Marketing Fallacies

Business owners face two primary enemies when it comes to marketing: themselves and slick, incompetent consulting firms. No wonder most online business are money losers. When you're busy running a business it's difficult to see things from the customers' viewpoint, or to objectively assess the competitive landscape, or to even know enough to properly evaluate service providers.

Basing decisions on things such as "conventional wisdom", "common sense" and what "looks good" often gets business owners in trouble because such "conventional wisdom" is all too often based on beliefs rooted in marketing myths that permeate business today. We call this syndrome death-wish marketing, and it is pervasive on the internet due to the newness and complexity of marketing online.

Symptoms of Death Wish Internet Marketing

• Inability and a resistance to calculating basic business metrics: e.g., marketing allowable, cost per visitor, cost per conversion
• Inability to implement and understand basic statistical analyses, such as how to do statistical analysis on an A/B test
• Relying on flawed data, such as focus groups and non-representative samples
• Seeking just short-term results; failing to consider long-term ramifications
• Insistance on simple solutions to complex problems
• Ignoring customer needs
• Considering too few alternatives
• Superficial thinking: Inability and reluctance to engage in competitive analysis, and analysis of strategy and tactics
• Overemphasis on form, appearances, and cool things that can be done with technology; with corresponding underemphasis on marketing strategy and online functionality
• Accepting only findings that corroborate decisions and rejecting or ignoring findings that contradict them
• Decisions based on the owner's judgment alone