I’m fascinated with Conway’s law:
Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.
-Melvin E. Conway
This also extends to marketing. No matter how much you talk about focusing on customers, you need to put it into practice. One of the best windows into marketing output are marketing meetings.
Tons of marketing assets are self-obsessed:
- It’s the content marketing that’s nothing but brags.
- It’s the self-absorbed landing pages with headlines like “We’re revolutionizing…”.
- It’s the ads that say “discover why we’re the best…”
Listen in on their meetings, and I guarantee they haven’t mentioned anything customers/users care about.
Whenever I’ve been part of teams that produce awesome marketing assets, they actually talked about users and showed concern in their meetings.
Perhaps we can apply Conway’s Law to marketing: Your internal communication ultimately becomes your external communication.