Marketing

from ShelfLife Magazine - Feb Issue 2022

Mace store profi le: Excellent

COLIN GORDON

marketing expert

Avoiding the busyness trap in business

Marketing operates at the fulcrum of every company and as such there’s always plenty of tasks to complete, but it’s important not to distract oneself with busy work - it’s what you don’t do that matters, writes Colin Gordon

In marketing, it’s easy to get caught up doing ‘stuff’. There are new competitors to deal with, demands and challenges from customers, new communications platforms to understand, new promotional ideas. And! And you have the internal challenges to cope with. There are reports to be written, research to be understood and personnel issues to be addressed.

Internal and external facing

Of all business functions, marketing could very easily be seen as having the most complex set of conditions to manage – whether they are brought about by internal or external sources. Most other functions in a company face in one direction or the other. I can’t think of any others that do both, except for marketing. The fi nance function tends to face internally (albeit with a glance towards banks, maybe the stock market, etc); operations tends to be focused almost entirely on the back end of the supply chain and ensuring staff and production effi ciency (with a recognition that the output needs to go the external ‘world’); HR has a strong focus on managing the current staff issues; customer service is predominantly an externally focused function. Marketing captures all these, the external and internal world. It’s therefore important to prioritise and not get het up on trying to do everything. But it’s a balance.

Marketing is not a general jobsbody just there to be hovering up all the parts of the business operation that others are not properly addressing. Instead, it uniquely resides on the fulcrum point of an organisation, balancing the external demands and challenges with the internal conditions and circumstances

Tim Cook took over at the helm of Apple in 2011 and has since seen the tech company’s value rise by a mammoth $700m per day

What can we learn from Apple’s obvious success? Silicon Valley’s Constellation Research CEO Ray Wang says one of Tim Cook’s biggest achievements is simply having a keen sense of where Apple should compete and where it should abstain: “Tim’s job, every day, is to say, ‘what are we not going to do?’”.

to create a way of clearing out all the problems and enhancing all the opportunities in an effort to drive sustained growth and real companywide effi ciency.

When I say “all”, I should be more careful. Given where it sits in an organisation, marketing can so easily get busy just being busy, doing stuff. It’s vital to prioritise and truly know what needs to be done for the real benefi t of delivering the strategy. Doing what’s right versus what’s urgent.

A clear vision

When I think of prioritising, I think of ‘North Stars’, focusing on one key metric, or what I call ‘One Big Thing’ (or Number). What are we all together trying to achieve? Are we all aligned to do what’s right to achieve

Avoiding the busyness it? So often, it is what you can discard that helps this prioritisation. This theory came to life when I read an article in The Financial Times recently (8 January 2022) which focused on one of the most successful companies in history – Apple Inc. Imagine being the successor to Steve Jobs! Tim Cook took over at the helm of Apple in 2011 and was seen by some leaders in the tech sector as bound to fail. Apple’s value since 2011 has risen by $700m per day! What can we learn from this most obvious success? Silicon Valley’s Constellation Research CEO Ray Wang says one of Tim Cook’s biggest achievements is simply having a keen sense of where Apple should compete and where it should abstain: “Tim’s job, every day, is to say, ‘what are we not going to do?’”.

Making the choice easier

Having a clear view of what you should and shouldn’t be doing is so obvious and yet a difficult objective to attain. Some may say that it is different in day-to-day marketing than say for a CEO of an already highly successful company. But a company’s progress (or lack of it) is based on the sum of all the individual actions and inactions. Everything matters! If marketing is at the centre of a business’ operations, then it is at the centre of the ‘what to do and not do’ challenge. The only way to make the choice on the run each day is to have a clearly articulated objective which drives through the company and makes the choice of what to be doing and not doing much easier.

The CEO and the board have clear roles in maintaining this focus. Whether there is a formal marketing function in the business or not, the role of managing the internal and external fulcrum is critical to the success of the company. Not getting caught up in just being busy for its own sake is a key aspect of how successful a company can be and of how fulfilling a job can be.

Deciding not to do something and maybe to become less busy (for its own sake) is by no means easy. It takes discipline and a supportive business to recognise this. But it’s the right thing to do. To replay a bit of advice from President Ronald Reagan: “Just don’t do something, stand there!” n