Incaution is an advertising crime — Kelford Labs Daily

“We are dealing with human nature, with wants, prejudices, and idiosyncrasies which we cannot measure up. No amount of experience can guide us correctly in even the majority of cases. That is why incaution is an advertising crime.”

— Claude C. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising

Incaution is a failure to heed inevitable risks.

No amount of experience, research, or data, for instance, willguarantee that a particular marketing tactic will work.

That is why we must experiment, measure, and iterate over time.

That is why we must preserve our resources to be able to continue and improve.

If we blow all our money, time, or energy on a single attempt, and it doesn’t work, what are we left with?

And if we overinvest in optimization and scale of an unproven tactic, what has it gained us if it doesn’t actually work?

That is why incaution is a marketing crime: It eliminates our ability to continue.

It impairs our ability to persist.

And that, my friends, is the essence of all strategy: Managing our ability to persist.

Any tactic and any advice that eschews caution in favour of bold, blind risk-tasking goes against the very essence of what we’re doing this all for:

To get and keep clients and customers.

And the only way to do that is carefully, steadily, and sustainably.

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