The audience that grades you isn't the audience that grows you

[Read me if the deck you show your board is better than the marketing it describes.]

In September 2018, UL, the company behind the 3DMark benchmark that phone reviewers use to test graphics performance, delisted four Huawei and Honor phones from its rankings, including the P20 Pro. The phones had a performance mode that switched on only when they recognised the public 3DMark app. Run anything else and they went back to normal. UL confirmed it by running the identical tests through a private version of the app that the phones didn't recognise. The public app's scores had been up to 47% higher. Same tests, same phone, different name on the app.

I don't bring this up to pile on Huawei. (Samsung was caught doing something similar with the Galaxy S4 back in 2013, so they had company.) I bring it up because the phones weren't broken. They did exactly what they'd been built to do, which was perform brilliantly for the audience that grades them. The people using them on the tram every morning got the other mode. There's a name for the general version, Goodhart's law, after the economist Charles Goodhart. It's usually paraphrased as "once a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure".

Your marketing has a benchmark mode too. It switches on every quarter and it's called board prep. It's Thursday, 21:40, and you're tuning the brand slide again. The campaign shipped, share of search is up, and sales has finally stopped complaining that nobody has heard of you. None of that fits the template, so you find the pipeline number the brand work touched, attribute what you can defend and retitle the slide so "brand" shares a line with "influenced pipeline". By 22:15 it reads like demand gen with a longer payback period, and it will score well.

If you have a version of that slide open in another tab right now, this one's for you. (Unlike the phones, you weren't hiding anything on Thursday night. Every number on that slide was true. The more interesting question is who it was true for, and what tuning for them is doing to the work.)

In Edition 5 I argued that your strategy document is mostly theatre performed for your board. This edition is about what the board does with the performance, which is score it. And once the people running the benchmark also hold the funding, benchmark mode stops being a mode and becomes the product. Nobody decides that in a meeting.

My own decks have run in benchmark mode. I once presented a performance deck to a board that had hired me precisely because I could tie marketing activity to performance, over both the short and the long term. They gave big initiatives room to breathe, which made them a dream client. I spent roughly 20 hours in the weeks before that meeting preparing the deck, which turned out to be about 20 hours too many. We had time for the opening slide and nothing else, because the sales portion of the meeting over-ran again. In that same week we missed two PR announcement windows that needed to land ahead of event season. That was entirely my fault. The marketing I did for the boardroom got priority over the marketing I did for the customer, and the boardroom never made it past slide one.

I wanted to know who each leader was actually trying to convince, so I went back through my 13 thesis interviews with B2B SaaS marketing leaders and coded every passage where a leader was working to be believed by somebody. There were 49 of them. Customers show up in 42, investors in 14, and a single passage can involve both (which turns out to matter). By volume, the market wins easily. Then I pulled out the eight passages where a leader was describing the activation trap, the pattern where short-term pipeline keeps beating long-term brand. In seven of those eight, customers and investors turn up together. Customers dominate the conversation overall. Where the long game stalls, the investors are in the room seven times out of eight.

One leader in the sample, asked whether startups are building up brand debt by chasing short-term leads, went straight to scale-ups and private equity. Most PE owners, in their telling, arrive with little real feel for marketing but completely sure they understand it, dictate the go-to-market to the executive team and expect a return on their timetable, which is fast. So marketing has to balance all that against getting commercial leads in quickly, because the sales leaders want their account managers fed now. Then came the part that stuck with me. Pressure like that, they said, makes people nervous, and nervous teams don't do their best thinking. The team stops being able to figure out which of its messages actually land. (The same leader's case for the alternative was proper thought leadership, the kind that gets you brand, positioning and leads in one go. Hold that thought for later.) My reading, not theirs, is that this is the cost of benchmark mode that never makes it onto the slide.

Now the part that's mine. The board is the one audience whose approval doesn't compound. A customer who believes you renews and brings a colleague along (sometimes two, if you're lucky and they move jobs). An investor who believes you extends your runway, until next quarter's numbers. Both matter, but only one of them ever pays for a seat, and it isn't the one reading your board pack. Every Thursday night you spend on that slide builds trust with people who will never log in to your product. It still feels like progress, because somebody with power nodded. The P20 Pro felt the same way about its 3DMark ranking.

Tuning for the test is the rational move when somebody else owns the runway, which is what makes it a trap. And you can't refuse the board. Pretending you can is how brand budgets get people fired. What you can do is find work that performs the same whether or not anyone is benchmarking it. The first leader's thought leadership is one version. Here's a smaller one. Another leader in the 13 runs enterprise marketing where half or more of the budget goes on big event sponsorships. Asked what they'd do if the budget were cut by 90% overnight, they said the sponsorships would go first. Alongside their digital campaigns, the thing they'd protect is the small stuff, round tables with ten or twelve hand-picked prospects, because that's real time in front of buyers and a chance to look like the capable partner on one specific problem. They'd keep it at any cost, because it feeds pipeline directly. (Same score in the public app and the private one. My reading, not theirs.)

So here's the audit, with my bet attached. Take your last ten meaningful marketing decisions and mark each one honestly. Mark who it actually moved, the buyer or the board, which isn't always who you'd have said it was for. Then, for every one you marked "board", write down the one thing a buyer would have noticed if you'd built it for them as well. Next quarter, give the top line of the brand slide to one buyer-side number (share of search, round-table-to-opportunity rate, expansion revenue from existing accounts) and let "influenced pipeline" move down to line two. The research can't tell you your split. My bet is that it's worse than you'd guess.

The full pillar covers why "brand" is really three different tasks on three different timelines for three different audiences, why putting off brand-building early is the right call right up until buyers stop knowing you personally, and what the transition looks like when it works. It lives at Legitimacy Transitions in B2B SaaS on gossamergrowth.com.

Next quarter the benchmark runs again. The deck gets built, the slide gets tuned and the board nods, same as last quarter. Meanwhile the market runs the private version of the test, the one your marketing doesn't recognise, one renewal at a time, on whether anything you shipped was worth coming back for. That score carries over into next year. Your deck will benchmark fine. Your customers are running the other app.