Most marketers we know think growth is magic, whether consciously or subconsciously. Put in more budget. Put the ad in front of more people. We’ll figure it out somehow. And sometimes it works. This happens usually in the early days of anything. There is a lot of unknown, the rule book hasn’t been written, and in that Wild West, there are many who get lucky, as is the case where there are many who lose.

At Group LGBTQ+, we don’t think of growth as a magic bullet. There’s no secret to growth. There’s no magic formula. Because sometimes the products suck and the brands suck and the marketing campaign will always fall flat. The blame starts flying and fingers point in this order: the media doesn’t work; let’s change the agency; we’ll fire the marketing team.

And many many agencies promise how they’ll do differently, so that you’ll get a different experience from your previous marketing team. Yet, we keep on rotating through marketing teams, over and over.

So, here’s our proposal: plants and babies.

A plant:

When it’s put in the right environment, it will grow.

A baby:

When the baby’s in the right environment, they magically transform overnight into a grumpy teenager, and their speed of growth is almost always a surprise to their parents.

So the understanding of growth is: change.

The requirement of change is: a different input and a different default state.

Our proposal:

Growth does not happen by brute force. Instead, growth happens naturally - without external assistance - by creating the environment and space that meets the precondition necessary that allows for growth to happen. Once that condition is met, growth will just happen naturally, magically. And as long as that condition is not met, growth will never happen, or happen with tremendous difficulty.

This doesn’t mean there’s no work to do. It’s simply that: everybody thinks the work is in making something grow, where the work is actually in finding the right preconditions. We argue most marketers are doing the wrong work.

Think of Mars:

If Mars had the atmosphere of Earth, something will probably grow there. That’s all there is to it.

A lot of brands want that “marketing genius”, because they really want to be differentiated from the competition. Except:

1. Any other brand with the same precondition met will also grow,

2. Most successful brands are not actually differentiated, they just established their market positioning and gained market share at the right timing.

And, when something grow, nothing grows in a vacuum. It’s not just your brand that’s growing. When something grows, it’s part of an environment, an ecosystem, a part of everything else that is happening at the same time - a forest, a hotbed of mosquitoes, a moldy piece of bread.

And that’s how we drive change - together.

Whether it is brand growth, increase in sales, or social change - we don’t experience the world in isolation. Even when the experiences are felt on our own, it is together that we experience our world and our era.