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Asked once for the achievement I’m proudest of, I didn’t name a product or a title. I named the people. The method behind it was far less noble than that answer made it sound.
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Most marketing decisions that disappoint are clarity failures, not execution failures. They happen upstream, before the brief was written, before the budget was approved. Three questions, asked in order, every time, that’s where the clarity either gets built or gets lost.
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Forty-five years. A near-collapse. A comeback that pulled in a new generation that had never owned a cassette tape. Metallica survived by refusing to stop. Consistency had nothing to do with it. There’s a lesson in that about commitment. A real one. And about one cassette tape made by someone who wouldn’t lend me the…
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I am a customer of most of my competitors. I use their products, follow their updates, read every single one of their newsletters. It wasn’t always like that. There was a time when I relied on reports and secondhand analysis like everyone else.
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Most customer research captures what people intend to do. Most purchase decisions are made by someone in a completely different state of mind. Preference is just one layer. To get closer to the real decision, the one made under pressure, in a hurry, with incomplete information, you need to peel a little further.
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The email arrives on a Tuesday morning. A competitor has just announced a new feature. Someone forwards it to the group chat. Within the hour, someone asks: “are we building this?” And just like that, someone else’s product decision becomes yours.
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Some of the information you’re looking for doesn’t exist yet. Customers can describe their current frustrations accurately. They struggle to evaluate something they’ve never seen. The last stretch of market understanding is always on the other side of shipping something.
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Don’t listen to your customers. Watch them closely! Understanding what your customers do matters more than knowing what they want.
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Your competitors probably don’t know more than you. They heard it three months earlier. In most markets, three months is the whole game.
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A marketing plan and a marketing strategy are not the same thing. One is a calendar. The other is a choice. Most businesses only ever build one of them and spend the rest of the year wondering why all that activity isn’t moving the needle.
