Marketing Strategy
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Tim Hillegonds
Stop Performing Random Acts of Marketing
Random Acts of Marketing waste resources, dilute your message, and rarely drive results. By connecting every marketing activity to a business outcome, you can replace hope with strategy—and turn scattered tactics into measurable growth.
I first came across the phrase “random acts of marketing” in The Next CMO: A Guide to Operational Marketing Excellence by Peter Mahoney, Scott Todaro, and Dan Faulkner—three marketing executives who built and sold a martech company called Plannuh (now Planful).
After analyzing thousands of budgets, they identified five common sources of waste in marketing plans:
Unused budget
Rush fees
Non-strategic spending
Duplicate spending
Over-paying
It’s number three—non-strategic spending—that gave us the phrase Random Acts of Marketing.
What Are Random Acts of Marketing?
Random Acts of Marketing are activities executed without a clear strategy, often on impulse or in isolation from business goals. They’re the “shiny object” tactics that feel good in the moment but don’t connect to outcomes.
In many organizations, Random Acts of Marketing might look like:
Sponsoring an event without a lead-gen plan
Creating a social channel because “everyone else is doing it”
Producing swag no one wants
Launching a product without market research
On the surface, these activities seem productive. In reality, they waste resources, dilute brand messages, and distract from strategic growth. Without connection to a business outcome, they amount to what Mahoney and his co-authors call the Hope Strategy.
Why Random Acts of Marketing Fail
Every organization is guilty of them at some point—even Six06 Strategy has been. When they work, it’s usually luck. When they don’t (which is most of the time), it’s because they were never tied to outcomes in the first place.
Marketing is inherently creative and exciting. That’s why random acts are so tempting. But without discipline, you’re just spinning the roulette wheel. The solution is to stop thinking in tactics and start thinking in strategy. Every marketing activity must be justified by its connection to a financial outcome.
The “To What End?” Test
In The Next CMO, the authors propose a simple method: keep asking “To what end?” until you connect an activity to a line on the P&L.
Example:
We want to create a white paper. To what end?
To help sales convert stage-one opportunities into stage two. To what end?
To move more opportunities through the funnel and close revenue.
You don’t need to attribute $2.73 to every data sheet. But you do need to understand that its purpose is to improve conversion rates—and therefore revenue.
If you can’t connect the activity to the P&L, it’s probably a random act.
Moving From Random to Strategic
Random acts of marketing happen when planning is weak, budgets are misused, or teams rely on intuition instead of insight. Eliminating them requires discipline:
Connect every activity to business and financial outcomes.
Apply the “To what end?” question to every initiative.
Resist the shiny object trap and prioritize what matters most.
Effective marketing isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing what matters—what aligns with strategy, strengthens your brand, and drives results.
Take a look at your current efforts. Where are you still relying on hope? And how much stronger could your marketing become if you cut the random acts and focused only on what moves the business forward?
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