Because if human beings were entirely rational, nobody would own a kitchen gadget they’ve used once. Marketing has traditionally been rather fond of the idea of the rational customer. This imaginary customer figures out what they need, looks at all the options, compares features and prices, thinks about the value, and then calmly picks the…
Every new tool, channel, and dashboard needs someone to look after it. Marketing has developed an accumulation problem. We started with advertising, PR, direct mail and events. Then came websites. Search. Social media. Email marketing. CRM. Automation. Analytics. Content marketing. Video. Podcasts. Personalisation. Attribution. AI. Each new arrival promised to make marketing easier. Individually, many…
Book Review : Writing for Busy Readers: communicate more effectively in the real world by Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink. We are all busy. Or at least we like telling people we are. Our inboxes are full, our phones are buzzing, our calendars resemble unsuccessful games of Tetris, and somewhere in the middle of all…
Because your customer is a human being, not a conversion event with a LinkedIn account. Marketing has become extraordinarily sophisticated. We have artificial intelligence, automation, predictive analytics, customer data platforms, attribution modelling, behavioural tracking, personalisation engines and dashboards capable of telling us precisely how far someone scrolled before deciding they’d had quite enough of us.…
Book Review : The Brand Gap (revised edition) by Marty Neumeier. Branding has a terminology problem. Ask ten people what a brand is, and you’ll probably get eleven answers. A logo. A colour palette. A reputation. A promise. A purpose. Something involving archetypes and a workshop with an alarming number of Post-it notes. Marty Neumeier’s…
Marketing has developed a slight technology problem. Not in the sense that technology is bad. Quite the opposite. Technology has given marketers extraordinary capabilities. We can understand audiences, automate communications, personalise experiences, analyse behaviour and distribute an idea to millions of people before someone in finance has finished asking whether the logo could be slightly…
You can buy somebody’s attention. Getting them to believe you is rather more complicated. Attention has become expensive. Businesses are competing with competitors, influencers, news, podcasts, streaming services, social media, AI-generated content and a surprisingly determined supply of videos involving people reorganising their kitchens. Everyone wants a few seconds of your customer’s time. And increasingly,…
No one wakes up wishing to be the target of a marketing sequence. Businesses want to sell things. That makes sense. After all, selling is one of the most reliable ways to stay in business. Problems start when every piece of content from a business tries to sell something. Every LinkedIn post turns into a…
A mildly radical suggestion in an industry that can turn sending an email into a six-platform workflow. Marketing has become complicated. Not necessarily because marketing itself has become more complicated, but because we’ve spent the last twenty years enthusiastically adding things to it. More channels. More platforms. More data. More dashboards. More specialists. More automation.…
Because adding another channel to the confusion rarely makes things clearer. Modern marketing tends to follow a strange habit. When something isn’t working, we add something. Are sales slow? Start a newsletter. Is engagement down? Make more videos. Have leads dried up? Launch a webinar. Still nothing? Maybe try TikTok. No one really knows why,…