Marketing behaves more like stock markets or weather than predictable machines. By working with marketing’s complexity instead of ignoring it, companies will realize more value.

Effective marketing operations in a complex world requires balancing efficiency with enough slack for agility, innovation, and customer experience.

Like healthy food, good research nourishes your decisions. But many studies are more like cheap fast food. After nine years as an IDC analyst, I learned a lot about how to source and interpret data - skills I would have found useful in my earlier marketing career.

Marketing’s “soft” goals compete for resources with “hard” efficiency goals. To avoid essential, but difficult to quantify investments repeatedly losing this battle, enterprises must reframe strategic immeasurables into useful terms.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a great proxy metric but isn’t a surrogate for all that encompasses customer loyalty. Revenue is a great proxy metric but isn’t a surrogate for all of marketing. It’s like saying a street map is the equivalent of a city. You can forget that there is so much more to pay attention to.

Science and technology ensure that we seldom fail for lack of knowing. Our problem is more often applying knowledge consistently and correctly. Checklists, used in hospitals, aviation, and other turbulent environments, can help marketers get things right with customers.