Addicted to a reigning ideology – that “persuasion is not a science, but an art,” as the renowned advertising executive Bill Bernbach once put it – marketing executives, almost from the beginning of mass marketing, have believed that they should intuit the “Big Idea,” and all else would follow. In fact, though, they have been trapped in a cycle of assumption, approximation, and acceptance.
They assume that one answer works everywhere – because surely tailored strategies can’t possibly pay off against the complexity involved in designing and implementing them.
They approximate the return on their massive selling and marketing expenses – because one can never know with certainty which half works.
They accept that their marketing and sales organizations will be in constant opposition because of this inherent imprecision – and that the job of the business leader is to force the brutes to stay on strategy.
Worst of all, they miss the Big Idea when it clubs them in the nose. Without precision and understanding, all ideas are simultaneously big and small – big if they work, and small if they don’t.
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