Marketing is making small mistakes — Kelford Labs Weekly

“How have I been able to win from this situation so many great successes? Simply because I made so many mistakes in a small way, and learned something from each. I made no mistake twice. Every once in a while I developed some great advertising principle. That endured.”

— Claude C. Hopkins

In a changing market, marketers often retreat to what feels safe.

What feels certain.

What feels data-driven, and validated.

But the thing I want to remind you (and me) is that this retreat is a retreat. And not necessarily to safety, but to an unsafe illusion.

Because there’s no amount of data that can tell you the future of your marketing. No particular datapoint that can predict what will happen.

Data can only tell you what did happen.

It’s our job as marketers to do things that data can measure. But we must do the doing, and we must do the deciding.

So as we marketers and entrepreneurs start feeling more and more pressure (from ourselves and others) to be certain and to be safe, we have to remember that there is no such thing as marketing certainty.

It is we who have to create the next datasets to measure, which can tell us what did work so we can do more of it, and what didn’t so we can stop doing it.

And, if we’re doing our marketing right, we’re doing something that hasn’t been done before. Saying something that hasn’t been said before.

Which means we’re creating data that hasn’t existed before.

So, short of somehow simulating all of human societal interaction, World on a Wire*-style, there’s no way of knowing, for sure, how something genuinely new will actually work.

(*This is a 1973 German TV serial that suggests our reality is just an elaborate computer simulation to run business and marketing experiments, which is a thought not completely without its appeal...)

But this is not to dismiss data! It is to define it as a tool.

One used in service of doing, of deciding, of determining what did and didn’t work.

Not as a recipe for success, but as a measure of it.

There’s no such thing as marketing certainty, but we can be certain we’re following the right process. One that is likely to lead us to future marketing success, not one constrained by the paths of the past.

Which is where all data comes from: the past.

Think about it this way: The more data we put on a car’s dashboard, the more likely we are to take our eyes off the road.

And the same is often true for our marketing. Knowing every detail of every interaction, and attempting for perfect attribution of every penny, will distract us from what we’re actually trying to do.

Which is not to be certain: It is to succeed.

And the quest for certainty is at odds with the need for experimentation.

Because marketing is not about making no mistakes, it’s about making lots of small mistakes. That’s what experiments are.

Remember: In creative endeavours like marketing, mistakes are not a necessary evil, “they’re not an evil at all.”

They’re our way of finding success. By making small mistakes and learning from each one, until we discover what works.

And we decide to focus on it.

Reply to this email to tell me what you think, or ask any questions!

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