Are you a day trader or a marketer?

It is a paradox to me that we treat investments in capital equipment for our businesses and various financial instruments for our own wealth generation, as items on a balance sheet. By contrast, we treat marketing investments, and particularly those made in various forms of communication, as discretionary items recorded in the profit and loss account as an expense.

Nothing is more critical to the long term commercial health of an enterprise than the investment in marketing. Identifying, communicating, creating transactions and building relationships with customers.

There are 3 basic strategies considered by financial investors

1. Index investment. This is a low risk strategy, sticking to stocks that reflect the particular index against the performance measures that will be applied. The most usual are the reserve bank interest rates, and the top 200 stocks.
2. Arbitrage investment. Essentially this is a short term strategy that assumes the investor is smarter than the market. It involves a lot of buying and selling of stocks, essentially bets that the short term is higher or lower than the current. Over the long term, there is plenty of research around that indicates that the performance is around the major stock indices. This is also a high cost strategy, in that the constant trading incurs transaction fees, usually not included in the published performance metrics.
3. Value investment. Investing for value is a strategy that involves taking a long term view of the businesses in which you invest. This means you engage deeply, not just with the numbers, but with the management and culture, as well as taking a view of the marketplace in which they compete. It is a ‘filtering’ strategy, one where a lot of research boils down the potential targets to a very few, in which you take a significant position. It is a focussing of resources at the specific points where you see there is long term returns available, and are prepared to accept the vagaries of the short term focussed market gyrations.

If you apply a similar frame to the manner in which businesses make investments in marketing, there is a remarkable similarity.

1. Index marketing. Doing what everyone else is doing, being average, a follower, and risk minimiser. It also ensures you do not stand out from the crowd, which in a cut-throat marketing world means nobody notices or cares about you, so perhaps you should save your money.
2. Arbitrage marketing.  Those following this strategy are just applying tactical actions to situations they see, there is no underpinning strategy, just advertising and promotion, usually driven by a budget that has to be spent, and KPI’s that measure the activity, not the harder to measure  outcomes of that activity. The driving word is ‘campaign’. A string of tactical activities will be seen as a campaign, and usually there is little flow from one campaign to another. This tendency has been accelerated to stupid proportions by digital, where the cycle time of a campaign, limited as they are, has reduced from months to days. No longer are we looking for the ‘big idea’ that will engage and motivate customers over a long period, we are looking for 10 ideas for the Facebook and Instagram posts in the next 24 hours.
3. Value marketing. Successful marketing requires a solid strategy, well executed with a long term perspective. Over time, you will fiddle with the details as you become more familiar with the minutiae involved, and you fine tune the application of funds as you learn, but it is a multi-year commitment, not a short campaign, and certainly  not a few ‘cat photos’ on Instagram. Such ‘cat photos’ may be a tiny part of the tactical execution, but are never a component of the strategy. This takes time, resources, and most importantly, a laser focus on what is important to the selected group of primary customers. Over time, you communicate your value proposition that defines why they should do business with you rather than someone else, and do so at a price that delivers you a premium return, while delivering them premium value.  Then you retain their business, increasing your share of wallet, innovating, reducing customer churn, all of which delivers sustainable returns. 

 

If any of the above arguments hold true, then it must be that the measures we use to make decisions about our financial selves should be able to be adapted to the investments we make in marketing.

Step one is to see it as a long term investment in prosperity, and not a short term expense to be reported and forgotten, hidden in a monthly P&L.  

Step two is to have a robust, well thought out, and agile strategy.

Step three is to implement relentlessly.

None of this is easy, there are no templates of any value around that you can just download and apply. The requirement for success is the wisdom that comes with long and deep experience, not some superficial knowledge of the advertising algorithms in Facebook.

 

Header cartoon credit xkcd.com