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…
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.…
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,…
Everyone is working hard. Everything feels urgent. But no one is really sure why. Marketing teams always seem busy. Really busy. There are campaigns to launch, dashboards to update, social posts to schedule, reports to write, emails to automate, meetings to attend, and new AI tools creating things for everyone to check out. By Friday…
Efficiency is wonderful. Assuming you’re efficiently doing something useful. Modern marketing has developed a slight obsession with speed. We can create content faster. Launch campaigns faster. Analyse data faster. Automate emails faster. And thanks to AI, we can now produce in twelve minutes what previously took an entire afternoon and at least three coffees. This…