I recently became acquainted with the idea of “checkbox marketing” via following Brendan Hufford on LinkedIn.
It looks something like: “This week, I’ll write 2 blog posts, 3 LinkedIn updates, send the newsletter, and record a podcast episode…”.
Check, check, check, and check.
As a practitioner, I can attest that this is indeed how marketing worked in many places before measurement became cheap, easy, and ubiquitous.
I’ve done my fair share of checkbox marketing, so what follows is not armchair criticism.
The ability to measure things is a double-edged sword. You get instant feedback on the efforts that are driving outcomes and the ones that are not.
So the question then becomes: Why would you invest efforts into something that’s not yielding the outcomes that the business needs?
Applying such Darwinian pressure to work—where anything that does not move the needle is starved of resources—instinctively feels reductive and coarse to many marketers.
For better or worse, I’ve never been in that camp. I detest the idea of being beholden to a business decision or project due to sunk cost fallacy, IKEA effect, confirmation bias, or any of the hundred other cognitive traps that unknowingly cloud our judgement.
I think marketing teams should be on a perpetual search-and-destroy mission to weed out work that either has no expected value or fails short of delivering it. And do it before anyone else gets around to asking.
The reason is simple: Effort is not fungible. At some point, you’ll hit the peak and then exhaust it. The goal is to have converted that effort into value before time runs out. Doing that requires endless pruning and pivoting.
If something doesn’t hurt the business but also doesn’t move it along; it’s a net negative after you factor in the cost of time and effort spent.
The true cost of standing still is that you inch backwards while others get ahead. It’s not just organizational drift, it’s wasted personal potential.
In that light, complete inaction, such as when you sit in a chair and do nothing, is more intellectually honest than filling the hours with work that has no clear payoffs for anybody.
This idea of performative vs. meaningful work bears resemblance to Sartre’s example of the waiter who’s just a little too good at his job (from Being and Nothingness). The spring in his step, the bottomless enthusiasm, the flourish with which he recites the Chef’s special—it’s all pitch perfect. So what’s the problem? Sartre argues that by fully internalizing the socially prescribed role of a waiter, the person behind the mask denies himself the freedom of being.
The same is true of the checkbox marketer. By hiding behind the safety of prescribed activities, he denies himself the freedom to ask the hard questions about value and meaning. (You can extend this analogy to any profession.)
It goes without saying, just because I say all this doesn’t mean that I’ve cracked the code. In a real-world setting, it is impossible to fully optimize effort because the real world is littered with chaos, constraints, edge cases, and exceptions.
Still, the value is in having the mental model and exercising it whenever you can vs. never consciously developing the muscle at all.
Doing that can be as simple as asking, “…but why are we doing this?” And knowing that asking the question is not symptomatic of impertinence, cynicism, or bad faith—but a service you do to yourself and others.