I've been listening to a podcast featuring Olivier Hamant for several times now. The last time was on Tuesday, when I came down alone, with my backpack, from the Pas de la Coche in the Belledonne massif.
This time, it was in Maxime Thuillez's excellent Greenletter Club podcast: https://greenletterclub.fr/podcast/episode-157
Every time I listen to Olivier Hamant (for want of having read him), I'm filled with thoughts about my own business and personal practices. Am I into performance or robustness?
We are in the business of performance marketing
I'll pass on to you all sorts of thoughts on robustness in our lives, robustness in business, and robustness in our marketing strategies.
I like to remind people that marketing is, first and foremost, the ability of a company to bring products and services to «market». Today (and for the past 70 years or so), marketing is necessarily about performance. This performance must be tangible, measurable, and arrive very quickly as soon as it is implemented.
What is robustness marketing?
Few companies aim for robust marketing. Okay, but then... what would robust marketing be? Robust marketing is marketing that can withstand disruption, last and adapt. The aim is not to be on top, but to serve long-term objectives.
For two years, Marion Duchatelet and I have been working on sobriety in marketing in our podcast «Sobriété et marketing... Possible?», but I don't seem to have come across this notion of robustness.
Marketing hype, the antithesis of robustness
Today's marketing strategies are dominated by fads. Rather than focusing on good practices (or better still, best practices) that take time to implement, we prefer to bet on «magical» technological innovations.
But above all, «magic» technologies, platforms and solutions are great opportunities for companies to lose control. We buy performance, without knowing exactly how it works. Dream sellers sell you performance by destroying entire ecosystems. This delegation of power to magic solutions means the disappearance of knowledge... and this has been the case since long before the arrival of AI.
To be a technophile is not to delegate to technology, but to understand how technology works, so as to force it to deliver the best of the state of the art.
Even committed companies fall for it
Socially and environmentally committed companies are no exception to this dilemma. They need to perform as well as anyone else to satisfy their investors (and sometimes their start-up egos).
This contradicts most of their values and doesn't allow for optimal alignment (I'm not saying I've done any better). In my opinion, these companies would do well to play the opposite game to their less virtuous counterparts. Admittedly, the climb will be much slower, but it may well be much more sustainable.
To build robust marketing...
To build robust marketing: don't put all your budgets into the same platforms, bet on extremely slow growth (with a goal of stabilization), get away from dependence on algorithms, build solid relationships with your peers, rely on human competence rather than magical platforms, choose technical solutions that serve humans rather than the other way around, replace promises with truths (even if imperfect), pool your tools and resources, reduce technological dependencies...
The companies that survive will not be the best performers, but those that choose to be strong.
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