The root cause of
ineffective marketing
Imagine this scenario…
You are feeling unwell, and have been feeling a bit off for a few days. It’s not too bad yet, but it’s definitely getting worse. It was a minor inconvenience, but now it gets in the way of day-to-day life. Irritating became uncomfortable, and now its heading toward unbearable. You go to see the doctor, and you walk into the office. Without a word, the doctor hands you a bunch of preprepared prescription slips and waves you back out of the room. No questions, no examination, no diagnosis.
You get the medications, and they work okay for a few days before it comes back. You go back to the doctor and the same thing again: a handful of prescriptions for a different set of medications, nothing else. The same thing happens: relief for a few days, then back to the discomfort. This carries on for months, a cycle of temporary relief then relapse; one step forward, one step back. No resolution, just repetition.
If I was in that position, I would feel frustrated and annoyed. I’d question the doctor’s competence. I’d be concerned, sceptical, and cynical about going back to the doctor. They don’t seem to know how to resolve the issue, they just keep throwing palliatives at it and hoping one will end up making it better.
That’s how a lot of businesses feel about their marketing: frustrated, concerned, sceptical. It seems to deliver underwhelming results, and the attempts to address it never seem to improve the situation all that much. There are some moments where it gets into gear and brings in some good numbers, but they always seem to fizzle out, it never seems capable of staying the course. One step forward, one step back. Why does this happen?
Like the doctor, a lot of marketing is ineffective because it masks symptoms rather than treating the underlying causes.
This isn’t a surprise in a discipline where—adjusting for survey respondent bias—somewhere between 70-80% of practitioners have no training in the discipline. Many marketers can only mask symptoms because they don’t know what the underlying causes are, how to identify them, or how to address them.
The results are below par because the business is getting “marketing”, not marketing. “Marketing” is an approach that looks and sounds good but doesn’t work very well: it knows the words and when to use them, but it doesn’t know what they mean or how to do them. The work isn’t done by educated, trained professionals with deep and broad applied experience; it’s done by hipsters, armchair philosophers, and bricoleurs.
“Marketing” fails because it prioritises style over substance: cultivating image is more important than providing efficacy. When form, process, and politics are prioritised over function, outputs, and performance, it creates a cosmetically impressive but effectually hollow “marketing” programme.
“Marketing” is ineffective because it is based on misapplications, misinterpretations, and misunderstandings which guarantee that many, many mistakes get made. Quantity is prized over quality, so many things are rushed rather than being done properly. Best practices are replaced with trends, fads, and bandwagons, adopted on popularity rather than efficacy. Critical thinking is replaced with emotional thinking, and decisions are based on preferences and wish fulfilment. Wisdom is replaced with opinion: chancers and charlatans are believed as confidence is taken as proof of correctness.
As it can’t deal with causes, “marketing” relies on a conveyor belt of prefabricated solutions that give short term fixes to surface level problems, with crossed fingers that one of them happens to fix something deeper: it is little better than hit and hope, any success is luck rather than judgement; that’s why it doesn’t deliver the consistent, sustainable results that a business needs.
If you’ve come straight to this point and haven’t read the previous articles that cover the causes of “marketing”, here’s the TL;DR version:
“Marketing” has developed as the result of a cultural shift in the discipline, taking its focus away from being a business function focused on commercial contribution. The shift in attitudes toward what marketing should be and how it should be done have made it an inward-looking discipline, primarily concerned with its own internal politics and impressing each other; understanding the wider business and working with it toward a shared overall goal has gone out the window, and prospects and customers are not the central concern of the work anymore.
The cultural shift has skewed marketer’s priorities toward theory, practices, and its relationship to business and the other functions within it.
The dominance of binarism leads “marketing” to see everything in absolutes, with an “all in” philosophy that encourages adherence to one thing at the complete exclusion of other possible options. It has led to fetishes and tribalism that result in self-interest and self-preservation, prioritizing processes over outputs. With the focus on legitimizing biases and preferences, effectiveness is reduced when potentially better and more effective options get dismissed or ignored.
The desire to revolutionise the discipline has led to major gaps in knowledge, theory, and the ability to bridge them, with and “adapt or die” philosophy that forces change for the sake of change. It has led marketers to reject established and proven fundamentals and replace them with pale imitations, prioritising form over function.
The binarism and revolutionary zeal of marketers has made them chronically short-termist, focusing on getting cosmetically impressive numbers right now rather at the expense of long-term stability. This happens alongside an abundance of tactically led marketing, and together they compromise effectiveness by replacing activity before it has had the chance to bring in everything it could while actively neglecting and sacrificing profit in the myopic pursuit of revenue.
