How is Marketing seen by key personas in Finance, Sales, Legal, Product and Engineering? All have goals, fears, and KPIs just like you do. We need to position ourselves differently to each of them, you know, like a marketer.
There might be dark times ahead for marketers. Perhaps the Ancient Roman philosophy of stoicism is what we need to pull through.
“Marginal gains and all these buzz words – a lot of the time, I just think you have got to get the fundamentals right.” Words to live by for marketers from Olympic cyclist, Bradley Wiggins.
The “marginal gains” philosophy is most closely associated with Dave Brailsford, the MBA-holding cycling coach who was inspired by the post-war Japanese practice of Kaizen. Brailsford credits the striking successes of British cyclists over the past decade to the marginal gains strategy that he and others instilled in the organisation.
A/B testing is simple.
You just compare a control to a variant. In digital marketing (especially the field sometimes known as ‘conversion rate optimisation’), this generally means doing something like splitting traffic between two versions of the same web page and monitoring their performance. You might also try it out with emails, apps, or any other manner of digital communication, but the point is: it is simple, dead simple.
The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend famously wrote that “the only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.”