The 4C Method

Not a marketing formula

Most marketing frameworks are persuasion formulas: tactics and hacks for moving a prospect. The 4C Method is different. It's the method beneath everything we do: a disciplined way of understanding problems and developing solutions, built on the premise that problems exist because something hasn't been properly considered. It's pronounced "foresee," and the name is its purpose: foresight is what disciplined consideration produces.

The method was discovered, not designed: parsed out of actual client calls, argued into shape, and finally recognized as a list of values. And here's the credential that matters: Defined Audience Marketing was created with this method. We applied the 4 Cs to the B2B marketing problems we and our clients were experiencing and created a more integrated, comprehensive program that we're truly excited about. Every client strategy runs on the same four steps. Each C has more than one meaning, deliberately, and the method works because they work together.

C1: Consider

Look at the problem from every angle: every stakeholder, what matters to them, who influences them, what they want, how they act, and why. This is harder than it sounds, because real consideration means going against your own assumptions and beneath the surface, into the deep work most analysis skips. It's messy on purpose: the mess is where the unconsidered hides, and the unconsidered thing is why the problem still exists. David Bowie had the gauge: go a little further into the water than you feel capable of, and when your feet don't quite touch the bottom, you're in the right place to do something exciting. Consideration is done when it has carried you there, not when you feel safe. Done right, it should still make you a little nervous after eight years. (It does.)

And the word carries its second meaning deliberately. Considering can mean including the people you wouldn't naturally value or think of. Being considerate is part of considering, and some of the best answers come from exactly the perspectives everyone else left out.

C2: Create

Make something new from what Consider found: at the intersections of ideas, in the gaps between them, in the spaces nobody has filled. Creation starts with the unreasonable. Look at the irrational and the impossible, then scale back to what works, because the goal is something new that works for the greatest number of people.

And Create means the whole word: the strategy and the craft. Strategic creative decides the angle, the offer, the plan. Traditional creative makes the copy and the design. At Angles they are one act, not two departments, because a strategy nobody can feel and a design that says nothing are the same failure.

C3: Collaborate

No one person can stand at every angle. Collaborate means recruiting the vantage points you can't occupy: working together and disagreeing, pushing past what any single view could produce. It is not consensus-seeking, and it is not precious about how the collaborators arrive. Invited, pitched, hired, bartered, partnered: whatever the situation demands, paid or unpaid within reason.

The test of collaboration is arithmetic. With the right people pushing on the right idea, one plus one equals three. And to collaborate is, literally, to create a collaborative system: the roster, the roles, and the exchanges are the durable thing the work leaves behind. Squandering that opportunity on something mundane is the failure to avoid: valuable people deserve to be recruited for work worthy of them.

C4: Connect

Connect ties it all together: the issues from Consider, the solutions from Create, the people from Collaborate, joined into one working whole. Dots into a figure. On the level of ideas, it's where the thinking resolves. On the personal level, it's the outcome the work exists to produce: people meeting people, relationships built, networks that compound.

In our marketing programs, Connect also means the outreach itself: the messages, the introductions, the campaigns. But the outreach is the expression, not the definition, and it comes with a law: connect to bring the other party something better than yourself. Arriving with nothing but your pitch is the oldest failure in this industry, and our own twenty years of message data measured exactly what it earns. Connection is both the end and the point.

The method at work, for seventy years

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has partnered with the company now known as RTX since 1955: over 2,600 degrees earned by that company's engineers and leaders, more than from any other school. In 2023, RPI's president and Pratt & Whitney's president stood together in front of a jet engine, alumni in the room holding titles like Chief Human Resources Officer, and the photograph traveled to hundreds of employees through their own colleagues.

You can read the Cs in it.

• Consider: decades of understanding what one company's engineers actually value and how their careers move.

• Create: programs built new, at the intersection of what the company needed and what the institution could teach.

• Collaborate: executives, alumni, and instructors recruited into the work itself, some as hosts, some as teachers, some as champions.

• Connect: the issues, the programs, and the people tied into a partnership that has compounded for seventy years.

The loop is infinite

The method closes into a loop. Every connection made widens the field of angles available to consider next time: more perspectives, more intersections, more collaborators, more connection. Run once, it's a sequence. Run continuously, it compounds, each turn starting from a wider base than the last. That's why the practice gets stronger every year it runs.

The method built a marketing practice: Defined Audience Marketing. The audience it works through: The Concentric Audience. The evidence it runs on: The Audience Structure Audit.