One of the most important ingredients in good marketing is focus. From macro to micro, here are the components:

Organizational Focus: The company knows what its strengths are develops them. It’s always easier to develop your strengths than try to overcome weaknesses. This is why Apple has only a handful of product types. And why Research in Motion should have never spent a year trying to make a tablet while neglecting its one great strength, the Blackberry.

Executive Focus: The intelligent, curious, distractable CEO has brought down many a startup. For years, RIM couldn’t even pick one CEO. Netflix’s CEO tried to focus on too many areas last year, and sank the stock price by two-thirds. A focused CEO aggressively elminates distractions, and knows immediately when they appear.

Staff Focus: Across the marketing function, do you focus on providing value to a long list of customers and prospects in your marketing? Do you focus on building relationships with the media? Do you focus on simple, emotional, lifestyle-focused messaging? Do you focus on effective platforms, or do you jump around from on flavor-of-the-week social media site and platform to another?

Focus is a rate-determining step for good marketing. How is yours?

Bonus Reading: Speaking of focus, my column from last week on Mashable details why Amazon should stay out of the smartphone business. Read it here.

The Evangelist Marketing Institute is a private strategy and marketing consulting and coaching practice with clients that include Logitech, TiVo, and Sprint.  Details about my work are here.

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