When We Stop Lying To Ourselves, What Are We Really Trying To Accomplish?

Marketing is full of mistruths. Lies even. Our circulation is 1.6 million people which means that 4 million people will see your ad; Running the same ad every month is a great way to build awareness; spending most of our time getting more Facebook likes is essential to our company; I don’t need to know the ROI of the campaign to know its successful; I could go on. So could you. Maybe you do? Have you started to believe your own lies? Do all your subsequent decisions now stem from this initial lie you told yourself?

I see it every day, CEOs who don’t have the confidence in their marketing teams to commit further dollars to newly requested campaigns, marketing directors wandering around blind without clear goals from leadership, the hot social media channel of the moment being pursued like the company depended on it. We’re fooling ourselves.

Here’s what we should be doing every day in marketing:

Learning everything we can about our products, services, customers and competitors in order to develop the most effective, efficient and measurable strategies in line with our unified vision in order to create demand and preference for our brand at a profit.

Of course, the devil is in the detail, but if our day is spent pursuing other goals that aren’t aligned with the statement above, we may want to question our motives. We may be lying to ourselves and our company.