CYOA: Balancing Short-Term Wins and Long-Term Success

The pressure is on for marketers to perform fast and perform now. Marketing has always been more of a marathon than a sprint, but like consumers’ waning patience for brands to get it right, executive stakeholders want to see results from their marketing immediately. 

The conundrum playing out in front of us is this: do you prioritize the here and now to get quick wins or focus on the long game? It’s a battle between those begging not to forget about your brand story and messaging (the long-gamers) and those pushing new tactics and outputs (the short-termers) to see a spike now and not get left behind. 

The answer, as with most things in life, is nuanced. Because everyone is working quickly. Change isn’t going to slow down. But it’s the companies that have excelled in the long game that have greater chances of winning both now and over time. And there's an analogy that I think will help this make sense. 

The Choose Your Own Adventure Book

Surely you remember these from your childhood (or at least from popular culture at large). Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books give you the framework on setting, characters, and plot, and based on the decisions you make as the person experiencing the story, the protagonist’s journey and outcomes vary. 

Your marketing is a CYOA book. 

• The foundational elements of the book (setting, characters, plot) are your brand and messaging: your brand story, value proposition, differentiators, etc. Those rarely change. They may evolve with the story, but fundamentally they are the same. 

• The dynamic content – the path and decisions you take along the way of the story – are your individual marketing tactics and strategies. They are how you react to what is happening around you. 

Everything that happens as part of your marketing should live within the same story universe. The characters and through-lines don’t go away. But the story still changes each time you read and make a different turn. The book is your long-game. The individual story is your short-term focus. 

Where Companies Struggle

Failure comes when you try to choose an adventure without a set book. I’ve seen and helped companies who are constantly pivoting from one strategy or another in search of that immediate gold. And they’ll have great months, but then those are followed by several bad months. 

And the reason why is because they have completely abandoned their long game. They have no consistent brand story. There is nothing grounding them in plot or setting. They’ve forsaken what made them successful in the first place in exchange for trying to evolve with whatever they think their audiences may want or need at that time. When that happens, you’ve become a commodity. And commodities don’t scale. 

How to Have Both

Here’s the secret. If you take the time to perfect your brand story (and what makes your company valuable, memorable, and important), you’re going to be able to adapt and evolve more easily in the short term. Because half the work is already done. It’s much easier to tell a new chapter in a story than trying to rewrite a book from scratch every month. What doesn’t change with your messaging and content is the through-line that provides credibility and familiarity to customers that allows them to go on new journeys with you. 

Having a great brand story doesn’t guarantee that your short-term strategies will work. There are still a number of factors that will determine if your adaptations with the changing landscape are successful. But what is more of a certainty is that if you have the foundational elements written and written well, customers are more likely to follow you throughout your journey because there’s familiarity and trust present. You can succeed in the short term if you’ve taken care of the long term. You can’t succeed in the short term if you’ve neglected the long term.

So go ahead and expand into a new service line or experiment with new products. Just make sure your company is equipped to get you there without losing your audiences in the pages of your story. 

And if you’re not sure how strong your long-term initiatives are or how to tell those new stories, you’re already in the right place.