Marketing is not management
On the importance of keeping things simple and repeatable
Some time ago, the marketing showcase website Marketing Examples wrote about the genius of the no name brand.
Quoting them:
no name is a ‘no nonsense, no frills supermarket brand in Canada.
Nothing special. A lot of discount brands share these ‘values’. But they all communicate them through similar slogans, packaging, and comparison ads.
So no name went the other way. What happens if you strip away all the fancy-dress from a brand? You're left with the bare bones. Stark simplicity.
The packaging is lowercase Helvetica over a yellow background. The website says ‘website’. The Twitter page says ‘twitter page’.
The brilliance of what no name did is pretty evident, but the idea itself is not rocket science. In fact, once the idea was clear, it was stupidly easy to replicate, repeat, remember. Its brilliance is its simplicity.
Which is what I think most marketing teams and marketing leads, at least in software, miss out on: simplicity, both in strategy and execution. We overcomplicate things, look at 24 dashboards, track 56 metrics, tie ourselves up in circles, and forget that marketing is not management. Your job is not to manage campaigns and metrics and dashboards - a smart project manager can do that - your job is to create something that will help persuade/sell/influence.
I remember this quote from somewhere about how the way toward mastery of any endeavour is to work toward simplicity.
So true, isn’t it?
Marketing is no different. I may have a big, world-beating strategy in my head, but I have to break it down into simple, clear marketing tactics, the idea being that when things are simple enough to be repeated by my team, it will become incredibly easy to keep executing.
And that’s exactly what I want them to do: create, execute, and repeat. Because that’s how we will win.
PS - There are actually a couple of older essays of mine, tangential to this topic, on Medium. I’ll post them here in the coming weeks.