The Marketing Umbrella

The word "marketing" is doing way too much work at most consumer brands.

I've come to see it as 5 separate jobs in one word 👇

I call this The Marketing Umbrella.

When most people say marketing, they usually mean the ads and the content running this month.

But that's a pretty thin slice of what's under the umbrella.

And that's why some brands keep dumping spend into marketing
and still don't grow.

5 distinct jobs are sitting under marketing that all need to be working:

1️⃣ Signals
↳ The discipline of deciding what to measure and what to ignore.
↳ Data only earns its keep when it's allowed to actually change a decision.

2️⃣ Positioning
↳ Why a customer picks you before any spend runs.
↳ The story your brand is telling before anyone clicks a single ad.

3️⃣ Creative System
↳ How creative gets briefed, made, tested, and iterated week over week.
↳ Without a system behind it, you're spending a lot of money on creative and hoping it works.

4️⃣ Acquisition
↳ Where you put spend once the upstream work is done.
↳ Most acquisition problems trace back to positioning or creative once you dig in.

5️⃣ Retention and LTV
↳ What happens after the first purchase, and how often that ever turns into a second one.
↳ Skip this, and you'll end up paying to acquire the same customer twice, which is one of the least interesting ways to spend money.

Most brands I work with are strong on the visible parts of the umbrella.

Almost none of them are strong on all 5.

That's why the ads keep running and the channels keep firing
without the growth ever really catching up.

The sooner you build all 5 parts of the umbrella,
the harder your marketing gets to derail.

Which part of the umbrella does your team actually have figured out?

♻️ Repost if your team keeps spending on marketing and the growth isn't following.
And follow me, Jacob Rokeach, for more on building consumer brands that scale without losing the plot.