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Our world is fraught with hidden misunderstandings. Hidden miscommunications. Missed opportunities in hiding.

See an example for yourself: Ask 5 people what a “campaign” is. Expect 7-10 answers in return.

“It’s an advertising effort on a channel. You know–a Facebook campaign, a paid search campaign, a Google Display campaign.” You open Google or Adobe Analytics and see 99 campaigns in Q1 alone that have names like “US_2021_Q1_BusinessA_Facebook” and “CN_2021Q1_BusinessE_Weibo.”

This is one of the answers you’d probably get from the client side. Ad hoc budgets or an incentive to show “lots of work” gets campaigns divided into tiny, narrow plots of land with really high walls around them. Facebook effort has nothing to do with the Reddit effort. No business goals in sight. What’s an omnichannel strategy?

“It’s a unit of work for one of our clients.” Then you open Google or Adobe Analytics and see campaign names like “2021_q3_na_us_clientA_businessGroupC_alwaysOn_paid_sop_exact_facebook_variantA.”

This is one of the answers you’d probably get from the agency side. It prioritizes financial automation (billing and invoice tracking) over client-side usability. You get a client who has to rely too much on the agency for its insights. Any client-side analyst or marketer who wants to learn something from the data has to build an automated parsing solution just to make sense of their marcom colleagues’ campaigns. Reinvent the analytics tool’s wheel to do basic work.

Sad times.

Even more fun: ask 5 people what “marketing” is. Expect 1-3 answers from them. At least one of those answers will probably be gibberish.

“Well. Uh. You know. It’s sales. Selling. Getting people to buy our products. Oh! And love our brand. Ooh! And also to visit our website. And download some stuff on it! And submit lead forms! And…”

Definition by example. Nobody can really action that.

“It’s making an impact. Capturing attention. Influencing. Attention is currency. If you’re not read, you’re dead. Get seen or run lean.”

Right before the writer flushes their employer’s brand equity down the drain with another clickbait headline.

There are places in the world for all of those answers, above. Each can solve a problem or two in its own way. However, they will get us into trouble if we affix them permanently to the work we do for our livings (“marketing,” “campaigns…”).

They’re narrow-minded. They preclude creative thinking. And they constrain our problem solving to a small subset of the kinds of problems we should (and could!) be solving.

Try being a marketer who thinks their job is just “getting read or getting dead” or accumulating attention like it’s currency. Clickbait, buzzword salads, non-sequitur marketing messages that don’t help audiences do anything, ahoy!

These definitions are not useful, because they are lightyears away from the first principles of the things they define.

First Principles

First principles are an increasingly big deal in the business world, so you may already be familiar with them. They come from the work of Aristotle and his philosophical descendants. Not like I’ve read that work, or anything. All of that just to say that the concept is old.

The first principles of a thing are the qualities of that thing which perfectly distinguish it from all other things. They help us understand more or less exactly what a thing is.

On a continuum of ways to understand a thing, first principles lie at the “most effective” end:

Least Effective: Examples. “Marketing is–you know–Facebook, LinkedIn, ads, email, selling, user experience, etc.”

Moderately Effective: Dictionary definitions. “The action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.” (from Oxford Languages)

Most Effective: First principles. “Marketing is the discovery and satisfaction of human wants and needs.”

First principles are liberating. You can keep focus on the true point of a thing while exploring the broadest possible understanding of it. Get creative while staying focused.

There are four marketing concepts whose first principles I’ve found especially liberating: Marketing, Strategy, Campaign and Tactic. Below, I’ll explain these first principles, tell you what I think is so liberating about them, and hopefully call out some useful ways you can think differently about your work.

Let’s do this.

Marketing

First Principle: The discovery and satisfaction of human wants and needs.

