The key to successful marketing

“Marketers need to escape the ‘urgency trap,’” Flint McLaughlin writes:

They need to transcend the urgent with the important. And this cannot be achieved with yet another “how-to” series. We need to contemplate; indeed, we need to make contemplation part of our normal work cycle.

Marketing, he argues in his book, The Marketer as Philosopher, is as much philosophy as it is science. Scientific marketing experiments like A/B testing can give you data about your customer, but only reflection and thought can help you use that data to understand your customer. And understanding, not clever tactics, is the key to successful marketing.