The Design of Your Everyday Marketing Program
By Jakeb Brown, for SAVD.
Marketing metrics like cost per lead and ROAS are evaluation signals, not goals. They only work while user behavior stays stable. AI search has shifted that behavior, so the old signals no longer point at the business outcome they were built to measure.
This is a piece about marketing KPIs vs business goals, and why the gap between the two just got wider.
“The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman is a read that can be brought into a plethora of topics. Early on in the book, Norman speaks to a seven-stage action cycle for creating “things”. He breaks the seven stages down into three parts:
- The Goal
- The Bridge of Execution
- The Bridge of Evaluation
The biggest piece of getting this right is the goal. Don Norman uses the teachings of former Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt, as Levitt famously stated, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.” Levitt was aligning the tool back to what humans use the tool for in his point.
But Norman argues that he didn’t take this back far enough. People don’t want quarter-inch holes in their walls for the sake of having quarter-inch holes in their walls. Their goal is usually to hang something.
When designing a “thing” we often get lost in the micro-goals of the past that helped us to reach the end goal, and that causes short-sightedness.
If the creators at 3M didn’t look around the ways of the past, they would have never created command strips, as an example.
Marketing Metrics Were Never the True Goal
This is where marketing KPIs vs business goals actually splits: when evaluating a product or a system, everything needs to flow back through the end goal, not a micro-goal. If you get stuck on a micro-goal of the past, then your solutions are tied to only what has worked in the past.
Some ways marketing teams have monitored their success in the past have been:
- Traffic to the website
- Lead volume
- Cost per lead (or cost per conversion)
- Return on ad spend
Oftentimes, because of the consistencies in how their customers interacted with their business, these were solid indicators that marketing was driving revenue and eventual profits for the business (or at least correlation studies showed that they were solid indicators).
The same mistake shows up one level down, inside attribution itself. We’ve written about how last-click attribution rewards the wrong touchpoint and starves brand budgets that were doing real work. It’s the same design failure Norman describes: optimizing the micro-goal you can measure instead of the goal you actually set out to hit.
My friend and colleague, Matt Russell, spoke at the University of Michigan recently and one of his talking points referenced that data is not insight.
As marketers, we had such a predictable landscape, or at least we thought we did, that not only did we consider our data as insight, but we considered our data as the goal.
Within “The Bridge of Evaluation” piece in Don Norman’s Seven Stages of the Action Cycle, there are three stages: Perceive, Interpret, Compare.
When our core micro metrics were flowing properly then we would interpret the results as positive outcomes for the business. The metrics worked within the ‘perception’ and ‘interpret’ stages of the process. The problem was that, as marketers, we took these metrics as the ‘goal’ stage.
“We’ve drilled the quarter-inch hole into the wall, our job is done.”
The Goal of Marketing Remains. It’s the Execution and Evaluation Processes That Need to Change.
But today, the shifts in ‘traffic to the website’, ‘lead volume’, ‘cost per lead’, ‘return on ad spend’ are massive. The way users interact with search engines has changed rapidly. The expectations a user has for the search result, itself, has changed. How competitors buy for the available traffic in your industry has shifted.
Chasing down actions to mirror the old ‘traffic to the website’ numbers that we were seeing, or the old ‘cost per lead’ number we’re used to seeing likely will not lead us directly to our ultimate goals for the business in this changing landscape.
Most of us need to make some overhauls to how we perceive, interpret and compare the results to our business goals. And from there, we can go back through the bridge of execution with new approaches.
In this new landscape to get things hung on the walls you may not need to drill quarter-inch holes anymore.
It’s a great time to be in marketing, because you get to be a part of the changing ways of execution and evaluation to drive business results. And with the right team, you can see the end result of your marketing dollars more clearly than ever before.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are Don Norman’s three parts of the seven-stage action cycle?
Don Norman’s seven-stage action cycle for creating things breaks into three parts: the goal, the bridge of execution, and the bridge of evaluation. Getting the goal right matters most, since a wrong goal misdirects everything built on top of it.
Why were traditional marketing metrics like cost per lead never the true goal?
Traffic, lead volume, cost per lead, and return on ad spend were solid indicators only because customer behavior stayed consistent. Marketers began treating these micro-metrics as the goal itself, rather than as signals within the perceive-and-interpret stages of evaluation.
What are the three stages within Don Norman’s Bridge of Evaluation?
The Bridge of Evaluation breaks into three stages: perceive, interpret, and compare. Marketing metrics operate correctly within perceive and interpret, but the mistake was treating those metric readings as the goal stage itself, rather than as inputs to compare against the actual business goal.
Why do old marketing metrics no longer point to the same goal?
The way users interact with search engines, what they expect from a search result, and how competitors buy available traffic have all changed rapidly. Chasing the old traffic, lead volume, or cost-per-lead numbers no longer reliably points back to the same business goal.
About SAVD
SAVD BY AI is a system-level consultancy for AI-driven marketing organizations. We help enterprise teams rebuild their evaluation metrics around the business outcome that actually matters, not the legacy proxy metrics search behavior has already outrun.
For operators rethinking what their marketing metrics actually measure, we welcome the conversation.
Works Cited:
Norman, Donald A. (2013). The design of everyday things. MIT Press.