7 Deadly Sins of Marketing

Let’s face it, no one is perfect, and that includes marketers! Despite many of us knowing what marketing best practices are, too often they get forgotten as we get swallowed by company day to day pressure. Here is a list of the worst sins that MUST NOT be committed to remain true to what marketing is all about.

1. Failing to think “customer”

Before any marketing activity is undertaken, the audience should be clearly defined and sized, and a clear and differentiating customer insight should be identified. Throwing yourself into a marketing activity without a customer insight is like driving blindfolded. When speaking to customers, the old adage of asking "why" five times will help you to find a deeply rooted insight, which in turn will allow you to differentiate from your competitors and really delight your customers.

2. Lack of objectives

How many new customers do we plan to acquire if we take on this sponsorship? How many visits to our website can we expect as a result of this digital campaign? These are often difficult questions to answer, but failing to ask them early creates two problems: 1- money wasted on activities that aren’t worth it and 2- failure to think how the success of an activity will be measured and realising too late that the reports needed haven’t been built. So define your objectives up front.

3. Poor project management

All marketing projects require contributions from many stakeholders, be it agencies, technical teams or legal teams. Ask these people what they hate most about their marketing counterparts and invariably they’ll answer “last minute requests!” Sometimes that’s justified (e.g. if after an executive a review, some changes are required but the timeline is kept the same) but most times, things were just not properly planned. For more complex marketing launches, bring in the help of a specialist Project Manager.

4. Letting agencies do your job

Let’s be clear: messaging and positioning is the marketer’s job. Expecting that the agency will take a broad and unspecific brief and come back with an amazing campaign is wishful thinking. Often the result is a wishy washy campaign that simply fails. Briefs need to have clear communications objectives and messaging hierarchy so that the agency can do its creative job effectively.

5. Being too greedy

When launching new products, we need to think clearly about primary objectives, which most often will be product adoption. We should engage in proper strategic thinking when it comes to pricing.

Pricing too high at the early stage of a new product is akin to starting a fire without oxygen.

A better approach is to think about the lifetime value of customers and how revenues can be obtained over time, rather than in one initial purchase. The freemium model is a good example of this. It allows early adoption and will let your customers try the product. If it’s good, they are likely to want more and will be prepared to pay for that.

6. Not measuring results

Whether big or small, marketing budgets are always finite. Developing intelligence allowing to optimize the marketing mix is therefore essential to get the most out of our budgets. Whether done through basic spreadsheets, sample surveys, attribution modelling or comlex econometrics, ROI calculations are necessary. The spectrum of capabilities in any marketing team must include quantitative analysis skills.

7. Not killing off activities

Ok, so you have done your ROI calculations on all your marketing activities and it turns out that one of them, which is really fun and engaging, is a waste of money. Then what happens?

That’s the moment of truth. Committing the ultimate sin of keeping doing what you have always done, even though it’s not working, means it’s probably time to go on holiday, or consider a career change.

Jean-Michel Maltais is a marketing professional, focused on putting the customer at the centre of company strategy and making marketing a commercial function. https://twitter.com/jmmaltais

Picture by Chocolate Mudshake, "Seven Sins 019", CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/