Mike Moran's book "Do It Wrong Quickly" has drastically changed my view of Internet marketing. As most Internet marketing tools are new and marketers yet inexperienced, the initial solution often ends up being wrong no matter how long the company is analyzing the alternatives. The idea of using quick experiments to test the online marketing tool is a great way to fail your way up to success. Companies still need to do things right offline, but it is much easier to fix a mistake online compared to the old marketing world where companies for example committed to running a failing TV ad for a year.
The only concern that I have is that it might not be as easy as Moran describes to convince the executives to agree to online experiments. Although he provides some great guidelines for this issue such as persuading your fellow leaders who are more adaptable, I am still not entirely convinced that there are not some companies where this approach would not work. Especially large and bureaucratic companies might not be able to do quick experiments without going through a long approval process.
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Thanks for such kind words about my book. You're right that not every company is an easy place to try these things, but I was able to do it at IBM, which is about as large a company (and one that loves approvals and procedures) as you'll ever meet. For many of my early experiements, I tried things that cost no money and I could do with no approvals, only going further when I had more of a track record to show how well it worked.
ReplyDeleteThanks again for such nice posts about my book, and let me know if I can ever be of any help to you.