Change your priorities not your principles — Kelford Labs Weekly

Answering the question: “How to know when to change marketing strategy”

“As we confront competing demands, we experience this uncertainty in our body—that feeling in the pit in our stomach or the racing of our heartbeat.

We naturally want to take actions to reduce the discomfort. To do so, we often avoid, reject, or move away from tensions.”

— Smith & Lewis, Both/And Thinking

I’ve been wrestling with something, and you may have noticed if you’re a regular reader.

Two of my principles seem to be in conflict:

1. You need to give your marketing time to work before you change it
2. You need to change your marketing if it’s unlikely to work

As you know, I’ve had seasons on the mind a lot lately. Seasons of the year, seasons of the market, seasons of the economy, seasons of technology.

Some of this is because questions and conversations keep coming up about whether businesses should change their marketing when the market is chaotic, or if they should wait it out.

And some of this is seeing the benefits of changing my own marketing, and wanting to investigate and engage with the process.

Luckily, Sir Jony Ive stepped in and helped me resolve the apparent conflict.

Last week, an interview between Stripe’s Patrick Collison and former Apple design head Jony Ive made the rounds on social media.

So I sat down to give it a watch and I kept finding myself pausing to transcribe particular moments.

Like this one:

“I do believe we go through chapters and seasons, and the painful part is the conclusion of one and the beginning of the next, where we have to adjust and we have to change our approach. ... I think being clear that we are in a constant state of flux and trying to figure out what I’m not going to compromise, I think that’s the very clear focus on your principles and your values and your motivations.”

— Sir Jony Ive 

That’s just one of the moments that stood out to me, and it’s the one that’s stuck with me since I saw it.

It lodged in my brain because it relates to exactly the conflict I’ve been wrestling with: How do you know if you should wait, or if you should change for the season?

If we give up too easily or too quickly we might miss out on learning, or even delayed success.

We tell kids that patience is the key to everything. We know that good things take time.

But so do the wrong things. Things that don’t work also take a long time. All of it, in fact.

Sticking with something that can’t work just uses up resources we need to preserve for future attempts.

“To achieve the things we want to achieve, we have to be responsive to the way the world is changing around us and the way that we ourselves are changing. That would mean unfixing our goals, but we don’t naturally do that.

...

Inflexible goals aren’t a good fit for a flexible world.”

— Annie Duke, Quit

And this tension feels bad. It feels like indecision, it feels like anxiety. When it’s happened to me, it felt like a prelude to disaster. So how can we know if we should stick it out or change it up?

Well, I’ll tell you how I look at it. And I think this is what Jony Ive helped nudge into place for me. Because it really does all come down to principles, to motivations.

So if I want to know whether I should change my marketing or keep waiting for it to work, I ask myself a few key questions. At Kelford Inc., we call this the DEW system:

• Are you Doing your marketing?
• Are you Enjoying it?
• Is it Working?

Notice that before we start looking at numbers we look at ourselves and our own efforts and their outputs. We notice whether we’re actually performing our marketing actions regularly, on schedule and ad hoc as needed.

And if we are, if we’re consistent and active, then we have to ensure we’re actually enjoying it. I know that sounds silly or trivial but I can’t overstate how important this actually is. Because marketing we don’t like doing we won’t do well.

As I’ve stubbornly rediscovered over the years, half-done, half-hearted marketing doesn’t work. If marketing came down to shoving some posts online and walking away everyone would succeed because everyone can do that, and most people do.

But if I’m actually working at it, and if I’m actually enjoying the marketing I’m doing, then it’s more likely to work. Then I can look at whether or not it’s working for me. But only then.

“The insidious lie follows: ‘We spend all our time talking about attributes because we can easily measure them. Therefore, this is all that matters.’ And that’s a lie.”

— Sir Jony Ive, Stripe Sessions

And what I look for are signs that the marketing can work if I were to give it more time, which are leading indicators of future success.

Things like:

• Are you more confident and clear in sales conversations?
• Are you noticing an uptick in engagement or attention on your marketing content?
• Are your proposals getting easier and faster to write?
• Are you getting more inbound inquiries?

If the answers to one or all of these questions are no, as in:

• You are not more confident in conversations
• You are not noticing any upticks in engagement or attention
• You are not getting faster at your proposals
• And you’re not getting more inbound inquiries...

