The most obvious target is rarely the threat

Marketing: Motion Wave Digital

It is often there to hold your attention while the real threat sits outside the cordon.

That is not a figure of speech. The obvious device is frequently there to be found; it is placed to focus every pair of eyes in the area on a single point.

Sometimes you have just done precisely what somebody intended you to do.

Many businesses have built their entire marketing function on the same principle and call it a ‘dashboard’. But coming from a background in bomb disposal, I was trained to resist that.

Instead, there was a common understanding: strategy sets what the campaign is for, objectives are what need to be achieved to get there, and tactics are what you do this afternoon. That order is not administrative housekeeping. It is the mechanism that stops the one thing directly in front of you from becoming the entire war. Tactics serve objectives. Objectives serve strategy. It only functions well in one direction.

Businesses run the same hierarchy, but often they have quietly reversed it.

How the order got inverted

In 1975, a British economist named Charles Goodhart observed that any statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

That became known as ‘Goodhart’s Law’, and, put more simply, it means that once people are judged or rewarded based on a short-term goal, they will change their behaviour to improve that result – often in ways that undermine the overall strategy.

For example…

Marketing tactics are reported daily, with clear and attributable numbers: reach, clicks, cost per acquisition and return on ad spend. Set against these are the less visible indicators of the business’s actual condition: whether buyers can find you, whether they think of you first and whether you can hold your price under pressure.

And in any organisation, the function that can show its numbers fastest wins the budget argument.

Win that argument for enough consecutive quarters, and you are no longer reporting to the strategy. The strategy is reporting to you.

Two companies, one cordon

Nike is the clearest recent example.

In 2020, it reorganised its marketing around a data-driven and digitally led strategy, and accelerated its shift towards direct-to-consumer retail. Digital sales grew. Direct margins looked handsome.

Everyone was looking at the bomb in front of them.

Meanwhile, outside the cordon, the brand was becoming harder to find on a shelf and arguably, less present in consumers’ minds.

On June 28, 2024, the market repriced the consequences of that strategy in a single session; the largest one-day loss in the company’s history.

Less than three months later the board brought back a thirty-two-year company veteran, and the share price rose around eight per cent before he had made a single decision. Investors were responding to the prospect that the ‘dashboard’ would once again inform strategy rather than define it.

The next example, Airbnb, took a different approach.

In 2020, in response to the pandemic, CEO Brian Chesky suspended most discretionary marketing, including a $540.5 million reduction in performance marketing spend. And before Airbnb resumed that investment, traffic had already recovered to 95 per cent of its 2019 level. That revealed something important. Much of Airbnb’s demand was arriving without paid acquisition, because the brand was already embedded in people’s minds.

Same error, opposite polarity.

One company could not see what it was destroying. The other could not see what it already had. The difference in outcome was not creative quality, channel mix or budget size. It was command: whether anybody in the building had the authority to look away from the obvious device.

Putting the order back

The question for a director is not whether marketing is measured. Of course it should be. And anybody arguing otherwise is selling something.

The real question is around direction of travel. Do the tactics report to the strategy, or has the strategy started reporting to the tactics?

There is a fast diagnostic.

Write down every metric discussed in your last three marketing reviews. If all of them describe activity-reach, engagement, clicks and cost per acquisition, but none describe the asset – whether buyers can find you, think of you first, pay your price – then the ‘dashboard’ is in the chair, not you.

Goodhart’s warning was never that measurement fails. It was that measurement succeeds. It reshapes whatever you point it at, patiently and efficiently, until the number is thriving. The measure always wins.

And that is precisely why it must never be given command.