Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind, it must be marketing, where graduates of the George Santayana School of Marketing are getting harder and harder to find.

To unpack that gimmicky lede, how do you make sure 2019 doesn’t repeat previous years’ mistakes?

A good first step is to resort to another end-of-year gimmick and make some new year’s resolutions. Here are the five resolutions I suggest you make.

Resolve to wean yourself off of social media – personally and professionally.

I don’t hate social media; I taught a 300-level college class in social-media marketing, for crying out loud. However, I don’t like what social media has become.

I noted in two earlier posts (here and here) the channel-by-channel problems with social media. I won’t repeat them other than to summarize that a combination of dwindling audiences and security concerns make social media less important for most organizations than they’ve been in nearly a decade.

And that’s over and above the endemic issues with social media – measuring true audience and impact and the fact that brand-building via social media is one of modern marketing’s greatest fallacies.

Make 2019 the year that you take a hard look at social media and how your organization uses it. Don’t settle for superficial analysis; knock it down to the studs. Ask yourself why you really are on social media, and how well you really are accomplishing what you set out to do. If you don’t like the answers, resolve to make changes.

I understand that a truly deep, soul-searching look at your social-media program is going to cause collateral damage, and that may extend to your entire web-marketing and content-marketing programs – which may well constitute your entire marketing program. But please realize that social media has changed dramatically and profoundly, as anyone who spent any amount of time studying these channels knew it would. It was the Wild West there for a while, and those sorts of ecosystems never last.

Personally, this is the year I quit Facebook. I’m done with its cavalier use of my data and the blatant ignoring of my privacy preferences, and I’m sure that won’t be the end of my social-media network abandonment. But we’ll start there.

Resolve to stop talking about focusing on the customer and actually focus on the customer.

Any idea how many organizations that purport to be customer-focused really are? I don’t think anyone’s actually measured that, but judging by personal experience, I’d say 2 percent. And I’m probably being generous.

I’ll give you an example of a truly customer-focused organization. My wife ordered socks from Bombas as Christmas presents. (Yeah, I know. Socks for Christmas.) Bombas failed to ship one of the pairs she ordered, and she mailed Bombas to let them know.

Bombas refunded her entire order and gave her a $100 gift card.

My wife was so astounded by this that she was sure it was a scam. “Who does this?” she said.

“A company that really cares about delivering a great customer experience,” I said, before asking her, “So you would order from Bombas again?”

“You bet!” she answered in a flash – and that’s it right there. A first customer became a customer for life, and an unabashed, uncompensated recommender of the product, because Bombas invested a couple hundred bucks (or less, depending on the company’s revenue model) on delivering an amazing customer experience.

This is what focusing on the customer really means. If you’re not willing to go at least this far to satisfy your customers, you’re giving customer experience lip service. Furthermore, if you’re not measuring the impact of what you’re doing, you’re throwing away all the probable goodwill you’ve engendered by creating that jaw-dropping customer experience.

I’ve said this many times many ways, and I’ll say it again: With social-media and content marketing looking sketchier by the day, you need to seriously investigate a different path for your marketing efforts. Marketing based on customer experience is the only one that truly checks all the boxes.

Resolve to be the ultimate expert on your business and industry and/or the businesses and industries of your customers.

I don’t care where you are in your org chart or what your job title is; if you’re not striving to be the expert in your business and industry, you’re not really doing your job.

Listen: The only kind of marketing that really works, in a global sense, is informed marketing – and informed marketing starts with you. If you’re not putting in the effort to get yourself informed, then you’re either a weak link in the chain or you’re cheating yourself of the opportunity to stand out and move up on the basis of what you know.

Old-fashioned as it may sound, one of your major job objectives is to help your company succeed. To do that, you need to really understand your company and the markets in which it operates – and usually that starts with understanding the finances.

If your company is publicly held, learn how to read a 10-Q and a balance sheet. If your company is private, try to understand its market share and the dynamics governing its market. If you’re not trained in competitive intelligence, this is how you teach yourself.

Once you’ve sussed the finances, look at survey data. What are customers saying? What are you doing well and poorly vis-à-vis your competition?

The combination of financial data and survey data will give you a thorough view of where your organization sits and how it can improve. Think of what you as a marketer can do with that information.

There are a lot of top-notch professional-development opportunities out there, and you should absolutely avail yourself of them if you have the opportunity. Ultimately, though, the best developer of your professional skillset is yourself, and it starts with the resolve to become better-informed. So what are you waiting for?

Resolve to keep tech in perspective.

I do a lot of music production and play a lot of guitar, and I can tell you: Music tech changes hourly. However, in the end a big ol’ chunk of that brand-new tech is just another way to make a guitar go squeeeeeeeeee… and most of that big ol’ chunk is obsolete and/or selling for pennies on the dollar within a year or so.

Tech is great. Tech has made marketing easier, and enabled marketers to target their audience down to the block, age, gender, and hair color. It’s awesome – but in the end you still have to deliver that hyper-targeted audience the right message at the right time.

Tech can get you to the doorstep, but it’s still up to you to get in the door.

For all the talk of artificial intelligence and machine learning taking over marketing, making the actual sale requires human guidance – and the most effective sales process is still person-to-person. That’s why insurance agents and travel agents are doing better than ever.

Embrace marketing tech for all the things it can do, but remember that in the end it exists to serve you, not the other way around. Also, remember that most tech is just a different way to make a guitar go squeeeeeeeeee, and it’ll be obsolete and/or selling for pennies on the dollar within a year or so.

Don’t get too attached, in other words, and don’t forget who’s in charge.

Resolve to respect, support, and build up the people around you.

Hey, ultimately work and business is all about the relationships you make and the people you meet. Cherish them.

Respect what your colleagues bring to the table, and celebrate that whenever you can. Put people in a position to succeed, have their back if they fail, and when they do something great, make sure everyone knows it.

If you already have your piece, make sure someone else gets theirs. Give young people their first break. Give old people another shot.

Work is more than work; it’s a highly personal act. And it can be one of the best parts of your life … if you resolve to make it so.

Why don’t you try that in 2019? I think you’ll like the way it turns out.

Happy New Year to all.

(What Should Be) Your 2019 Marketing Resolutions