Listen to the average marketing strategy meeting at a company and you’re liable to hear something like this:
- “We need to adopt service like Zappos!”
- “We should do what Chris Brogan does with Twitter!”
- “Do we need a Comcast Frank?”
- “What if we could reduce costs by making customer service self-serve like Dell?“
It sounds so tempting, so good, doesn’t it? Pick and choose best practices from market leaders and you’ll create a market leading company yourself. Makes total sense, right?
Suppose we changed the context a bit. How does this sound?
- “We need to use lots of garlic and butter like Emeril on everything!”
- “What if we replace all our other cooking methods with a grill like Bobby Flay?”
- “We should do what Rachael Ray does and use only Extra Virgin Olive Oil!”
If your goal is trying to make sushi, it’s going to be… interesting sushi, no matter how many expert ideas you try to implement.
The lesson here isn’t that Guy Kawasaki or Seth Godin or other folks are wrong. The lesson is that you can’t pick and choose little bits of what they do to replicate their success, any more than you can pick and choose ingredients and cooking methods randomly and get a five star meal. You not only have to know how to cook, you also need to follow the recipes for success to the letter in the beginning.
Let’s take Chris Brogan as an example. If you operate on the basis that Twitter and his book Trust Agents are the foundations of his success, you’ll miss his blog, company, Third Tribe, Kitchen Table Companies, Julien Smith, PodCamp, and many other pieces that all add up to his method. If you want to achieve similar success using his methods, you can’t just pick 10% of what he does and hope that 10% of his success appears. If you’re trying to cook a masterful meal using Emeril Lagasse’s methods, your food is unlikely to improve if all you change is yelling “BAM” at it.
Beware of being a dilettante in marketing methods and ideas. Yes, absolutely read, research, and explore, but if you choose to make a method your focus, you need to commit and go all in to make it work, at least in the beginning. Study the methods, teachers, and results that are available, choose a method that’s aligned with your goals, and then focus exclusively for a while just on making that method work.
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I love what you say here and I’m glad you wrote this. I’m guilty as well at times, especially when I was first starting out, of following “thought leaders” without entirely thinking through how what’s been said might not apply to the situation I’m working on, or how, one of them might have been, gasp, wrong about something. I fully support taking it all in and learning all we can about various theories and methods, but ultimately, there’s nothing like thinking for ourselves to come up with the best ideas that meet the needs of our audiences.
About 15 years ago I read a very similar article in the Wall Street Journal. It was entitled, “The Dangers of Marketing Mettle”. It dealt with a lot of the tinkering amateur suggestions given to marketing professionals from other departments, managers, leaders, etc. I worked with a good guy who was in charge of advertising. He always wanted to “get his nickles worth of input” in every project. It made him feel like a relevant contributor! He didn’t do much else. Trouble was, he got a nickles worth, another guy got a nickles worth, this guy put in a dimes worth. By the time we pleased all the amateurs, the great idea was hardly noticeable anymore and the impact was so watered down it was worthless.The best ideas, the best strategies are ones that are fairly simplistic (you can write them down on a 3 x 5 index card), not too many moving parts, and easy to carry out. But most of all, the best ideas are PURE. The hardest part of being a truly amazing marketing leader is to carve out enough space and freedom to implement PURE and great ideas. When that does occur, you get the Apple type success stories, the Google success, and so on.
“Study the methods, teachers, and results that are available, choose a method that’s aligned with your goals, and then focus exclusively for a while just on making that method work.”
“Study the methods, teachers, and results that are available, choose a method that’s aligned with your goals, and then focus exclusively for a while just on making that method work.”
That is seriously excellent advice, in any endeavour.
Man I really needed this post. Thanks Christopher. I have a tendency to do exactly what you’re talking about here. Need to work on it.