Change your mindset, manage conflicting demands, and move beyond tactical overload.
Marketing is like Tetris. Managing an increasing set of tools, channels, tactics, and inevitable “fires to put out” involved in campaign execution can feel like you’re playing the game at an elite level. It can even be – dare we say it – fun to be the one balancing this ever-changing set of demands each day. Yet, the tactical overload of short-term execution often conflicts with the need to create long-term strategic change in our organizations.
Balancing the two dynamics can be tricky. Deloitte’s report on redefining the chief marketing officer explores why CMOs have the shortest tenure in the C-suite at 4.2 years, an unsurprising reality given the competing needs marketing teams often face. According to the report, marketing’s role has shifted from brand and campaign management to enterprise-level revenue generation – which comes with a host of ambiguities.
Driving revenue at an enterprise level requires marketers to effectively measure and understand full-funnel attribution, qualitative and quantitative drivers of customer experience, and the relationship of both to customer lifetime value. This understanding must also be considered in the face of shifting market conditions, both writ large and industry-specific.
In the manufacturing space, this is especially fraught due to the varying buying cycles of industrial equipment and the myriad ways attribution may be measured across channels. Effectively adapting to this shift in marketing to drive enterprise revenue takes long-term strategic change.
How do we balance these seemingly conflicting demands of long-term strategic change with our shorter-term day-to-day demands?
How Decision-Making Biases Affect Your Organization and You
First, we must understand (and accept) the psychological realities that underpin the opposing forces we face in organizations and within ourselves. When we face opposition to change (whether that is discomfort in ourselves or our organizations), we are facing fluctuations of dopamine that occur because of a change from what our minds expected.
Daniel Kahneman, renowned for his work in behavioral economics, popularized the concepts of Systems 1 and 2 thinking as basic cognitive processes in decision-making in his 2011 book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” The Decision Lab explains this concept nicely:
“System 1 is fast, automatic, and intuitive, operating with little to no effort. This mode of thinking allows us to make quick decisions and judgments based on patterns and experiences. In contrast, System 2 is slow, deliberate, and conscious, requiring intentional effort. This type of thinking is used for complex problem-solving and analytical tasks where more thought and consideration are necessary.”
System 1 thinking allows us to navigate the world effectively. We would become paralyzed if we employed a full cost-benefit analysis for every minor decision. Instead, System 1 thinking utilizes our intuition, which is built over time and reinforced by dopamine receptors. It can give us useful, in-the-moment cues that guide our decision-making. But much like AI models, we are only as good as our training data. The mental shortcuts and rules of thumb we employ to make quick decisions can blind us to new information, as they are mental models we’ve created from past experiences to support those decisions.
System 2 thinking allows us to step back, slow down, and focus on complex tasks requiring deliberate processing. When we want to employ a new initiative, such as setting up a fully integrated campaign with full-funnel attribution tracking, we need to introduce System 2 thinking. It would be easy (and validating) to assume that a penchant for System 1 thinking is what leads us to retreat into the comfortability of completing simple daily tasks for quick dopamine hits rather than foray into the unknown of questioning purpose, strategizing, and deeper market analysis. But, we would be missing the whole picture.
System 2 thinking is susceptible to its own form of bias. For instance, the famed Invisible Gorilla Test highlights how inattention blindness can form when focusing deeply on a task. In this experiment, participants were asked to watch a video in which two teams pass a basketball and count the number of passes made by a particular team. During the experiment, many participants missed a person in a gorilla suit walking into the center of the frame, as their minds were occupied with counting the number of passes.
This example details how “System 2 can sometimes dominate our attention so completely that System 1 fails to register even the most conspicuous elements in our environment.” The participants were focused so deeply on the System 2 task of focused counting that they missed the obvious.
Have you ever worked with a colleague who became so fixated on a particular project that they lost sight of the bigger picture? Have you ever been that colleague?
Although we need to effectively deploy System 2 thinking to achieve change in our marketing practices, we cannot allow ourselves to be blinded by overfocusing on that change initiative. Both types of thinking must be employed together.
