The instinct to attempt anyway — Kelford Labs Daily

A British historian and military strategist once wrote that, “There is nothing more fatal than the instinct to attempt what cannot succeed from the feeling that if it could succeed it would be good.” (Emphasis mine)

I think about this quote a lot.

I‘ve seen so many marketing disasters over the years that stem from this precise premise:

Someone thinks a marketing idea is cool, so they imagine how successful it should be.

If it worked. If it could work.

But, often, it simply can’t.

They attempt it anyway, it wastes resources, and whatever desperate marketing or business situation inspired the attempt is now even worse.

Perhaps the budget and resources just don’t exist to give it a fair shot, so it launches but no one notices. Perhaps the customer it targets is fictional so lots of people see it but nobody cares. Or maybe the idea is simply too clever for its own good and the team behind it defend it but everyone else ignores it.

It could be any number of things, but the problem is the same: Resources get wasted on a wish, instead of saved for a real opportunity.

Worse, the sunk cost fallacy can cause marketers and entrepreneurs to overinvest in hopeless directions, just because it would be good if they could win back their losses. But they can’t. Not that way.

Instead we need to see what actually works by experimenting, by making small mistakes so we avoid the big ones.

Just because we want a particular marketing tactic to work, or just because we see it working for someone else, that doesn’t mean it will work for us.

The way we find what works for us is by trying what could work, and measuring what is working and what isn’t.

And doing more of what does.

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