Marketing Philosophy and Sammy Hagar

Marketing can be a blend of art and science (overused). It can be psychological (almost all the time). Marketing can even be rather philosophical if you let it. The traditional journey that a marketer takes is “Awareness - Intent - Desire - Action” (AIDA). You can merge together the middle two steps to be “Awareness - Consideration - Action” if you like things in three’s, which most people do. I like things simple because if you overcomplicate things, they get messy and you open yourself up to process paralysis, over-analytics and simply too much to do. When I think of the three’s, I commonly go back to a model I created and have used for years in my pursuit of being a data-driven storyteller, and that is “Data in - Value Creation - Data Out”. To me, that makes it simple and yet still allows room for the creativity and the magic that attracts me to Marketing.

AWARENESS - INTENT - DESIRE - ACTION

AWARENESS - CONSIDERATION - ACTION

DATA IN - VALUE CREATION - DATA OUT

I recently heard someone posit a slightly different model, but upon thinking about it, I liked what they had to say and it made me think even more deeply about whether my model was still accurate. After all, the best way to determine if your model is viable is to constantly stress test it and see what you come up with. This updated model revolved around Consideration as the core, and especially in the context of B2B marketing. He broke it down slightly differently Awareness being pre-Consideration and Demand Generation being in-Consideration, all leading to Action. In their eyes, Action was actually a subset of Consideration. In this model your role as a marketer is even more simple. Pre-Consideration means you are responsible for building a target audience, or a universe to speak to. Demand Generation is simply the activation of that audience and the journey you are looking to engage them on. 

AWARENESS - DEMAND GENERATION

Is this model too simple? Does it not take into account what happens after Demand Generation and the subsequent conversion and onboarding of your customers? One might argue “yes”, if one looks at Marketing’s responsibility as simply creating Demand. Creating Pipeline. To me, Marketing is about reducing friction in the process from start to finish. It is about greasing the skids and oiling the wheels of your entire go-to-market, which applies to defining a universe and identifying product market fit, ensuring you have the voice of your customer in development and all through the creation of the product, to identification of prospects, creating awareness, engagement, consideration, conversion and all the way through to onboarding and advocacy.

DEVELOPMENT - CUSTOMER JOURNEY - CONVERSION - ONBOARDING - ADVOCACY

Your GTM might be in the shape of a funnel, or a linear path. To me, it is an endless cycle. One that repeats over and over as you identify new audiences and sub-targets, create new ICPs and create new motions to activate messaging and deliver results. This is the same for B2B as it is for B2C, and all of it requires a strong element of creativity coupled with analytics, but never let the analytics get in the way of a good story.

So whatever your philosophical approach is, you should always be opening to questioning it. When things are working well, thats the best time to deconstruct and see if you can be doing better. For me, I still like my model of “Data In - Value Creation - Data Out” because I can apply it as a process to each step of the broader journey mentioned above. Take what you will and customize to your needs, but never lose site of the philosophical approach behind your marketing because that is what keeps it fun. That is what keeps it interesting. That is what will make you different from the other practitioners around you, and that will serve you well through your career.