Daily Lab: Don’t buy the best practice

Here’s why following marketing “best practices” will get you into trouble:

It’s not that existing strategies can’t be adapted or even imitated, to some effect.

It’s that marketing “best practices” are an average, an amalgam of different decisions different people have made for different reasons in different contexts.

Just mixing it all together, and hoping something will work.

But let’s face it, you probably wouldn’t be willing to drink a mixture of the most popular Starbucks orders.

And yet that would arguably be the “best practice.”

Defaulting to best practice is how we get anxiety-driven marketing mixes that attempt to invest everywhere, spreading the impact so thin the only person who notices anything happened is the accountant.

It’s how we get entrepreneurs who imagine that spending all day on TikTok or scrolling through subreddits constitutes “research,” because that one business went viral that one time. (What ever happened to them, by the way?)

But businesses that end up defining best practice don’t get there by following someone else’s.

They get there by focusing on what they can do best.

You wouldn’t go to a bar and ask for a mixture of the most popular drinks. You’d pick the thing you like.

So don’t just order the average of the most popular marketing tactics.

It doesn’t taste good.

Read more about the following the crowd and best practices.