If you’re like me, you read a lot of marketing-related newsletters, blogs and publications. Every year about this time, there is a bevy of articles and posts discussing which strategies worked best last year or which tactics will have the greatest success this year.

As marketers we spend a lot of time thinking about what’s working. Sometimes we look at what’s working and say “Let’s do more of that.” Or we present to our managers on the status of our projects and focus almost exclusively on what’s working.

Taking a cold, hard look at what’s NOT working isn’t as much fun as celebrating what’s working. It means someone’s idea failed. Or someone’s prediction was wrong. It can also be challenging to fix or put the brakes on something that’s not working because change can be difficult; it’s often easier to keep doing what you’ve always done, even if it isn’t very effective.

But if you don’t look beyond the successes, you risk spending your time and resources on the wrong things or continuing down a path that won’t get you to the desired destination.

There is a moment in the movie “Anchorman” when a character says of his cologne: “60% of the time, it works every time.” Perhaps the start of this new year is a good time to start thinking about the other 40%.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.