How Marketing is Like a Triathlon, Part 1

Perhaps more than any other discipline in business, marketing requires a multidisciplinary world view and tool-kit. I think this accounts for my observation, admittedly unscientifically founded, that marketers represent a disproportionately high percentage of triathletes. This may be due more to a form of brain damage, though I think that it may instead lie in the similarities between marketing and triathlon.

First, success in both requires a commitment to the long term. Both require a multiyear planning horizon, each broken into shorter mesocycles, each with a different emphasis. Building strength, endurance, technique take as long as building brand recognition, customer loyalty, and market share.  Each also requires a number of tools and disciplines to achieve, so comfort with complexity are the norm for marketer and triathletes.  This complexity can diffuse effort and focus on end results, so a strong sense of the goal and where we are in the training/business cycle are critical.

Marketers and triathletes are also subject to a continuing, almost overwhelming barrage of new tools and technologies that purport to help them reach their goals faster/easier/cheaper than ever before.  So the ability to separate value from hype are critical for saving the time, money, and energy that might otherwise be spent on shiny new, useless, junk.  Between the two, I'm not sure who's subjected to more unsubstantiated new product introductions, but it's pretty close to a dead heat.  There's quite a lot of hype about social networking now that promises to radically change marketing (true) and make every other tool obsolete (not very likely).  Much of that hype sounds like the promises of equipment manufacturers extolling the virtues of aerodynamic triathlon stuff - from bikes to helmets to water bottles.  The ability to avoid getting swept away by the promise of an easier life is critical, just as important as recognizing a new tool/technique that can in fact act as a game changer.  In either case, marketers and triathletes (the successful ones, anyway) are especially good at discerning the difference.

Next time: Part II - Marketing is like swimming in a muddy, debris-filled river