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This email: to share the latest trends in marketing.
The goal: to make us all better marketers.
When learning Japanese one of the first words you’ll learn is ganbaru.
It translates “stay firm by doing one’s best.”
What ganbaru looks like is finding something you love doing and getting closer to perfection every day.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about this as finding your flow.
Flow is the thing you do when time seems to slip away without you noticing.
Flow is the thing that you think about at night and keeps you motivated.
It could be writing, engineering, meditating, teaching, cycling.
Complete absorption.
Finding that which gives you flow will bring harmony, focus and dedication.
As a marketer it can feel like we are always spending time on things that other people want us to do.
That’s unavoidable to an extent.
My advice is to try not to let a week or even a day go past without practising the thing that brings you peace, absorbs your attention and gives you that sense of flow. It’s time well spent.
Idea
🧠
Making decisions
Regardless of what stage of career you are at there is an important skill you need to learn in business: how to get stuff done.
More importantly, how do you get stuff done that needs the support of other people?
One of the first things to work out in any new job is how decisions are made at the company.
Are decisions made at the top and passed down to the people that ‘do’ without any collaboration?
If so, who influences those decisions? What voices do they listen to?
Are decisions made ‘bottom-up’? If so, what are the common characteristics of those decisions and initiatives that are accepted?
Once you observe and are able to answer these questions, a pattern will emerge.
Then, it’s over to you to copy that pattern in order to achieve change.
For example, the executive team may accept strategic inputs from the team only at certain times of the year.
They may prefer to read an internal memo about an idea before having it pitched to them.
For more impulsive leaders, they may prefer you raise new ideas in casual conversations over lunch.
For ‘bottoms up’ companies, you may find that for your proposal to gain traction you need allies to co-pitch your idea.
In this case, early and regularly collaboration with these allies is essential.
This may seem petty. In my experience, the sad reality is the best ideas don’t always win.
The ideas that win are those that are best presented.
And they match the decision-makers timeline and preferred communication method.
Marketers should have an advantage here.
Quote
🤔
“We must give effective and actionable feedback to those we are leading in an effort to help grow them and to help develop their core competencies and skills.”
-Aaron Irizarry (source)
“Some of the most successful, beloved and iconic brands of the past few decades are built on compelling and sophisticated loyalty efforts.”
-Jason Bornstein (source)
Question
🚀
Finding your flow is important for progress and purpose.
Understanding how to create change internally is essential to have an impact.
The natural question we should ask ourselves at the start of each day: what should I work on next in order to have the highest contribution to my goals?
There are a number of prioritisation methods that agile companies use to sort through the endless opportunities.
I’m a big fan of a few of them and I’ll likely write a longer piece in the future.
My 2 favourites:
MoSCoW
MoSCoW is a prioritisation technique that helps you divide the essential tasks from the non-essential.
The letters stand for:
Must Have
Should Have
Could Have
Won’t Have this time
This process involves going through all the items on your to-do list and sorting them into 4 categories. Start with Must.
WSJF
Weighted Shortest Job First is a prioritisation model used to sequence ideas or tasks to produce maximum economic / revenue benefit.
The formula is:
In other words you want to measure the cost of not doing something by a factor of how long a job will take to do.
This formula prioritises ideas that provide a higher return sooner.
As you score each idea they can be plotted on a matrix like the one below and give you an idea of the best thing to do next.
This might seem like overkill for your personal todo list, and it likely is.
Although as marketers with endless tactics, channels and opportunities, these prioritisation techniques can bring transparency and clarity to a decision making process that can often be accused of secrecy and intuition.
Let me know if you would be interested in learning more about prioritisation. Just reply to this email.
What will you do next?
This is Marketing.
Cheers,
Sean Blake