Thomas Edison supposedly said that “ninety per cent of .. success in business is perspiration” – implying that ‘inspiration’ plays a relatively minor role in the scheme of things.
Serious marketers know this already. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s high-profile marketers and big product launches that grab our imaginations and are arguably over-rewarded by companies and industry media alike.
You have to get stuff landed in market to stand any chance of changing buying behaviour in the desired way. If you don’t change behaviours, then kiss goodbye to growing sales or market share. For marketers, this critical and under-valued work of landing stuff is the ‘perspiration’ to which Ford referred.
The Problem
Marketers are typically an optimistic tribe – of course, the associated energy has many advantages but also comes with blind spots. One trap is to put everything into the development and launch of an initiative, and less energy into implementation and follow-up.
It’s a mistake to confuse enthusiasm for effectiveness. Although admirable attributes on their own, passion & hope aren’t enough to implement things with confidence.
The Principle
Inspired by 30 years of direct experience and a multitude of other influences, including books like the formidable Essentialism by Greg McKeown; our business helps executives in marketing and their teams to discern and execute on the meaningful few. These are the things that should have an outsized impact on performance.
One of the beliefs underpinning our approach is that “good habits lead to great results”.
You could replace the word habits with systems or process, but ‘habits’ is broader and more human. It also gives a nod towards the powerful – but often unconscious – nature of the influences on our work (and in life generally).
In his excellent book Atomic Habits, James Clear, promotes the idea of understanding and manipulating our habits in order to set a “floor” under our performance.
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems” – James Clear
I wish I had recognised this is my early days as a marketer. Like many I’ve been guilty of getting people “fired up” about a brand initiative (which of course, has an importance at the right time) but then neglecting the low-key actions to follow up & build post-launch.
Charlie Munger – the ultra-successful investor and longtime business partner of Warren Buffett – has an unexpected mantra. Rather than focus on “being smarter than other investors”, he says he tries to be “less stupid”.
In practical terms that means having guiding principles for investments and using it to rule out “virtually all” investment opportunities that appear. Munger attributes his huge success to the avoidance of big mistakes, rather than cleverness of his strategy.
This is a great philosophy to apply to business generally. The best strategies are not necessarily the cleverest. In fact, a simple, consistent well-applied strategy will beat indulgent intellectualism most of the time. And, as with life, survival replies on avoiding existential threats.
Continuing the investment theme, in his book “Richer. Wiser, Happier”, journalist William Green synthesises themes from decades-worth of interviews with investment masters.
I recently joined a webinar featuring Green in which he said people should challenge themselves to write down a behavioural “do not do” list. Individuals all have certain default behaviours or beliefs that are unhelpful, and it is useful to identify these and then put in place systems to control them.
In personal finance, that might be a tenancy to fiddle with portfolio allocations every time we see negative financial news in the press (this one applies to me). In marketing, it might be a tendency to spread budget too thinly across an expanding list of activities – while kidding ourselves that this won’t compromise effectiveness.
Practical application
There are many good project management tools available to marketers that will help them plan and drive through the execution of initiatives. Some of the most basic interventions are the best.
For example, simply setting, measuring & reviewing objectives for marketing activity at pre-agreed intervals is a great step. Although it’s not done as universally as you might expect.
One of my favourite techniques is for a marketing manager – almost always in conjunction with their project team – to conduct a pre-mortem. For UK readers, think ‘Silent Witness’ but in reverse … you’re investigating a death that hasn’t yet happened.
The pre-mortem requires your team to ‘fast forward’ to some future point and assume that the product or initiative has just failed.
The task for the team is to work backwards to the present day, identifying causal reasons why the failure occurred.
After that it’s useful for the team to prioritise the list of contributing factors – one way to do this is to think about impact x likelihood to get a handle on the most critical risks.
Last – and most important – the team designs and implements systems (or “habits”) that will help prevent those failures happening. For example: we anticipated competitor spoiling tactics deployed to disrupt our launch, we closely monitored for signs of a reaction and quickly deployed contingency measures to protect our launch.
Like other habits, this is something that embeds with repetition. You might insist on it for every project your team runs. The idea of searching for flaws and putting in pre-emptive plans becomes easier and less threatening each time you do it.
Competitive edge
Sometimes it’s easier to profit from territories that are over-looked. In business, I believe that execution can be one such area. The under-leveraged opportunity for savvy marketers then, is to define and embed habits that help execute strategy successfully.
Questions for you
- How much emphasis does your team put on execution – it normally a source of strength or weakness?
- What behaviours aren’t serving your team well – what should be on the “do not do” list?
- What’s the one simplest intervention you could make enhance the team’s ability to land things even better?
