FP-1. Marketing exists to sell.
Every marketing activity is judged by whether it moves someone toward a purchase, a renewal or a referral. Awareness, engagement and applause are means, never the end.
FP-2. Start with the customer and work backward.
Strategy, product, message and channel all begin with a specific person and what they need. Technology, tools and internal opinions come after.
FP-3. The product is the first play.
Marketing amplifies what the product actually is. It can speed a good product up. It can't save a bad one, and it shouldn't try.
FP-4. Tell the truth.
Trust is the one asset every campaign either builds or spends. Claims must be true, complete and fair to the customer and to the competitor.
FP-5. Focus means saying no.
You get one shot at a small piece of the customer's memory. Pick who it's for, what you want them to remember and the few things you'll do excellently. Then cut the rest.
FP-6. Specific beats clever.
Clear, concrete, factual communication persuades. Generalities, buzzwords and showmanship are noise.
FP-7. Test, don't argue.
The market settles what meetings can't. Measure what people do, not what they say, and decide on evidence before you scale.
FP-8. Every touchpoint builds or bleeds the brand.
A brand is a long-term investment made one impression at a time. Every ad, page, email, package and service interaction adds to it or takes from it.
Marketing campaigns must operate from a documented strategy.
Running marketing without a documented strategy means every campaign exists in isolation — with no shared goals, no learning accumulation, and no way to hold channels accountable to business outcomes.
• Wasted spend • No learning accumulation
Marketing must target a clearly defined audience.
Marketing that tries to speak to everyone ends up resonating with no one. Every campaign needs a single primary audience — defined before creative, copy, or targeting decisions are made.
• No resonance • Weak conversion rates
Marketing must align with the correct customer.
Attracting the wrong buyers creates a downstream problem that no amount of optimization can fix — it inflates metrics while distorting what's actually working.
• Sales friction • Misleading performance metrics
Marketing strategy must dictate tool usage.
When tools drive strategy instead of the other way around, execution becomes shallow and reporting gets shaped by platform defaults rather than business goals.
• Shallow execution • Leaning on tool analytics to define success can mask real results
Marketing should optimize for sustainable value creation.
Chasing viral moments and short-term spikes builds nothing durable. Sustainable marketing growth comes from compounding channels, consistent positioning, and optimizing for retention alongside acquisition.
• No compounding growth
Marketing messaging must communicate clear value.
If a prospect can't explain what you do and why it matters after reading your homepage, your messaging has failed. Clear value communication is the difference between traffic and conversion.
• Confusion kills conversion
Marketing should communicate outcomes before features.
Customers don't buy features — they buy results. Leading with specs and capabilities instead of the outcome the buyer actually wants is one of the most common conversion killers.
• Low engagement
Every marketing asset must contain a clear next step.
A page, ad, or piece of content without a clear CTA leaves the user with nowhere to go. One primary action per asset — every time — is the baseline requirement for any marketing touchpoint.
• Lost conversions
Messaging must remain consistent across channels.
When your ads say one thing, your website says another, and your emails say a third, you're not running integrated marketing — you're running three separate brands with no coherent voice.
• Trust erosion
Creative should prioritize clarity over novelty.
Beautiful creative that confuses people doesn't convert. When design or conceptual cleverness gets in the way of comprehension, the creative has failed its primary job.
• Low comprehension
Marketing channels should be executed with strategic depth.
Spreading thin across too many channels produces underperformance everywhere. Owning one or two channels with real depth consistently outperforms a scattered presence across five.
• No channel mastery
Marketing organizations should diversify acquisition risk.
When more than 70% of leads come from a single source, one algorithm update or platform change can collapse your pipeline overnight. Acquisition diversification is risk management, not a nice-to-have.
• Platform risk
Campaigns should be continuously optimized.
Running the same creative, messaging, and targeting for months without review is how audience fatigue sets in silently. Scheduled optimization cycles are basic campaign hygiene, not advanced practice.
• Audience fatigue
SEO content must align with user intent.
Ranking for keywords that don't match what your buyer actually needs produces traffic without conversion — and gives a false impression of SEO success while wasting content investment.
• False success metrics
Paid media campaigns must have a defined funnel role.
Running paid campaigns without assigning a specific funnel stage — awareness, consideration, or conversion — makes it impossible to evaluate performance, optimize spend, or build a coherent paid strategy.
• Inefficient CAC
Success metrics must be defined before execution.
Defining what success looks like after a campaign launches means you're measuring backward. Pre-defined KPIs create accountability, enable optimization, and prevent gut-feel from passing as analysis.
• No accountability
Marketing measurement should prioritize business outcomes.
Likes, impressions, and reach feel good to report — but they don't pay the bills. Measurement that doesn't connect to revenue, pipeline, or behavior is decoration masquerading as analysis.
• Misaligned incentives
Tracking systems must produce reliable data.
Broken tracking means every decision downstream is built on corrupted data. Unreliable attribution, misfiring events, and inconsistencies across tools make real optimization structurally impossible.
• Bad decisions based on bad data
Organizations should maintain a consistent attribution methodology.
When every team uses a different attribution model, channel performance becomes a political debate instead of an analytical one. A single documented methodology is what ends the argument.
• Paralysis
Reporting systems must have clear ownership.
Dashboards without owners go stale, break silently, and eventually get ignored. Assigned accountability for reporting quality is what keeps data trustworthy and decisions grounded in reality.
• Loss of trust
Marketing technology stacks should remain intentional, streamlined, and operationally effective.
An unmanaged tech stack accumulates tools nobody fully uses, costs nobody fully tracks, and creates integrations nobody fully understands. Intentional tooling means every platform has a defined owner, purpose, and measured ROI.
