Essay
What I Was Wrong About in Marketing
Beliefs I held confidently that turned out to be incorrect.
One of the more valuable exercises is cataloging your past errors. Not to flagellate, but to calibrate. Understanding where you were wrong helps you hold current beliefs more appropriately.
Here are beliefs I held confidently about marketing that I now believe were incorrect. Some I learned were wrong through experience. Others through exposure to marketing science. All of them shaped how I currently think.
I Overvalued Customer Loyalty
I believed customer retention was the key to sustainable growth. Acquiring customers is expensive; keeping them is efficient. Focus on your best customers. Build loyalty programs. Increase repeat purchase rates.
The research on market share changed my thinking. Brands grow primarily through acquiring new buyers, particularly light buyers who make up most of any market. Loyalty is largely a function of market share, not a driver of it.
I was not entirely wrong. Terrible service erodes customers. But I overestimated how much loyalty could be influenced and how much influence mattered for growth.
I Undervalued Mental Availability
I thought what mattered was having the best product, the best price, or the best service. If you were genuinely better, customers would find you.
Mental availability matters more than I understood. Being the brand that comes to mind in the buying situation often matters more than being objectively better. Buyers do not conduct comprehensive evaluations. They consider what comes to mind and is easy to access.
This was humbling. Operational excellence matters, but being mentally available is often the more binding constraint.
I Believed in Funnel Stages
I thought buyers moved through stages: awareness, consideration, decision. Marketing should match content to stages. Nurture prospects through the journey.
Funnels are symptoms, not models of buyer psychology. Buyers do not experience stages. They experience problems, searches, conversations, and decisions. The same content can serve people at different stages because stages are not psychologically real.
Buying moments beat stages. The situation matters more than where someone hypothetically is in a funnel.
I Trusted Attribution Too Much
I believed we could measure which marketing activities drove results. Attribution models would tell us where to invest. The precision was comforting.
Attribution models lie. They give precise answers to questions that cannot be precisely answered. They favor measurable over unmeasurable, recent over distant, digital over offline. Budget decisions based on attribution are often wrong.
I still use attribution data, but I hold it loosely. It is one input among many, not the truth.
I Thought Optimization Was Always Good
I believed continuous improvement through optimization was unambiguously positive. Test, learn, improve. The scientific method applied to marketing.
Optimization can make performance worse. Optimizing proxies instead of outcomes. Local optimization that degrades global results. Short-term optimization that sacrifices long-term value. Optimization that narrows when you need to explore.
I still optimize. But I am much more careful about what I optimize, over what time horizon, and with what trade-offs.
I Believed Differentiation Was Essential
I thought brands needed to be meaningfully different to compete. Unique selling propositions. Competitive advantages. Points of differentiation.
Distinctiveness matters more than differentiation. Being recognizable is more important than being meaningfully different. Buyers often cannot articulate why they chose one brand over another. But they could recognize and find the brand they chose.
This reframe was liberating. Many businesses struggle to identify genuine differentiation because differentiation is less important than they think.
I Underestimated Operational Execution
I thought marketing strategy was the hard part. Get the strategy right, and execution would follow. Clever campaigns and creative ideas drove results.
Operational execution often matters more than strategy. The best Google Ads strategy fails if follow-up is broken. The best landing page fails if the phone goes unanswered. Demand capture is mostly operational, not strategic.
I now spend more time on operational infrastructure than on marketing strategy. The infrastructure determines whether strategy translates to results.
I Thought More Data Would Help
I believed the solution to marketing uncertainty was more data. Better tracking. More metrics. Bigger dashboards. The data would reveal the truth.
Metrics drift from reality. More data can mean more precisely wrong answers. The fundamental uncertainties of marketing, what caused what, what would have happened otherwise, are not solved by more data. They are obscured by the illusion of precision.
I still value measurement. But I am more humble about what it can tell us.
Why This Matters
These errors were not random. They followed patterns. I overweighted what was measurable, proximate, and familiar. I underweighted what was hard to measure, distant, and counterintuitive.
Marketing science provided correctives. Empirical research on actual buyer behavior challenged my assumptions. The data showed patterns I had not expected.
I am probably still wrong about things. The correct response is not certainty that I have now figured it out. It is holding current beliefs more tentatively, remaining open to evidence that challenges them, and updating when the evidence warrants.