The causes of
ineffective marketing
Introduction
Marketing. “The colouring-in department” that’s “just a cost centre”. Poets and philosophers; a lot of talking, not much doing. Always changing direction, never much to show for it. Thinking they’re experts in everything. This is how many businesses see marketing, and a lot of the time it is valid: as my A-Level Sociology teacher said to us in our first lesson, most stereotypes exist because there is an element of truth to them.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Over the past decade or so, a group of mindsets have emerged that reshaped the culture of marketing as a profession. Their influence on thinking and practice has created “marketing”, an approach that looks and sounds like marketing on the surface, but inside it is a broken mess of misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and misapplications. “Marketing” has become the dominant approach, accepted and applied in a discipline largely populated by untrained and narrowly experienced practitioners who don’t know any better, and fuelled by a staggering number of enablers actively promoting and monetizing the culture for their own commercial gain. People with extremely narrow and specialist experience and zero training can get to senior leadership roles, so “marketing” has become normalized at all levels of the department.
The cultural shift has moved it away from a discipline built on proven fundamental principles, one integrated with the wider business to drive commercial returns, ultimately concerned with its contribution to business performance. It’s abandoned its roots and forgotten how to do the basics well, trying to run before it can walk, only paying attention to the journey with little thought about the destination.
This has damaged both marketing and the businesses it is meant to be helping, producing ineffective marketing through the numerous and repeated mistakes that “marketing” makes.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF "MARKETING"
A BETTER WAY
It’s not fashionable for me to say this as a marketer, but I believe marketing is a business function: its job is to help the company make money. It does this by creating and maintaining an advantage over the alternatives in the market, and it uses this advantage to generate revenue and improve profitability. It does this with tailored plans that combine proven fundamentals with contemporary evidence-based best practices. These plans use resources responsibly and appropriately to deliver long-term, sustainable contributions to the overall business objectives. Marketing is a verb, something that is done: to paraphrase Elvis Presley, it should have a little less conversation and a little more action.
If marketing is done well, my beliefs would also be the dominant perceptions of it, not the stereotypes. The key word in that sentence is “if”: the stereotypes exist because a lot of marketing isn’t done well, and that makes it ineffective.
The good news is that a lot of the “marketing” mistakes are avoidable if you have a marketer that understands the root causes and has the expertise to move you away from them. The inability to do that is the likely reason you’ve had underwhelming marketing fractionals, freelancers, consultants, or agencies before: their expertise only extends to putting plasters over small cuts, patching surface level symptoms because they don’t have the depth of training and breadth of applied practice to go beyond and address the underlying causes. They don’t create solutions for your problems; they shoehorn your business into their standardized ones, and that’s why they didn’t work.
There are two reasons I’ve written these articles exploring the root causes of ineffective marketing. Firstly, so you can be confident that I am aware of what they are. Ask yourself: why you have found very few, if any, independent marketers covering this? (The answer: they can’t tell you what they don’t know). Secondly, if you recognize any of the issues, attitudes, or behaviours covered in them, this will save a lot of time in early discussions: coming into a conversation with an idea of where things may be going wrong will help to streamline the diagnostic portion of the engagement. If you are shopping around for marketing support, by all means use these articles as a source of questions to gauge a contractor’s potential to provide support that goes beyond cosmetic quick fixes. If you are looking to sort out your marketing internally, hopefully they will give you some suggestions of places to start or areas that might have been missed.
If you would like marketing to make better contributions to revenue and profitability by avoiding “marketing” mistakes, let’s talk.