Thinking

LeadershipPrinciples08Tracy Smith3 min read

Principle 03: Psychology first, tactics second.

Every brand, team, and customer decision is a decision about people.

Marketing has a tactics addiction.

The new platform. The new ad format. The new hook template that "broke the algorithm" for some guy on LinkedIn with a podcast microphone the size of a toaster. We chase them because tactics feel like progress. You can put a tactic on a slide. You can launch it by Tuesday.

Then it stops working, because everyone else found the same slide.

Tactics expire. Psychology does not. Tactics are milk. Psychology is honey.

Tactics expire. Psychology does not.

I know, because I have chased every one of them. I have rebuilt landing pages because a webinar said orange buttons convert better. I have posted at 7:42 a.m. because an expert swore it was the magic minute. I have said "synergy" in a meeting without irony, and I would like that on the record as a cry for help. The tactics changed every quarter. My customers did not. They wanted the same things they always wanted, and I was too busy repainting buttons to ask.

Nobody buys a bag

STM makes cases and bags. You might think we sell protection. We do, technically. "Technically" is the most boring word in marketing.

But nobody wakes up wanting a laptop case. They want to stop worrying about dropping a $1,500 machine. A parent wants the school iPad to survive a twelve-year-old. A traveler wants to feel like the organized person they keep promising themselves they will become.

A Harvard professor named Clayton Christensen, a man who was out-thinking algorithms before algorithms were cool, had a name for this: the job to be done. It is the tidbit I think about every time I write a product page. People don't buy products. They hire them to make progress in their lives. The feature is the receipt. The feeling is the purchase.

People don't buy products. They hire them to make progress in their lives.

When we built our messaging around the customer's problem instead of our product's specs, the words got simpler and the work got better. The customer is the hero. We are the guide holding the map and a very good zipper.

Teams are people too (unfortunately for spreadsheets)

The same rule applies inside the building.

A reorg is not a box diagram. It is twelve people each wondering whether they just got demoted, and refreshing the org chart like it is a lottery result. A new process is not a flowchart. It is a group of humans deciding whether to trust you.

Most team problems that look like strategy problems are actually status problems, fear problems, or clarity problems wearing a strategy costume. Fix the human part and the plan usually fixes itself.

Why this matters more with AI

AI just made tactics free. Your competitor's intern has the same content calendar you do. So does the intern's cousin.

Anyone can generate a content calendar, a funnel, fifty ad variations, and a landing page before lunch. If your edge was execution of known tactics, your edge just became a commodity.

What AI cannot do on its own is care about the right thing. It does not know what your customer lies awake worrying about until you tell it.

So I use AI the other way around. Before a campaign, I ask it to play my skeptical customer. Argue with me. Tell me why they would not buy. Tell me what they would be embarrassed to admit. It is a cheap, fast, and humbling focus group. No catering. No one-way mirror. Just a machine politely explaining that my headline is boring.

Then we pick the tactics.

The order matters

  1. Who is this person?
  2. What do they want, and what are they afraid of?
  3. What would make them feel smart for choosing us?
  4. Now, and only now, what is the tactic?

Start with the tactic and you get activity. Start with the person and you get results.

Start with the person and you get results.

Tactics are the vehicle. Psychology is the map. Driving fast without a map is just a more expensive way to get lost.