Marketing is not engineering.

Stop wasting time on processes.

Why do marketers try to reduce marketing to a simple process? Is it because humans naturally prefer patterns and ordered thinking, even if it’s wrong. Or, is it because it makes us feel more professional, like our colleagues in finance. Whatever the reason, it’s not a good one.

Both academics and practitioners in marketing from the ‘I don’t learn or read’ crowd to global CMOs treat marketing as if it’s engineering. 

There are so many conflicting and prescriptive approaches written about marketing and most of them are wrong in doing so.

Certain well intentioned bodies proclaim marketing science is in fact the marketing gospel, but conveniently forget the need to include 99% of businesses within their data-sets to make such stern proclamations. Those missing businesses I speak of are smaller and medium sized businesses. They make up the bulk of the economy and employment in most countries. Without their inclusion, it has to be taken as good advice at best and not a rule for businesses of all sizes to follow.

And while this advice may be useful, it still doesn’t quite meet the needs of marketers searching for the holy grail - a process that a business can follow to guarantee its marketing success.

Marketing isn’t maths.

I believe this seemingly logical approach is actually an emotional one, it’s a desire to formalise and reduce something that is by its very nature, messy - and it’s because engineering and processes feel ‘managerial’ and ‘professional’ and creates a sense of control that soothes the nerves that come with working in a business.

What gets measured, gets managed is as much a warning as it is a philosophy. Nevermind that Peter Drucker never actually said it. But it sounds nice, so it’s stuck around anyway. Unfortunately.

Marketers often feel embarrassed about what they do, because they are expected to know the answers quickly. But the question usually infers that a marketer should already know the answer to the question. So, the question being asked is actually “What process can we follow?”.

Which is the wrong question to ask in the first place.

And if the question isn’t right, then the answer will always be wrong.

Let’s be very honest. Marketing is rarely process driven, because a process is something you can follow to guarantee a predetermined outcome. And since marketing efforts are not predetermined, it probably means we shouldn’t talk so much about processes.

Marketing isn’t maths.

Itchy, tasty.

I’ve always had an itch in my brain about this issue, feeling like I was being gaslighted by my own brain and others because it didn’t make sense to me. Constant demands for processes to be written up in my early days after delivering successful work, even though each project was approached differently. It didn’t quite make sense to me. How could I standardise things that were always different? I thought it was maybe my poor attitude, but that’s what happens when employer and employee culture influences you. Something that never happens with my contract or self employment work, not in my case anyway. Clients are paying me for novel thinking, not cookie cutter process thinking. They want to be challenged, they recognise that they need to be.

And I’m not the only one, many start-ups rightly or wrongly believed the same thing as I do - questioning and binning the stuff that big brands preached, because it evidently didn't work for them even when they tried. Their cynicism and desire to reinvent the marketing wheel makes sense from that perspective, even if they’re just as wrong - because they aren’t and weren’t major brands in established categories so none of what they were told to do worked. Different game, one without any rules.

The irony being that tech darlings fell into exactly the same hole that those who came before them did. And with most of them being engineers, they apply their very narrow style of thinking to something that is nowhere close to engineering. It’s all quite funny, but it’s very human and expected. Because it’s what we do by nature. We want to find patterns, we want sequence, we want cause and effect.

It’s why Simon Sinke’s Golden Circle nonsense is so popular, who cares that it’s demonstrably guff - it makes you feel good. It makes you feel in control, and that’s what humans want in anything.

There is a lack of acceptance that we are not in control, we can simply act within constraints to the best of our abilities.

Cynefin and Marketing.

So, after years of thinking about this annoying issue and feeling like I was losing my mind, I stumbled upon David Snowden by chance, thanks to a tweet from JP Castlin around 2020. I can’t remember the exact conversation we had, but it pushed me to get Snowden’s book Cynefin and I watched every video about him and Cynefin that I could.

What I learnt from Snowden helped me turn those itches I’d always had into much clearer thinking. It allowed me to categorise and understand marketing, in a way that makes sense.

Cynefin is a sense-making device, and it uses four domains. These are simple summaries, and I encourage you to do your own reading on Cynefin.

Clear

This is the realm of the predetermined outcome, where you know the answer and you simply have to follow a process to get there. An example is following a recipe or an internal procedure at work for making sure invoices are paid. This is where marketers want to be, but that’s not how marketing works.

Complicated

This is where cause and effect requires analysis, this means that experts are valuable because they will have broad enough experience to understand various signals that may indicate certain or possible outcomes. An example would be building the world’s largest building, there are many rules of physics that are known and the principles are applied but expert knowledge is needed because the building is unique. There is no process to be used here because it’s not been attempted yet as every other building is smaller.

Complex

This is where cause and effect can only be seen in retrospect, where safe experimentation must take place to inform future practice within the context and constraints of the work being done. Things cannot simply be taken apart and turned into a process for the future, because each situation is unique and could be subject to lots of external variables that are unknown at the time or not within control.

Chaotic

There are no rules here, the job is to simply act and then see what happens. Find stability and try to maintain it as best you can. A good example of this is the effects of unknowns such as the Covid pandemic or the war against Ukraine. There is no modern playbook for either of these situations, but you can’t sit still either. You have to do something.

By understanding Cynefin I was able to think clearly about where marketing sits within each domain. With most of it sitting quite comfortably in the not-clear domains.

Yet, so much of marketing is about trying to fit a square peg into a round hole in the hopeless quest for the nonexistent Holy Grail of total clarity and control.

Good practice, not best practice.

The difficult reality is that marketing is about good practice, not best practice. There is no recipe, formula or pre-made plan that you can follow to guarantee an outcome. Anyone selling that is either willfully ignorant or a scam artist, possibly both. 

Marketing is not process driven, it is not engineering, where the rules of physics and other natural laws set very strict unbreakable rules about what is possible.

Marketing is a mess. The best analogy I can think of right now is that marketing is like building a house - with little knowledge about how to do it. But you’re much better equipped if you have learnt from others. Those that have built many types of houses, using many tools and approaches as well as making sure you practise and experiment with this knowledge yourself before committing to the final build.

That’s not to say that marketing is a free for all, there are plenty of idiots out there that pretend to know how to build a house and absolutely do not, no matter how confidently they say it.

Marketing is about experimentation, with good practice. Scientists have to learn before they do and it takes them years to get to that point, hopefully you saw Oppenheimer recently too and marketing should be exactly the same.

Good marketing is about principles, not processes.

And learning comes through listening and doing.

Not one, nor the other.

Both.

Better marketing, better business.

If you’d like to talk with me, you can respond directly to this email.