What Would Happen If You Stopped Marketing?

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At a time when marketing’s contributions are increasingly in doubt and CMOs are too often being taken for granted by CEOs and CFOs, can one of marketing’s greatest campaigns provide a roadmap?_________________________________

In the beginning, there was milk. More accurately, there was an absence of it, and that was what made all the difference.

Almost 30 years since the 1994 launch of Goodby Silverstein’s Got Milk campaign, its brilliance remains rooted in its “deprivation strategy” which, according to Jeff Goodby, the agency’s co-founder and co-chair, “grew out of the simple observation that nobody thinks about milk until it’s not there.” Such is the lot of all those and that taken for granted.

Today, like milk, marketing, and many marketers—CMOs in particular—are being taken for granted; their work and results too often judged by those lacking any actual experience in or insight into that which they’re judging—only 10% of the CEOs at the largest 250 companies have marketing experience, and only 4% of them have ever been a CMO.

So, when work doesn’t work—which is an inevitability—they think they know and could have done better as if because they’ve been marketed to they understand marketing. This is like thinking because you’ve been to a Beyonce concert you can dance like Blue Ivy (you can’t.)

Maybe then, the taken-for-granted CMO ought make like milk. Maybe to make a point about marketing’s value amidst doubt’s surrounding same, borrow a page from Got Milk’s deprivation strategy, and see how the marketing skeptical CEO responds to a recommendation that the company:

Stop Marketing.

Stops for one year. Does no marketing at all, just produces the product or service, and puts it on the “shelf.” Drops any marketing investment in getting it off that shelf to the bottom line. What do they think might happen?

And what if you stopped but your competitive set didn’t?

What do they think might happen? To sales, market share, share price, market cap, brand value, customer, client, and retail relationships? Near term and long?

While of course the answers depend on a portfolio of variables, variances aside it’s safe to say nothing good would happen, and a lot of irreparable and irrecoverable harm to brand and business might.

Is it possible that the thought of depriving the enterprise of what’s done to create and capture demand and drive growth could make even the most marketing skeptical CEO appreciate the “milk” that is marketing anew?

I’m not sure but I’m being flippant either. Something has to change because marketing’s current state is bad for business. The consequences of marketing’s being taken for granted, of an absence of understanding that presages an absence of appropriate investment (and, sometimes, strategic patience), is material and economic. It can be measured in lost growth and profit, diminution of shareholder value, and when aggregated at scale, a reduction in global GDP.

To be equally clear, bad marketing is indeed money burned, and might just as well have been dropped to the bottom line. And there is no shortage of bad marketing, there’s an abundance. But as in venture capital where risk and failure are built into expectations and forecasts, so should they be when selling (i.e., marketing) anything to anyone as idiosyncratic and fickle as human beings are. Missing the point is a problem but missing the mark is a feature not a bug. There is no such thing as a sure thing—no matter what the data says.

So, maybe next time the CEO or CFO questions marketing’s economic contributions and says they’re cutting marketing spend, the CMO ought make like milk and take a strategic page from one of marketing’s greatest campaigns.

Let them know not to worry about marketing for a year; that as an experiment you’ll stop marketing and just see what happens. As Otis Redding sang, “you don’t miss the water (milk or marketing) ‘till the well runs dry.”