Banishing Thought: Why Most Marketing Fails

There’s a story about a quality management consultant advising an old English manufacturing company…

The company had famously operated through the second world war, but 30 years later, the organization needed to improve its general operating efficiency.

The consultant reviewed a daily report that dealt with productivity, absentee rates, machine failure, downtime, etc.

The report was completed manually every day by the foreman.

On the report, there was a box in the top right corner with an illegible heading under which the figure ‘0’ had been documented for the last 30 years.

Confused, the consultant asked the foreman about the mysterious zero.

The foreman shrugged and said, “I was told to put a zero there. I guess we’ve always just done it that way.”

The consultant continued to dig for the original form to make some sense of the mysterious ‘0’.

Finally, he found a folder marked ‘master forms.’

He dug through the folder and found the original copy of the report in question. When he looked at the heading in the top right corner, it read ‘Number of Air Raids Today.’

Banishing Thought

“In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.” - Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park.

We can all laugh at the foolish foreman and the antiquated manufacturing plant completing outdated forms. Still, the reality is that this is the same amount of critical thinking many of us apply to our marketing plans.

When most companies say, “we need marketing!” they are calling for the implementation of a particular set of assumptions they are using as a poor imitation of critical thought around their marketing strategy.

Marketing is not a summation of the tactics you use to reach potential customers. Good marketing is a centralized theme or extension of your product that anchors it as the solution to your customer’s problems.

Marketing is the bridge you build to take your customers from where they are today to where you want to take them.

Most marketing is not executed through this lens, which is why most marketing fails.

Caught in the “Better Trap”

In an article published in Harvard Business Review, Eddie Yoon, Christopher Lochhead, and Nicolas Cole highlight a study that found that in tech categories, on average, the category king or queen wins 76% of the total value created as measured by market cap in the entire category.

This means that most of the thoughtless marketing that aims to “compete” for market share or “disrupt” an industry by copying the go-to-market of the competition with a “better” product is a fight over 24% of the market capitalization in that category.

Yikes!

“The category leader stays in their position as long as the world agrees with their definition of the problem and the solution.” – Christopher Lochhead.

Instead of finding companies to “compete” with or “disrupt,” find customers to serve. Stop letting your competitors set the terms for your customer conversations or get used to fighting over the scraps and leftovers in your category.

Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.

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