Lean Marketing: It's Time to Leave the Building

How often do we see businesses, especially start-ups, stuck in a slow process of planning, approving, strategising, and then launching a new product, only to realise their customers actually wanted a different set of features, or didn't think even half the current ones mattered? Marketing faces the same pitfalls.

What Is Lean Marketing?

To minimise this kind of market uncertainty, Eric Ries introduced the concept of Lean Marketing in his book The Lean Startup. The book promotes iterative product design, development, and launch, favouring experimentation over exhaustive strategising when developing a more efficient marketing approach.

According to Ries, startups need to identify their "minimum viable product" (MVP) and get it into the market as quickly as possible, to start gathering customer feedback just as quickly. Marketing should be managed the same way: campaigns should hit the market quickly, and Lean Marketing is fundamentally about staying agile, continuously improving how you acquire and satisfy customers, rather than perfecting a plan before ever testing it.

Three Guidelines for Applying Lean Marketing

1. Get Untested Campaigns Out the Door Quickly

The core objective is speed: instead of spending months researching and planning, lean marketing encourages businesses to test untested assumptions directly in the marketplace. Stop refining the PowerPoint. Go outside the building, test, and test.

Most marketing strategies fail. Ask any marketing expert, and they'll tell you as much. That makes it an unfavourable gamble to pour a marketing budget into extensive upfront planning and strategising. It's wiser to break the budget down, test a variety of ideas in smaller batches, and adapt along the way, rather than investing it all in one or two large spurts.

2. Marketing Isn't One-Way Communication

This busts an old myth: that marketing is inherently one-way. It doesn't have to be. Always have a plan to leverage customer feedback. It can be the difference between making money and burning it.

Testing in small batches matters for exactly this reason: once you've tried a few things, you also have a live channel for collecting customer feedback, rather than waiting until after a full campaign to find out what worked.

3. Agile Development — Iterate on What You Learn

Once you know what customers think of your initial ideas, you move into the third phase: agile development. The process of improving your marketing strategy in direct response to customer feedback. This is how you find the right marketing channels and messages for your business, rather than guessing them upfront.

The Takeaway

"Lean marketing is a cycle that you keep repeating till you find the most efficient marketing strategy for your brand — one that, I believe, will keep changing over time. We've tried this with clients, and although it may seem strange to implement marketing with a lean approach, since it's widely believed that everything needs to be planned, I feel there are still ways to treat marketing in experimental mode. One size doesn't fit at all."