The Best Marketing Idea Might Be Something That Doesn't Scale

Marketing loves scale. Reach more people. Automate more things. Lower the cost per acquisition. Build the funnel, optimize the funnel, put AI inside the funnel, then make a dashboard showing how efficiently everyone moved through it.

Ideally, one person should be able to press a button and reach four million people before lunch.

This makes sense. Businesses need efficiency and marketing needs to produce results. Nobody is getting a quarterly budget approved because they said the campaign had really good vibes.

But somewhere in our obsession with making everything scalable, measurable and automated, we may have optimized away some of the things that make marketing interesting. Because sometimes the best marketing idea is something you can only do for 50 people.

Efficiency Isn't the Same as Effectiveness

Digital marketing has given us incredible efficiency. You can send an email to 100,000 people almost as easily as you can send one to 100. You can launch an ad campaign across an entire country from your couch, schedule a month of social posts in an afternoon, and build automated flows that respond differently depending on what someone bought, clicked or abandoned in their cart at 11:47 p.m.

This is all useful. I do this stuff.

But efficiency has a way of becoming the goal instead of the tool. We start asking how we can make something reach more people before asking whether it's actually good.

A mediocre idea delivered to two million people is still a mediocre idea. You've just distributed it extremely efficiently.

Some Things Work Because They're Small

Imagine ordering something online and finding a handwritten note inside. Not a printed card designed to look handwritten. An actual note. Someone wrote your name, maybe mentioned what you bought, and the handwriting is probably terrible.

It feels different because you immediately understand something: this wasn't made for everyone. It was made for you.

That's difficult to replicate at scale, which is precisely why it has value.

The same applies to small events, limited products, strange packaging, local collaborations, surprise gifts, physical mail and dozens of other ideas marketers often dismiss because they aren't efficient enough. Their inefficiency is sometimes the entire point.

The Spreadsheet Hates This

Imagine pitching this in a meeting: “We're going to make 100 really nice packages and send them to people we like.”

What's the projected reach? Maybe 100. How many impressions? Unknown. What's the conversion rate? No idea. Can we attribute revenue? Probably not very well. Can we scale it? Not really.

Fantastic meeting.

Marketing departments have been trained to favour ideas that fit neatly into spreadsheets. Digital advertising is especially comfortable because almost everything produces a number: impressions, clicks, CTR, CPM, CPC, ROAS, conversions.

You can watch the little lines go up and down and feel like you're observing the entire reality of your brand. But measurable doesn't automatically mean important, and difficult to measure doesn't mean useless.

Nobody Tells Their Friends About a Retargeting Ad

Think about marketing you've actually talked about. Not marketing you've clicked. Marketing you've mentioned to another human being.

It was probably unusual. A ridiculous billboard. Packaging that was surprisingly good. A pop-up. A restaurant doing something funny. A company sending you something you didn't expect. A weird collaboration. An event. A product launch that felt like an actual cultural moment instead of a press release and three Instagram graphics.

People talk about things that break patterns.

Your perfectly optimized Meta ad might generate excellent returns. Keep running it. But nobody is texting their friend, “Dude, you have to see the retargeting campaign I just got served.”

At least I hope not.

Physical Things Feel Different Now

One of the stranger consequences of everything becoming digital is that physical marketing has started feeling interesting again.

Mail is a good example. For years, direct mail was treated like the ancient embarrassing uncle of digital marketing. Why would you mail something when you can send an email for essentially nothing?

Exactly.

My inbox has 4,000 unread messages. My mailbox has a hydro bill and one flyer from a realtor who appears to have been professionally photographed inside a luxury SUV. The competition is different.

A beautifully designed postcard can feel unusual. A printed catalogue can feel intentional. A sticker might end up on someone's laptop for three years. Packaging might sit on a desk. A poster might become decoration.

A physical object occupies space in a way a social post doesn't.

