Getting to the root of a problem can have quite the butterfly effect in marketing teams and businesses more generally. In some ways, it’s like how you get the best out of ChatGPT or Claude: if you don’t use clear, logical questions or prompts that directly address the root problem you want to solve, then you’re likely to get irrelevant drivel back. 

If a problem isn’t diagnosed correctly, then the knock-on impact can be huge. The KPIs and workloads of whole teams and annual budgets rest on the assumption that the problem they’re being asked to solve is the right one; that their work is directly focused on what will generate the most value. 

So if the initial diagnosis of the problem is flawed, in some scenarios you could be looking at years of inefficient work and millions in wasted budget. The bigger the team, the bigger the impact of this and, looking more broadly, the greater the risk of inviting negative stereotypes of marketing as the wooly, wasteful team that can’t quite explain what value they’re bringing.

An example here is the fundamental question of how marketing helps B2B organisations to grow. Too often this is focused on short term metrics because they are the levers most easily understood and controlled, and the problem being solved then becomes something like “how can we quickly generate more short-term clicks and enquiries?”.

When it’s framed this way, marketing naturally overindexes on demand based tactics and starts down the slippery slope to the “performance penalty” as WARC have called it.  

How can this be avoided?

Be the toddler in the room

With so much at stake, it pays for marketers to push back if they’re not totally clear on why they’re being asked to do something. Some might recognise this as a particular trait in B2B organisations, where marketing isn’t always the dominant force it can be in the likes of FMCG, and therefore more exposed to poor problem-solving elsewhere in the business.

At its root, this is a case of applying strategic naivety – that is to say, asking why as relentlessly as a toddler until you can link marketing plans right back to the final boss of “why” in the business. Usually, that results in identifying who owns the capital and how that’s returning for them; you may then be several steps of logic down to how marketing is helping to do this – perhaps fewer in some cases such as businesses being packaged for sale.

This commercial rationale becomes your core tool in hacking through the undergrowth to the lost temple of logic. Marketing is after all a commercial enterprise by nature, and so it should always be driven by clear commercial logic. But that doesn’t mean everything must be a 10x performance marketing AI enabled hellscape; creating value in the form of increased pricing power or lower CPA through growing the brand is just as valid as direct lead gen.

A practical way of applying this is the Five Whys developed by Toyota. Developed to diagnose manufacturing problems, this requires you to define a problem then ask why to address the next layer up. Now clearly the number of whys is pretty arbitrary and will change between applications, but it’s a neat, memorable way to apply toddler-level thinking.

A marketing example of this would be asking why the sales team are crying out for a plush new brochure. They’ll probably say something about needing to show customers the full range of products. Ask why they need to do this now, and you’ll probably start talking about their numbers for the quarter. Ask why that’s more urgent than usual, and they might reveal some issue with a particular product line or category not selling as well as expected. Ask why again, and you might learn that customers just don’t seem aware of the benefits. That leads you to a much more interesting, commercial framing of the problem than simply “throw more satin finish 170gsm brochures into the void.”

Don’t get stuck in the basement

Achieving true toddler status can require you making a nuisance of yourself. In many cases we come across, misdiagnosis doesn’t come from a lack of clarity at the top but competing priorities and views amongst those tasked with implementation – such as the example above.

Especially if marketing is not always at the top table, assumptions can be made about the role it is playing before someone that knows what they’re doing even enters the conversation. Marketing, a profession sadly without the same certified rigour of our legal or finance colleagues, can suffer from being sidelined – despite enjoying the advantage of a broad view across customers, products and other components of a business.

Marketers need to make the most of these assets to provide unique points of view as commercial strategy is formed – after all, getting clarity on where you fit is going to help make sure resources are used to the best possible effect.

An enviable point of view

Marketers should have a pretty unique point of view on all of the above – after all their roles cross more elements of the business than many others. Using this vantage point can prove invaluable in releasing your inner toddler.