What my mom meant by fresh

My mother used to call me fresh. Or more accurately she would say something like, “don’t get fresh with me.”  What I remember most is that being called Fresh felt more like a compliment than an reprimand. Maybe my mother said it with some sort of repressed smile on her face that let me know she somehow appreciated the fresh thing I had just said. Usually I felt pretty good about being fresh.

This month we’ve focused upon and explored the word fresh for our marketing communications. We wrote about fresh campaigns, fresh marketing tools, fresh ways to solve a marketing problem, even old campaigns that are still fresh today. We’ve also posted a blog about the fresh snow that we in Minnesota saw way too much of this April.

But Fresh as an attitude…a sometimes-not-all-that-admirable type of attitude? This seemed worthy of further exploration, especially as it is seldom used today.

The official dictionary definition of fresh in this context is:
Fresh /freSH/: Bold and Saucy.

Kind of like the sound of that. Sounds like a marketing asset. Seems as though being fresh in this business might be a really good thing. (Full disclosure, it was also defined as impudent, but I’m going with Bold and Saucy because I’m sure that’s what my mother meant.)

So here we are. All of us who work in marketing are continually challenged to develop fresh campaigns, ideas, designs, tag lines, tactics and strategies. There exists an endless need for the new, the next, the better…and that’s a really good thing.  We are the purveyors of the the new, the next, the better. We are the daredevils of the business world. We get to push limits. We get to be bold and saucy.