Change Your Approach: Prove Success With Little Bets
How do we balance Systems 1 and 2 thinking in our role as marketers and still achieve long-term change?
We can take inspiration from the “little bets” approach. Introduced in Peter Sims’ book “Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries” and grounded in Carol Dweck's concept of a growth mindset, the little bets approach breaks down larger, systemic problems into small test cases.
This approach, which has been used in everything from counterinsurgency warfare to behavioral economics, also mirrors the core values of the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle used to test changes on a small scale and implement continuous improvement in manufacturing. And, it can be applied to our marketing problems.
Let’s revisit our problem of setting up full-funnel attribution tracking from lead acquisition to deal close and understanding how that contributes to customer lifetime value (commonly referred to as CLV and denoting the revenue that can be expected throughout a customer’s lifetime). To properly accomplish this, you must ensure systems integrations are accurately set up to capture interactions and relationships across your CRM, marketing channels, and transactional systems to understand which interactions drive revenue. You must have a clear strategy for attributing weight to each interaction and understanding how revenue and acquisition cost drive customer lifetime value across different segments. (For those interested, we will dive into both attribution and CLV in future articles.)
This is a monumental endeavor, so you will need to identify the factors that matter most to you. For instance, if you have not yet tracked CLV, this may be the most logical place to begin, as you cannot truly determine how much you are willing to pay in cost-per-click rates until you understand customer lifetime value.
This is where best practices may not always align with reality. In this case, you may face pressure to perform quickly and consistently to generate leads to support sales instead of focusing on a best practice like full-funnel attribution tracking, whose ROI may take longer to appear. After all, no organization can exist without recurring revenue.
Taking the little bets approach can allow you to adapt. For instance, you may already know that LinkedIn is your top-performing social channel and may choose to employ a digital lead generation campaign focused on LinkedIn, which drives your audience to a landing page with a lead capture form. In this campaign, you can use LinkedIn’s A/B testing features to continue to optimize your target audience, ad creative, and messaging to optimize cost-per-click. This campaign will allow you to provide continuous qualified leads on a regular cadence, solving your organization’s short-term revenue generation needs. But, it serves a larger purpose. By connecting your LinkedIn account and landing page to your marketing CRM, you move one step closer to understanding full-funnel attribution by knowing how many folks moved from seeing your LinkedIn ad to visiting your landing page to submitting a lead-gen form. This gives you a baseline, albeit an imperfect one, for attribution measuring and understanding acquisition cost (a key input into CLV).
This approach does not solve your long-term need to understand full-funnel attribution and does not account for the total acquisition cost of any customer brought in by your lead gen efforts, but it gets you one step closer to your goal while still serving your business's immediate needs.
That is the magic of little bets.
Placing smaller, more intentional bets allows for two things. First, it allows you, the marketer beset by demands from all sides, to implement something quickly. It will be imperfect, but perfection is not the goal. Implement, fail fast, and learn.
Second, smaller initiatives make change bearable. Pitching a comprehensive overhaul of your marketing stack, CRM, and organizational processes is more likely to overwhelm than win hearts and minds. Remember: The System 2 thinking needed to implement meaningful change takes time and effort. Focusing all your energy on it is not sustainable and can blind you to the day-to-day realities of your business.
Starting small and testing ideas step by step allows you, your team, and your organization to employ a combination of Systems 1 and 2 thinking and to learn as you go. It allows you to share your vision with others and see meaningful progress that adds incremental value at each step of the journey.
Reconciling Tactics and Strategy
Taking the little bets approach allows us to reconcile the conflict between short-term tactical deliverables and long-term strategic revenue generation. And, perhaps, if we look closely enough, we will see that these considerations do not have to be mutually exclusive.
The push and pull of conflict between diverse perspectives and goals often drives us to consider solutions that are better than what we would come up with alone. What feels like compromise is, often, an opportunity to challenge our perspective, to learn, and to grow.
If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to me on LinkedIn.
