Marketing Needs the ‘Why’ to Be Effective
Of the stream of requests that come to Marketing on a daily basis, many arrive with an innocuous sounding ‘Just’ from our stakeholders. They ‘just’ need this, that or the other.
I always found the inclusion of ‘just’ inflammatory as it both trivialised the work necessary and implied that the deliverable would work effectively on its own – which, of course, it almost never did. It also implied that the stakeholder was aware of all the options and dependencies and had made an informed choice on how to fulfil the objective behind the request, which was almost never true.
Worst of all, it insinuated that we didn’t need to know what was behind the request – as a request fulfilment organisation, it was above our pay grade!
If Marketing understands the goals, objectives and priorities of stakeholders, we can create a business-like and defensible set of priorities and get the job done, balancing scarce resources against those priorities.
If we do not, and all we have is a stream of incoming requests for deliverables, the work will be, at best, futile and, at worst, impossible!
Accordingly, we adopted the mantra of ‘share objectives, don’t specify deliverables’. Of course, beyond the mantra came the blood, sweat and tears of convincing the stakeholders that it was in their best interests to share objectives. We needed to explain what was in it for them and provide examples of how objectives made for better outcomes for them and the company.
That was painful, but the sensation was nothing compared to the pain of living in an often unintelligible request stream!