The 8% Marketing Elephant: Why your marketing isn't driving growth

Let me give you a stat that should make most marketers a little bit uncomfortable… Most of what you and your colleagues call “marketing”… is only 8% of the actual job of marketing.

Now, that might sound like a throwaway line, but it’s actually quite a serious problem.

What proper marketing actually looks like

Proper marketing - and by that I mean effective marketing that drives commercial growth - follows a simple sequence… You start with diagnosis… That diagnosis informs our strategy… and our Strategy informs our Tactical execution… Equal thirds of the job. Equally important and co-dependent on each other.

Diagnosis starts with understanding that you are not the customer; it involves proper market research that gives you qualitative insight, which you then test quantitatively on the wider market; it involves segmenting that market on meaningful variables that predict purchase, helping you figure out what the market really looks like and how to make order out of the chaos.

From Diagnosis to Strategy

Then can we turn the lens back on our business and create Strategy. Who are we going to target and - more importantly - who are we not. We need to figure out what we’re actually going to say to them and create our brand positioning to make them remember us when they’re buying. And we need to decide what we’re actually going to do, with SMART objectives, based on purchase funnels.

Then, and only then, can we enter the Tactical 3rd… But within Tactics, we have the familiar 4Ps: Product, Price, Placement, and Promotion.

So if you pause to think about it, Promotion is one quarter of one third of the overall job. And roughly speaking… that’s 8%. So as well as being the final part of the job, it’s only 8% of the job. And that 8% has to cover all promotional activity…

The problem...

And yet, when most people talk about marketing, what they’re really talking about is Promotion. Social media posts, ad campaigns, emails, brochures… the visible output. The stuff that “looks like” marketing to them.

Which means that, in many organisations, marketing teams are spending the majority of their time on a very small fraction of what marketing actually is.

And – I’m afraid - that has consequences.

Because if all you do is Comms, then you become (and remain) the “Comms Department”. You become the people who “do the posts”. The colouring-in department. The team that gets asked to “just put something out” when the numbers dip.

And then we start wondering why marketing isn’t taken seriously?

Well… this might be why!

What marketing should be

Proper marketing starts much earlier. It starts with understanding the market! What people want, how they behave, what choices they’re making, and how the category actually works.

From there, we make decisions. Who are we really trying to reach? Where are we going to compete? What do we want to be known for? What are we trying to achieve?

Only when those things are clear can Promotion (or advertising) come into play.

At that point, Promotion isn’t guesswork. It’s an expression of your Strategy. It’s how you bring those “upstream” decisions to life.

The consequence

By skipping all of that, and jumping straight to Tactics, you’re not really doing “marketing”. You’re just producing “output”… Sometimes that output works, often by accident. But more often, it just adds to the noise and does nothing to effectively drive commercial growth for the business.

This is also why so many marketers feel busy but not particularly impactful. Always doing. Always delivering. Always reacting… but not necessarily moving things forward in a meaningful way. And that’s because they’re operating almost entirely in the 8%.

Now, to be fair, it isn’t always their fault. Organisations and senior leaders tend to value what they can see, and promotion is very visible. Strategy and Diagnosis are quieter, less tangible, and often harder to explain. So the work that matters most, is often the work that gets squeezed out.

Final thought

But if you want to be taken seriously as a marketer - if you want to grow in confidence and have more influence in your organisation - you have to move upstream. Starting with Diagnosis. Then into strategy. And then into the decisions that actually create customers.

So yes, Promotion does matter…

But it isn’t marketing!