When ‘meal replacement’ shakes first came to market they seemed like the answer to a dieter’s prayers. Replacing one or two regular meals with a calorie counted milkshake meant ingesting fewer calories, resulting in rapid weight loss. Meal replacements worked for some people for a little while. Those first few pounds often ‘fell off’. But monotony soon overcame motivation. Dieters gained weight as soon as they went back to eating real food.

The efficacy of the product failed to meet expectations. It’s not that the product didn’t work.
It’s just that it didn’t do everything the customer hoped it would do.

We have a similar problem when it comes to marketing. We sometimes expect our marketing messages to do too much heavy lifting and are disappointed with the results. It’s almost impossible for a marketing message to take a customer from awareness to action in a single leap. And yet, becoming the outlier is the holy grail of marketing. We dream of being the bestseller, the blockbuster, the breakthrough. Mostly we’re disappointed by our results.

Often the problem isn’t the efficacy of our marketing—it’s our expectations about the kind of change it’s possible to create, with the resources we have, in the time we’ve allowed. Two questions worth asking at the outset then—what are we asking this marketing message to do and is it reasonable to expect the result we want in the time we have?

Image by Paul Kelly