Kill Your Darlings

The funnel. Long-term brand building. Strategy 101, day one cornerstones. Apparently it’s all wrong, and I’m fine with that. In fact, I’m excited about it.

My old boss Richard Huntington taught me never to worship at the altar of strategic dogma. It made intuitive sense to me because I had always been taught that being a good scientist means reviewing and refining your theories in the face of new evidence, even when it contradicts your adopted stance. Firm beliefs, loosely held.

And that gets to the heart of an important question: are we, as strategists, good scientists or  evangelists? All too often strategy feels like dogmatic evangelism cloaked as scientific inquiry: omniscient proprietary platforms built on foundations of good science. But all good science is never more than just a theory, especially at the edges of our understanding of a topic.

Speak to a key decision-maker in the field of consumer decision-making research and they’ll tell you that they have a hunch about how it all works but still haven’t fully made up their mind. That’s a good scientist. If in doubt, ask them if there might be another explanation, one that might not fit their theory. The type of response you get will speak volumes. If you get a defensive double-down, you’re speaking to an evangelist, not a scientist.

Think of it this way, in the face of conflicting evidence:

Existential crisis = evangelist

Excited curiosity = good scientist

As an example of this, last year I read WARC’s The Multiplier Effect: A CMO’s Guide To Brand Building In The Performance Era [1] and it shook some of my fundamental beliefs about strategy to their very core. And I was delighted.

For my ten-plus years in this business I’ve been on an absolute hiding to nothing trying to persuade clients to buy into the infinite wisdom of Les Binet and Peter Field. Intellectually, clients understand the theory of The Long And The Short Of It [2]. They accept it in principle. They nod at the graphs. But in their guts they feel a tangle, and I don’t blame them.

“Ignore your instincts. Invest heavily in this ideology and one day you will (might) be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams.” That sounds an awful lot like evangelism, even when it’s backed up by years of longitudinal IPA effectiveness data.

The Multiplier Effect meaningfully shifts the conversation forwards. It turns out that short-term sales activation vs long-term brand building isn’t the binary moral choice between immediate reward or delayed gratification that it’s so often been framed as. The data shows that switching from a performance strategy to a combined equity and performance approach boosts total revenue returns by a median 90%. 90%! Better demand conversion now. Generating future demand, also now.

Last Thursday I attended the launch of WARC’s Multiplier Playbook [3] and heard some enlightening views on the best way to use the data and learnings from The Multiplier Effect to influence C-Suite audiences. 

Personally, I’m delighted that I’ll no longer have to attempt to persuade my clients to resist the allure of the one marshmallow now in favor of the promise of two marshmallows later [4]. Instead, I get to tell them that they can have their cake and eat it too: strong brand equity makes your performance assets work harder, now. The benefits aren’t only felt in two or three years’ time.

“It’s not brand + performance, it’s brand x performance” –WARC

This all helps make sense of the anarchistic murmurs I’ve been hearing of late saying, “let’s get rid of the funnel.” Honestly, the funnel! I’ve stood in front of rooms full of people and presented countless full-funnel messaging strategies, but now that I think of it, I don’t think in all honesty I could fully explain to my own mum what the consideration layer actually is.

Grace Kite argues that customers are either actively in-market or they are out-of-market, no gray area [5]. She also argues that performance marketing is only capable of converting people who are in-market, but most of the time most people (~90%) are out-of-market. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore those people, you still need them to be aware of you, familiar with you and positively inclined towards you. That way, the moment their life changes and they suddenly snap into market, they’re primed and ready to be converted into customers by your performance assets.

“If only 10% of people are shopping, spending 70% of your budget on performance is not just unsustainable, it limits your growth.” –Grace Kite

Ok, great! Sod The Long And The Short Of It! F*ck the funnel! Kill your darlings. 

I’m being facetious of course, that’s evangelist talk. But the point remains that when old models no longer serve us, we should let them go, lest they become useless dogma. Instead, if we’re committed to being good scientists about all this, we should review, refine and update the models we have and acknowledge that, “if I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” –Sir Isaac Newton (very good scientist)

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References:

[1] The Multiplier Effect: A CMO’s guide to brand-building in the performance era, WARC [link]

[2] The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies, IPA [link]

[3] The Multiplier Playbook, WARC [link]

[4] Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, Wikipedia [link]

[5] The ‘Margherita Funnel’: Effective marketing sticks to two ingredients, Grace Kite, Marketing Week [link]

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