Three tips to get you going

Russell Davies

Russell Davies

— 4 min read
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Headline that says 'So you've got to do some marketing'
Uh oh

I was asked for some tips on how to start a marketing/advertising project. Here are three:

Headline that says 'ban the word brand'
With maximum force

Don't say brand

The first problem you'll find is that marketing is full of impenetrable jargon. That's not a bad thing in itself, jargon can be a useful shorthand, a handy shared language. The problem with marketing jargon is that it's escaped into the world and everyone uses it all the time - it's just that there's very little agreement about what any of it means.

For instance, I always try and ban the use of the word 'brand' in my teams.

Because it can mean a 1,000 different things. And when an investor says 'develop the brand' to mean 'invest in paid advertising' and a CMO hears 'develop the brand' to mean 'redesign the logo' you end up in trouble. When people say brand they might mean: organisation, logo, company, tone of voice, logo, vibe, reputation, logo, trademark, advertising, PR, logo, team, awareness, etc.

If you try and be clear about exactly what you're talking about it will be helpful.

Headline that says 'write down your assumptions and your plan'
Single piece of A4

And share it widely

Similarly, it's very likely that your team and stakeholders will be very different ideas about what you're trying to do with your marketing and how it's supposed to work. And most of those differences will be cloaked under different understandings of language and different assumptions about how marketing/advertising/whatever actually works.

If you've got time it's a fun exercise to get everyone to get together and ask them how they think marketing/advertising works. You will get dozens of different answers. Someone will dimly remember AIDA. Many people will mention 'awareness'. There might be 4Ps. There might even be some mental and physical availability and some fluent devices. There's unlikely to be a shared mental model of how you're going to spend the billions of pounds your investors are about to dump on you, so this is a good time to get one.

Write down, in as concrete a way as you can, what you're about to try and do. Something like:

We're going to try and get frequent users of crispy onions to sample our crispy onions as well.

We're going to do that by:

  • securing prominent shelf locations in fashionable independent retailers
  • creating really distinctive and unusual packaging - so distinctive that some people will be put off
  • creating content with young chefs - the job of that content is to put the product and packaging in front of people before they get to those shops
  • bringing energy and entertainment to a dull category

We are going to prioritise being heard and noticed over taste and quality cues. We hope the onions will speak for themselves.

We won't be doing any other activity for the first 6 months . No paid advertising, no PR, no sampling.

Success will be measured in numbers of people who have sampled our onions in the next 6 months.

I don't know, I'm making it up. I know nothing about marketing crispy onions. But writing down a plan like this is really helpful. Partly so you know what you're doing and why. Mostly so everyone else knows what you're doing and why. Because if you don't do this everyone else will soon be asking you why they've not seen you on Facebook or sponsoring the F1.

Headline that says 'Quick! Make something'
Yup. That'll do

Anything really

You know that Mike Tyson quote 'everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face'? It's true. And so you need to go out and get punched in the face as soon as you can. Because your plan will be no good until you've actually made some stuff and shown it to someone.

Start by making something and putting it in the world. Do you have a theory about what a good message might be, or a good product thought? Make a Facebook ad and put it in the world. Write something on a leaflet and hand it to people in a cafe. You get feedback, that's helpful. But just as importantly, you'll see how you feel about it, you understand your ideas differently when they're real and public. It feels very different to some abstract positioning statements in a strategy deck.

Your timeline should be something like this:

Day One:

  • Morning: get everyone together, ask them how they think marketing works and ban them from saying brand
  • Afternoon: write down your assumptions and your plan

Day Two:

Start making stuff

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