If you have some years’ experience as a marketing strategist, you will have noticed an interesting evolutionary phenomenon in how our industry strategises.
Many species of management ideas have risen and fallen and the fossil record of ‘latest things’ is long. I can remember when direct (paper) mail was the ‘next big thing’ and you’ve probably experienced the waves of enthusiasm for branding, closed-loop marketing, patient-centricity and, today, the hype around marketing AI. You might remember when ‘flat teams’ were going to revolutionise how brand teams work, the hype around matrix structures and ‘management by objectives’. Today, we see similar claims for agile working. These ideas aren’t valueless but experience teaches us that they often consume attention and create distraction out of all proportion compared to the difference they make. Like voracious weeds smothering your roses, fashionable fads often out-compete valuable but less trendy ideas. This leads to neglect of fundamentals, like segmentation, targeting and positioning or alignment between functional objectives and strategies. In my coaching work with industry executives, I’m often asked whether the latest consultancy bandwagon is worth boarding. My answer is usually considered helpful, so let me share it with you.
Interesting, not important
Put on your scientist hat for a moment and rephrase your question from the specific to the general. Not ‘Should we adopt idea X’ but ‘What makes one idea more popular than another?’. The implicit assumption is that a popular idea must be effective so we should devote time and energy to it. But that assumption is flawed. Decades ago, the academic Murray Davis wrote an insightful paper that helped us to understand two things. First, contrarian ideas are usually more popular than accepted wisdom. The more a new idea claims to overturn existing thinking, the more interesting people find it. The second is that interesting isn’t always important. New ideas may challenge conventional thinking but to be important they must also create value. Some very traditional strategy ideas, like focus and differentiation, are extremely important, despite being old. Davis’s ideas show how contrarian new ideas can become popular even if they are not important. Patient-centricity isn’t important if it doesn’t actually add value. Value beyond the pill isn’t important unless it’s customer-perceived value. AI will not be important if everyone adopts it in the same way. Davis’s observation reminds us that, just as all that glitters is not gold, not every interesting idea is important.
Snake oil
An entire sub-industry of consultants have tapped into their clients’ preference for glittering novelty over important substance. Their default strategy is to package pedestrian thinking as overturning conventional reasoning. They freely employ provocative words like ‘transformation’, ‘disruptive’ and even ‘Armageddon’ to imply that their ideas are innovative enough to be worth paying for. In essence, these tactics are similar to those of media ‘shock jocks’ and politicians pretending to be outsiders. In this blizzard of hype, it’s difficult to interest marketers in improving the fundamentals of their strategic thinking when they a distracted by the latest snake oil. This is important because attention and energy are a brand team’s most limited resources, too precious to be frittered away on fads. And even if the new ideas offer some value, that value can’t be realised if the foundations of strategy are shaky. The best senior strategists know this and subordinate new techniques to getting the fundamentals right. But it is still too common for inexperienced or poorly led brand teams to get sidetracked by some popular but insubstantial new gimmick.
Fundamentals first
The take-home lesson from applying Davis’s thinking is a reality check for strategists. When consultants try to sell you a ‘radical’ idea that will transform your business, question how a single idea could have such an impact on your sluggish, regulated market with many interconnected and conservative stakeholders. Or if they talk about industry Armageddon, remember that the status quo that they want to overturn currently saves, improves and extends billions of lives every year. You’re entitled to ask them questions about babies and bathwater. The reality of life sciences strategising is that you have to work with a team of many varied experts to craft a complex, compliant and compelling value proposition that addresses the myriad, conflicting needs of payers, professionals and patients. You should welcome new ideas about how to do that. But, in the market for new ideas, you should always prioritise important fundamentals over interesting fashion.
This column appeared in the May edition of PME. Read the full issue here.