Many customer journey maps are inside-out, based on company structures, not customer needs. Without an accurate journey map, companies struggle to be relevant.

Five outstanding recommendations from Bain for developing a strategy under uncertain conditions (and what industry isn’t uncertain). Innovative, practical, wise, proven, and almost certainly not what you are doing now.

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.

What do markets have in common with slime mold, beehives, and traffic? Science calls these complex adaptive systems. They share defining characteristics.

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

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.

Content alone, regardless of its quality, rarely results in significant change. Expand your persuasion repertoire to include everyone’s “go-to” decision tool.

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.

The capriciousness of markets derives from the same complexity as traffic and weather. Many persistent marketing challenges are caused by the mismatch between long-accepted work practices and the market’s reality.

Marketing builds the road that sales will eventually drive on. Marketing is an investment – not an expense. If your business plan calls for revenue growth tomorrow – you must build the conduit for delivering it today.