OVER TO YOU
Master the principles
How adoption turns marketing ideas into compounding impact.
Resources to accompany chapter 10 of Make Marketing Matter: Change perceptions. Drive performance. Architect growth.
Chapter snapshot
Each principle holds transformative power, but marketing often sees the need for change long before anyone else. Push too hard and frustration follows all round. Often the answer is to slow down and ask two things: what's the business ready for, and what's the next 1% to get there?
Chapter 10 shows how to champion principle-based change and how to audit where each principle stands today. The starting point is Design in 3D then working through the other principles in sequence, defining and demonstrating each before delivering it.
It also introduces principle thinking: applying the principles as a lens to a business challenge someone else owns. Pick a struggling outcome metric, work with its owner, and bring marketing's three-dimensional view alongside the operational fixes. That's how a principle stops being a marketing project and becomes how things are done.
Definitions in this chapter
principle thinking enabler.
Applying the principles as a lens to business challenges. Contributing insight, three-dimensional thinking and marketing expertise to solutions that others own.
Check In
Take a moment to reflect on how ready your business is to adopt the principles.
- Which principles are embedded in your business today, which are aspirational, and which have been tried and abandoned?
- When marketing sees the need for change, does it bring others on the journey, or push ahead before they're ready?
- What's the next 1% your business is ready for?
Take Action
Audit the current state of the five principles. Ignore the results for now and focus on how each principle exists today. Ask:
- Is someone in the business well positioned to deliver the principles?
- Which are less of a focus today?
- Which are in place in the business's eyes, but marketing would say there's more work to do?
- Which feel out of reach with the current mindset of the boardroom or teams?
- Which have been tried before and stepped away from?
Then dig into each principle individually. Is it defined? Is it being delivered? Can its effect on outcomes and growth be demonstrated?
The gaps show you where to start.
Bring it to the room
Principles are adopted fastest when they help solve a problem someone else owns. Bring principle thinking to a challenge the business already cares about.
Choose a business outcome or growth goal metric that isn't performing well. Sit down with its owner and explore the blockers, the audience feedback and the fixes already in progress. Then ask together: is there a principle that could help improve this metric alongside the operational improvements? What could we focus on over a short period, and how will we measure success?
Operational thinking and principle thinking work best side by side. The owner keeps the metric and marketing adds the outside-in view.
Related reading
Leading Change by John P. Kotter
Leading Change identifies the common mistakes organisations make when driving change, such as underestimating urgency, lacking a strong guiding coalition and declaring victory too soon. It sets out an eight-stage process to avoid them. It's the book to read if you're trying to drive change in your business and want a proven framework for bringing others with you.
Harvard Business Review Press, 1996.
Read the Harvard Business Review article here >
Get the full picture
This page includes additional resources to support Chapter 10: Master the principles in the book Make Marketing Matter.
The chapter shows how to move the five principles from ideas to adoption so they become a lens for business challenges and deliver compounding impact. Make Marketing Matter is a comprehensive guide for marketing leaders and boardroom colleagues who want to build a marketing ecosystem that shows impact, links to outcomes, and leads to recognisable revenue.
30
Definitions
Clear, precise language that gives you a shared vocabulary for your ecosystem approach.
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Practical Exercises
Consistent, repeatable actions that bring the ecosystem approach to life.
Preorder Make Marketing Matter
Make Marketing Matter: Change perceptions. Drive performance. Architect growth. is out on 20th October 2026.
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