If you look after the cents, the dollars look after themselves

Marginal Gains For Consistent Business Growth

This approach was made famous by David Brailsford, the Performance Director of British Cycling. During the London 2012 Summer Olympics, he led Team GB Track Cycling to a record seven gold medals (or 70% of the gold medals available for track cycling events). Clearly he was doing something right.

British Cycling describe his marginal gains philosophy as perhaps his greatest British Cycling legacy. The technique is encapsulated by this quote:

“If you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by one percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together,”

Implementing his marginal gains approach initially led to success in Chris Hoy’s gold in the kilometre time-trial and Bradley Wiggins’ gold in the individual pursuit in Athens. More recently, multiple Olympic gold medals and the Tour de France victories by Wiggins and Froome again showed the technique in action.

Applying the aggregation of marginal gains approach to digital marketing

You can see that the mindset of marginal gains is closely linked to the mindset of data-driven and always on marketing.

Dynamic personalization and structured testing and improvement of digital experiences is a key feature of Always-on marketing, a term that has emerged to show a change in emphasis from burst marketing campaigns to generate awareness and response to investment in marketing activities that continuously drive and meet changing demand. This is what Google has called the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) by Smart Insights.

Marginal gains aggregate to vast improvements over time.

The first thing you need to do is to write a list of every single factor of your business – and then aim to improve each of those factors by just 1% (or more, if you like) over the course of, say, six months. If there are 100 items on your list, then the overall improvement to your business operations in that time will be massive. And then, the following six months can be devoted to making 1% improvements all over again.

The idea itself is pretty straight-forward. If you improve everything by one percent, those percents add up and can have a large effect in performance. Like my mom used to say, if you look after the cents, the dollars look after themselves.