The Religion of Marketing

"The bigger concern for any business now is not the competition; it’s obscurity."

- Bernadette Jiwa (Marketing: A Love Story: How to Matter to Your Customers)

Does all “marketing” these days require a lot more faith than what was needed in the past?

What I mean with this is that every recommended “best-practice”, channel or tactic comes without a guarantee that it will move the needle for you. Even if you applied an expert’s 37 step blueprint perfectly, results may vary. This might not be too different from 5 years ago, but things felt easier then.

What seems to have happened is that we now seem to unilaterally agree that any marketing will take a lot of time before it even starts to move the needle for you (or for you to figure out it isn’t working).

For every marketing discipline or channel, you will also find staunch disciples false prophets advocates too, proposing priority of this over that. (Or you should just do all the things.)

They say you should do content marketing. But you have to consistently show up and publish new stuff for ages before hopefully bearing any fruit. Ditto for SEO.

They say build a brand that your customers love. Make them part of a community. Inspire them to absolutely love you so much that they will tell friends. Maybe you’re doing all of this already and growth is still not what you want it to be?

Is this the status quo and still our True North? Or has it become blind faith and we just need to admit that there really is no silver bullet?