Marketing is difficult

Dear friends, I read this recently: Marketing is the only field I know where once a new strategy has been tried and is found to work, it completely stops working.  Absolutely nailed it. This is the single reason marketing is tough. Marketing is all about using channels, techniques and messaging in unique and creative ways that stand out from the crowd to get you mindshare for whatever it is you are promoting. As soon as you find the winning formula everyone knows about it and copy it, so so it's longer effective. That's what makes us marketers a little bit bonkers. We have to keep trying new things. Doing the same thing as you did before means you are effectively going backwards. Did you ever meet a successful marketer that wasn't trying new things, a bit of a risk taker? Pushing things forward to try brand new ideas can lead to challenging conversations in a business. How does a marketer build a business case that  demonstrates ROI for a brand new marketing strategy or programme? It's not easy and involves some guesswork and intuition. Two words that most CFOs seem to hate. Nothing in marketing is predictable. It sounds unbelievable, but I've been in a meeting where someone has suggested we "create a viral marketing campaign". Yeah, like that's something you can just roll-out. That said, the challenge of constantly trying to find a winning strategy is is what makes it a such an interesting career choice. Cheers and all the best - just another of my 100 days of writing challenge