Embrace the Marketing Mess

So when Liam interviews somebody, there's usually some theme, and the theme that kept coming up as I was reading your article about that episode is that so much of it is sort of accidental, but then there are certain principles that are really important, and I think you put together three principles here, right? So let's just go through these, and I wanna ask some questions along the way too.

Yeah, and I've been thinking about our own marketing a lot lately, and then obviously most of our clients are in the marketing business in some form or another.

And, um, you know, I've read the canon of literature and all the good marketing books, so I feel like I know what marketing is.

I know good marketing from bad marketing.

[laughs]

But this point that Rory has made many times, I didn't really hear it, I guess, until Liam had him make the point on this podcast, is that marketing success is fat-tailed.

So he told the story...

I don't remember if he told me this or it was on another podcast of his.

He remembered the moment when he was having dinner with his friend, Nassim Taleb, the statistician and philosopher, I guess you would call him.

He refers to himself as a flaneur, one who wanders.

And Taleb made the comment to him that, you know, marketing's fat-tailed.

If you think of a classic bell curve shape of distribution of anything, so this would be the distribution of marketing success, a thin-tailed bell curve is what most of us are used to, where the curve just tails off down to zero or the bottom.

But fat tails, the tails don't hit the bottom of the graph.

So what does that mean? It means that a small number of random outliers can actually have a really big effect on the average.

So what Taleb meant by this, and what Rory means by this, marketing success is fat-tailed, is you think it's logical and marketing success happens through a steady increment of small successes.

But the reality is you should see your marketing as a series of experiments.

It's more like a hit maker model, like a studio model or a VC model, where 9 out of 10 investments aren't going to work, and the 10th one is gonna work big time, and that's how you should think about marketing.

So that insight that- Marketing success is fat-tailed, and it's often accidental and even illogical.

Just is a great reminder to all of us that marketing planning is important, but at the end of the day, we are better off viewing our own marketing and the marketing that we might do for our clients as a series of experiments, most of which will fail, and we need to be comfortable with the fact that most of them will fail.

And I would say we don't have a problem starting all those experiments.

We have a problem stopping them in time.

Oh, great point.

We're not comfortable just saying, "Oh, I don't think that's working." Even if mathematically you're not sure that's the case, you just follow your instincts, say, "Oh, no problem.

Okay, we tried that.

What's next?" One of the things that we talked about in an earlier episode, I should have looked this up and I didn't, was about how both you and I were recommending that people do lots of things and see what works.