When It Comes to Marketing, Be Like the Tortoise (Not the Hare)

The following is adapted from Lies, Damned Lies, and Marketing by Atul Minocha.

If you’re like most CEOs, you probably have a Type A personality, typified by ambition and impatience. You like to move fast, and you want things done yesterday. The business world is full of leaders rushing as fast as they can to meet deadlines, hit milestones, and beat the competition to the punch.

The problem is that speed can be deceptively lethal. It’s a lot worse to move fast, in the wrong direction, than it is to move slowly in the right direction. This can be illustrated with a modified version of Aesop’s classic fable, “The Tortoise and the Hare.” In the original story, the hare loses the race because his overconfidence causes him to rest, while the determined tortoise slowly but surely walks past him and crosses the finish line.

Now, imagine a version of the story in which the hare takes off running at lightning speed, the second the starting gun sounds, but he is headed in the wrong direction. In his desire to be fastest, he fails to analyze the route and winds up running away from the finish line.

Meanwhile, the intrepid tortoise makes sure he knows where he’s headed, takes time to map out his route, then sets off at a deliberate pace, which allows him to deal with obstacles in the road.

By the time the hare realizes his mistake, he has gone so far in the wrong direction that he has no hope of catching the tortoise. In the end, the tortoise crosses the finish line first and wins the race.

Strategy Before Execution

So, what’s the point of this story? Am I encouraging you to move as slowly as a tortoise in your marketing initiatives? Not at all. Actually, I am encouraging you to take a more thoughtful approach to marketing — and any business decision, really.

Before you pull the trigger, ensure that your initiatives make strategic sense. Otherwise, all the haste in the world will amount to wasted effort.

Put simply, strategy comes before execution.

Figure out your strategy before implementing tactics. Make sure the direction you’re heading will take you where you need to go. To help with this, place the customer directly in front of you, in all of your strategizing, to ensure that any decision will resonate with them.

Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, famously leaves one empty chair in his conference rooms — a chair which is intended to represent The Customer. As he likes to say, “Start with the customer and work backward.” Of course, he applies this to far more than just marketing. The Customer stays front of mind when discussing finances, IT, or just about anything else, and the empty chair provides a constant reminder, for all in attendance, of the central focus of every decision.

First Is Not Always Best

Customers don’t necessarily care which company is first to market. Consider the fact that Google Wallet — later called Google Pay — became available in May of 2011, while Apple Pay didn’t hit the market until October of 2014, three years later. Despite this, Apple Pay has twice the market share of Google Pay among the top one million websites.

How can that be? Google Pay was a revolutionary product that made life easier for customers, and it was created and released by one of the largest companies in the world. How did Apple Pay so handily beat it, even though Apple’s version lagged behind by three years?

It’s all the more incredible when you consider the fact that Android phones have 75 percent of the mobile phone market. There are three times as many Android phones on the market as iPhones, and still, Apple Pay managed to become twice as popular as its competitor that had a three-year head start.

What did Apple do right with their pay service? Simple: they released it after they helped create an ecosystem to support mobile payments rather than rushing to be first.

This enabled Apple to create a more complete product, and it also enabled them to time the release for when the market was better suited to accept this service. They spent time working out the kinks and, more importantly, invested in making sure a wide variety of merchants would be willing and able to accept Apple Pay from customers.

For those of you who remember physics, they demonstrated velocity rather than speed — and you should too. Velocity is defined as speed plus direction. Instead of just trying to move as fast as possible, think about the direction you want to go and the destination you’re trying to reach. Then, once you are sure of the direction you need to take to get to your goal, move at a pace that suits you and your organization.

For more advice on how to create a great marketing strategy, you can find Lies, Damned Lies, and Marketing on Amazon.

Atul Minocha is a partner at Chief Outsiders, a marketing consulting firm that helps CEOs accelerate growth through strategic planning, customer insight, and disciplined execution of well-crafted marketing plans. With experience in startups and Fortune 500 companies like Honeywell, Kodak, and Toyota, Atul works in a wide range of industries, from automotive and healthcare to industrial goods and technology. Atul has a degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and an MBA from Yale University. He is a professor at the Hult International Business School, a mentor and an angel investor with Sierra Angels, a Vistage speaker, and a Forbes contributor.