Friction Free Marketing
Building the capability to run marketing experiments at the push of a button
No matter which metaphor you pick to illustrate exponential growth, it always blows my mind that the last doubling does a full half of the job. Fold a piece of paper 40 times and the thickness will equal the distance to the moon. It is a crazy thought experiment and fun to do with learners of all ages. Even though I know I am (as a human being) not naturally able to understand exponential growth. And even though I have thought about it over and over. When it comes to the 39th fold and I’m only half way to the moon… I am always amazed that the next fold finishes the trip.
The other direction can be equally mesmerizing. When you reduce the time required to accomplish a task to zero, truly amazing things happen. Taking out that last little bit of time is just as spectacular as traveling the second half of a forty day trip – all on the last day.
Marketing is experimentation. We want to drive growth. We have ideas about how we might do it. We turn the ideas into experiments. Use the results from the experiments to learn. Then we either start over if it was a total flop, make adjustments if it showed some promise, or scale up the winning ideas. It all takes energy and time. If it takes two months to run this cycle, you get 6 experiments in a year. If it takes 1 month, 12 experiments. 1 week, 52 experiments. 1 day, 365 experiments. If it takes a push of a button? Things get just as crazy as that jump to light speed on the 40th day of the trip to the moon.
When building a marketing team and picking the tools the team is going to use, each decision must be made with an eye on reducing the cycle time to zero. Friction free, instantaneous experimentation, should be the pursuit of every marketing leader.
Friction Free Marketing
Wait, wha…? You fold a piece of paper forty times and … 🤯 my public school education has failed me yet again