The 12 Steps Guaranteeing A Miserable Marketing Year in 2024

"How to Have the Best Marketing Year Ever in 2024!!" is lame.

Therefore, let's pay homage to Charlie Munger's famous thought framework of inversion.

So without further ado, here are

"The 12 Steps Guaranteeing A Miserable Marketing Year in 2024"

(AKA "Mistakes Preston Made at Chubbies Making the Road to the IPO Way Bumpier")

1. Double, nay, quadruple down on bottom funnel performance direct response advertising. You actually want paid channels to dominate your new customer revenue traffic sources. You WANT my revenue to go to zero if my facebook ads stop serving. Having any resilient baseline of revenue thats always there, whether or not you run ads, is boring.

2. Put all of your focus on revenue. Calculating variable costs is too difficult anyways. Who cares about incorporating discounts and marketing costs into the evaluation of the performance of the marketing team. Only nerds to that. Contribution dollars and contribution margin is finance's job. Marketers don't have time to think about that stuff. Just run ads and drive revenue to the moon. YOLO

3. Only focus on, and trust in, your ability to grow paid customer acquisition because it's easier to measure. Don't even think about focusing on driving organic + owned (unpaid) new customer acquisition. It's a black box.

4. Leave all of your differentiators to third parties. Creative, brand building, budget allocation, the works. Just get it off your plate and hand it to a third party with no skin in the game.

5. Put all of your focus on hitting this month's revenue number. Never, EVER ask yourself, "Does this increase my brand's desirability?". Do the opposite! Bonus your team on how successfully they increase long term degradation of your brand's ability to generate future profits. After all, your forecast is the only thing that's true in a world full of LIES.

6. All marketing investments need to pay off on a last click basis TODAY. No better time than the present, AM I RIGHT?

7. Ignore the 95/5 rule saying that 95% of the people seeing your ads right now are simply not in the market to buy your product. That's just some person's opinion. Everyone in the world wants my product right now. All I need to do is CONVINCE them.

8. ONLY put out creative that focuses on PRODUCT FEATURES, AN OFFER, AND URGENCY. People are 100% rational beings. They make all purchase decisions based STRICTLY on product features, how objectively strong your offer is, and ONLY if there's urgency on a CTA. Without this, people will not buy anything. hashtag#facts 

10. Measure your brand investments according to how they drive purchases in the short term. Measure all of your marketing investments by return on ad spend (ROAS). There simply is no other measure of marketing effectiveness.

11. Pull all of your brand budgets the second you miss a monthly revenue target.

12. Actually, don't even talk to me about BRAND. After all, BRAND stands for Bogus Rationale And No Data.
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Thanks for reading. If this post was helpful, here are 4 things you can do right now to 

• Get more strategic + tactical nuggets on brand building, 

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