High School Baseball Prospects
A Case for Marketing Experimentation: Making Failure Work For You by Jerry Bader
Remember Roy Hobbs
Any baseball fan that likes movies should know the name Roy Hobbs, the fictional character played by Robert Redford in “The Natural.” Hobbs at nineteen years old is one of those athletes whose easy grace and athleticism, makes him a natural, but his career takes a fifteen-year detour due to a youthful indiscretion and some bad luck. Eventually, at the end of his failed career, Hobbs finds success and redemption. This story transcends sport and becomes an allegory for life, and yes, even business.
Failure Versus Success
Our earliest memories of failure are formed in school. Nobody wants to fail and repeat a grade – the social stigma is far too high a price to pay. As adults we are more used to the prospect of not always meeting our expectations. Even successful baseball players who hit 300, fail seven out of ten times. And in business the sales-to-traffic, or sales-to-call ratio is generally fairly low.
We all know what success is: it’s meeting goals and expectations based on how we define them. But do we learn from success? In most cases no. In fact success establishes the status quo, ingrains conventional wisdom, stifles innovation and creativity, and promotes the repetition of the same methods, technologies, and ideas that have always been used, even when those methods no longer work.
Standing Still Is Not An Option
Don’t get me wrong, success is vital to staying in business and prospering, but it does have a dark side. In a business climate that moves ever faster each day, standing still is not an option.
And what about failure? Obviously going bankrupt is bad, that kind of failure we can all live without. But not all failure has such dire consequences. Most failures are simply a matter of not achieving the results we expected from our investment of time, money, and effort.
As negative as failure is, it does have a positive side, as long as that failure does not become irreparable. What failure does do is teach us how to improve, it forces us to change, and most importantly, it demands that we experiment with new ideas, methods, and techniques.
A Case for Marketing Experimentation
Marketing is one of those nebulous words that has fallen through the cracks of common usage, it has somehow lost its meaning. It is used to describe everything from sales to advertising without any distinct place in the business vernacular, or in the average entrepreneurs’ collective conceptual understanding.
I think it is important to give marketing a precise definition, if for no other reason than to provide us with an achievable purpose for spending money on promoting what we do.
According to Harvard Business School’s emeritus professor of marketing Theodore C Levitt as presented in BusinessDictionary.com, marketing is summarized as “