Same pitch, same players, same game
In the 1970s, with Ajax, Barcelona and the Netherlands national team, Johan Cruyff was one of the most influential figures in European football. But describing Cruyff merely as “a very good footballer” would, I think, miss what made him special. What set Cruyff apart was not only what he did when the ball came to his feet, but what he saw before it ever reached him.
He could read the opponent’s positioning, his teammates’ movement and the areas of the pitch opening up and closing down all at once, and foresee where the game would flow a few seconds later.
Same pitch, same players, same game.
But a better reading.
For a while now, as I think about marketing’s changing role inside companies, Cruyff keeps coming to mind.
For many years, what was expected of marketing was quite clear: explain what the company does, grow the brand and create demand.
None of these has lost its importance today. But I think defining marketing’s real potential only through communication and lead generation is falling increasingly short.
Because marketing stands at the intersection of three different worlds that very few functions in a company can touch at the same time:
The market. The customer. The company’s own reality.
It sees what the competitor is saying.
It hears what the customer wants, and sometimes what the customer can’t yet describe properly.
It knows the objections sales runs into in the field again and again, where the product is truly strong and what the company actually has the capacity to do.
The real point, though, is not having each of these pieces of information; it is being able to see the relationship between them.
Because more often than not, a company’s problem isn’t a lack of data. It is dozens of disconnected signals piling up at different points in the organization and not adding up to the same meaning.
Let me explain this with a very simple example.
A restaurant business might say, “I want to do inventory management.”
If you take this request at face value, you’ll talk about inventory management.
But dig a little deeper and you may see that the customer’s real problem isn’t inventory.
Waste can’t be controlled. Purchasing decisions are still made on gut feeling. Recipe costs have become invisible. At the end of the month, the manager doesn’t know where the profitability is melting away.
Then, even though the product is the same product, the problem you’re looking at changes completely.
In one, you sell an inventory management feature.
In the other, you answer the customer’s need to keep control of their profitability.
And this isn’t just a better communication decision.
It can also change which problem you own, how you position yourself, which customer you go after and which value you put forward in the product.
It helps the company see more clearly where it should grow, which problem makes sense for it to own and which opportunity truly carries commercial value.
That’s a bit like what Cruyff did on the pitch.
Everyone was looking at the same pitch.
He saw what the pieces were saying together.
Perhaps that will be exactly the most important task of good marketing from here on.
