The causes of
ineffective marketing
The immediacy problem
The combined impact of the binary and revolutionary mindsets has given marketing an immediacy problem. It has become addicted to the rush of spiking superficial numbers, and developed a fixation on implementing practices that gain fast increases against easily raised metrics. This is driven by a “here and now” philosophy, only concerning itself with actions and results in the present, and fetishizing things that happen fast. This has created two barriers to effectiveness: short-termism and tactically led marketing.
SHORT-TERMISM IN MARKETING
Short-termism is one of the most pervasive problems in marketing, sparking many false binaries between short-term versus long-term: product versus brand, revenue versus profit, digital versus ‘traditional’. The binary mindset explains why a side is taken in the first place; the revolutionary mindset explains why the short-term option wins.
The “adapt or die” philosophy is fuelled by industry hyperbole, and it is an unreliable and irresponsible guide often spread by people with a vested interest in its proliferation. Many superficial things change, like the tools people use to access information or the places people go to get things they want; but the fundamental ways that humans think, assess, and perceive the world are not changed by them in meaningful ways. The Narrative balloons localised small trends into universal life-altering cataclysms, exaggerating the extent and depth of their impact. Millions of years of human evolution haven’t been reset and overwritten because we’ve moved from GA3 to GA4; millennia of physical and psychological behavioural development haven’t been discarded because Amazon changed the shade of yellow on their order button; innate instincts like fight or flight haven’t been eradicated because emails can be personalized and automated. The changes are temporary and/or surface level behavioural and attitudinal reactions prompted by new technologies and tools, and marketing has always adapted to these. To take an easy example: if it didn’t, then the pillar of ‘modernity’ that is ‘digital marketing’ wouldn’t exist. We wouldn’t be doing email or SEO or social media, we would still be posting leaflets through doors and putting print catalogues on kiosks as if the internet doesn’t exist.
This has created tunnel vision on certain areas of marketing. There’s a disproportionate focus on areas with numbers that can be spiked quickly, repeatedly, and often, hoping that it makes an aggregate that looks good enough at the end of the year.
There’s a disproportionate focus on digital channels, because their numbers are quicker to spike than ‘traditional’ channels that are slow to execute and slow to bring in results. This has caused missteps like ‘digital first’: it is meant to be a tactical approach, starting the planning with the digital communications mix first as they are best suited to deliver the objectives; instead, it is used as shorthand for a pseudo-strategic decision that is really a justification for a preferred and preselected digital mix, regardless of how well it will deliver objectives.
There’s a disproportionate focus on revenue, because that is easier to spike than profit. At its worst, it legitimises instant gratification, done through quick-win gimmicks like discounting that increase the speed and size of the revenue spike but actively kill profit. This has caused missteps like 'performance marketing' that chases flawed revenue-centric metrics, with arbitrary cut-off points for performance that lead to things being abandoned before the full potential returns have come in. Resource gets diverted away from activity that is still working, cutting its effectiveness short. It also means that a lot of the money the activity makes after the cut-off point goes unattributed, often underselling marketing’s contribution.
There’s a disproportionate focus on tactics because strategy doesn’t have numbers to spike, it takes a long time to do, and if it’s treated properly it doesn’t provide the rush of reactivity. In the worst-case scenarios strategy doesn’t happen at all because there is too much eagerness to get to the action, and strategy just slows things down. In some cases tactics are planned before the strategy is finished, so the plan isn’t the optimal way to achieve the objectives, or the plan is optimised for marketing’s own vanity metrics rather than the objectives that effect business success. In other cases, strategy gets treated tactically: it becomes reactive, chopped and changed at the slightest provocation, making the marketing unfocused, inconsistent, and incoherent. Common sense would tell us that the phrase “strategically led marketing” should be redundant as marketing should naturally involve strategy; unfortunately, the phrase exists because it is a distinct approach in a landscape dominated by tactically led marketing.
TACTICALLY LED MARKETING
The sentiments in the revolutionary mindset mean that marketing does not know what strategy is, how to develop it, or its relationship to tactics; so strategy and tactics get folded into a nebulous blob, leading to the tactical plan being called the “strategy”, or “strategy” consisting of post-justifications for tactical choices. Lurking behind all this, binarism and short-termism create a bias toward tactics, the “all in” philosophy encourages a wholesale focus on them, and the “adapt or die” philosophy dictates that tactics must be reactive to the constant changes in the world, so they must be replaced as quickly and as often as possible.
Rather than having tactics be a response to strategy, strategy is consumed by tactics and disappears, which results in tactically led marketing. Strategy is either partially present or entirely absent and the thinking and operations start with tactics and consider little else.
Tactically led marketing is the business equivalent of taking Ozempic. Miracle weight loss drugs are an extreme appetite suppressant, they trick the body into being able to starve itself, which reduces the calories in without reducing the calories out. It allows for fast weight loss through aggressive malnutrition. Here’s the catch: what happens when a person stops taking it? The appetite isn’t suppressed, it comes back, they eat more: calories in exceed calories out again, and the weight comes back. They start taking Ozempic again, the weight goes away, and they stop taking it; the weight comes back, they start taking it again, lose the weight, stop taking it. Weight comes back, start taking it again, lose weight, stop; and the cycle continues. It creates an input-output dependency: without one, they can’t have the other. Here’s the first problem: when enough people are in the cycle and more people are entering it as it becomes more popular, the pharmaceutical companies will monetize the dependency by raising the prices of the drugs again and again, knowing that people are locked into paying whatever they have to if they want to continue getting the results. The second problem: the body adapts and builds up a tolerance to drugs that are taken regularly, so you have to increase the dose over time to get the same level of results. Eventually the tolerance reaches a point where the maximum dose can’t maintain the results, so the results steadily decline. In the end, it’s a higher price to get decreasing results.
Tactically led marketing follows the same pattern, with the same input-output dependency, and the same consequences. Activity gets results while it is running, but only while it is running. The price of doing tactical activity increases over time, so the cost goes up to keep the numbers coming in. As the activity lacks relevancy due to the absence of any proper strategic foundation, it tries to compensate with gimmicks to get attention, which work well initially but quickly lose impact as the audience becomes apathetic to them. In the end, it’s a cycle of ever increasing spend on ever diminishing returns.
The anti-establishment and anti-education mentalities justify the theory of tactically led marketing, and the “adapt or die” philosophy legitimizes the use of it. What’s emerged from this is a widespread adoption of short sighted, tactically led pseudo-specialisms like 'growth marketing' and 'performance marketing' that look impressive initially but don’t provide any consistency over the long term. They are also unreliable and inconsistent: their volatility and sensitivity to uncontrollable variables makes it difficult to rely on them to deliver the results needed, forcing more nomadism. Shifting from one to the next means that activity is not around long enough to have its efficacy properly assessed, and things that might have been very successful had they been given time are thrown out before they reach their full potential.
The coexistence of short-termism and tactically led marketing create a few factors that reduce marketing performance. The nomadism it forces removes the option of testing and learning to find out what works, limiting the ability to refine and improve the marketing programme. It pushes resource and focus onto vanity and stepping-stone metrics while taking them away from practices that provide reliable and sustainable returns against meaningful metrics. It takes valuable channels off the table because they don’t spike anything “here and now”, wilfully ignoring any negative consequences those omissions might have on future performance.
Effectiveness is damaged through long-term benefits being sacrificed in favour of quick wins. This fails to get the best of both worlds, as it stops the long feeding the short while the short feeds the long, and creating a mutually beneficial cycle between the two that provides sustainable holistic growth across revenue and profit.