Beyond The Balance Sheet

Welcome to Fairtree Event

Markets have always had their complexities. Anyone who has been in the business for as long as I have will attest to that. But there’s a new complexity with the explosion of touchpoints and channels, sources of influence, and changes in buying habits and journeys. To cope, the marketing industry has opted to simplify and standardise. Marketing thought leaders advised us simply to: ‘outspend to outcompete’, ‘forget the hard work of finding a point of difference, just be distinctive’. This advice is not incorrect, but it’s an unhelpful oversimplification. The truth is that reach and distinctiveness are not relevance, and relevance is what drives purchase behaviour.

It’s this drive to oversimplify markets and marketing that has held brands back from the rate of growth they’re capable of achieving. The focus on simplification should read ‘shortcut’, or at best ‘incomplete’, and followers will undoubtedly find their marketing outcomes are either budget-hungry or just fail to meet expectation.