Here’s the thing about marketing principles: everyone’s got them, some are borrowed from someone else’s LinkedIn post, and approximately 73.2% of them sound profound and totally not based on made up statistics.

So when I sat down to think about my own marketing principles—the ones that have survived over 15 years of campaigns, three economic downturns, and that many times I sent an email with a broken link—I realised something: the fundamentals haven’t changed much at all.

The truth about the evolution of marketing

Let me tell you about the marketing evolution myth. You know the one—where technology transforms everything, disrupts all the rules, and suddenly we need entirely new playbooks because “the customer journey has fundamentally shifted”.

Here’s what actually happened: we got better tools. Much better tools. Tools that can tell us when someone’s about to abandon their cart, what colour button makes them click, and whether they prefer being called “valued customer” or just… their actual name (revolutionary).

But people? People are still people. They still want things that solve their problems, make them feel good, or help them look clever at dinner parties. They still make decisions based on a delightful cocktail of logic, emotion, and whatever their mate Dave told them worked for him (hi, Dave!).

The technology changed. The humans didn’t.

And that’s actually fine.

The art of saying no

The biggest revelation of my career wasn’t about growth hacking or attribution modelling or any of the other activities that sound important in board meetings. It was this devastatingly simple truth: focus on what works and discard everything that doesn’t.

(Someone should probably alert the Harvard Business Review.)

But here’s the problem—marketers are magpies. Not just marketers, everyone really. Show us a new channel, a fresh framework, or a metric we haven’t tracked yet, and we’ll abandon whatever we were doing to chase it.

Meanwhile, the boring thing that was actually generating revenue sits in the corner like a neglected houseplant, slowly dying from lack of attention (and water, sorry houseplants).

The intelligence of intelligent interventions

Like with RevLifter (smooth segue, right?). Let’s talk about intelligent offers. Not because I get paid to—well, partly because I get paid to—but because it illustrates something important about how customers actually behave versus how we think they behave.

Most brands approach promotions like they’re feeding ducks at a pond: scatter discounts everywhere and hope something good happens. But customers aren’t ducks (controversial stance, I know). They’re humans with different motivations, different price sensitivities, and different reasons for being on your website at 2:47 AM on a Tuesday.

The biggest misconception about offers? That customers always want them. Some people are ready to buy at full price. Others need a nudge. Others still are just browsing because they’re avoiding doing their tax return (we’ve all been there, Derek).

Technology now lets us figure out which is which and intervene accordingly. It’s not revolutionary—it’s just sensible. Like only offering umbrellas when it’s raining instead of giving them to everyone including people in the desert.

The reassuring consistency of human nature

Here’s what I’ve learned marketing databases to developers, academic publishing to researchers, and eCommerce technology to retailers: the fundamentals never change. You have an audience, you have something to sell them, you need to get in front of them, and you need to clearly demonstrate why they should choose you over everyone else (creatively).

That’s it. That’s marketing.

Everything else is just different ways of executing those four things. Different channels, different messages, different metrics to obsess over. But the core remains beautifully, reassuringly consistent.

Human motivations don’t change much either. People want to feel smart, look good, solve problems, avoid pain, and occasionally treat themselves to something nice. They have cognitive biases that make them do predictably irrational things (like buying extended warranties they’ll never use or abandoning carts because the shipping cost was £2.99 instead of free).

Your job isn’t to fix these biases—it’s to understand them and work with them. Like a martial arts master who redirects force instead of fighting it (this metaphor works, right?).

Who needs an MBA anyway?

Does business school marketing theory translate to actual marketing practice, or if it’s just expensive intellectual theatre?

The answer is yes.

Most of what you learn in business school about marketing you could pick up from a good marketing book and six months of actually doing the job. The real value is the forced thinking time—stepping back from the daily chaos of campaign optimization and channel management to consider strategy from 30,000 feet.

It’s like finally cleaning your desk after months of shuffling papers around. You don’t discover anything revolutionary, but you remember where you put things and why they mattered in the first place.

Advice for young marketers (ages 8+)

If I had to give advice to someone just starting out—and you should be deeply suspicious of anyone offering career advice, including me—it would be this:

First: Don’t assume anything. Do the work. Ask the questions. That campaign everyone says was brilliant? Look at the actual numbers. That strategy everyone swears by? Test it yourself. Your gut instincts are valuable, but data is your friend (most of the time).

Second: There are no shortcuts. Sorry. I know that’s disappointing. But every “hack” and “secret” and “one weird trick” is just someone trying to sell you something. Good marketing takes time, attention, and a surprising amount of spreadsheet wrangling.

Third: Be careful about advice. Including this advice. Consider the source, understand the agenda, and remember that what worked for someone else’s business might be completely wrong for yours.

(WISDERM)

The best practice that isn’t

We build buyer personas like they’re scientific documents instead of useful fictions. We design customer journeys as if people follow neat, linear paths instead of stumbling around like slightly confused tourists.

We create marketing campaigns based on what we think people want instead of asking them what they actually want.

The most important thing you can do as a marketer—more important than any framework or strategy or tactical execution—is listen. Really listen. Not just to what people say they want, but to what they actually do. Not just to what your boss thinks the market needs, but to what the market demonstrates it values.

Your job isn’t to be clever. It’s to be useful.

The point

Marketing isn’t rocket science. It’s not even particularly complicated science. It’s applied psychology with better charts and more acronyms.

The principles that work are the ones that acknowledge this basic truth: we’re trying to help people make decisions that benefit both them and us. Everything else—the technology, the tactics, the latest growth hacking methodology—is just different ways of doing that more effectively.

Focus on what works. Understand your humans. Use technology intelligently. Don’t assume you know better than your customers.

And maybe, just maybe, remember that behind every conversion metric is an actual person who probably has better things to do than engage with your marketing campaign.

But if you can solve a real problem for them, or make their day slightly better, or help them look smart in front of their colleagues? Well, that’s when marketing stops being an interruption and becomes genuinely useful.

And that’s actually the whole point.

This article was written with the assistance of AI.