Avoiding Marketing Myopia, or Back to the Basics

“Marketing Myopia” is an idea coined in a 1960 Harvard Business Review article by Theodore Levitt, and refers to the marketer’s inclination to focus on the product they sell rather than the benefits it offers to the customer. It asks the classic business school question, are you selling a drill or the hole? 

Most of us recognize that you can’t just build something, but rather you have to build something that solves a customer's problem. Simple, right? Maybe. But too often we create marketing about the drill and not the hole, even though we know we are selling a solution not a product.  

How does this happen when we know better? We get wrapped-up in the crisis of the moment, the issue of the week, the problem of the month. I’ve run high performing marketing teams and understand the myriad of demands that pull you in many directions. These are often quite urgent matters that require changes to your ongoing activities. Most are necessary and provide immediate improvement. 

When under pressure, the easy and most comfortable way to market is to regurgitate our product and services offerings. The result is ‘we do this and this and this and this.’  But little understanding of the customer is demonstrated when we talk about this. Bring it back to the customer. Thoroughly understand what you are trying to solve and try talking about it without mentioning your product. Difficult? Maybe. But there is no doubt you will be more successful when you have a customer-centric approach.

My advice is this: When you think you are ‘done’, take one more minute to make sure you are talking about the customer, not just to the customer. Below are some highlights to get you started. 

The What's and Why's of Integrated Marketing

B2B marketers talk about Integrated Marketing a lot, but what is it and why is it important?

Integrated marketing is a strategy that requires a consistent message or series of messages across all marketing channels, such as promotions, websites, and email campaigns. It is typically used for direct response and demand generation and is time bound. Integrating marketing is important because, 1) it is more effective than ad-hoc strategies, 2) it is easier to implement, and 3) the results give you actionable insights into marketing effectiveness. 

The research backs this up. Integrated campaigns that employ four or more channels outperform single or two-channel campaigns by 300%, according to Gartner. Consistent messaging multiplies value, and according to Kantar Millward Brown, integrated campaigns are 31% more effective at building brands.

To understand why it works so well, put yourself in the shoes of the customer. Seeing different messaging from the same company at the same time can be confusing, and when each channel has a markedly different tone or design, it can be even more bewildering. We know that it usually takes multiple touches for a B2B lead to convert, and the last thing we as business leaders want to do is interrupt or divert the customer journey by sowing confusion. When messaging is consistent across media channels and launched in concert, you and your customer are having one conversation, not several. In fact, 90% of customers expect consistent interactions across channels.

Where ease of implementation is concerned, an integrated marketing approach takes more effort in the planning phase, but will only include regular tactics employed by marketing teams and needs no additional investment. A successful implementation must have a solid messaging document that becomes the blueprint for all activities. Stakeholders across the organization can use this blueprint to write blogs, create advertisements, develop webinars, and carry out any other marketing activities. Here are several critical components of the messaging document:

• Timeframe

• Goal

• Persona

• Pain Points

• Benefits

• Key Words

Once you have put the necessary time and effort to plan and have the messaging document as a guide, the content and messaging should flow much more easily than with a more ad-hoc approach.

Results are actionable when they are clear and conclusive. The more variables involved, the more difficult the endeavor. In marketing, the primary variables include target demographics, messaging, marketing channels, and sales follow-up. As we learned in algebra, results are accurate when you either eliminate variables or keep them constant. 

Integrated marketing can eliminate the marketing channel as a variable, making it fairly easy to determine that overall performance is based on the messaging. Similarly, if the message is the same across channels and one channel is performing poorly or superbly, you can infer something about that particular channel with confidence. The data in both instances is much less ambiguous than if you had been running multiple messages across multiple channels.

What do you think? How are your experiences different?