Marketing–literally all of it–is discovering and satisfying the wants and needs of humans. Every single word in that first principle carries meaning that is required for the principle to make sense. Let’s break it down:

• Discovery: The part of marketing where you figure your market/audience out. This is market research. This is analytics. This is longitudinal studies. This is forecasting. This is inviting a stakeholder out to lunch to “pick their brain.”
• Satisfaction: The part of marketing where we develop an offering. We don’t produce and serve to help ourselves. We do so to help our markets. This is R&D. This is product development. This is design thinking seminars. This is communication strategy. This is a pricing schema. This is a distribution plan.
• Human: Our target decision makers are always human. If we were discovering and satisfying the wants and needs of computer systems, we’d be IT technicians, roboticists, systems admins. If we were discovering and satisfying the wants and needs of dogs, we’d be veterinarians, pet nutritionists, dog trainers. Human cognitive psychology is therefore a fascinating and useful field for exercising our dabbling impulse as marketers.
• Wants: Things people don’t require to survive. Make us happy. Don’t necessarily keep us alive.
• Needs: Things people do require to survive. Conditional needs are a grey area. I need a Tesla if I want to be taken seriously as a Tech YouTuber. Is that technically a want or a need? A case could be made for each opinion. Maybe a topic for another post.

If we’re marketers, then this influences the way we solve most of our problems. If we’re not, then this helps us clearly identify when a problem we’re solving is a marketing problem.

IT friends: 85% of your employer’s workforce are now working from home (let’s say). Leadership are scared to death of confidential information leaking out as a result (let’s also say). What solution do you develop to satisfy your “market’s” needs? Are both groups even your markets?

Finance friends: Share price keeps going down every time your CEO opens his or her mouth. What do shareholders need that they aren’t getting? Can you satisfy it?

And what’s really great about it is that it runs its way all the way down your 4 Ps (or 4 Cs or 7 Ps or whatever slight re-flavoring of the week is floating around the blogs right now):

• Product: This one’s probably obvious. On which market problem(s) is your company currently based? Data scientists want to be able to train some models locally. So Nvidia developed CUDA cores. Stoners get hard munchies around 2am, every morning, so Taco Bell invented the Enchirito.
• Price: “Pricing wants and needs” are commonly summarized in a concept called “willingness to pay.” Pricing research seeks to uncover that (Van Westendorp, Gabor-Granger, conjoint, etc.). And a pricing strategy satisfies it. Your market’s only willing to pay $30 for your smart toothpicks. You need to sell them at $90 to make the profit you need to keep the product going. But hey! It turns out their problem is that $30 is just the most they can pay at one time. Four installments of $25 is agreeable to them. Discovered and satisfied.
• Place: This one is about determining tolerances and definitions of convenience. How do your market want or need to be able to obtain your offering? Let’s say you’re Kaiser Permanente, and you learn that some market segment of yours almost never go to the doctor. You discover the reason: they hate driving to a doctor’s office and waiting around to be seen. They see it as a boring waste of time. So, your intrepid services team satisfy that need by developing a virtual visit system to allow patients to get their diagnoses from video calls.
• Promotion: In the marcom space, target markets are translated into target audiences (they don’t always translate over 1:1). What are your audiences’ communication wants and needs? Do they need to know what the company is all about? Do they just need raw product info? Where do they need it? Via Twitter announcements? In their email inbox? In face-to-face consultations? How do they need it? Video? Text? These are the kinds of problems we discover and satisfy in the marcom space.

Strategy

First Principle: A sustainable, long-term source of competitive advantage.

Over a decade ago, my undergrad capstone Marketing professor put that idea in our brains. It’s been glued to the inside of my cortex, ever since. One of the strongest a-ha moments a person has ever given me.

More recently, I was told by a colleague that “a strategy is a roadmap.”

How far does a roadmap-for-its-own-sake get us, though? “Hey, boss. I’m going to run an awareness campaign to convince our audience that they should be flossing their armpits. Here’s what I’m doing each quarter.”

If that’s the end of the conversation–if Boss doesn’t ask me to explain why awareness, or why that audience, or why those ad vehicles, or why that creative appeal, or why that flight plan, or why those KPIs–then I’m an armpit’s uncle.

A roadmap is a tool that helps us communicate a strategy. It isn’t the strategy.

In fact, I think that’s emblematic of a commonly problematic way of thinking about strategy. We tend to think too tactically about it. We think about tools. Tools to help us formulate strategy (like a bi-dimensional matrix or the more nuanced “Boston box”). Tools to help us communicate strategy (like a roadmap). Tools to help us evaluate a strategy (like a measurement model).

