This 2 cents, it’s time to make a marketing promise to ourselves.
This Tuesday is New Year’s Eve, a time for resolutions and making promises on things we will do.
Maybe write that book, read more, join the gym, drink more gin (just me?), or start a more positive habit.
However, in marketing, to do something new (and there is always something new), you need to stop doing something.
This year, I’ve discovered the acronym YAGNI, which comes from software development and stands for “You Ain’t Gonna Need It”, which states “a programmer should not add functionality until deemed necessary”.
This has tipped me toward understanding marketing efficiency, thinking about what we don’t need, and specifically, the keyword of this definition, what is deemed “necessary.”
We need to decide whether what we are doing now, all the suggestions we get from the other executives, requests from the business, new doohickeys, and if the things we want to do tomorrow are necessary.
This work also helps to communicate back to the business – why the suggestion of more cowbell is not necessary to reach the goals you’ve set.
And, stopping something is not negative; if we can allocate some time and resources to something new, by stopping something old, there is a world of exciting opportunities (and maybe this involves a bit more cowbell).
The paradox is that to figure this out; we need to stop doing something to have the time to do the analysis and determine what is necessary.
Could I call this The YAGNI Paradox? Now THAT could be a book that should have been a blog post.
I don’t know about you, but while I love a bit of planning and data analysis, it can be way more tempting to crack on with something new or creative or run a little harder on the marketing hamster wheel than pause and do the deep work.
Deep work we must!
But first…
We need to stop doing something to figure out what we should stop doing.
🤔
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I’m a 3xCMO, now a marketing strategy advisor and podcast host at Rockstar CMO. Although, I’m not a rock star, but a marketing leader, strategist, content marketer, columnist, speaker, industry watcher, and creator of ART (Awareness, Revenue, and Trust) for the companies I work with. But most of all, I am an enthusiastic tea drinker.
You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or now Threads! – or listen to my weekly podcast at Rockstarcmo.com
The half-baked thoughts shared on this blog may not reflect those of my employer or clients, and if the topic of this article is interesting or you just want to say hello please get in touch.