new math is the brand killer

how old marketing solutions are creating new problems

Some people frame up marketing as a mystery. Some as magic. It’s really neither. 

Marketing is human behavior leveraged in the service of commerce. And human behavior has trends. Social trends. Economic trends. Norms that shift, sometimes dramatically due to the changes in the ecosystem we all market within.

Marketing in its true form creates a market where there was not one before. You standing next to a taco truck selling tacos out of the back of your car at a 10% discount is not marketing. It’s sales. 

Today, brands like yours are spending millions chasing yesterday’s problems, racing to the bottom, hoping to avoid the emerging frontier, where the economy is going. To illustrate this let’s take a look at that old rag of a marketing strategy: the customer journey.

fighting for the bottom

For simplicity’s sake, let’s say your customer’s journey is like a funnel. (It’s not, but the analogy is so well known that we’ve got to use it just to keep the conversation moving.)

95% of marketing tactics you’re using are designed for the very, very, very bottom of that funnel, where people are already in the mind to buy. In marketing-speak (an incredibly stupid language) this is called Demand Capture. 

Demand Capture is basically sales activity delivered through marketing channels. It’s digitized prospecting. It is not, in the truest sense, marketing, because it does almost nothing to create a market. It merely takes people who are about ready to buy and gives them a different place to buy. Digital marketing’s rise was built primarily on the power of Demand Capture.

Let’s say you’ve got a total addressable market (every person or business that could buy from you) of 10,000 people. Only about 10% of those people are even ready to buy something like what you sell. Targeted ads used to work like magic. You’d just isolate that 10%, disrupt their Facebook feed with your call-to-action and the money ensued. 

What could be more sublime? Unfortunately, dear readers, 2014 is firmly in the rearview mirror.

it’s not your fault

What’s happening today? 

Of that 1000 people, immediately remove 43% because their Apple devices keep them from being tracked and they never got your ads so they don’t know you exist. 

Now there are 570 people.

Remove another 34% who believe that you’re not being transparent about your products and services.

Now you’ve got 376 people. 

And 71% of those don’t think you’ll follow through on your promises. 

Now you’ve 110 people accessible to you, willing to buy, and open to your services. And that’s assuming you got your addressable market correct.

How long can your business last if there are only 100 people out there who can buy from you? Not long, I suspect.

That’s why traditional Demand Capture techniques, when working alone, are a race to the bottom, putting you in a full-blown scarcity scenario where you’re willing to do anything just to get that sale. 

We don’t tell you this story to depress you. (Pinky swear.) We actually tell you this to encourage you. To show you that what’s happening in your business is happening BY DESIGN. 

brand is not the solution (we don’t sell cosmic bullshit)

At this point, cynical readers (not you, of course) are waiting for us to extoll the benefits of branding. “Stop using all those foolish marketing tactics and have a brand! It’s the new magic! It feeds starving children AND wins the space race all at the same time!”

Well, we’re not going to do that. Because brand awareness is just one more tactic in a sea of tactics. And getting your“brand” out there is sort of like circulating flyers in the parking lot with your address on them. 

Now more people know your address, but is that a good thing?

The attention economy that the branding gurus sell (grab eyeballs, produce more content!) is just the other side of the Demand Capture dilemma. It’s a lot of activity to nab the attention of people who are likely not your buyer or not ready to buy. And simply knowing you exist and seeing your snazzy new logo isn’t going to change that.

Neither is that perfectly crafted, SEO-ed lead magnet that you’re shipping to “raise organic awareness.” Even if you put it on TikTok. 

Brand is actionable reputation. It’s what people think about you and what they’re going to do about it. So if brand is the way—and, spoiler alert, it is—we have to think about brand altogether differently than how you’ve been misled. 

one million transactions

Today, brands face a uniquely cynical problem: buyers distrust sellers. And in too many cases, sellers distrust buyers.

Your buyer will intentionally block your Instagram Ad because she doesn’t want to be tracked by you… even while she’s considering purchasing your product. Your buyer will skip your Case Study or Report because they don’t want the SDR call they know is coming the second they put in their information.

Sellers, on the other hand, have been trained by so much digital marketing to be careless about their buyers, commoditizing them, treating them as a percentage point in a funnel, one more lead to track, no longer a business to serve or a person to delight.  

The only solution is a reimagining of the marketing system. The tools aren’t the issue, how we use them is. Instead of creating endless transactions of distrust, we must shift our activities to create one million transactions of trust. Small deliveries of value at every point in the buyer's journey. 

In today’s emerging economy, a business that holds the buyer’s trust in greater esteem than the buyer’s data will win the game. To do so sellers like you must reshape your view of the customer. You must re-instill in every corner of your organization a passion and clarity for who is being served, why, and how. 

And most importantly, you must audit every digital transaction, every piece of content, every advertisement, every invitation to buy, for value.  

Checks for value: 

• Did we deliver something that is valuable whether someone buys or not?

• Did we deliver it in a way that respected how the buyer wants to be engaged?

• Did we invite the buyer to the next transaction of value?

• Did we inspire trust with the words we chose, the credibility of our offering, the consistency of our service?

• Are we connecting with a clear community of buyers who share values, needs, and pain points that we are uniquely qualified to solve?

• Did we tell the truth?

Distrust is the primary barrier to demand in today’s economy. Access is no longer the lead blocker it once was. We should not be surprised that the solutions to our last problem (access to buyers) produced our current one: distrust between buyers and sellers.

At CultureCraft we engage organizations every day to navigate these waters, use the full suite of marketing capabilities, all in service to a strategy that builds trust and creates demand. In the absence of such work, we’re all racing to the bottom to get those 100 buyers.

Let your competitors race to the bottom. You don’t have to.