I have attended a great many marketing events over the years, and most of them sing the same song: be innovative, think outside the box, connect with consumers at the root level. None of it is wrong. All of it is useless on Monday morning, because knowing and doing are entirely different things.
What was missing, every time, was a structure for deciding which activity belongs where. Here is the one I have used since.
Four stages, and they are not interchangeable
A buyer moves through awareness, consideration, influence, and loyalty. That sounds obvious until you audit what a company is actually spending on and discover that 90% of it is aimed at one stage—usually consideration, because that is where the measurable conversions are.
The result is a business that is very good at closing people who already knew about it, and has no mechanism for producing more of those people or for keeping the ones it closed. Both ends of the funnel are where the compounding happens, and both are where the budget is not.
Three layers under it
The content layer is the material itself — the guide, the video, the deck, the diagram. It exists to be useful whether or not anyone buys, and it is the only part of this that keeps working after you stop paying for it.
The interaction layer is where people can respond: the blog, the social accounts, the newsletter, the occasional question you actually ask them. Companies treat this as distribution for the content layer. It is not. It’s where you find out you were wrong about something.
The marketing layer is the machinery — search, paid placement, email sequences, the landing pages. It is the layer everyone starts with and the one that performs worst in isolation, because it is a set of pipes with nothing to carry.
Know the market you are actually in
When I was working in India, the single most important fact about that market was that it was mobile-first, and second in the world by volume. A plan built for desktop browsing would have failed, no matter how good the creative was. That was not a marketing insight; it was a geography one.
The same applies at a smaller scale. A commodity is bought on price. A specialty product is bought on quality. Some things are bought almost entirely on how good the support is afterward, and a company selling one of those while advertising on price is fighting itself.
The example everyone cites, and why
Apple gets invoked in every one of these seminars, and the reason is usually stated wrongly. It is not the design, or the retail, or the launches. They don’t sell a product; they sell a philosophy, and a customer who has bought the philosophy stops comparing prices—which is the only durable escape from competing on cost.
Another worth studying is the Coca-Cola campaign in Australia that took the brand name off the bottle and replaced it with people’s first names. Removing your own logo is a strange thing for a brand to do, and it worked because it moved the product from something you buy to something you hand to someone. It is one of the few campaigns of that decade that produced a measurable sales change rather than an award.
The uncomfortable first step
Before any of this, stop spending on what isn’t working. Not reduce it — stop it. Almost every company I have looked at is carrying at least one line item that survives purely because canceling it would be an admission, and that line item is funded out of the budget the content layer never gets.