It’s Time To Give Up Junk Thinking

What does accidentally setting fire to $795 million of your own money, every single day of the year, feel like?

Just ask the marketing community. 

CMO’s consistently estimate that between a quarter and a third of their marketing budget goes up in smoke.

Not much different, perhaps, from a century ago when Lord Leverhulme (or was it John Wanamaker?) famously couldn’t say which half of his advertising was wasted.

With global marketing spend heading towards $1 trillion, there’s a truly eye-watering sum of money simply not doing its intended job. 

And, while briefing, execution and implementation are all important, if your strategic fundamentals are wrong in the first place, then it’s not a proportion of spend being wasted – it’s the whole lot.

The root cause of all this needless wastage?

We call it Junk Thinking.

Junk Thinking is the fast food of the marketing world.

It’s cheap, superficial, snackable, hideously addictive and leaves brands simultaneously empty, bloated and wanting more.

And it’s the most insidious force in marketing today.

Because it looks like strategy, sounds like strategy and says it’s strategy, but it’s actually anti-strategy.

It keeps brands stuck, glued to their metaphorical sofas, incapable of creating the forward momentum every organisation needs.

And Junk Thinking takes many, equally unhealthy, forms:

• Junk insight treats customers as data points, not people. It thrives on ticking research boxes, swaps humanity for generational marketing constructs, loves the latest buzzwords, and confuses insight with the bleeding obvious. Junk insight is obsessed with the what, rather than the why, and illuminates nothing.

• Junk vision puts brands on impossible purpose-shaped pedestals. It ignores inconvenient commercial reality, would rather build an image than solve a problem, confuses advertising strategy with brand strategy, and delights in meaningless platitudes. Junk vision is risk-averse, bloated and hates making hard decisions.

• And then there’s junk impact, treating brands as PowerPoint decks rather than complex systems. It avoids embedding the brand all the way through an organisation, ignores the galvanising power of internal stakeholders, treats the marketing department as a silo, and generally acts as if it’s far too good for the hard business of real change. Junk impact is all about talk, not action.

Junk Thinking might seem superficially harmless, but if it isn’t dealt with it can throttle momentum, paralyse teams and immobilise whole organisations.

Which explains why Untapped Strategy is in the business of cutting through Junk Thinking and getting brands back to a healthier strategic diet.
 
Putting some of that $795 million to good use again.
 
So, what flavour of Junk Thinking do you think does the most damage?