What flexibility means — Kelford Labs Daily

One of my all-time favourite facts is that the Apollo 11 moon landing—the very first manned lunar landing—was partially improvised.

The landing spot they’d been aiming for turned out to be more treacherous than they’d thought, so Neil Armstrong made a last-second adjustment and landed long.

Oh, and more than that, the astronauts knocked off the knob of a vital circuit breaker inside the lander, and they had to depress it with a felt-tipped pen to take off again.

Seriously.

Because nothing ever goes as planned.

— Kelford Labs: Nothing ever goes as planned

Building a flexible marketing strategy can be thought of as simply widening the scope of our preparation.

Instead of assuming that what we try will always work, we assume that it often won’t. And we prepare for that.

Instead of assuming our messages are perfect, we assume there’s room for improvement, and we prepare to keep finding it.

Instead of assuming that our steady, consistent client base will always be with us, we prepare to be led to new markets.

By building in preparation, we avoid the need for prediction. We don’t need to know what will happen next because we’re prepared for whatever happens.

A marketing strategy that assumes initial success or eternal relevance is obsolete the moment it’s written.

But one that assumes an uphill struggle, plans for constant adaptation, and prepares for a long and patient process is likely to last.

And likely to work.

Not because we knew what the future held, but because we prepared for whatever it might.

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