20 Ideas That Challenge The Way You Think About Marketing

I started Engineering Marketing 20 months ago, with a personal ambition to write about business topics I held dear to my heart: marketing communication strategy, digital media opportunities, brand growth models, and not last creative excellence. By sharing my thinking with my current and future network, I managed to unlock newer ideas and great new connections and explored my vulnerability.

Who doesn’t like a nice list of ideas?

Here is another personal challenge to celebrate my 50th blog post on Engineering Marketing and the struggles to find topics worth writing about weekly.

20 ideas that challenge the way I think about marketing.

In short one-liners, today, in longer form in the next months on the blog.

1. Marketing comms is 10x more difficult today than 10 years ago.
2. Attention to bad advertising is declining at an alarming rate.
3. Non-marketing people don’t think a lot about your brand.
4. People primarily use System 1 thinking to process brand messages.
5. Don’t make complicated ads; make simple product-centric stories.
6. Using too often Brand Distinctive Assets can’t hurt.
7. Advertising has a short-term impact on sales and a long-term impact on equity.
8. Brand equity carries a long-term impact on sales.
9. Entertaining advertising is more likely to build brands.
10. Some people are ok with watching a great ad, again and again.
11. The brand manager is the first to get tired of the current campaign.
12. Most people will skip your ads as soon as they can.
13. People will still catch a few seconds of your ad – make every second count.
14. Content is still the #1 driver of success. Reaching your audience via targeting comes second.
15. Precisely targeting your audience by accurately describing it doesn’t mean your execution will be flawless.
16. A growth-limiting strategy is always to target the same audience.
17. Most digital companies want to be the TV of this decade.
18. Whatever your audience is, more reach is better than more frequency of viewing.
19. Marketing communication is a mix of science and art.
20. There is a lot in marketing that can be engineered.