Give People Something Worth Keeping

A lot of marketing is designed to be consumed and immediately discarded. Instagram posts disappear into feeds. Stories expire. Display ads are ignored. Emails are deleted. We've collectively developed the ability to navigate websites without consciously seeing half the advertising on them.

What if you made something people didn't want to throw away?

A really good tote bag. A strange little booklet. A beautiful product guide. A poster. A sticker sheet. A useful tool. A genuinely nice shirt that doesn't have a six-inch corporate logo across the chest.

Something with enough design and personality that it has value beyond being marketing.

The best branded objects don't feel like promotional products. They feel like things that happen to come from a brand. There's a difference.

Local Is Underrated

The internet convinced businesses that every audience needs to be enormous. But most businesses don't need everyone.

A restaurant needs people who can reasonably get to the restaurant. A local retailer needs customers in its community. A creative agency might only need a handful of good clients every year.

You don't necessarily need 700,000 impressions. Sometimes you need 200 of the right people to know who you are.

Sponsor something small. Collaborate with another local business. Put on an event. Make something specifically for your neighbourhood. Partner with an artist. Make a ridiculous sandwich. I don't know your business.

The point is that geographic limitation can create relevance. Something designed for Vancouver doesn't need to appeal equally to someone in Miami, London and Singapore. It can actually feel like it's from Vancouver.

Specificity gives ideas texture.

Make 100 People Care

Marketing conversations frequently focus on audience size. How many followers? How many subscribers? How many impressions? How much traffic?

These numbers matter, but there's another question that's harder to put on a dashboard: how much does anyone care?

Having 50,000 followers who vaguely recognize your logo isn't necessarily more valuable than having 500 people who actively like what you do. One audience looks better in a pitch deck. The other might actually buy things.

Small marketing ideas can create disproportionate loyalty because participation feels more personal. The first 50 customers get something special. Twenty people get invited somewhere. A hundred packages exist. One neighbourhood gets the campaign.

Not everything needs infinite availability. Sometimes limitation is what makes something interesting.

Stop Trying to Automate Every Human Interaction

Automation is fantastic when it removes boring work. Order confirmations should be automated. Abandoned cart emails should be automated. Appointment reminders should be automated.

Nobody needs an employee manually emailing customers: “Hello Devin. It appears you have once again left protein powder in your shopping cart.”

But automation becomes less impressive when we start using it to imitate human attention. First-name personalization, dynamic recommendations, AI-generated sentences, automated birthday messages, automated anniversaries and automated “just checking in” emails.

Eventually we're building increasingly sophisticated systems designed to simulate someone giving a shit.

Sometimes it might be easier to just give a shit.

Send the email yourself. Reply to the comment. Remember the customer's name. Drop something off. Write the note. Not every interaction needs to become a workflow.

Weird Ideas Usually Start Small

Another advantage of things that don't scale is that you can take more risks. It's difficult to convince a company to do something strange in front of five million people. Doing something strange for 100 people feels considerably safer.

Small projects can become laboratories. Try the packaging. Run the event. Print the shirt. Make the zine. Do the collaboration. See what happens.

If people love it, maybe it becomes something bigger. If nobody cares, congratulations. You confused 74 people instead of spending $80,000 confusing the entire country.

That's innovation.

Scale the Thinking, Not Necessarily the Thing

None of this means businesses should abandon scalable marketing. Please continue sending your emails. Run your ads. Build your SEO. Automate the repetitive stuff. Make the content. Do all the boring things that quietly keep businesses functioning.

But leave some room for ideas that don't immediately make operational sense.

Do things with more care. Create unexpected moments. Make customers feel noticed. Give people something worth keeping. Design things with enough personality that they don't immediately disappear into the enormous pile of marketing everyone sees every day.

A handwritten note doesn't scale. A local event doesn't scale. A beautifully printed object doesn't scale particularly well. A weird little gift definitely doesn't scale.

Good.

Maybe that's why someone will remember it.