Eliminating Marketing Debt
By: Andrew Dawson, Executive Strategy Director, Barbarian
Marketing Debt is the onus you incur, in human & media capital, when you decide to have an official presence on a channel or platform, whether that be owned or paid. It’s the feeling of obligation to constantly be on, compelling, and relevant as well as the literal obligation to hire staff, create and then pay for the content, and maintain its platform or application. It should be a part of the conversation before you jump on “the hot new platform.”
Hypothesis 1: Most brands have significant Marketing Debt, either via legacy or bandwagon pressures that have them indebted to superfluous content production across too many channels and platforms, diminishing the impact and efficiency of their people, paid resources and ultimately their brand.
Hypothesis 2: If you aren’t at least eliminating an activity or increasing staff and resources every time you create a new platform or join another channel, you’re incurring marketing debt.
That said, not all debt is bad of course, it can be a key to growth, to stretch your resources, at times, into a new and rewarding activity. It’s your goal to figure out when you are incurring debt to grow and when you’re picking up dead weight.
Actions:
Get your team together, and challenge them with the following questions/activities:
- If we could only execute a single marketing tactic to drive our business in the coming year, allocating our entire marketing budget to it, what would you choose and why?
- If you could eliminate any channel(s) or marketing activity(s), tomorrow, without anybody asking any questions at all, what would you kill?
- Rank all marketing activities in two categories (brand building and sales driving) from best to worst (1 being “most impactful” to 10 being “no impact”). How would you rank your marketing activities?
Things to observe:
- How similar are the responses/rationales? Are your teams all clear on the critical objectives of your brand and business?
- Are there areas where you could use some research or additional data to evaluate an activity?
It is the desert island approach, but in a world of rapidly changing budgets and platforms, we should routinely challenge ourselves to eliminate non-essential tasks and activities, to pursue quality and impact over quantity. Netflix is doing it even when they’re at the top of their game, are you?
