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Well, maybe not learned… “experienced” would be more accurate. There’s a little-known fact in education: the best teachers are found in kindergarten, and as you progress, the teaching becomes worse and worse (generally). You’ll find the worst teachers at the graduate level. They may have the greatest knowledge of the subject, but they’ll drone it out in a monotone while standing inertly at the front of a blackboard. The best teaching happens in kindergarten through fifth grade.

At its heart, kindergarten teaching (marketing) is entertainment. There is no such thing as an “attention span.” That’s a myth propagated by bad teachers. My four-year-old can easily sit quietly in rapt attention for two hours… if he’s watching Spiderman Into the Multiverse. That’s his attention span. What humans have is a boredom span… the duration in which we can maintain focus while being bored to death. The best teachers know this and fill the classroom activities and colors and sounds. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and all of the other social media platforms are primarily entertainment machines using game theory to maximize engagement. As a video production professional, I may go to Facebook to network, Instagram for inspiration, and YouTube to learn new techniques, but once there I choose with whom I will engage… and the platform is influencing my decisions at every step, using game theory, attractive thumbnails, catchy titles, auto previews, and other entertainment tricks.

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THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN ATTENTION SPAN

So how does a kindergarten teacher entertain? They tell stories. They have interactive discussions. They break learning into small bits and incorporate games and challenges whenever possible. They use pictures. They build friendships between the students. They teach kids how to walk in line. And they periodically test their knowledge. Does this sound similar to marketing best practices?

• *Tell stories = success stories, client stories, branding
• *Interactive discussion = respond on social media
• *Use pictures = engage visually
• *Build friendships = create community, network
• *Walk in line = streamline navigation on your website
• *Test knowledge = listen to feedback

In regards to testing knowledge, another great hoax that bad educators have foisted upon us is the idea that tests are meant to evaluate the student’s knowledge and learning. They even created the idiotic bell curve to justify the idea that students ability to learn are varied. But tests are more useful at evaluating the teacher’s ability. If all the students fail it’s clearly a teaching problem; if 10% of students fail then you obviously have a competent teacher— and there’s no reason why 100% of students can’t be learning at an “A” level.

The main takeaway of this Kindergarten thought experiment is to emphasize the importance of entertainment. Entertainment is not “brand positioning,” or clearly differentiated products and services, or consumer behavior, or market research, or data analysis. It’s stories, and play; comedy and drama; games and friendship. Center your marketing activities around these concepts and you cannot go wrong.