Our topic today is relevant for many marketers, but particularly so for SMB owners who, all too frequently, find it easy to lose focus on the big picture in the hustle and bustle of wearing a LOT of hats. Without the time to really dive deep, issues can be treated superficially and expediently with the hope that things will improve. And this very expediency can often lead to solving problems with a hammer - because everything starts looking like a nail. That just isn’t going to solve anything.
What we have found is that sometimes looking at a problem in a different way lets us see the issue from a different angle, showing some manner of insight that was previously obscured. This is what we are going to write about today.
What we’re talking about is using an analogy for the situation - what is called a mental model. This mental model can move your perception of the issue to a higher, conceptual level, allowing you to concentrate on the big picture and prevent you from getting lost in the minutiae, details, particulars and, eventually, weeds. Learning how to use mental models is the basis for many billionaires’ fortunes. And to illustrate our point we want to introduce one here - the mental model of a bucket.
Picture the bucket as a representation of your business. Filling the bucket to the top is your goal and represents business success. Everyone wants more leads, more traffic, more sales; the default reaction can be ‘let’s pour more in!’ resulting in more ads, more spend, more work - it feels productive.
But it’s often wrong.
Because it’s not filling. Or at least it’s not filling as quickly as you expect given the resource input.
You get frustrated; your team sees the water level dropping and grabs a bigger hose - more spend, bigger campaigns, louder messaging - the bucket still doesn’t fill, and you all now have wet shoes, so to speak.
Here is where the bucket model really starts to makes sense: your bucket isn't full yet.
Stepping back you now see that (whoa, wait) there could be a hole in the bucket.
It might be that there’re even more than one. Holes that represent inefficiencies or missed elements and ‘leak’ via things like poor conversion rates, high churn rates, weak onboarding, overly narrow or broad targeting, misaligned messaging, a mismatch between promise and experience, media inefficiencies - the list, sadly, is lengthy. But you need to find (and plug) the ‘holes’ from largest to smallest if you’re going to make any progress.
The model is useful not in that it tells you how to fix the problem necessarily, but it helps you understand where to look for the problem. It’s a way of redrawing reality so you can see the real constraints of your situation, seeing all the sides of the coin, as it were (there are only three, but that will be a future email) ... and, importantly, helping you avoid reacting to symptoms by doubling down on what you are already doing instead of addressing root causes.
The bucket is just one illustration - there are dozens that can help explain other situations from why things stall, don’t scale or break in curious/inexplicable ways.
Take, for example, ‘Single Fence Posts’. If you come across a single fence post in a field and think it’s odd, instead ask yourself “there must be a reason that someone would go to the effort to put this here? Why don’t I see it and what am I missing?” The answer is, maybe it’s not actually a single post - you just can’t see the next one(s). This mental model teaches us to not just look at nodes, but at intervals as well.
Or ‘Flywheels’, where pushing a heavy wheel in one direction, small wins build momentum that compounds and it all becomes easier, providing self-sustaining growth - the famous ‘Your margin is my opportunity’ from Jeff Bezos.
Even back to ‘Long Tail Theory’ - one of the original mental models - which tells us that there will always be low but sure demand for a very large set of items and that perhaps competing there rather than in a small set of very competitive popular items is the way to go.
No matter your issue, there is definitely a mental model that will help you look at it in a different and revealing way. Want to explore more? We’ve got a mental model for a lot of marketing/business issues. If you want to talk about how we might help you look at your marketing issues through a mental model, reach out and book a free 30-minute consult with us.
