OTT Issue #1: Flying Over the Himalayas: Impressive, Yet Unnecessary

Have you ever finished a project and thought, “Wow. That was a lot harder than it needed to be.” If so, you probably have a lot in common with a goose. And you’re also in the right place.?

Greetings, and welcome to the very first issue of Off the Trail. I’m your guide…or more accurately your fellow explorer, Andrea Fryrear. This newsletter is here to focus the attention of all the innovative, curious, solution-minded marketers on new ideas.?

Not necessarily new ideas about?what?we do as marketers, but new ideas about?how?we do our work. Call it an operational approach to marketing rather than a strategic one.?

Actually, it shouldn’t be “rather than.” It should be “in addition to.” We still need smart messaging, resonant branding, and content that cuts through the clutter. But if all of that brilliance takes multiple quarters to get to market and has gone through so many rounds of revisions that it’s lost all its sparkle, then what’s the point??

Take, for example, the Bar-headed geese, so named for the two distinctive black bars on their heads.

They migrate from Central Asia to India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan every winter, and then head back to China and Mongolia to nest when the warm weather returns. And to do that, they fly over the Himalayan mountains. Yep, you read that right. They fly OVER the highest mountains in the world. Every year. Sounds impressive, until you find out that they don’t have to do that.?

See, millions of years ago the OG ancestors of today’s Bar-headed geese started flying this route when it was safe and sedate. But in the intervening millennia, some gigantic mountains showed up in their path. Now the modern geese are stuck repeating the journey, even though there are less treacherous, more efficient options. They’ve even developed unique physical adaptations to make it possible.??

One time, I went onsite with a client to discover that they were carrying physical folders around their offices that contained their critical work in progress. People had to check off their input – with pens and stuff – before the work could move on to the next person. Yep, you read that right. They carried files around their office and marked them up to show they had looked at them. Like the geese, they had conjured up adaptations that allowed them to get important things done. But they really didn’t have to anymore.??

Sure, we could contort ourselves to fit the way we’ve always done things. These adaptations might even be impressive and unique when viewed in isolation. But why expend the energy evolving to fly over the Himalayas, when we could more easily and quickly go around them??

I realize that operations might not be quite as snazzy as some of the other components of modern marketing. But I’m convinced that’s exactly why it needs our attention. Marketers waste extraordinary time and effort developing workarounds, rather than devoting those energies to creativity, strategy, and innovation.?

If we fix the way we work, if we stop flying unnecessarily over the Himalayas, then everything – every single thing we do – benefits from passing through that improved process. It’s an exponential improvement opportunity. Yet most of us ignore it. There are a few reasons why I think that is, and so to help us understand how we got here, this first issue of Off the Trail (OTT for short) will glance over our shoulders at the path we’ve trod. Then we’ll step, deliberately and with glorious purpose, toward new ideas.??

And so, to the root causes.?

What’s keeping us on the road we know? Why aren’t we leaping gleefully into uncharted glens? When did we stop skipping merrily into unknown meadows?

The OG geese who started their migration before the Himalayas existed were just doing what was best for their own chances of survival and reproduction. Similarly, our own ancestors got rewarded for limiting their risk. If you were skipping merrily into unknown meadows that turned out to be filled with predators, you weren’t hanging around to pass on your genetic material.?

This reward system has led to a whole bunch of humans who are hard-wired to avoid the unknown. Consider this abbreviated list of cognitive biases that are related to steering clear of stuff we don’t quite get:?

• The well-traveled road effect:?This refers to our tendency to?underestimate how long it takes us to cover ground we’re familiar with, and also to?overestimate how long it’ll take us to go on a less familiar route. Anybody else tends to get behind on weekly blog posts even though you do them…every week? Here’s your culprit.?
• Confirmation bias:?When under its effects, we tend to seek out and retain info that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. (This one’s a big problem outside of marketing too.)
• Overconfidence effect:?We’re reeeeaaallly sure we’re right, even though we probably aren’t. When people say they’re 99% positive about something, they turn out to be wrong about 40% of the time.?
• Planning fallacy:?Good old- fashioned low-balling of how long it’ll take us to get something done. Basically, what everybody does in every planning meeting.?
• Scope neglect:?Also known as scope insensitivity, this leads us to ignore the size of a problem when we’re evaluating it. So if we’re willing to expend the same amount of effort to get 2,000 leads as we would to get 20,000, we’re suffering from scope neglect.?
• Zero-risk bias:?We prefer to reduce a small risk down to zero, rather than reduce a bigger risk by more. So if we’re gambling $2,500 on a new ad design, we’re more likely to do something that reduces that gamble to $0, rather than take our $50,000 experiment down to $25,000.?

Like the Bar-headed geese who now have an enhanced ability to bind oxygen in their hemoglobin because their ancestors picked a particular migratory route, we now have a tendency to stick with what we know because our ancestors weren’t overly exploratory and therefore didn’t get eaten.

Of course, we’re no longer regularly in danger of getting eaten, so it’s a good time to let go of our inherited biases. The geese would probably do the same if they could.?

If we?don’t?free ourselves of our bias-laden thinking, the chances are good that we’ll get trapped in the lather, rinse, repeat mode of marketing. You know, the stuff that sort of works but gives you slightly worse results every time. Safe, but boring. Likely to get approved during budgeting cycles, but unlikely to set off fireworks in a quarterly recap.?

This kind of marketing is likely to contribute to the misconception that marketing doesn’t matter. That we eat up budget and don’t deliver results. And why do we have so many people on that team anyway??

That misconception makes me mad. Not just because I’m a career marketer and I want my colleagues to get respect. But also because I built a business on content marketing, and I’ve seen its power up close. Organizations of all sizes are walking away from major opportunities if they belittle their marketers. And also marketers deserve better.?

So I’m not flying over the Himalayas anymore.?

I’m looking for the smarter, better, and almost certainly warmer routes that aren’t well marked.?

Let’s walk, run, swim, and fly together.?