Who’s selling to whom?

As experts in market orientation, communication and persuasion, it’s a great irony that marketers have been played over the last 10 years, on an industrial scale.

We have weekly meetings with Google and fortnightly catch-ups with Meta. Calls with Salesforce, consultants for GA4, daily stand-ups with our social agency, advisors for Adwords, experts in video optimisation. We’re seeking guidance on search, landing page optimisation and a parade of SaaS solutions that give us better workflows, publishing and file sharing. Just about anything to distract us from spending time with customers and focusing on big objectives.

So who’s the marketer and who’s the consumer?

Of course, B2B is a broad sector of extremely useful stuff. But don’t forget there’s another marketer over in that other B. And that marketer’s job is to elevate their solution so that optimising its output is on par with customer behaviour.

So our high-level objectives start looking like smaller-order KPIs. Annual goals are aligned around engagement, clicks, video views, dwell time, open rates, channel-specific ROI, speed of X, volume of Y.

Somehow we got tricked into playing their game instead of ours. And when that happens, everything from our org structure, our focus, and our capacity to think beyond our job gets diminished.