On leaky buckets, systems thinking, and where campaigns actually go wrong
Good Campaigns Just Find the Problems Faster
On leaky buckets, systems thinking, and where campaigns actually go wrong
Systems thinking is something I’d already been doing for years before I knew there was a name for it. Document the workflow (however messy it may be), find the one spot where it’s breaking, fix that spot, watch what happens, and then repeat the process. Peter Senge gets credit for coining the term systems thinking in his book “The Fifth Discipline.” And the concept is a simple but powerful one. It means seeing the structure behind a problem instead of chasing whichever symptom is loudest that week.
Marketing had been circling the same idea years earlier but landed in a slightly different place. The marketing scientist Andrew Ehrenberg called it the leaky bucket: companies are always losing customers, so they have to keep pouring new ones in the top just to maintain share. Ehrenberg wasn’t wrong about the pouring. But the way the idea usually gets used, all the attention goes to the hose and the top of the funnel, and the holes in the bottom are simply an unavoidable fact of life, not worth the time or effort to fix in most cases. His belief was that most growth comes from continuous acquisition, not retention, and that most customers are never really lost for good, so no special retention efforts need to be made.
But this is where I disagree with Ehrenberg. The holes in the bucket aren’t always inevitable, and they shouldn’t be accepted as an unfortunate fact of life. Sometimes customers are lost for good if they end up falling through one of those gaps. Systems thinking sends you looking for the leak before spending a dime trying to outrun it. And yet plenty of companies pour an enormous acquisition budget into a bucket they’ve never once inspected.
That instinct is also why I recognize a specific client conversation almost before it starts, and I’d bet every experienced marketer reading this recognizes it too. A company comes to you with a marketing problem. Sales are flat, leads have stalled, a competitor is eating their lunch, and they want a campaign that fixes it. But when you actually go looking for the hole, the marketing is rarely where the leak is coming from. The hole is upstream. It’s a site that doesn’t answer the most basic questions the average prospect has about the product or service, a brand indistinguishable from everyone else in the category, a support team that takes four days to answer an email, a sales team that drops half its leads before the second call, or an onboarding flow so confusing that most people who sign up never come back. The best campaigns in the world will never be able to patch those holes. All they can do is pour water in faster than before.
Advertising legends have been saying some version of this for decades and have been ignored just as long. Jerry Della Femina, one of the most quoted admen of his generation, made the same point decades ago that good advertising is what finishes off a bad product fastest, not what saves it. It’s a line agency people love to repeat at conferences and then quietly ignore the next time a client asks for a bigger hose.
It doesn’t take much searching to find high-profile examples where systems thinking could have helped. Take the infamous Fyre Festival (1.0), for example. The doomed festival’s organizers ran one of the most effective campaigns in advertising history. A single coordinated push across roughly 400 celebrities and influencers reportedly generated 300 million impressions within 24 hours (all according to the festival’s own pitch deck, so take this with a huge grain of salt), and it sold out a luxury music weekend before a single tent was pitched. The hose worked exactly as designed. It poured an enormous number of excited people into the bucket in record time. But the big problem was that nobody was paying attention to the gaping holes. What attendees found when they arrived were disaster-relief tents pitched on concrete, cheese sandwiches, and no headline act, because nobody had patched a single hole before turning on the hose. The marketing wasn’t the failure. The marketing worked so well that it’s the reason the failure happened at a scale big enough to become a Netflix documentary instead of a contained embarrassment.
I’ve seen a quieter version of the same pattern play out at plenty of ordinary, un-newsworthy companies. It usually starts with a legitimate win. A campaign launches, leads pour in, and the first debrief is a celebration. Look at all these great leads! A few weeks later, the pipeline starts to look a little different. Prospects go cold, calls go unreturned, and deals that should have closed just stall out. Blame shifts to lead quality, and the ask comes back…for more leads. Nobody stops to ask how the leads that already arrived were actually worked, how fast anyone followed up, or whether the sales process gave a ready buyer any reason to say yes. Somebody asks what went wrong with the campaign. Nothing went wrong with the campaign. It did exactly what it was built to do. It delivered a steady stream of qualified prospects to the front door. What happened to them once they got inside was never marketing’s problem to fix, and no amount of clever creative can close a deal that nobody followed up on.
This is the kind of situation that systems thinking is perfect for. Find the one place where a small, correctly targeted change reshapes everything downstream, rather than pouring more effort into whatever happens to be most visible. In marketing, that place is almost never the hose. This is also the point where the best marketing partners separate themselves from the pack. Before they write the brief, they check the bucket for holes. If the product, the service, or the operational process underneath the campaign has a hole in it, a good partner says so before the budget gets spent, not after the reviews come in. It’s a harder conversation to have with a client than agreeing to buy a bigger hose, but it’s also the conversation that actually protects their money in the long run instead of just spending it faster.
Good marketing genuinely works when there’s something solid underneath. A patched bucket with no water in it is just an empty bucket. You need both the hose and the patch kit, the campaign and the operational fixes, and mistaking one for the other is exactly how a good campaign ends up taking the blame for a hopelessly leaky system.
Before you brief the next campaign, check the bucket for holes. Fyre Festival’s marketing team didn’t need a better hose. They needed someone to step up and say what was obvious to almost everyone involved. The bucket wasn’t ready yet.
The best campaigns don’t just increase the lead flow. They find the leak first.
