Marketing isn’t a single dish

What makes a successful restaurant? Is it a single dish, a single signature food? Not if you want to stay in business, it’s not. There are countless reviews on sites like Yelp that effectively say, “This dish is good but the rest of the menu is inedible”. Five star reviews are not made of single dishes of excellence on a table full of failure. What makes a successful restaurant is a reputation for consistently serving reasonably good food, with reasonably good service, at reasonably good prices. Above all else, a successful restaurant has to do what it does consistently in order to be known for its offering. A great dish served once followed by endless tablefuls of mediocrity has never kept the doors open.

Marketing needs to take a lesson from this. Right now, marketing is stuck in a campaign-centric view of the world. All of our focus is at the campaign level: an email blast, a social blitz, a television ad. These are single serving dishes, and while a brilliant campaign can give your numbers a brief boost, it’s not enough. As marketing evolves to be centered around people, your efforts as a marketer must transcend a campaign view of the world if you want longer term success. A single great email blast can’t make up ground for terrible SEO, inept social media strategy, and no clear brand message. A single TV ad can’t fix a broken sales process or a marketing funnel that’s leaking at every stage.

The successful marketer today and in the near future will leave behind the singular focus on campaigns and re-center on the person we’re trying to impact. Are campaigns still important? Yes, in the way that every single dish you prepare at a restaurant is important (and one really bad one can damage your overall reputation) – but it’s that dish’s role in the larger view of the restaurant’s reputation that matters most. Marketing campaigns are still important as the tactical activities that make up your marketing strategy, but it’s the overall effect of your marketing on your target audience that matters most. Serve up great marketing consistently over a period of time and you’ll not only create short-term benefits, you’ll reap long-term loyal fans.

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