​
None of this has been helped by the recent disappearance of marketing’s head up its own backside. Delusions of grandeur and main character syndrome have led to a “better than you” philosophy; marketing overestimates its importance and value, and marketers overestimate their knowledge and ability. Add to this the belief it can pull the wool over the wider business’s eyes with shortcuts to credibility, it prioritises politics over performance and promises things it doesn’t have the expertise to deliver.
Most of these attitudes and behaviours are legitimized and justified through faulty data and insight that is sought for bias confirmation, not proven efficacy. Either through emotional thinking or wilful ignorance, due diligence is neglected as neither the sources or their conclusions are critically evaluated or assessed, simply accepted and applied. Effectiveness is minimized by the application of generic solutions to contextual problems, which do not solve any of the actual issues at hand.
THE ROOT OF INEFFECTIVE MARKETING
All of this leads us to the root underlying cause of ineffective marketing: the loss of customer orientation.
Customer orientation has been relegated a buzzphrase, something that marketers know they should say but don’t do. It’s become a noun rather than a verb, a hypothetical concept rather than an applied practice.
An early episode of The Simpsons sums the situation up neatly. Homer is gaining notoriety as a food critic, but Lisa is the writing the reviews; during the episode Homer says to Lisa: “the people will think what I tell them to think, when you tell me what to tell them to think”. If you don’t have customer orientation, what do you have? It’s replacement, which is company orientation: the voice of the company deciding what customers should want on their behalf, projecting that onto them, and using that romanticized vision as a guide for everything going forward.
Customer orientation comes from customers telling you what they want; or, in more recognizable terms, the voice of the customer. The voice of the customer is really the attitudinal and behavioural data gained from the qualitative and/or quantitative market research, and customer orientation is using that information to guide everything going forward, making sure that it is informing decisions throughout strategy, tactical planning, and campaign execution. This makes the marketing relevant to prospects and customers, which makes it more likely to get their attention; the content aligns with their attitudes and behaviours more, making it more appealing to them; that makes it resonate more, making it more likely to result in action being taken.
In essence: customer orientation comes from customers telling the business what they want; company orientation is putting words in the customer’s mouths. The absence of customer orientation means that any marketing was doomed from the start: it was never going to have the relevance to get attention in the first place, let alone the appeal or resonance to move anyone to action.
Marketing effectiveness is damaged by marketing that is not made to address real prospects or customers in real-world contexts, but wish-fulfilment fantasy versions of them that do, think, and want what suits the company’s view of itself.
At the operational level, the loss of customer orientation leads to marketing aimed at an audience that doesn’t really exist. At the individual level, the loss of customer orientation leads to marketing aimed at the wrong audience altogether.
Put them together, and it’s no wonder the marketing doesn’t work.
AVOIDING THE MISTAKES
While my thoughts on the mindsets and the environment around them have been kept quite structured and cleanly delineated to stop these articles becoming a rambling and semi-coherent stream of consciousness, in the real world they all overlap with each other. Nomadism partly happens because the trends, fads, and bandwagons are often “the” answer that marketers are reliant on; “evidence” for fetishes provide confirmation bias for delusions of grandeur and main character syndrome, which often fuel tribalism; the constant invention and reinvention makes up a substantial part of Marketing™, which in turn is used to put the complexity myth to be put into practice.
Similarly, the warped priorities caused by the mindsets are not exclusive to each one, they are the one I think is most prominent for each. The binary and heroic mindsets also push processes over outputs like the revolutionary mindset does; the revolutionary also pushes image over efficacy, and the binary mindset is guilty of pushing form ahead of function. There’s also other warped priorities that lurk within all of them: to varying degrees they all prize quantity over quality; the revolutionary and heroic prize words over actions; through the immediacy problem it is arguable that the binary and revolutionary place medium over message. These are just the obvious ones: there’s likely several more that haven’t occurred to me.
These mindsets and their practical manifestations are also evolving, they are far from reaching their final form. Every few years a shiny new toy emerges and hypnotises the marketing discipline; a tool, concept, or approach which gets pedestalled within the mindsets. They will become one of the options in a binary, a starting point for a revolutionary new era in marketing, and a catalyst for greater heroic deeds. They all follow the same pattern of settling into the niches where they are useful before everyone else moves on to the next trinket, but the mindsets temporarily worship them; this fleeting idolatry is why I avoid referencing them in the articles, as their relevance will only decline after the time of writing.
​
In most cases, different marketing functions make different combinations of mistakes to different extents; there is no single resolution, which is why it is important to have a tailored marketing programme built to resolve both practical and cultural factors, and minimize “marketing” as much as possible.
If you would like marketing to make better contributions to revenue and profitability by avoiding “marketing” mistakes, let’s talk.