The challenge for marketers is to stay focused

A marketer’s life is a busy one, dealing with a multitude of challenging tasks from brand strategy to pricing, communications, innovation, distribution, shopper marketing, design, market research, choosing and managing agency partners, to balancing the internal team’s skills and experience mix.

It can easily lead to fragmentation and a feeling of being driven by – rather than driving – events.

Yet when we step back, we can see that there are essentially just two core challenges a marketer needs to address: building effective brand associations and building in effective short cuts.

Keeping this in mind doesn’t reduce the diversity of the work that needs to be done, but it can speed things up and increase satisfaction. Instead of just ticking off another meeting or task the marketer can see how each step leads to addressing one – or sometimes even both – of the essential challenges that will ultimately determine success or failure.