A First Principles Approach to Marketing

Growth Marketing, Content Marketing, SEO, SEM, CPM, Click-Rate, Bounce Rate, etc, etc. It’s a well-known fact that marketing bandies about terms like candy, and each one has their moment in the sun as the new ‘it’ strategy to grow a business. But are they first principles marketing?

But the truth is there is no one-size-fits-all best strategy – it all comes down to you, your business, and your customers (and not in that order – but more on that later).

That’s why it’s best to take a first principles approach to marketing.

First Principles in Business

To the unanointed, a first principle is a fact or assumption that cannot be deduced any further. It’s used as a way of thinking in contrast to the common way we approach problems – analogous reasoning (to look for something similar and make assumptions based on that similarity).

In business, analogous reasoning is relied upon heavily. For example, when you’re looking forward to next year’s budget, the first thing most of us do is look at our budget this year and extrapolate from there.

Crafting a budget via first principles reasoning, however, would likely bring a different result. It starts with a premise along the lines of, ‘what do we absolutely need in the budget to keep the doors open?’

From there, you build a list of essential line items (payroll for staff, insurance, licenses, taxes, rent, internet access, et cetera). And while there’s a chance it comes out to be the same number as it would if you just carried forward this year’s budget, more often than not you would find somewhere on your P&L where you could save some money.

First Principles Marketing

When it comes to marketing, it starts with the somewhat meta question of, ‘What is marketing?’

Well, to answer the question – marketing is the process of getting people interested in your company’s product or service. Which begets the next question, ‘What is the best way to get someone interested in your product or service?’

From there we can get even more meta and ask, ‘Well, how do you get interested in a company’s product or service?’

The answer commonly varies depending if you’re looking for something you want or something you need — and this directly leads us to first principles marketing.

Let’s say the drain on your kitchen sink broke – it’s something that needs to get fixed and quickly. If someone doesn’t have a plumber they already know and like, there are two places they commonly go – they Google ‘Plumbers near me’ or they call a friend and ask if they have a plumber they like.

In this scenario, marketing for the plumbing business would need to heavily skew towards a focus on SEO and word-of-mouth to grow their business.

This same strategy won’t be very effective for an IT company targeting law firms. While, yes, a law firm may have an urgent need for an IT fix – that’s not the best way for an IT company looking to sell large-retainers of managed services to gain entry to their clientele (read: sure it works, but it’s not ideal). So, we’d have to ask, ‘How does an attorney get interested in better IT?’

Simple: you give them the information they are looking for, perhaps when frustrated with breaking tech services, and a lot of it – so as to show them your expertise, and gain their trust by getting to know and see that you have not only addressed similar issues but prevented them through quality pro-active services.

Blogging about individual solutions that with which you help your clients will allow you to show up with the precise solution to the problem they are searching for – when they take to Google in search of answers.

Now, when your product is a want and not a need – the approach is different, yet again.

Let’s say you sell running socks – great ones. It’s estimated that 50 million Americans (15% of the country) participate in some form of running. Launching a campaign to target 50 million people is prohibitively expensive for most companies. So, you need to trim your niche down.

About 0.1% of the US population (~328,000) runs races, and they are more likely to talk with other runners about the products they use than more casual runners. If, as a sock company, you can talk about the features that make your product better (less friction = less blisters, sweat absorption, arch support) – and target geographic regions based on the race season in the area with social ads, sponsor races to get a free sample in race packets, you’re going to be able to get a lot of runners interested in your product.

Once you have that loyal base of support in a region, you can have a strong pitch to national distributors like sporting goods stores for them to carry your product and you’re off to the races (pun intended).

The moral of the story: before you look at what should be the components of your marketing strategy, focus on answering the question of how your prospective buyer becomes interested in your company. If you can answer that question, the campaign should build itself successfully as a first principles marketing campaign.