Written by Jeremy Langley – Marketing Director at The Marketing Centre

I was taught a long time ago that one of the most important decisions we make in life is that of how we choose to allocate our time. Time is the only currency we all possess and the decisions we take daily on how we spend each hour, the smallest meaningful unit of this currency, can often define how successful we are.

Some of us are instinctive investors – able to sense the direction where time spent will deliver the greatest returns in happiness, wealth or progression. Others are spendthrifts, spending it on whatever shiny thing lands in front of then until they end up like glorious failures (or young children) having enjoyed every minute of their day but achieving precisely nothing. Most of us bounce around somewhere in the middle, wise investors until the shiny ping of LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook lures us from our good intentions – “Look a shiny thing!”.

I think of ‘low hanging fruit” as shiny things, shiny red things, just like the mythical apple Eve is holding in the image above, and it’s a phrase that can leave me feeling a bit flat – in the same way that I imagine Eve felt after that first bite.

Because in business terms low-hanging fruits, if they exist outside the imagination at all, are rarely as sweet as they seem, rarely as low-hanging or plentiful as most leaders imagine and usually bloody hard to actually pick amongst the thorns of an over-grown garden (I’m stretching this metaphor a bit too thin). Worse still, they are often terrible time stealers – and that is the original sin here.

As a Marketer my value is in driving financial returns (typically revenue, profitability and sometimes business valuation) and people like me are not cheap: costing the same as a small team of apprentices who could be making a difference elsewhere today, and so there is often a great deal of (real or imagined) pressure to allocate significant time to finding that low-hanging fruit.

It makes sense. If you’re a business leader you know that all that fruit, even if it’s not as plentiful, attractive or juicy as you’d imagined (and it rarely is) it has an immediate value. Low-hanging fruit can be weighed and spent – they generate cash. Whereas for many of those same business leaders strategy and strategic marketing can feel like ‘jam tomorrow’. It’s activity that has a higher risk profile, is often outside their comfort zone and can often feels like cash out, but not in.

The purpose of strategy though is to create long-term (sustainable) competitive advantage, and if we lived in a more enlightened world we could perhaps treat strategy development like the cost of plant or equipment, we could call it a capital investment and depreciate the value over three years, but we don’t and we can’t and so we we feel the need to look for low-hanging fruit.

What’s my point? It certainly isn’t that we shouldn’t look for these fruit. We should. We should always be aiming to pay for ourselves along the strategy journey and not just wait until the end, but also because there is almost always something out there and it’s our job to find it. However we should be ruthless in investing our time in proportion to the return – regardless of whether that’s long-term or short-term, and long-term gains as a result of good strategy, should always significantly outweigh short-term. That’s how time should be allocated, but I’d be surprised if that’s how our time is allocated.

As a business leader your job is to ensure your marketing lead isn’t being lured into just focusing on the short-term by asking them right question “How does this action create long-term value?” and you should expect them to have an answer. Be prepared to steer them away from the shiny thing if the return on all that money you’re spending on them is less than you should get by playing the long game.

As a strategic marketer you should not avoid the difficult questions about the returns of good strategy by getting hypnotised by the fame of short-term gains. Because low-hanging fruit usually deliver less than promised, less than your boss imagined and less than you would have delivered if you’d spent that time wisely. Worse still, like Eve, they can often leave you painfully aware after eating that you are…well…naked.