The main thing I’m hearing here is a criticism of the choice to handle marketing only after strategy decisions have been made, rather than incorporating marketing in to strategy decisions. My instinct is to view that as a feature, not a bug. EAs strength is its epistemics. We figure out what is good to do based on facts and evidence, not based on how we think it will look. A marketing person is just an expert in how it will look, or how to make it look good. Seems like having them in the room when making strategy decisions would poison those decisions, not strengthen them. What am I missing?
This is a total misunderstanding of what marketing is. Marketing is strategy (How do we get to where we need to be? How do we engage the right people? Who are the right people? How will we know if it’s working?), not design. I would recommend that you review your understanding of marketing as it’s much more complex and critical to success than design.
Calling marketing “poisoning” strategy only makes sense if you think impact happens automatically once the evidence is correct. It does not.
A strategy can be perfectly evidence-based and still fail because no one notices it, understands it, trusts it, or changes behaviour. That failure mode is extremely common in EA work and it is rarely about the core intervention being wrong. It is about adoption.
Marketing, at its best, is simply the discipline that asks whether a theoretically sound idea will actually be processed and acted on by real humans with limited attention, competing priorities, and imperfect reasoning.
Ignoring that layer does not make a strategy more epistemically pure. It just shifts the risk from “is this true?” to “will anyone meaningfully engage with this?” and then acts surprised when uptake is low.
If the objective is real-world impact rather than theoretical elegance, then stress-testing for salience, comprehension, and behavioural response is not a contamination of strategy. It is part of doing strategy properly.
The main thing I’m hearing here is a criticism of the choice to handle marketing only after strategy decisions have been made, rather than incorporating marketing in to strategy decisions. My instinct is to view that as a feature, not a bug. EAs strength is its epistemics. We figure out what is good to do based on facts and evidence, not based on how we think it will look. A marketing person is just an expert in how it will look, or how to make it look good. Seems like having them in the room when making strategy decisions would poison those decisions, not strengthen them. What am I missing?
Hey, thanks for the comment.
This is a total misunderstanding of what marketing is. Marketing is strategy (How do we get to where we need to be? How do we engage the right people? Who are the right people? How will we know if it’s working?), not design. I would recommend that you review your understanding of marketing as it’s much more complex and critical to success than design.
Calling marketing “poisoning” strategy only makes sense if you think impact happens automatically once the evidence is correct. It does not.
A strategy can be perfectly evidence-based and still fail because no one notices it, understands it, trusts it, or changes behaviour. That failure mode is extremely common in EA work and it is rarely about the core intervention being wrong. It is about adoption.
Marketing, at its best, is simply the discipline that asks whether a theoretically sound idea will actually be processed and acted on by real humans with limited attention, competing priorities, and imperfect reasoning.
Ignoring that layer does not make a strategy more epistemically pure. It just shifts the risk from “is this true?” to “will anyone meaningfully engage with this?” and then acts surprised when uptake is low.
If the objective is real-world impact rather than theoretical elegance, then stress-testing for salience, comprehension, and behavioural response is not a contamination of strategy. It is part of doing strategy properly.