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 Minute is a weekly thinking launch point that is always short enough to read in about 60 seconds. It covers marketing, branding, positioning, language, and public relations. Your email address is never shared, with anybody, for any reason.

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.