“The crowd within” — Kelford Labs Daily
Slowing your marketing down.
“Researchers have found that merely asking people to assume their initial judgment is wrong, to seriously consider why that might be, and then make another judgment, produces a second estimate which, when combined with the first, improves accuracy almost as much as getting a second estimate from another person.”
— Philip E. Tetlock, Superforecasters
When we create marketing messages, it can be difficult to know whether we’re on the right track.
Before we’ve put them into the market and actually tested them, how do we know if they’re likely to work?
We have a few tests we use to poke holes in strategy and look for ways to increase the probabilities of success, but, sometimes, what we need most of all is a little time.
Before putting anything out into the market, we always recommend our clients take a day or two to sleep on it. To let it sit for a bit and let their unconscious minds play with the ideas and concepts.
Our initial “estimate” of the market and our message’s effect can be improved greatly by pausing, giving ourselves a break, and coming back to it later.
“This approach,” Tetlock writes, is “built on the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ concept,” and “has been called ‘the crowd within.’”
I never recommend writing a marketing message and publishing it the same day. Instead, I strongly advocate for crafting it on one day, editing it another, and publishing it on yet another.
This slows things down, to be sure, but that’s a feature, not a bug.
Marketing that takes a little longer, but works, is infinitely better than fast marketing that doesn’t.
So, appeal to the “crowd within,” and take some time between making the marketing and putting it into market. Between writing and publishing.
Between estimating and acting.
