Every business is a people business.
Our focus on “consumer strategy” is rooted in the conviction that business growth forms a virtuous cycle with supporting people.
That’s who you sell to, yes. It’s equally the larger world we all live in, and who we work alongside to keep the cycle rolling.
The seed of any business is the value it provides to people.
With consumers, product-market fit is what lets organizations sprout. The more you truly know & deliver what people want, the less that consumers can ignore just how valuable your product is to them. Any company, and any department within one, can win fans & buyers with this seed at its center.
Equally, whether on the front lines or in the executive suite, each employee in any organization contributes to its success. Naturally, it’s not only “right” that employees grow hand-in-hand with the business — it’s critical to the business itself to bring the best out of all of its people. The best organizations empower & learn from their full diversity of perspectives, even when some individual voices are quieter.
The product speaks clearest to people only once the process of marketing feels human.
Marketing, especially, is a people business, even though it forgets this often.
Branding, marketing, advertising — whatever word fits at a given time, it’s the last puzzle piece you fit, but the first impression you make on consumers & fans. It’s where product-market fit comes to roost!
And yet, in practice, much marketing is missing the very humanity that makes it powerful. A process of fragmented specialties has lead us to a thousand different points of risk, and a disconnect from what moves consumers. It’s tragic because, almost always, every individual involved is capable of more.
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Jargon takes root within teams & disciplines, leading to breakdowns in communication.
We can struggle with the "knowledge barrier" with our teammates in different department -- forgetting to think about how their assumptions are different, what they know & don't know about our own discipline, and vice-versa.
We remain optimistic as budgets & deadlines tighten, and in our optimism, don't allot enough time in the process to deeply understand consumers enough to move them to action.
...Or, when consumers do tell us what they need, we can't hear it — whether because it’s unexpected, inconvenient, or different from what the data says.
With breakneck timelines & tight budgets, we often struggle to accommodate family emergencies, divergent thinkers, mental illness, and the many other experiences that makes us human.
Department are joined / incentivized in pursuit of a bottom line, rather than in pursuit of a KPI centered on whether consumers will actually come back.
We forget that marketing is first & foremost a business of human capital, and drive our most valuable resources to burnout to achieve incremental improvements in non-capital areas.
Don’t even get me started on AI.
To unlock the best from everyone, it’s a superpower to speak in the common language of the consumer, and thus return to common goals. The more that teams focus on what a person feels & needs, the more that their overlapped disciplines work together as one unit. It’s highly effective with the many different specialties under “marketing”, and equally, for how marketing intersects with the rest of an organization.
Smaller Apple is our way of reconnecting those dots, to grow business & people alike.
We see the common assumption that business must be extractive, and we reject it. Through our “consumer strategy” approach to marketing & its adjacent skills, we reconnect businesses to their roots in humanity, so that they instead become additive :
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Offering marketing, experiences, products, and features that bring actual value to their life, through understanding them fully & deeply.
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Building the capabilities of a marketing organization, by building key structures & sizing / upskilling teams to meet any challenge the business faces.
Helping everyone on your team use their skills to their fullest capacity -- both to increase retention, and so they feel fulfilled, valued and supported.
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Maximizing how marketing supports the whole business, by building marketing structures (e.g. brands, programs) that power many of its teams.
Connecting with these teams & teammates, to outline & vet specifically how marketing strategy can support their work.
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For ourselves, it’s our deepest hope that we start to show others how our industry can be more effective, person by person.
In a world with increasing inequality, isolation, and physical upheaval, it’s critical that everyone build sustainable practices, in any industry. We believe that collective growth is a powerfully convincing tool towards this aim, showing that we're each better off individually when we all work collectively.
Even as every organization brings a unique set of consumers & employees, these principles of collective growth extend across industries. It’s just like we said — every business can be a people business.
Tapping into this truth opens up the whole world of marketing, and everything it connects to.
Smaller Apple can truly “walk the walk” on consumer strategy, because we’re trained in the full suite of marketing strategy skills — anything required to meet consumer needs.