The hamster wheel of marketing. Image via Giphy.com

The hamster wheel of marketing

Are we in an eternal loop of producing outputs and engagements just to do the same thing over again next week, month or quarter?

“The only thing I think about when I launch a campaign .. is the next campaign”. Illustration by the author.

Are we doing the same marketing over and over and over again, because there is no data, measurements or insights available to tell us something new?

We did the research, we asked: why are we doing the marketing we are doing? And we found two things:

First: We are asking the same questions to capture the same insights over and over again. And so when we go into the same room with the same people and the same information, what is going to happen? We come up with the same ideas every year [paraphrasing Pablo Calcaterra].

Read more here: https://uxdesign.cc/curiosity-eats-creativity-for-breakfast-03e96dc74996

Secondly: We only measure outputs. And then we tell ourselves that this is a great way to measure marketing. It isn’t. The purpose of marketing is not to create engagement .. it’s to use engagement to produce something of value to the customer and the business.

The purpose of marketing is not to create engagement .. it’s to use engagement to produce something of value to the customer and the business.

But if we stop at the engagement part, we will never get to the value part.

Read more here: https://medium.com/everything-new-is-dangerous/newsletter-05-on-measurement-3a164db13fcb

So we tell ourselves: “engagement is value” .. but we’ve found this has a slow burning deteriorating effect on both the value of the marketing and the meaningfulness of the work.

The way we fix it is to focus on outcomes, answering: “what happens when the marketing goes into the world, meets the customer and influences progress?”

Supporting the customer’s progress towards the desired outcome. Illustration by the author.

We know how to measure engagements, we know what the customer values, and what the business needs, and we have a strategy for how to make all of this happen.

So we create a chain of measurement from engagement to customer value, behavior and business value.

If we use our data and market research to find, ask and answer better questions, and if we set and measure a logic from engagement to outcomes then we can get off this hamster wheel of marketing and start doing meaningful work that works.