Boring Marketing

Marketing is multidisciplinary, even in the narrowest of definitions. Think of the narrowest definition of marketing you have come across. What is it? For me it is that marketing is just about ads. But even ads, when done well, are complex and have so many disciplines baked into them.

This complex nature is rooted in the fact that marketing is about providing value for the customer and communicating it effectively. For this to happen, so many things have to be considered. This makes marketing hard to explain, let alone master.

In this essay I argue that when marketing complexity is attacked instead of cherished, marketing becomes stale to the point of failing to stimulate any kind of value creation. I also argue that this attack is the result of different sources of pressure that, collectively, have led to the aforementioned outcome.

Pressure from the Top

Sometimes you zoom in too much trying to see things clearly, yet as a by-product of that, your perception gets distorted and the thing you are looking at loses its shape. This is how many boardrooms treat marketing. Marketing is part operational, part strategic. It is part short-term and part long-term. Part about what happens internally, part about what happens outside.

Being all over the place is not easy to grasp. So limiting the areas in which marketing can have an effect is a good first step to easily understand it. But even then, marketing is notoriously difficult to measure. So limiting its contribution is not enough. You have got to focus on the things that are easily measurable. This is a good second step. Knowing that they should only stick to what is clearly seen and understood, a marketer has very little motivation to connect the dots. Seeking to understand the underlying context of day-to-day operations becomes an invisible effort that is neither expected nor rewarded. Today, we see CMOs talk about the tangibles more than anything else. And we see the role of the CMO already disappearing. This is mysterious. If marketers are being obedient, why are they severed? The short answer is that in becoming obedient, we have become useless.

Marketing is not the kind of job in which you are expected to simply go to work, perform a number of chores and go back home. Even if C-levels tell you otherwise. When numbers (the ones that really matter) go south, you are a good candidate for blame and punishment. We are disconnected from our customers, they say. You are not doing your job well.

Pressure from Within

Working in such a field pushes people to employ all kinds of defense mechanisms to survive. Some find solace in trends, capitalizing on the fugitive rush of adrenaline that hits management when any innovation announces itself, promising huge gains in efficiency, effectiveness or capital. Others find great success in calling marketing something else altogether. In this, they are more costume and makeup artists than marketers. This has been repeating forever now. Growth hacking is a good example. In 2010, Sean Ellis told us that a growth hacker is:

[…] a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth.

At the time, growth felt prestigious. It was where the technicians of SEO, performance marketing and the like went as a reward for their technical prowess. It felt like growth hackers had superpowers. Ellis’ definition is all about being growth-oriented methodically. That is good and all, but I struggle to find it meaningfully different from the regular responsibilities of a marketer. What is growth other than exchanging value with customers at the highest rate possible? The more customers you exchange value with, the bigger you grow, right? So a growth hacker does this faster than others? Who are the others? Maybe marketers?

The growth community kept optimizing for the “methodical” bit of methodical growth to the level that it became an objective that overtook growth itself. You see, growth is also contextual. With time, context became secondary to experimentation. Despite focusing on acquiring customers at the highest possible velocity (or maybe because of it), customers fled. Why? Because the mere act of acquiring a new customer became a goal in and of itself.11Goodhart’s law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. This is exactly what growth people did with acquisition, rendering it a useless measure of their own efforts. Growth people developed a more mature version of growth hacking and added retention to the equation to balance the imbalance caused by targeting acquisition alone. This way the job of growth hackers became creating and keeping a customer.22This is Peter Drucker’s definition of the purpose of business. This way growth went a full cycle, from being something very specific that is outside the scope of marketing to being synonymous with how business functions.

Things are similar with product marketing too. I do not know where this came from, but it seems that product marketers feel like they are not marketers, claiming that their role is much more than that. It is about understanding the customer, collaborating with product and sales teams, and doing cool stuff like positioning, messaging and maybe a bit of copywriting. I do not know about you, but to me this seems an awful lot like what a marketer would work on.

The repackaging of marketing can be seen as a defense mechanism practiced by people who want to save their careers from falling into the trenches of being seen as a failing ad person, people who see that vanilla marketing is not respected anymore. It needs a bit of spice and glamour to it. In a career that lacks a ladder, people will lump, jump and hop for a living. And the last thing marketers may care about is losing the joy of figuring things out.

Dogmatic Pressures

You can imagine that when working amidst all of this chaos, it is grounding to find authoritative figures who preach universal marketing laws that apply across different markets and industries. The data is solid, the research has depth to it, and on this front, it is an incredible tool in the marketer’s toolkit. Problems arise when the people who provide the research try to make it the toolkit instead of being part of it. It is as if you were having a heart attack and someone came and resuscitated you and put you on a ventilator. They then believe that being on a ventilator is the only way to survive a heart attack. They write a book and name it How People Grow, in which they argue that in their datasets, people who live long enough to have a heart attack are always put on a ventilator.

It is incredibly helpful to have rigorous minds providing us with different descriptions of how markets behave and brands grow. But it is ridiculously limiting to impose descriptions as laws. In something as context- and path-dependent as marketing, it is astonishing that people believe that we are limited by a handful of laws that constrain businesses, markets and behaviors. This contributes to the staleness of marketing. Marketers may believe that everything is answered, and the many business configurations that actually work and thrive are ignored for the sake of law universality.

The Verdict

The product of this multi-level pressure is boring marketing. It is marketing that does not try to answer some questions because they already are answered, and does not ask other ones because they are not compensated for doing so. It is marketing that is not interested in understanding context or in being proactive; instead, it creates marketers who try to watch their backs.

In Praise of Demanding Marketing

Marketing, as this essay argues, is incredibly demanding. A marketer’s first responsibility is to continuously make sense of the context and calibrate the company’s actions accordingly. This means that a marketer is constantly fighting not only their prejudices but also others’ shallow framings of the complex, path-dependent challenges they face day to day.

Marketing demands the marketer to juggle zooming in on daily operations, zooming out to see the elements of the system in which they operate, and maneuvering between pressures from boardrooms, colleagues, and whatever is debated today amongst marketers. Between all of that, the marketer is compelled to settle down on whatever these dynamics seem to favor instead of trying to find their own path. Can you blame them?

But for those who choose to keep the joy of discovery, understanding and coherence in marketing, those who decide to respect the complexity of marketing instead of reducing it, those who are not comfortable with easy answers that are not tied to clear commercial excellence… they know the challenge is the reward and have come to terms with all of it.