• Cost and confusion
Marketing systems and automations must be documented and governed.
Shadow tech — unapproved scripts, undocumented integrations, and unmanaged automations — is one of the most common sources of site risk, data leaks, and operational fragility in marketing organizations.
• Risk and fragility
AI-generated outputs remain subject to human review and brand governance.
AI without a review process publishes hallucinations, erodes brand voice, and creates compliance risk at scale. Every AI-generated output needs a human checkpoint before it goes anywhere near a live channel.
• Brand erosion • Inaccurate information published • Data leaks and risks
Automation should only scale validated and effective processes.
Automating a broken process doesn't fix it — it amplifies it at scale. Before building any automation, the underlying strategy, segmentation, and execution must first be validated manually.
• Scales inefficiency
Marketing promises must align with the actual customer experience.
When marketing overpromises and the product underdelivers, you don't just lose a customer — you lose their trust, their referrals, and their reviews. Alignment between messaging and reality is the foundation of retention.
• Churn and reputation damage
Important customer information should be communicated clearly and transparently.
Burying limitations, fees, or terms in fine print is a short-term conversion tactic that creates long-term trust damage. Transparency upfront builds the kind of customer relationship that actually compounds.
• Trust loss
Audience attention should be treated as a limited and valuable resource.
Emailing too often, posting too much, and retargeting too aggressively burns through your audience's goodwill faster than most marketers track. Frequency without value trains your audience to ignore you.
• List decay
Marketing responsibility continues after conversion.
The moment a lead converts is not the end of marketing's job — it's the beginning of retention. Onboarding, education, loyalty, and advocacy all live inside the marketing function and directly drive LTV.
• Lost LTV
Marketing organizations should maintain documented operational playbooks.
When processes exist only in someone's head, every departure, every new hire, and every agency transition risks losing critical institutional knowledge. Documented playbooks are what make marketing organizations scalable.
• Slow scaling • Mistakes that cost real money and time
Marketing organizations should conduct regular performance reviews and learning cycles.
Without structured retrospectives, marketing teams repeat the same mistakes campaign after campaign. Regular Film Review sessions are how organizations actually improve — not by luck, but by design.
• No improvement loop
Marketing experiences must load fast enough to hold attention.
A slow page loses the visitor before the message ever lands. You already paid to get them there, and load time decides whether that spend was wasted.
• Traffic you already paid for never sees the offer
Sites must be readable by the machines that rank and cite them.
Search engines and AI answer engines only know what they can crawl and parse. A site without clean robots rules, a sitemap, canonicals and structured data is invisible no matter how good the content is.
• The site exists but cannot be found or cited
Search authority must be earned before it can be ranked.
Search engines rank what other credible sites vouch for. Publishing more content against a competitor with far more external validation does not close the gap on its own.
• Good content cannot outrank a competitor the market already trusts
Brand awareness must convert into non-branded discovery.
Branded search measures the awareness you already have. Non-branded search is the only organic channel that brings you people who had never heard of you, and a high branded share means growth depends entirely on other channels.
• Growth is capped at the size of the audience that already knows you
The headline must do the heaviest lifting.
Most people read the headline and nothing else. A headline that doesn't pick out the right reader and promise a benefit wastes the copy, design and spend behind it.
• Most of the audience never gets past the headline, so a weak one wastes everything below it.
Claims must be specific and provable.
Generic claims are invisible because everyone makes them. Specific facts are believable, memorable and hard for competitors to copy.
• Claims get discounted to zero and the brand blends into the category.
Big bets need a small test first.
A test campaign answers in weeks, for a fraction of the budget, what a full launch answers in a year at full cost. Scale certainty, not hope.
• Expensive failures that could have been cheap lessons.
Win on your merits, not your rival's flaws.
Attacking competitors spends your airtime on their name and makes you look small. Fair, factual comparison is fine; trash talk isn't a strategy.
• You advertise the rival, look petty and invite retaliation.
Do the research before you write a word.
Great marketing starts with homework. Copy written before you understand the product, the buyer and the competition can only be generic.
• Generic work, missed angles and messaging that answers questions nobody asked.
Keep running winners until the data says stop.
Your team sees the ad a thousand times; your customer sees it twice. Retire creative when performance drops, not when the team gets bored. Pairs with Rule 13.
• You throw away your most efficient asset.
Speak the customer's language, not yours.
Customers search, scan and decide in their own words. Copy written in your internal vocabulary is harder to find and harder to believe.
• Lower comprehension, lower search visibility, lower trust.
Presentation signals quality before the product does.
People judge the book by its cover. Every first impression tells them how good the product is before they ever use it.
• Buyers mark the product down before trying it.
Give value before you ask for the sale.
The fastest way to sell is to let the product or the expertise prove itself first. Offer service before asking for commitment.
• Cold audiences bounce and CAC rises.
Campaigns need a big idea.
Without a big idea, campaigns blend into the feed and vanish. One ownable idea executed everywhere beats a dozen disconnected assets.
• Forgettable work that has to be reinvented every quarter.
Compete on value, not cheapness.
Discounts buy short-term volume and long-term weakness. A brand built on value can charge for it; a brand built on deals keeps paying for every sale.
• Margins shrink, the brand cheapens and you attract the least loyal customers.
The brand must stand for something distinct.
In a crowded market, a brand without a personality is a commodity. Values and a distinct voice are what people remember and come back to.
• No loyalty, no word of mouth and steady pressure to compete on price.
Marketing must ask before it tracks.
Every analytics tag and ad pixel collects data about a real person. Privacy law in the EU, the UK and a growing list of US states gives that person a say first. A site that tracks without asking is building its reporting on data it may not be allowed to keep.
• Reporting built on data you may not be allowed to keep