A New Marketing Challenge: Learning Before Trying to Fix Everything

Starting a new marketing role naturally creates the temptation to prove yourself quickly. You arrive with ideas, experience and plenty of things you think you could improve, and there is an understandable urge to start making things immediately. When I joined Cardiff Met Sport, though, one of the most important things I could do was actually the opposite.

Before trying to change anything, I needed to understand the organisation I had joined.

That might sound obvious, but marketing has a habit of jumping too quickly to tactics. We start discussing websites, campaigns, social media, email, video and advertising before properly diagnosing the situation. Increasingly, I think the quality of the marketing work depends on the quality of the questions that come before it. What is the organisation trying to achieve? Who are the audiences? Where does marketing genuinely create value? What are the existing strengths? Where are the gaps? What is already happening that simply needs to be communicated better?

Moving from a football club environment into university sport made those questions much bigger. Cardiff Met Sport sits across a wide range of areas including student sport, performance sport, community activity, facilities, memberships, events, sporting pathways and the wider story of Cardiff Metropolitan University. That means there is no single Cardiff Met Sport customer and there is certainly no single marketing objective.

One of the things my strategy learning has reinforced is the importance of diagnosis before strategy. Playing to Win talks about choices around where to play and how to win, but those choices mean very little if you do not first understand the environment you are operating in. I increasingly see marketing strategy as a process of narrowing possibilities rather than simply generating more activity.

That was particularly relevant coming into a new organisation. It would have been easy for me to look purely through the lens of my own background in digital marketing and conclude that the answer was more content, a better website or more campaigns. Those things might eventually be part of the answer, but a marketer should not arrive with a favourite tool and go searching for somewhere to use it.

Instead, the first few months have been about understanding the wider system. Where does sport contribute to student experience? How can sporting success strengthen reputation? What does the organisation offer to prospective students, current students, community customers, athletes and partners? Where can digital channels make something easier? Which audiences should different areas prioritise?

This is where market orientation becomes important. Good marketing needs to begin outside the marketing department and, ideally, outside the organisation. Internal stakeholders naturally see the organisation through their own responsibilities. Customers do not. A prospective student, gym member or parent booking a child onto an activity experiences the organisation from an entirely different perspective.

That has probably been the biggest lesson from my first month in the role. Sometimes the best way to demonstrate your value as a marketer is not immediately producing more marketing. It is understanding the business well enough that, when you do start making decisions, they solve the right problems.

I still love ideas and I still naturally want to create things. The difference is that I am becoming much more disciplined about what should happen before the idea.