Adrift, wallowing dangerously in the stormy North Atlantic. The periscope of a German U-boat rises at 500 yards. A torpedo slices the brine, tracing a turbulent promise of extinction. With all the hunger of a desperate woman, you clutch both lapels of my sodden Navy greatcoat, looking deeply into my eyes. “Ernest,” you murmur hoarsely, “What is the single most-important secret to great marketing?”

We gasp, as the magnetic torpedo speeds right underneath our rubber liferaft and continues toward Brest. Warmth suffuses my frozen garments. I enfold you tenderly in my arms, and whisper, “Just think, my darling. Just think!”

Just Think!

Look, if you THINK DEEPLY (more than a few seconds) about the marketing decisions you make, and discuss them openly among yourselves, you will be amazed at the results. A less scrupulous consultant than I would surely write a book called Think Your Way to Marketing Greatness, and charge $50,000 a pop for inspiring speeches, in which he made you close your eyes and imagine that you are Steve Jobs. Not me! This is simple and easy.

So if thinking is so great, why do people do anything else? Because it’s also easy to be lazy and lazy can be fun.

Five Easy Ways to Avoid Thinking

Embrace the Familiar

Why think when you can do the same thing that you did last year? And the decade before that.

This is a special problem with success. Toyota climbs to the top of the world automotive market, basks momentarily in the glory, then circles the wagons to defend its position, while the Korean Indians whoop and holler and shoot flaming arrows, and the American cavalry comes charging back. The company known for quality stumbles on success.

Even if your company is not so successful, the marketing experiments of yesterday become the formulas and habits of tomorrow.

In as much as marketing is a science, it is a practical and experimental one. In business, we leave theory to the professors. Keep trying new approaches, measure the results, and adjust course.

Best Practice Bingo

Best practices are approaches that have succeeded in other companies. Whole books are written about this. Acme Valve tripled sales while communing with an Indian yogi who mumbled mantras and giggled. Bingo! Best practice! Get the entire sales team down to Yoga and Pilates World, for lotus positioning.

As Michael McLaughlin, coauthor of Guerilla Marketing for Consultants, arguably one of the best marketing books of all time, points out in his blog post Why Best Practices Are Losers:

Starting any project with a canned solution narrows your focus to how you will implement that solution, instead of broadening your thinking about what should be done.

Read All About It!

Business books are perennial best sellers, but then so are diet books. The parallel is more than skin deep. People keep buying diet books, not because the ones they have read don’t work, but because they expected a miracle, a formula that didn’t require eating weird food and exercising a lot. Hope springs eternal. It is the same with most business books. Don’t read about the latest miracle cure for marketing, based on fads and fashions that will soon be as dead as Dr. Atkins and his diet.

Instead, find the few that are original, insightful, and worth reading. Read the ones that espouse hard work, discipline, and process. There is no shortcut.

Listen to Consultants

Look, we are consultants, but we have no illusions about it. We work with clients who want to learn from our expertise, experience, and insight, so that they can become better marketers. Not with clients who are too lazy to think and learn, or too timid to take a risk, so that they hire a consultant to tell them what to think and take the fall if it goes wrong.

How seductive it is to hire expensive consultants (not us!), the more expensive the better, so that you can shift your brain into neutral and coast along behind the super-intelligent, 25-year-old Ivy Leaguers from McKinsey or Bain, fully confident that you can blame them when you don’t make your numbers.

Bury Yourself in Daily Urgencies

Marketing departments are full of great doers. People who can organize a trade show booth, get the new brochure printed, or publicize the wet T-shirt competition far and wide. They are invaluable, but they are not enough.

Every company needs marketing leaders who think deeply. They can diagnose problems, devise strategies that are longer term than a month, and make well-reasoned decisions. They get the need for important but not urgent, as well as urgent but not important, in Stephen R. Covey’s words from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

Often, the emphasis on daily doing over thinking big is simply an easy evasion or a lazy convenience in itself. Peggy Noonan laments the same problem in Washington, in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece:

Our political professionals cheapen everything they touch because they are burying themselves in daily urgencies in order to dodge and avoid the big picture.

If all your marketing people start to melt when you mention positioning or segmentation, or quote common knowledge without insight or imagination, you have a doer/thinker imbalance. Your leaders must also be thinkers. And your thinkers must not take constant refuge in the emergency of the hour.

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