More-more-more Marketing

Today's marketing landscape celebrates intensity over durability. We're bombarded with stories of overnight success, leading many business leaders to believe that's what they should aim for.

This puts enormous pressure on marketing teams to deliver thousands of initiatives with immediate results. Which leads to fatigue, both for consumers and marketers.

Real understanding and meaning requires a more empathic approach.

Enter Minimalism

Minimalism isn't about minimizing. It's about identifying what truly matters and channeling your energy there. It's about creating maximum impact with minimal input.

Applied to marketing, it is not an invitation to slash your budget. It's about allocating your resources—time, attention, and money—more intentionally:

1. Identify what you truly need—the essential
2. Take inventory of what you have
3. Match your resources with your needs
4. Identify and eliminate the clutter
5. Create space for what matters
6. Optimize existing resources
7. Experiment selectively and focus on what works

When you follow this approach, something magical happens. Your marketing becomes more focused, more meaningful, and ultimately more effective.

Finding the Balance

Marketing is the reproductive organ of a business. But as I like to say, we cannot just flail it around and demand that everybody takes it. Our marketing has to learn to seduce, to please, and to fertilize the audience.

This means finding the right balance between intensity and durability:

Intensity might look like a campaign that claims all billboards in the country and floods social media.

Durability is your ability to consistently keep telling your story, even when your brand isn't the hottest thing in town—your weekly blog post, regular podcast appearances, continuous customer journey improvement.

Why Meaning Matters

When your marketing combines empathy and understanding of your audience with genuine meaning, a special chemical reaction occurs. Customers start to value your marketing:

• Awareness brings a sense of clarity
• Consideration adds enthusiasm
• Exploration unlocks gratitude

And while your brand may only play a minuscule role in your customers' lives, that small interaction can linger for a lifetime when it's truly meaningful.

Go Minimal

Look at your current marketing efforts. How much of it is just noise? How much truly adds value to your customers' lives?

Remember, you don't need to be everything to everyone. You just need to be meaningful to the few thousand people you've chosen as your customers.

Start by identifying what matters to them through deep interviews, social listening, observation, and empathy. Then align those insights with your organization's purpose.

The world needs more meaningful marketing. Your customers need it. And honestly, as marketers facing burnout from constant pressure, we need it too.

One audience. One story. Maximum meaning.