Take Marketing Risks? Yes. But Without Assessing Them First? Never!

Whether we admit it or not, marketers today struggle with risk.  Increasingly, we act irrationally and wonder whether it’s good or bad.  We’re confused by the mixed signals we get about business risk and probability.  What exactly is a rational marketing decision? After all, you can’t simultaneously squeeze more from the budget on one hand and bet the farm on a 500-to-1 shot with the other.

Marketing is not a zero sum game.  You don’t have to win 100% of the marbles to win.  It’s not all or nothing.  On the contrary, marketing is fundamentally relative and incremental.

Those who insist that high risk is the only “safe bet,” and that the opposite is also true (“safe” being the new high risk) take an extreme view that denies the middle ground.  They tell us to forget the parachute, just jump out of the plane.  Parachutes are for wimps, they say, and if you must use one, just sew it on your way down.

Unfortunately, social media parroting, which spreads good ideas quickly, also feeds this foggy mindset just as fast.  Pithy, ironic witticisms like “x is the new y,” where x and y are opposites, are hugely popular.  We seem to believe that the wittier or more ironic a statement is, the more truthful it is.

Wrong.  They are merely witty or ironic.  We like to be surprised, and sometimes we’re lulled into thinking we’re getting a present.

It’s not hard to disprove the high risk-as-the-only-safe-path theory, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming enormously popular.  I have to admit it sounds like fun to blow the marketing budget on one giant, frivolous binge of willful intent to gain attention.  Fun—but effective marketing? (There I go again—throwing cold water on the marketers-just-wanna-have-fun School of “B2B Revolution.” What a party pooper.)

For anyone interested in exploring life as a rational marketer (despite some of the bad reviews the idea gets lately) here’s a little exercise in set theory:

Please rate the following statements as true or false.

1. Today all traditional, old school marketing tactics will fail.
2. Today all new, digital/social marketing tactics will fail.
3. Today all traditional, old school marketing tactics will succeed.
4. Today all new, digital/social marketing tactics will succeed.

If your answer to all four questions was FALSE, then congratulations.  You’re mentally prepared to deal realistically with probability and risk.  You have knees that don’t jerk … at least, not all of the time.  You acknowledge the possible existence of shades of gray or medium ground.

This capacity can be very useful for understanding the highly-complex systems that are involved in the spreading of influence.

Sadly, these days this does not make you merely competent, but special.

And another thing.  Some of us are having trouble telling the difference between strategies of last resort vs. those of first resort.  Have you ever seen a football game in which the winning team starts pumping out hail mary passes in the first quarter, and all throughout the game?  On every play?  No?  Why is that?  Because coaches know the higher risk is justified only when it’s a last resort—as the clock runs out—and not when there are other, lower risk/higher probability ways to get it done.

As smart marketers, we have to know more than one way to win the game.  We must know all the ways, and all the tools, and when and how to use them to best advantage.  In that we really do have something in common with winning athletes and coaches.

When you think about taking risks in your marketing, consider:

• Yes, you will have to take risks.  Some of them might be big.  But there’s a huge difference between taking a single, well-calculated risk vs. habitually taking risks with casual disregard and little or no analysis.
• Reckless abandon is no more your friend than is analysis paralysis.  It simply doesn’t matter how popular risk-taking is or who says so.
• When gauging a risk, keep guts, glory and other tired clichés and emotions out of it.  Focus your passion on your business. Spend it on the times when you need to fire yourself up to take on that big, important risk.  Don’t squander it on trivia that doesn’t matter to prove entrepreneurial cred or massage your vanity.  No one else cares, and you shouldn’t either.
• Don’t forget probability: it’s the most important factor.  Ignoring probability is what allows poor people to throw away their precious dollars on lotteries.
• Regardless of which risks you take and which you don’t, and regardless of the outcomes, you’ll never regret having first done your homework so you can fully understand the risks.

So stop the swirling, and just do it.

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About The B2Bblogger: Steven H. Parker is founder and CEO of Parker Communications, a PR and marketing agency specializing in start-ups and fast growth technology companies. He has worked exclusively with tech companies in PR and marketing for the past 25 years. His prior agency, The Launch Company, for 10 years was one of the top 25 independently-owned agencies in the U.S.He’s also a former VP at Hill & Knowlton, and a former journalist.

During his award-winning career, Parker has provided strategy and consulting to everyone from two-person start-ups to major industry leaders including Lotus, IBM, Digital, Xerox and BBN. Thirty of his 160 clients have been acquired at a total combined value of more than $5 billion. He blogs at www.marketingdissector.com.

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