marketing, this remnant will be ready for a new life with other leftover bits like it.