Marketing is hard, so let's cut the judgement

“If you’re not in the building, you don’t really know.”

That’s one of several memorable quotes by Ernie Adams, Director of Football Research at the New England Patriots, from the exceptional Apple TV series The Dynasty.

But let’s make this about marketing, because I don’t want to start a football flame war ...

When we look at a firm’s marketing from the outside—when we’re not in the building—it’s easy to make judgements. The messaging doesn't make sense, the website stinks, and so on.

But marketing is hard. Even more difficult in non-market oriented firms. It's time for the tear down approach to marketing analysis to stop. Especially from the talking heads on LinkedIn.

As Mark Stouse regularly reminds us in his frequent and thought provoking LinkedIn posts, campaigns interact with a multivariate world, results are time-lagged, a no one channel is ever responsible for outcomes.

Dave Kellogg summarized this perfectly in a post on his blog titled Great Marketing Machines Are Like Costco, where he wrote:

Great marketing machines are like Costco. There is no magic wand. There is no secret lever. It's about 50 little things, all working together. And that's one reason why people have trouble understanding them.

By "people" Dave means boards and executives. He continued:

CMOs show the funnel slide in board meetings with stages and conversion rates. But no one really understands the machine. They ask a few random questions, usually about channels. The inevitable attribution conversation follows. You can almost feel them searching for the one thing. (Or the one cock up.) But in this case, there isn’t one.

I believe great marketing is the most effective and efficient way to grow a company. It drives revenue, delivers above industry average margins, decreases price sensitivity, and decreases long-term cost of sales.

When managed by a qualified and experienced leader, the marketing function becomes the voice of the customer—the entire market—inside the building.

Great marketing leaders create a uniquely holistic approach to the company's growth, where everything becomes marketing even if it doesn't feel like it.

Successful company's do what others can't or won't: serve the market. Which I admit is when marketing becomes easy.