Thesis-driven marketing

A marketing message is an argument. “AI has overwhelmed talent acquisition teams” is a niche argument, but it’s an argument nonetheless—something that can be debated, defended, and proven right or wrong. You’re making a claim about the world and asking a buyer to act on it.

A lot of marketing today is graded on whether the claim is compelling but not necessarily on whether it’s true. I’ve been thinking about this in light of some popular, long-form essays like Leopold Aschenbrenner’s “Situational Awareness” or Dario Amodei’s “The Adolescence of Technology,” essays that launched a thousand investors.

The very first line in Aschenbrenner’s tome reads, “You can see the future first in San Francisco.” It’s catchy, but is it true? Arguably, you can see the future first in New York or Shanghai or Tokyo. What does “the future” even mean, and how does one “see” it? Nonetheless, it is an argument, no matter how imprecise, empirical, or down right wrong it might be. The eponymous fund that started after Aschenbrenner’s essay was published has since imploded. The argument created conditions for the market—and massive leverage—to prove it right or wrong.

The same is true, however, for a marketing engagement even before getting to the messaging phase. Our pitches, strategies, and even monthly analyses deserve the same argumentation, logic, and falsifiability. Is it logically sound? Is it defensible? Is it precise? Can it be proven wrong?

I’ve long argued, for example, that the most cost-effective way to do content marketing is to create a podcast. From one recording you can create a dozen multimedia assets on every channel that matters. I think it’s true and defensible. It’s also useful because most leaders don’t have the time to sit down and type out their thoughts, since they prefer to talk anyway, saving time while providing scale. For many reasons a podcast is a perfect workflow for cost-effective content that builds trust with your audience.

I’ve also argued that in order to do marketing the right way—the way that actually gets results—is to first start with your message or story, develop that into a differentiating and scalable visual brand, supported by a next-gen tech stack. Only after these steps can you get the most benefit from content marketing.

But historically I’ve argued for these positions as a methodology and not necessarily as client-by-client theses. Our Scale practice and reviewing our analytics and lead-gen tactics in more detail has me rethinking how we could do marketing, where every engagement or monthly call starts with or reviews a thesis.

A thesis in this case is a one-page memo or brief that defines our client’s buyer, what that buyer wants, where they can be reached, what format will reach them, and what the outcomes will be of doing so, particularly quantitative outcomes around leads, conversion, and revenue, especially with a date on it. In my experience, all else in marketing is noise. Although there’s some benefit for brand awareness and so on, at the end of the day clients hire us to deliver revenue. 

The headline of a thesis might be something like, “Twelve posts a month on LinkedIn plus two podcast episodes on YouTube will produce 40 qualified conversations a quarter, and if it doesn’t, the buyer isn’t where we think they are.” The thesis makes the case for its own condition to be falsified.

Now, some performance marketers or growth hackers might laugh. “That’s just marketing!” Of course, I do ask many of these questions to understand the initial scope or build a message framework. I think where I’m heading is to think more clearly about how to write down our argument ahead of time so we can measure it and test it, to agree in advance on what success looks like in quantitative terms.

To be sure, marketing addresses many problems that are difficult to quantify or tie directly to revenue, like building credibility with a more professional visual identity, preparing for a sale with a modern website—hell, even creating a master PowerPoint template can help empower a sales team. This work could make its way into the thesis as well, but written more like “Friction in the sales process is a result of not having a clear enough pitch deck,” after which we’d measure whether that work increased sales velocity in the following quarter.

Developing a thesis before we touch one asset will help to answer more clearly and concretely why clients hire us in the first place: What is the problem they’re trying to solve or the quantifiable goal they’re trying to reach? It will help get to the heart of the matter from day one rather than six months down the road: Does our argument hold water and is it clear enough to develop the strategy and the assets required to hit our goals?

Reading a dozen books by the economist Thomas Sowell has taught me that much of what we say day to day is actually empirical: Compared to what? At what cost? He likes to say that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. A thesis could answer those questions, illuminating tactics, timelines, and trade-offs. After the engagement is finished, we’ll have a completed “book” that we can give back to clients on whether we answered that question or confirmed the thesis.

There’s a reason to formalize this process now. The traditional CMO role is being replaced by other titles like Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), Chief Commercial Officer (CCO), or Chief Growth Officer (CGO). A Forrester study published in July described how the CMO title has declined for the third year in a row for Fortune 500 companies, falling from 49% using the title last year to 36% this year. Expectations are rising to more clearly focus on experimentation, quantitative growth drivers, and a suite of tools for pinpoint lead generation so go-to-market (GTM) teams can focus solely on revenue growth. Recall the “agentic revenue” post from a few weeks ago.

So, I’m betting that the best place to start is with a one-page argument called a thesis. Learning formal logic in seminary taught me how to write a claim that can be falsified. Financial modeling in business school taught me how to put a number on it. It turns out that both skills might prove more useful in marketing than I expected.