There is a Stevie Wonder song called As. The lyrics all roll together but the key line in the chorus is “you can rest your mind assure that I‘ll be loving you always.” I cannot imagine a better start for a conversation about marketing cadence – how often and in what ways do we love on the targets?
As a line from one of my favorite movies, this tells us more about our job as professional marketers than we might think. In a constantly evolving marketing environment, it is very easy to find traditionalists and those who like constant experimental change. Each has a very different philosophy. The traditionalist wants to lock down and focus and the experimentalist wants to throw "stuff" against the wall and hope that it sticks. The traditionalist argues that constant change wastes resources. We have often heard of it as spinning un-connected cogs in a clock. The experimentalist criticizes the traditionalist for ignoring competitive advantages that can come to the brand from new ways of doing marketing. When eeeking out competitive advantages it can be very tough for brands that do not have significant budgets. Either of these positions is a tough one to defend or attack.