Most of you’ve most likely heard the story in regards to the inebriated man who had misplaced his home keys and is looking for them beneath a road gentle. A police officer comes over and asks what he is doing.
“I am searching for my keys,” the person says. He factors to a spot about 20 ft away and says, “I misplaced them over there.”
The police officer appears to be like puzzled and asks, “Then why are you searching for all of them the way in which over right here?”
The person replies, “As a result of the sunshine is so a lot better over right here.”
For the previous a number of years, entrepreneurs have confronted relentless stress to show the worth of their actions and applications. In response to those pressures, they’re inserting better emphasis on measuring the efficiency of promoting techniques, channels, and applications, and lots of advertising and marketing leaders are allocating budgets and basing advertising and marketing combine selections on efficiency information.
General, this has been a superb factor. It is exhausting to argue that entrepreneurs should not measure the efficiency of their actions and use efficiency metrics to information advertising and marketing investments. Widespread sense says this could result in higher selections.
However, advertising and marketing efficiency measurement may also have a darkish aspect. The issue arises when the flexibility to simply measure a advertising and marketing tactic turns into the first criterion for figuring out its worth.
When taken to the acute, this mind-set can lead entrepreneurs to decide on advertising and marketing techniques based mostly totally on how straightforward they’re to measure. Not that way back, entrepreneurs accepted as proven fact that they could not inform which half of their finances was wasted. Right now, some entrepreneurs appear to consider if it may well’t be simply measured, it is not value doing.
I can perceive why entrepreneurs are tempted to assume this manner. In an surroundings the place proving the worth of your work can imply the distinction between maintaining or shedding your job, advertising and marketing strategies which can be simply measured can seem like the protected selection.
However making measurability the principle criterion for figuring out the worth of a advertising and marketing tactic or channel is short-sighted and finally harmful. It is a basic instance of the McNamara Fallacy.
The McNamara Fallacy was named for Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Protection throughout the Vietnam Struggle. McNamara believed that the success of the U.S. battle effort in Vietnam may very well be measured utilizing quantitative metrics, significantly physique counts. To place it bluntly, in the event you persistently inflict extra casualties in your enemy than your forces maintain, you’ll win the battle.
The time period McNamara Fallacy was coined by the famous social scientist Daniel Yankelovich, who described it this manner:
“However when the McNamara self-discipline is utilized too actually, step one is to measure no matter could be simply measured. The second step is to ignore that which may’t be simply measured or given a quantitative worth. The third step is to presume that what cannot be measured simply actually is not necessary. The fourth step is to say that what cannot be simply measured actually does not exist. That is suicide.” -Daniel Yankelovich, “Deciphering the New Life Kinds,” Gross sales Administration The Advertising and marketing Journal (November 15, 1971).
Mockingly, a few of our efforts to enhance advertising and marketing efficiency measurement may also exacerbate its darkish aspect. Most entrepreneurs have grow to be centered on measuring the affect of promoting actions on income. So, we assemble multitouch attribution fashions to assign income {dollars} to particular advertising and marketing actions.
Measuring the efficiency of promoting actions that produce fast outcomes is comparatively straightforward. It is a lot more durable to measure the affect of promoting actions that will not bear fruit for months and even years.
For instance, the content material that you simply create and publish this 12 months can produce a constructive impression within the thoughts of a possible purchaser, and that impression could affect a shopping for course of that happens months or years sooner or later. Likewise, a few of the gross sales you shut this 12 months could have been influenced by advertising and marketing applications you ran final 12 months.
Advertising and marketing actions with lengthy gestation durations, and people whose impacts are a number of steps faraway from the shopping for determination could be troublesome to measure. However, a lot of these actions are vitally necessary for advertising and marketing success. Sadly, our fixation on measurability can lead us to underinvest in these crucial advertising and marketing actions.
The lesson for entrepreneurs is obvious: Do not gauge the worth of a advertising and marketing tactic solely by how straightforward it’s to measure.
As Albert Einstein purportedly wrote on his blackboard: “Not every thing that counts could be counted, and never every thing that may be counted counts.”
Illustration courtesy of Shawn Carpenter by way of Flickr (CC).
