I really need to tell you something

Despite what an awful lot of people say, marketing is not complicated. I’ve written about this previously, but there’s no harm in repeating it. You need:

• To know who is likely to buy your product or service

• Understand what they need to believe in order for that to happen, and

• Figure out how to get those beliefs into the correct heads

  
  

In other words, you need to talk to people. You need to get information from your head into somebody else’s head. That is a process. But it is also not rocket science, and there’s absolutely no need to over-complicate it.

Unfortunately, what I see out in the real world is a constant desire to prioritise what I might call ‘marketing led’ communication over simple common sense. There’s a place for the former (more on that later), but I would always encourage anyone involved in marketing, or more broadly go-to-market, to ask themselves the following question:

If I really needed to get a message to another person, what would I do?

Forget about ‘marketing’. Forget that you are in business. Just think in human terms: what would you do?

You would pick up the phone. Or text. If the person lived close by, you might call over. If they worked in the same office, you might walk to their desk.

One answer you definitely wouldn’t come up with is “send an HTML email from an email marketing platform”. There could hardly be a worse way to get information from A to B. If it gets delivered (debatable) it is likely to be dumped in a promotions or quarantine folder somewhere, and even then the format is almost designed to tell the recipient “this message is not important and I am just trying to sell you something”. 

But I see this mistake, or variants of it, made all the time. There’s a few reasons for this, one of them is that organisations believe that ‘this is what marketing does’. It’s like somehow the marketing department is cheating if they don’t bother designing a nice email. As above, that would be a misconception: I outlined marketing’s job in the three bullet points above. HTML email is nothing to do with it.

Effective communication

Before anyone gets the impression that this is nothing more than a knock on HTML email (which, after all, has its place), let’s move from the particular to the general. What are the principles that could be applied when considering how to communicate.

I would suggest something along the lines of the following:

• All other things being equal, choose the communication option that comes to mind when you ask the “if I needed to get a message” question.

• In terms of content, follow the same logic. Don’t try to be clever, just say what you have to say.

• Immediate caveat to the point above: that doesn’t mean you haven’t thought very carefully about what you have to say.

• Do this until scale demands you take an alternative approach

  
  

If there’s one theme to most of what I write, it is this: stop thinking of marketing as a set of activities, and start thinking of it as consistent, effective communication of a message. Stop assuming that what you see out in the wider world is ‘marketing’: the reason Coca Cola advertise is because calling everyone up to ask them to buy a Coke isn’t a scalable solution. 

And for what it’s worth, Coca Cola spends a HUGE amount of unseen time and money on building direct relationships, in person and on the phone, in the retail space that ensures a can of Coca Cola is staring you in the face pretty much every time you open a fridge.

That leaves one final question, which might be summarised as “it’s all very well to tell me to communicate directly, but it is very hard to do that in 2026, for all sorts of reasons. What then?”

My short answer to that question consists of two parts. The first is to stop thinking of communication as a single shot. If I want to talk to my mum, I don’t stop trying if she doesn’t pick up the phone. I send an email and try again later. And one way or another we will talk in the future. Without being creepy, think of your prospects and customers in the same way. It’s not about ‘did it work?’ right now, but about making it work some time in the future.

The second is that yes, conventional ‘marketing’ is a way to communicate with those people who don’t or won’t respond to direct communication. It is also a way to prepare the ground and make direct approaches more effective. In a way, it helps turn your prospects into people like my mum who (despite decades of evidence) believes I might have something interesting to say and so picks up the phone. 

So I’m not telling anyone to give up on social media postings, digital advertising, sponsorships or indeed anything: if it makes sense, do it.

Just make sure you’ve explored the obvious angles first.