New offering? Changing the organisation? Enlarging the target audience?

[zakiyatasnim]

Scenario Two
It’s the typical situation where leaders make confusion between goals and strategy. Goals are important, but they are not a strategy.

How many times you have seen slide decks with strategy statements like “we will grow triple-digit and beat the competition in the next 3 years”.

This is surely a wonderful vision, but not a strategy. Unless someone of the canada cell phone number list executive team will explain how you’re supposed to grow triple-digit in a market that grows 5% a year.


As Rumelt explains, good guiding policies are not goals or visions or images of desirable end states.

This is exactly what happened in scenario two, with Greg and Mike confusing OKR goals for a company strategy.

Scenario Three
Scenario three needs some more thoughts. Let me introduce the “two-speed marketing model”.


The Two-Speed Marketing Model
I recently wrote about the two “natures of marketing”, long-term brand awareness, and short-term sales activation.

The latest seminal research of Les Binet and Peter Field, Effectiveness in Context, inspects hundreds of campaigns of the IPA Databank, with a focus on marketing effectiveness, and well clarifies the dual model.

How do Field and Binet define (slow) brand-building and (fast) activation marketing disciplines?

Activation is marketing that evokes an immediate behavioral response, without necessarily affecting long-term memories or behavior. It’s lead gen, as we B2B marketers are used to call it. It’s PPC. It’s a limited-time promotion (think about Amazon’s daily deals).
Brand-building is when you create long term memories that influence behavior over the long term. It’s big broad reach campaigns. It’s TV ads or campaigns that people remember for years.
All marketing activities have both brand and activation effects. But the mix varies, depending on targeting, copy, medium etc.

Evidence suggests there is a trade-off between brand and activation effects. Activity that is good at one tends to be poor at the other. It is not too hard to divide marketing activities into those that work primarily by brand effects and those that primarily work by activation.

Note the word “primarily”. The last few years have seen short-term marketing techniques as enterprises’ first priority, in many domains, including B2B and Financial Services.

Enterprises have invested most of the marketing money in short-term, fast-return campaigns driven mostly by online paid media programs and related content, in the hope to lift sales for the next few quarters.

Les Binet’s Sales Activation vs. Brand Building Model
Les Binet’s Sales Activation vs. Brand Building Model
Always according to Binet and Field, “short-termism” is, in many ways, the reason for marketing effectiveness decline over the last years.

What happened?

As I have mentioned, marketers are increasingly short-term in their focus. They spend money on fast/immediate marketing programs rather than on slow and longer-term brand-building campaigns.

They opt for bottom-of-the-funnel tactics because in a three months period that will pay better in the majority of the cases.

But in one of the most important sections of their research, Field and Binet demonstrate that over the longer term this short-termism will rapidly deteriorate the overall impact of marketing.

Too much time spent picking the low-hanging fruit means less time watering the tree. Eventually, the tree stops growing.

“Online brands need a higher percentage of their spending going to brand building because they already have direct channels to conversion. Digital realization is leading to increased distribution efficiency, so more emphasis needs to be on brand.”

Brand building and sales activation are not choices or alternatives — they are mutually interdependent and both are essential to long-term success.

At this point, it should be clear why the company in scenario three has a problem.

Without a clear diagnosis and a proper guiding policy, Charles has moved all marketing focus (and budget) to demand-gen. He needs results, and demand-gen/activation will provide results, soon.

Unfortunately, those results won’t be sustainable, long term.

Now, if you’re looking for a way to build a solid Content Marketing strategy for your business, don’t forget to read our definitive guide on the subject!