...then you have to ask yourself what you’re waiting for. Why are you holding out and holding on if nothing appears to be working and there are no signs that it can?

But there’s another wrinkle here before we move on:

What if things used to work but no longer do?

Well, we may have entered a new season.

If our marketing was working but no longer seems to be, we need to ask ourselves if our prospects’ previous priorities still apply. Or if they’ve been recontextualized and reorganized by changing circumstances.

Which means we need to be flexible, fluid. We need to manage the tension between waiting and changing instead of trying to eliminate it.

In fact, we need to realize that change is not a one-time thing. It is a state, not a task.

One we need to find a way to be comfortable with, to indeed even relish.

“Companies that target their products at the circumstances in which customers find themselves, rather than at the customers themselves, are those that can launch predictably successful products. Put another way, the critical unit of analysis is the circumstance and not the customer.”

— Christensen & Raynor, The Innovator’s Solution

A marketing strategy that works starts as a marketing strategy that can work. It starts as one that recognizes the situation we’re in and the circumstances our prospects are in.

One that recognizes their priorities and how those priorities interact and interface with our principles.

And that, right there, is the key: Our principles. Change is scary only when we don’t know what to change, or how. But it’s possible to know by examining our principles.

As an example, I’ve recently had to reassess my own priorities to match my prospects’:

I was previously resistant to creating a custom GPT to house my marketing frameworks, principles, and years of content. I didn’t want anyone to get the idea that an LLM could be trusted, and I didn’t want my name attached to it to give a tacit endorsement.

But, you know what? My clients and prospects are already using ChatGPT. Even if they know it’s not reliable or trustworthy, that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful to them as a thought partner or sounding board.

“If you can link disparate ideas from multiple fields and add a little random creativity, you might be able to create something new.”

— Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence

And I had to admit that at least part of my resistance was fear of having been wrong to resist for so long. I felt vulnerable and anxious (What would people think? What does it say about me?).

Like Annie Duke wrote in Quit, “When it comes to quitting, the most painful thing to quit is who you are.”

But then I realized that my principle is to help, not to be stubborn. It’s to make my clients’ marketing better, not to keep them from trying new things.

So I did the thing I thought I would never do and I made a custom GPT called JoelPT. It contains detailed instructions on all of my tools and frameworks and has access to the more than 500,000 words I’ve written on marketing, content, and demonstrating value over the years.

But my principles still apply. I still don’t think you should outsource all your marketing thinking.

• So this custom GPT is instructed not to write for you (don’t poison your vocabulary with GPT cliches).
• It shouldn’t create content for you (that goes poorly).
• It will usually refuse to think for you (the thinking is the work).

(I say “is instructed,” “shouldn’t,” and “usually refuse” because sometimes it will do those things because LLMs are inherently unreliable.)

Instead, it tells you how to follow my frameworks and marketing philosophy to adjust, improve, and create your own marketing. Not one with dubious IP protections (if ChatGPT wrote it, you don’t necessarily own it) or dodgy best practices advice.

But one grounded in tested principles and real-world experience. So that you maintain your ability to acquire customers by demonstrating your unique value at a distance.

JoelPT is currently being tested by a few trusted peers and will be rolling out to clients who want to try it out in the coming weeks.

“Advisors who rate the highest on reliability will not just deliver their work on time and on spec. Nor will they simply be consistent, even at a level of excellence.

They will also be expert at a variety of small touches that are aimed at client-based familiarity.”

— Maister, Green & Galford, The Trusted Advisor

In a way, everything’s changed, but the principles haven’t.

We just need to adapt how we demonstrate and deliver on our principles to meet the current moment, the present season.

And we need the courage and confidence to change.

That begins by measuring the current situation, and identifying if how we’re currently implementing our principles is less effective or less valuable than it had been.

Admitting we need to change can often feel like admitting we were wrong. But the only wrong thing is not changing when we know we should.

The only mistake is not fixing the ones we’ve already made.

As Jony Ive put it, “We are in a constant state of flux,” which doesn’t mean compromise.

It means we need a “very clear focus on our principles and our motivations.”

So that we can stick to things that can work if only we give them time, and we can pivot away from things that can’t work no matter how much time we give them.

As Leah once said, “You don’t wear your winter coat in August just because you love the colour.”

It’s our principles that stay consistent, not our procedures.

Because our prospects’ priorities may have changed with the season.

Reply to this email to tell me what you think, or ask any questions!

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