The Problem with Tactification in Marketing

Have you seen the deliciously postmodern promo for Timothée Chalamet’s new film Marty Supreme? It’s ricocheting around the internet right now,and for good reason. The spot offers a bone-dry portrayal of a virtual marketing meeting between the film’s agency team and Chalamet himself, who joins the call to share his “thinking.”

He wants to be on a Wheaties box. He has a Pantone: “hardcore orange”. He demands the Statue of Liberty. The Eiffel Tower. The session culminates in a sixty-second team meditation on the values of “culmination,integration and fruitionizing”.

It’s worth the full eighteen minutes, because it offers a frighteningly accurate portrayal of modern marketing planning and its superficial cocktail of optics, bullshit, and tactification.

yes, tactification. I made that word up. But if Chalamet gets “fruitionizing,” I’m having one too.

Tactification means the almost total obsession with execution that afflicts most marketers and comes at the expense of a broader, deeper grasp of the discipline.

Roughly 70% of American marketers have no formal marketing training. They stumble backwards into marketing from the consumer side and assume the entire discipline is just an array of tactical activities: Social posts, billboards, blimps. The Eiffel fucking Tower.

In reality – and this will shock precisely no one with proper training – tactics and communications are merely the tip of the marketing spear.

Roughly 70% of American marketers have no formal marketing training.

After comes strategy.

The sequence has been clear for millennia: diagnosis informs strategy, strategy directs tactics. It’s a hierarchy. You don’t build a house starting with the paint color. You start with the foundation.

But the modern marketing world rewards speed and “doing.” The pressure to show immediate results incentivizes skipping the hard work of research and strategic thinking.It’s easier to launch a TikTok campaign than to conduct thorough market research. It’s faster to brainstorm ad slogans than to analyze competitive positioning.

This isn’t to say tactics are minor.They’re crucial. But they’re derived from strategy, not the other way around.A brilliant tactic executed in service of a flawed strategy is still a waste of time and money.

The Marty supreme promo isn’t mocking Chalamet. It’s mocking the agency. It’s mocking the marketers who are so eager to demonstrate their creativity that they forget to ask the fundamental question: what are we trying to achieve?

Key Takeaways

• Tactification is a problem: An overemphasis on execution without a solid strategic foundation leads to ineffective marketing.
• Training matters: A meaningful portion of marketers lack formal training,contributing to the focus on tactics.
• Strategy first: Marketing should always begin with diagnosis and strategy, followed by tactical implementation.
• Tactics support strategy: Tactics are tools to achieve strategic goals, not goals in themselves.
• Avoid superficiality: Don’t prioritize optics and “doing” over thoughtful planning and research.