Many marketing leaders and frontline marketers have a “thing” for marketing best practices. And, it’s easy to understand why.
Marketing success is difficult to achieve and even harder to sustain because the marketing environment is always changing and because it’s incredibly hard to predict what marketing methods and messages will resonate with potential buyers.
Under these circumstances, it can feel immanently reasonable to identify the marketing tactics successful, high-performing companies are using and then emulate those practices. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that many marketers are enamored with “proven” best practices.
Marketers often see best practices as effective and reliable tools for achieving marketing success, but the reality is more complicated.
Best practices can be helpful when they’re understood correctly and used appropriately, but it’s easy for marketers to become enthralled by their benefits and forget about their limitations. Two of those limitations are particularly important.
They Don’t Tell the Whole Story
Most marketing best practices come with an explicit or implicit promise: Use this practice and your marketing performance will improve significantly. However, the reality is rarely that simple.
A marketing best practice typically describes a single aspect of marketing or a small set of related marketing activities. But, marketing success usually results from the combined effects of numerous factors, many of which the best practice doesn’t address. Therefore, a best practice rarely provides a complete “formula” that will guarantee a large-scale improvement in marketing performance.
Francois Bazini discussed this issue in a column published last month in Marketing Week. Bazini wrote:
“One of marketing’s most persistent habits is to turn successful outcomes into portable principles. We see a company win, a brand grow or a challenger break through, and immediately begin asking what others can learn from it . . .
More often, the useful question is not whether the example is impressive, but what exactly made it work.
This is how many best practices are born. We look at successful companies, list what they did, and start connecting the winning dots . . . Each observation may be true. The mistake is to assume that each one explains the success or think it will produce the same results somewhere else.”
Our tendency to treat best practices as “portable principles” and all-inclusive formulas for success is what Phil Rosenzweig called “The Delusion of Single Explanations” in The Halo Effect . . . and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers.
These days, many of the products we buy come with warning labels highlighting the bad things that can happen if we don’t use the product correctly. Most marketing best practices should come with this warning label:
WARNING: Marketing success results from the interplay of numerous activities and conditions, not all of which are addressed in this practice. Therefore, the use of this practice may produce less-than-expected results if other factors required for success are absent.
Widespread Use Reduces Effectiveness
One of the most paradoxical characteristics of marketing best practices is that the more widely they are used, the less effective they tend to become.
Marketing best practices can derive their effectiveness from several sources. A practice can be effective because it is based on sound business principles, or because it resonates with how potential customers make decisions, or because it leverages the capabilities of a particular medium of communication.
But, best practices are also often effective because they are exceptional. When a best practice is new, it tends to be used by only a few companies. Therefore, the practice stands out in the marketplace and more effectively captures the attention of potential customers. The distinctiveness also serves to differentiate the company using the practice from its competitors.
Unfortunately, though, as more and more companies adopt and use a best practice, it will lose some of the distinctiveness that made it highly effective.
Image courtesy of James Whatley via Flickr (CC).
