While You Were Working (Live) Ep. 8 – Unexpected Things That Work

Unexpected approaches CAN generate results. With the 2017 holiday season is in full swing, the demand for marketers to produce well-performing holiday campaigns is pressure felt in all areas of our industry. From holiday campaigns, timely promotions & paid media money burning a whole in our pocket, so to speak, everyone is buckled down to focus on finishing the year strong. But is this causing us to have our blinders on?

Today we’re taking a few minutes to reflect on some unique ways of thinking about a few age-old marketing and business practices- branding, decision making & goals. With the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, we find ourselves falling back on these tried and true practices. Though these topics are all rooted throughout the practice of marketing and business, you’ll find that when you shift your concept of them, there is a whole new approach that could yield the best outcomes you never thought possible.

In this week’s While You Were Working (Live) episode we discuss:

1. How efficiency could be killing your brand
2. The real cost of indecision
3. Why you should consider giving up on goals

WYWW Live Article Links

1. Don Draper Wouldn’t Know What to Do:

How Efficiency Could be Killing Your Brand

A great article was published in AdAge a few weeks ago on brand. We particularly enjoyed this one because branding is the fun stuff. It’s the reason Nike is one of the leading fitness brands in the world (Go ahead, say their tagline right now. We know you know it.) and it’s the foundational piece on which the practice of marketing was built.

However, with the emerging world of digital marketing, marketers were given a powerful tool called DATA. It’s main goal? To solve the problem that even Don Draper himself couldn’t charm his way around…pinpointing what part of your marketing was actually producing your KPIs. With this, marketers were able to target where they should spend their money and make smarter decisions. Unfortunately, like a game of telephone, this concept didn’t get passed along with all the details. The result? Calling any marketing spend that didn’t support the bottom of your marketing funnel a ‘waste’ and ultimately resulting in it being cut to make our budgets more efficient.

But boy is this the wrong way to look at it. Check out the full article to read why you need branding to enhance all areas of your marketing efforts and why thinking this way is short-sighted.

2. I Definitely Maybe Think I Want That:

Why Indecision is a Decision and the Real Cost it’s Having on Your Business  

We fully support slowing down and evaluating the information presented to make the best informed decision. We all desire to make the right decisions day in and day out. This is an ideal world though and most of the time, a decision has to be made.

As a leader, you are forced to make hundreds of decisions a day. Which is why this article by tomtunguz.com was interesting when it said that making a good decision required the commitment to simply make a decision. In the article it goes into why you should measure the marginal gains you make by committing to a decision against the costs of postponing the decision. When you are leading a team of marketers, a non-decision ends up being the decision and this has ramifications. This can cause:

-productivity levels to drop

-loss in business agility and speed (which is a huge competitive advantage in this day and age)

-underdeveloped ideas or shortcuts to take center stage

3. More Goals, More Problems:

Should You Give Up on Having Goals?

Goals can make you work harder, drive you to focus more and perform better. All great things and probably why goal setting has been a part of everyone’s personal and business strategy for, well, for ever.

In this article published by the BBC, they demonstrate how goals can also kill your creativity, drive you to cheat or take shortcuts and make you less likely to thrive.

But before you go thinking that you can shred that Q4 Goals document, this article simply suggests that you prioritize the process of achieving a goal over the end goal itself. Which is a pillar of thinking here at Rogue Marketing. We believe that by focusing on the trajectory, the goal itself will be much stronger in the end.

For more on these topics, check out our WYWW (Live) post show: