Author: Franz Malten Buemann

In most pyramids, the top gets all the attention, but it’s the foundation that truly matters. Marketing is no exception.

The base of the pyramid, the most important layer, is INTENTION.

What change are you seeking to make? Does the team have clarity, measurements and resources to prioritize this?

Intention comes with design thinking. Who’s it for and what’s it for? Have you identified the smallest viable audience and built a product and created and designed a service infrastructure around it that works beautifully for this audience?

Your story is intricately linked with your intention. If you don’t know who it’s for and what it’s for, the story can’t resonate.

A story doesn’t work when it’s your story. It works when it becomes their story.

Then comes RETENTION. Because existing customers are worth far more than new ones. If you are constantly losing the folks you worked so hard to attract, you’ll have to work even harder to find people to replace the ones who just left.

And then comes REMARKABILITY. The conversations that happen as the result of your work. The network effect is the most powerful force for growth that most organizations ever encounter, but people aren’t going to talk about your work unless they believe it will help their goals to do so.

If you’re fortunate and focused, retention and remarkability will earn you PERMISSION. The privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to the people who want to get them. This is the asset of the future, because building and maintaining teams to spam the world is exhausting.

And then, only then, do you have the ability to focus on tactics, words and images. What’s the narrative that engages with people eager to join you on this journey? Where is their status? What sort of affiliation do they seek?

Finally, in tiny print, hardly worth mentioning, are hype and hustle and the rest. Ignore them if you can. By volume, by priority, by effectiveness, this is nearly worthless noise, despite the fact that it gets so much attention from pundits who have rarely successfully marketed much of anything.

Every year, Forrester publishes prediction reports and shares the biggest trends for the year ahead. To do that, we analyze customer expectations, market dynamics, new technologies and innovations. For 2022, we expect that European brands will look to their customer experience (CX) teams to help them navigate through the lingering effects of the continuing pandemic.  According to our research, companies will adjust by managing customer expectations and emotions around topics such as digital acceleration and saturation,…
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If you’re considering putting an unmarked key into a drawer filled with keys, you’re better off simply throwing it out instead.

Not only won’t you be able to find that unmarked key when you need it, but you’ve just made it more difficult to sort the other keys as well.

We hesitate to embrace or announce failure right now, preferring to put it off to some indeterminate date in the future. But postponing the announcement isn’t the same as not failing. It simply makes things worse later. And being clear about the failure we’re about to cause someday makes it more likely we’ll do the work to avoid it.

If you don’t have time to do it right, you’re unlikely to have time to do it over.

No sense wasting tomorrow as well.

This is an absolutely terrible acronym for a really important idea.

Use Your Best Judgment.

Don’t wait for someone else to take responsibility. Don’t wait for perfect. Don’t wait to find this exact situation in the manual or in history.

Use your best judgment.

My preferred abbreviation is: Go go go.

Not with a guarantee.

Not with someone to blame.

Simply because we need you to lead us.