Marketing exists to create forward motion — from disinterest to curiosity, from curiosity to confidence, from confidence to action, and ideally, to evangelism. Leverage is what allows you to generate that motion. I first began thinking seriously about leverage during a graduate school negotiation case study taught by Prof. Ned Wellman. In that case, a man named Bill learns that his city plans to spend $450,000 to demolish a beautiful 125-year-old downtown building. Bill poses a straightforward question: “What if we could save the building for less than that?” He persuades the city not to tear it down, secures incentives, and finds a commercial buyer. By the end, the building is preserved and Bill walks away with a six-figure profit. The story shows it doesn’t actually “take money to make money.” It takes leverage.
For marketers, leverage is the real game-changer. No level of ad spend, content volume, brand awareness, or clever copy can make up for a lack of leverage. I know this from experience. The problem is that most marketing teams don’t recognize they’re missing leverage until it’s prohibitively late and costly to fix. They’ve mistaken things that merely resemble leverage for the genuine article.
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Get started with 5 false signals of marketing leverage
Here are a few things I’ve watched marketing teams wrongly interpret as leverage.
False leverage 1: Complexity disguised as clarity
Some teams have convinced themselves they’re communicating with simplicity when, in reality, they’re not.…