Marketing can't solve a business problem

Every manager has business problems that keep them up at night. Their sales team isn't hitting its targets. The leads that are coming through aren't qualified. Too many existing customers are leaving. And so on, and so forth.

On the face of it, these look like marketing problems. And lots of times, they are! But not always.

Sometimes, what looks like a marketing problem is actually a wider business problem - and you need to rally a lot more people than just the marketing team to resolve it.

I thought of this last week, when I finally got around to reading a 1980 marketing classic called Positioning: The Battle for your Mind. It's one of those seminal marketing books that everyone recommends.

It's an easy read, and is a great intro to positioning as a topic. On the whole, I recommend it.

When you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail


But the book does have one big problem. It treats every business problem as a problem that can be solved through marketing, with new positioning.

Take this example from the book, where they argue that positioning (and a brand name in particular) is the reason Eastern Airlines isn't as successful as it could be.

Like all airlines, Eastern [Airlines] has had its ups and downs. Unfortunately, more downs than ups. Among the four largest domestic airlines, Eastern consistently ranks fourth on passenger surveys.

Why? Eastern has a regional name that puts it in a different category in the prospect's mind than big nationwide names like American and United. The name Eastern puts the airline in the same category with Piedmont, Ozark and Southern.


So they're basically saying that the only reason people are choosing other airlines over Eastern is because of its name, which positions it in customers' minds as an inferior regional airline.

This is dumb.

I don't know much about Eastern Airlines - it went out of business when I was five. This was the first I'd heard of it.

But I do know that when this book was written, there was another, smaller airline knocking around. An airline would grow to be the most consistently profitable airline in the US, and in 2018, become the airline that carried more domestic passengers than any other American airline.

That airline is called Southwest Airlines.

Maybe a regional name isn't such a big deal after all.

What's in a name, anyway?

This kind of flies in the face of the bold claims Ries and Trout made in 1980. But it makes sense if you look beyond the marketing, and into the business itself. Southwest became successful because they did things like:

  • Standardise their fleet to 737 jets, to make maintenance more efficient.

  • Get their planes back in the sky 15 minutes after landing, to squeeze more flights (and more money) out of every day.

  • Focus on midsize cities and smaller airports in large cities, to save on expensive gate fees in high-demand airports

And a whole bunch of other stuff. All of it to do with how Southwest conducts itself as a business and very little to do with what Southwest calls itself, or how it markets itself.

There's no such thing as a silver bullet

Ries and Trout's approach is an example of silver bullet thinking. Silver bullet thinking is when you try to solve a big problem with one specific solution - in this case, its positioning.

It's super common, because when you live day-to-day in a specific product or discipline, you start to lose perspective, and forget that there are lots of other things that could affect the outcome you're trying to achieve.

The reality is that things like your name, your website, your copywriting, your tone of voice and your brand are all just aspects of your business. If the rest of the business isn't performing, they won't perform - and vice versa.

When you're making marketing decisions, your challenge is to figure out which problems can be solved with marketing alone, and which problems need to be solved by making changes to the rest of the business as well.

Where to from here?

From here, I'd encourage you to take a hard look at your current marketing activity. Are you getting what you want from it? And if you're not, ask yourself why that might be the case.

Is it because your marketing is subpar, you're not spending enough, or both?

Or is it because you have a fundamental business problem that you're trying to solve with marketing alone?

Once you figure this out, you can start making changes to the rest of the business - or accept the marketing problem as a cost of doing business.

Both are better options than spending time and money trying to solve a problem that can't be solved with the tools you're using.

Let me know how you get on.

See you, bye

Sam

PS: Remember the content audits I mentioned in the last newsletter? This is exactly the kind of problem that my audits help organisations unravel. An external review is a great way to find out whether you have a marketing problem, a business problem or both. Reply to this email and let me know if there's something you'd like me to take a look at.