But a strategy is the plan that helps us win. The plan. Full of hows and whys. Not just whats and whens. It’s a sustainable, long-term source of competitive advantage. Let’s break that down:

• Sustainable: We have the resources to keep it going for its duration. Resources include time, money and energy (and will).
• Long-Term: Our plan takes us well into the future. At least one year.
  • Long-term plans have the chance to affect our org’s goals (which are themselves hopefully long-term). Short-term plans hit the audience and burn out before they can affect anything.
  • A strategy that gets us through a year is also a lot cheaper than four strategies that each get us through a quarter. Imagine having to come up with and execute a new way to leapfrog the competition four times each year!
  • The longer-term, the better, when it comes to strategy. The best strategy is the one that makes us the best forever. Falling short of that, how close can we get?
• Source of Competitive Advantage: The strategy should make us better than our competition. I’m sure we all feel this, intuitively. But a strategy is just empty work if it doesn’t help us win. And “winning” is definitionally finding a way to be better than our competition.

Let’s think about that in our own work.

A poorly formulated strategy: “I’m going to spend $50,000 on paid search this quarter to drive people to our landing page about the horrors of armpit lice.”

A better-formulated strategy: “Our largest audience segment are deathly afraid of armpit lice. If they floss their pits once per week, they reduce the chances of getting those lice to zero. We’re going hard on social media–Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, even TikTok–during 1H23 to get people talking about armpit lice as constantly as possible. Our calls to action will be invitations to sign up for newsletters about armpit lice prevention and treatment. That will be the lion’s share of our 2023 budget. About $200k.”

“This phase will soften our market and prime them for phase two.”

“2H23, we’re shifting to direct response channels. Emails against the leads we generated in 1H23, paid search, Google Display, Facebook Ads (we’re shifting from social posts to display ads on Facebook). That will need the remaining $80k. All the while, our CTAs will direct the audience to our armpit floss order page. After everyone’s been talking about armpit lice for 6 months, they’ll be ready to learn where they can get something to prevent or treat them.”

“Again, our biggest audience segment are digital natives, so we expect that channel plan and that budget to drive 80-100k visits to our product pages easily. If our 20% overall conversion rate from that channel mix holds, we’ll drive about $400k in sales for about a 43% return on ad spend.”

“And the best part: Our competitors’ armpit gels don’t do anything for armpit lice. They just clean the pits and make them smell nice. The market’s fixation on lice will make our floss king, queen, lord and lady. The competition will be an irrelevant luxury.”

Campaign

First Principle: A marketing communications (marcom) strategy planned at the individual contributor level.

Okay. I concede that the wording above is a little weird. A little clunky, maybe. It’s not fully polished. Here’s why the “at the individual contributor” part is there:

• The director of a marcom org will have something they call “THE marcom strategy.” It’s not a campaign, though. It’s a workforce mobilization strategy. It delivers competitive advantage by incenting some desired behaviors among managers and their individual contributors.
• Individual contributors have many “A marcom strategy.” They run campaigns. It delivers competitive advantage by translating target markets into target audiences and then discovering and satisfying the communication needs of those audiences.

This one causes a lot of problems on the client side. I’m sure the marketers reading this will recognize these and relive their pain through this post. I’m sorry for that 🙂 It tends to be:

1. Defined too narrowly. Someone responsible for the dog mittens side of the business runs a campaign on Facebook, a campaign on paid search, and a campaign on Reddit. The “campaigns” don’t tie together. Audiences don’t see the links, so it feels like the campaign manager is starting from scratch with a new audience, each time. Digital omnichannel strategy thwarted.
2. Misappropriated, entirely. Your agency uses invoice management software that their IT team have (they think) cleverly automated by tying it to client Google Analytics properties. A campaign becomes a unit of work for the agency rather than a marcom strategy by the client. The client needs a whole analyst team of their own to write software that untangles the agency’s naming conventions until they make some business sense on the client side. How to parse “2021_q3_na_us_clientA_businessGroupC_alwaysOn_paid_sop_exact_facebook_variantA” into a client-legible name that can be tied to business value is an exercise in tedium and time consumption that I wouldn’t wish on my least favorite analytics teams.

Let’s break this one down:

• MarCom: When we’re designing campaigns, we’re operating in the realm of the fourth P. Promotion. We’re designing something for a communication audience. We’re thinking media plans, creative appeals, calls to action, landing pages.
• Strategy: See the first principle above. Sustainable, long-term source of competitive advantage.
• Planned: It’s a plan. An ordered, explained intent to do things. We plan a campaign. As I’ll say next, we do tactics.
• At the individual contributor level: Refer to the first bulleted list in this “campaign” section. MarCom Directors determine THE marcom strategy. A campaign is an individual contributor’s marcom strategy. An IC manages several of these.

