A healthy diet is much more about what you don’t eat than what you do eat. Chugging superfood smoothies doesn’t help if you still eat deep-fried snickers bars. The same principle applies elsewhere: If you spend hours on social media, you won’t heal your mental health by meditating for 10 minutes.
As marketers, we often act like a dieter who keeps buying micronutrient supplements, but won’t cut out sugar.
It’s tempting to add more channels, create more content, hire more people, try more tactics. You can tell show your boss you’re active.
But few marketers reflect to determine what they won’t do (anymore).
Apple doesn’t do big discounts, let alone giveaways. Louis Vuitton doesn’t sponsor gaming YouTubers. It’s not that they can’t, it’s that they won’t.
Like a candy bar at the gas station, the benefits of marketing tactics are often immediate while the downsides are delayed.
That’s obvious when you’re resource-constrained. Since you won’t spend them everywhere, you need to choose where not to spend your limited resources. But even if you had unlimited resources and a giant team, determining what not to do matters:
Giveaways and heavy discounts generate leads, retweets and likes. But they also damage your brand by conditioning your customers to expect free stuff and never buy at full price.
Unless being a cheap brand is your strategy, you exchange short-term pleasure for long-term pain.
Defining a maximum discount or a ban on giveaways could fix that—an explicit statement of what you won’t do.
While giveaways are a tactic, the same extends to strategies. It makes perfect sense to ignore TikTok if your product requires deep involvement. That’s not a dig at TikTok: You’re also better off eschewing podcasting if your product is an impulse buy.
Why do so few companies do this? Determining what you won’t do in your marketing is hard. It requires an understanding of who you’re building for, where they are and the communication to change their beliefs and behaviors to persuade them. And few marketers understand those fundamentals about their marketing.