When you make one bold move: everything becomes clearer and you can see where you actually need to go, not where you think you should go. But, most people wait for perfect conditions before taking action. That's backwards. Bold moves create perfect conditions. They shake things up. They force you to think differently. They make you deal with reality instead of hypotheticals.

Sometimes time spent reinventing the wheel results in a revolutionary new rolling device. But sometimes it just amounts to time spent reinventing the wheel. Our intertwined social world is too complex for us to master, driven by feedback loops and tipping points, forces that are constantly changing, swayed by chance and chaos, accidents, and black swan events.

The process of focusing our attention only on a subset of the stimuli in the environment — usually those related to our goals makes crafting effective marketing campaigns even more challenging. Why?

Most marketing campaigns are lots of activity and noise, but there's no real sense of where they're headed. We launch campaigns because that's what we do.

This is misguided.

Try starting with the end in mind. Not just "we want more sales" (that's lazy thinking), but a crystalline vision of what transformative success looks like. When you're fuzzy about success metrics, every A/B test is just guesswork (most A/B tests are done incorrectly but I digress). Every piece of content is just content for content's sake. You're throwing post-its of varying sizes at a wall, hoping something sticks.

The weight of past investments creates powerful psychological anchors. Marketing executives often face resistance not because the new approach is flawed, but because stakeholders feel the pain of "abandoning" previous investments more acutely than they feel the potential of future gains.

Recognize when something is ready enough to serve its purpose. The people we get to work with, especially in marketing often forget that every piece of work is an iteration, not a final destination. You create work that matters. Now go and see who else thinks so by launching it into the world.

Instead of highlighting what your product does, emphasize what prospects lose by not acting. Frame inaction as the risky and therefore uncomfortable choice.

Enemy Number One Of Innovation? Your Ego.

Imagine looking at the wall where your brilliant campaign strategy is laid out. You're certain it's going to revolutionize everything and crush the competition into oblivion. Certain.

Poppycock! Certainty is the enemy of innovation.

Give yourself options rather than being beholden to preordained steps especially if any expert or guru proclaims "that's how it's always been done".

We're not just competing for attention; we're exploiting fundamental neurobiological circuitry that evolved over millions of years. The orienting response – that automatic head turn toward novel stimuli – wasn't designed for massive digital billboards along the highway or infinite scroll feeds. It was meant to help us spot predators and potential mates.

No diversions. No distractions. Just relentless, intelligent, and pragmatic work. When a potential partnership emerged that could crush competition and create market dominance, she didn't hesitate. Old rivalries meant nothing compared to strategic advantage.

Sometimes, you have to let people fall in love with your product one feature at a time.

Breaking down a product's value proposition into individual, meaningful benefits can help customers better appreciate its total worth, counteracting their natural tendency to undervalue combined probabilities or features.

Are you trying to optimize your marketing campaign but not sure what to optimize? Try one, two, or all of these. Maybe not at the same time as optimizing for many can hurt the optimization of one. More on that later.

It would be best if you shortened your marketing feedback loop. How do you do that? First, you did a good job recognizing that every delay represents a risk and an opportunity cost. Traditional marketing often relied on quarterly reviews or monthly analytics, but now such delays are practically prehistoric.

The iterative marketing strategy process works. All you need to do is observe, analyze, hypothesize, experiment, measure, and adapt.