Approach
Everybody sounds smarter in the car on the way home.
The best ideas show up 30 minutes after the meeting ends, with nobody there to write them down and no one to discuss them with.
Most organizations are carrying more clarity than their marketing shows. It just lives in conversations, in the way one person explains the company to a friend, in the thing everybody knows about the product and nobody has put on a page. Getting it out is most of the work.
Understand the system. Identify the constraint. Intervene at the right level.
That's the whole logic, and the third part is where most engagements go wrong. Intervening at the wrong level looks like progress for about four months.
01
Understand the system
Not just the marketing. How inquiries arrive and what happens to them. What the offer actually is, as opposed to how it’s described. Who buys and why, in their words rather than yours. What the competitive picture looks like from outside the building. Where the money and attention currently go.
02
Identify the constraint
One thing is usually limiting the result more than everything else combined. Finding it means separating what is observed from what is reported, and both of those from what is assumed. A symptom that everyone agrees on is still a symptom.
03
Solve the right problem
A messaging problem doesn’t get solved by a redesign. A capacity problem doesn’t get solved by a campaign. An offer problem doesn’t get solved by anything on this website. Matching the intervention to the problem is the difference between spending and fixing.
Nobody has ever gotten organized by buying a planner.
Buying one takes four minutes. Deciding what actually matters takes time, and it’s not something you can buy.
A request for a service is a hypothesis about the problem, and usually a hypothesis about which purchase will solve it. It is evidence, and often good evidence, but it is not the brief.
So the answer sometimes confirms what you asked for. Sometimes it changes the order, or the scope, or the thing itself. Sometimes the recommendation is to stop paying for something, fix something internal first, or hire a different kind of specialist. An audit that only ever recommends more work from the person who wrote it is a sales document with footnotes.
A system is anything that still works when you aren't thinking about it.
Most marketing advice is about tactics, and a tactic is something you have to keep deciding. A system is the opposite. It is a small set of decisions made once, carefully, so that the next fifty get faster and more consistent without anyone convening about them.
In practice, that covers less glamorous ground than it sounds like. How inquiries get routed and answered. The language everyone uses for the same thing. The page that exists so you stop writing the same email. The calendar that makes content happen without a crisis. A good system is effective, coherent, and realistic to operate with the people who actually work there. The third one is where most of them die.
What I won't do
- I won’t automate a broken process. Speed applied to a bad system produces the same result more often.
- I won’t design something that requires an organization you don’t have. A system that only works if you hire two people and nobody takes vacation is not a system, it’s a wish.
- I won’t tell you industry convention is best practice. Sometimes it is. It should have to prove it.
Principles
Clarity over noise
When people can’t quickly tell what you do and who it’s for, every downstream thing costs more and works less.
Systems over tactics
A tactic is something you have to keep deciding. A system is a decision made once, well, that keeps paying.
Values over hype
Values show up in what an organization decides, funds, and declines. They aren't what you write in a paragraph.