A campaign rules hardest when it unites many marcom activities under one roof over a long period of time. I propose that business goals comprise that roof. That way, it’s linked intrinsically to why it’s being planned in the first place. Business goals are the reasons we all exist (professionally, that is :)).

A current colleague of mine has been running a two-year campaign to help our employer’s manufacturing group fill a new fab that was just built in her country. She’s been running comms in media from social to email to display and paid search. Each of those media are being executed on several vehicles (Twitter, Facebook, Google, on and on).

The message is constantly “Hey there. We’ve opened a fab here in our country. A big one. And we need people to manufacture in it. Want to join?”

As you can imagine, calls to action are all job openings or lead forms that will have job openings sent to people as they open up.

It’s brilliant, and it’s the #1 campaign in the world right now in our organization for traffic and job applications.

The campaign constantly remembers that its purpose is helping a business unit hire a ton of people into a new fab. It’s ruling super hard, in other words.

When campaigns decouple from business goals, on the other hand, they give us questionable output like Gillette’s 2019 “We Believe” ad. The spot seemingly urged men to buy razors by flipping Gillette’s own tagline on its head.

P&G’s CFO stated that the ad seemed to have no discernible effect on sales after it ran. The official YouTube video earned 1.1 million dislikes and only 0.62 million likes.

The company likely meant well. Taking the opportunity to address their male audience directly during the #MeToo movement is arguably an approach to advertising that’s nobler than most.

But through that ad, “the best a man can get” became a cynical reminder of “the worst a man can be.” And if grooming products are meant to make each of us feel like the best version of our self, it’s easy to wonder if the ad’s frame would have been more effective if it were positive rather than negative. If it focused on ideal men being ideal rather than on subpar men being substandard.

Tactic

First Principle: An executable that helps realize a strategy.

I’m fairly certain that we all understand tactics. There are a couple of ways by which I feel this first principle can help us:

• Executable: A thing that we do.
• Helps: A single tactic doesn’t usually by itself float a whole business goal. For that reason, single-tactic campaigns are usually destined to morph hastily into nebulous “awareness efforts” with pageview-based KPIs during post-hocs with leadership.
• Realize a strategy: Makes our intended sustainable, long-term source of competitive advantage real.

The key eye-openers are “helps” and “realize,” I think. They tie neatly to “omnichannel” and “business goals,” respectively.

If I’m running tactics that I think are doing all the work solo, I’m probably not connecting enough of my efforts together to have any meaningful impact on my audience. I’ll look back on a year of marcom and see a paid search flight that generated leads with hard-sell ads, a Facebook social flight that promoted educational material and an email effort that tried to drive product trials. They’ll all be using different slogans and different imagery against ambiguously overlapping audience segments and they were executed in a less-than-sensible order.

Likewise, if I’m running tactics without ensuring that they help realize a broader strategy (supporting a business goal), I’ll have very little to say to my business stakeholders at the end of a campaign.

“Look, business unit! We executed 97 campaigns this year and drove a total of 100,000 pageviews, 5,000 leads and 2,000 trials!”

“Very nice, campaign manager. And how does all of that translate into our goal of getting more premium users among college students in India?”

“Well, business unit, we believe that targeting the right audience at the right time with the right message and a seamless user experience will lead to-wait where’s everybody going?”

What do you think, esteemed visitor?

Thinking in first principles has above all helped me find roles for myself in the organizations in which I’ve worked.

Instead of thinking “Geez, if the company starts devaluing social media, I’m in trouble as the social media guy,” I think “If social media becomes irrelevant as a component of my strategy, I’ll find out what does work and incorporate that one, instead.”

If I see an opportunity to transition from the marcom team to the web strategy team, I can take it and feel comfortable knowing that web strategy is another outlet for “discovery and satisfaction.”

When I’m called to plan and pitch a strategy to leadership, I’m framing it as a sustainable long term source of competitive advantage rather than a list of planned activities, and I make sense to those leaders as quickly as possible.

What about you? Do you already think this way and have stories of your own to share? Do you think differently and have anything to add? Teach us what you know in the comments!