How “marketing best practices” hurt companies
Copying marketing “best practices” means using tactics you haven’t tested and looking like every competitor. Why that hurts, and when to follow them.
Jon Founder, Cultmethod Positioning 6 min read
Contents
Following marketing “best practices” hurts companies in two ways. You copy tactics without knowing whether, or why, they work: KISSmetrics kept a live chat widget its own A/B test linked to 22% fewer activations. And you end up looking like everyone else, so people tune you out. Learn the rules, then break them on purpose.
Thousands of people google marketing “best practices” every month. “SEO best practices” alone gets about 5,000 searches a month worldwide.1
Branding best practices, marketing best practices, design best practices… You get the idea.
If you’re one of those people, I’m here to tell you to stop.
Now… don’t get me wrong. I like to learn from other people too. There’s no sense in reinventing the wheel every time you try to accomplish something.
But the current overbelief in “best practices” is killing creativity. And it might just be killing your business, too.
Why do marketing best practices hurt companies?
Because you copy tactics without knowing whether they work, and copying makes you look like everyone else.
The way I see it, there are at least two serious problems with adhering to best practices.
Problem #1: You’re being a lemming
If everyone in the world jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?
Sure, some really successful businesses may be doing X. But have you stopped to consider why they’re doing X? And moreover — if doing X is actually a benefit to them?
Lars Lofgren, who ran growth experiments at KISSmetrics, tested the live chat widget on their site. Activations fell 22%. The widget stayed on the pricing page anyway, because the head of Sales figured that if Salesforce used live chat, it should work for KISSmetrics too.
(A live chat widget is the little chat box in the bottom-right corner of many websites.)
KISSmetrics was a successful company at the time. But not because of their live chat widget.
When you copy what other companies are doing, you do so with very limited information. Perhaps, like KISSmetrics, they’re successful in spite of the very thing you intend to copy.
And even if X works for them, what’s to say it will work for you?
Of course, you might counter that the fact that a lot of businesses do X and are successful would suggest that X in general is at least not detrimental and possibly even at least somewhat beneficial. Basically, applying evolutionary theory to business.
That’s a reasonable counter. But of course, you don’t know that to be true either. It could very well be that more businesses that did X failed than succeeded. You just haven’t heard of them because of survivorship bias.
Problem 2: It leads to marketing incest
I don’t know if “marketing incest” is actually a term that people use. If it isn’t, I’m coining it:
Marketing incest
noun1: Marketing (design, copywriting, or campaign) that so closely conforms to industry trends as to constitute a crime against creativity:
Did you see Burberry’s rebrand? They used to have that cool knight illustration but now their logo just looks like every other sans-serif based high fashion brand. It’s total marketing incest.
Or something like that. A more PG term would be “homogenisation.” But I like my version better because it provokes the appropriate level of disgust that people should feel towards this phenomenon.
(Burberry eventually agreed: in 2023 it brought back the knight and a serif wordmark.2)
The big trend in visual branding in the late 2010s was the adoption of non-descript sans-serif wordmarks.
Another example of marketing incest is the gangly-armed cartoon style (often called Corporate Memphis) that nearly every startup used in their marketing materials around 2020.
The thing about marketing (and design in service of marketing) is that one very important factor that makes it effective is the extent to which it stands out.
If your logo doesn’t stand out, it doesn’t get noticed, and will be swiftly forgotten.
If your video ad doesn’t stand out, it doesn’t get noticed, and will be swiftly forgotten.
If your website doesn’t stand out, it doesn’t get noticed, and will be swiftly forgotten.
When every company is saying the same things in the same ways, people tune out. In Havas’s 2021 Meaningful Brands study, consumers said they wouldn’t care, or would easily find a replacement, if 75% of brands disappeared.3 And rightly so.
Marketing incest causes you to blend into the background. It strips your brand of the things that make you unique and identifiable to people. Identifiability and memorability are important competitive advantages, but sooo many companies are willingly giving them up just so they can keep up with trends.
Why does creativity matter in marketing?
Because marketing works when it stands out, and you can’t stand out by doing what everyone else does.
There are lots of aspects of your business where creativity is a bad thing.
If you’re a restaurant owner, you don’t want to get “creative” with the health and safety standards, for example. And you definitely don’t want your accountant to engage in some “creative accounting.”
But things are very different when it comes to the aspects of your business that actually drive growth: product and marketing.
Creativity plays a vital role in marketing. Gary Vee (you know that loudmouth guy on YouTube who has a videographer following him around all day at work?) calls creative ‘the variable of success’. I agree with him.
If you sacrifice creativity, you sacrifice your competitive advantage. And probably your soul too.
Now, the nature of creativity is such that it usually fails. (Though having a good process will help.) Most creative bets fail. You have to try many things until you get it right. But when you do get it right… You really get it right.
When should you follow best practices?
When they’re true best practices, the few that hold for every business. Even then, know the rule well enough to break it.
I’ve been ragging a lot on best practices in this article. But like I mentioned earlier, I do believe in learning from others. There’s no sense in reinventing the wheel every time you need to drive somewhere.
Basically: true best practices do have a role in marketing.
But we need to recognize two things:
- Most “best practices” are not actually true best practices (i.e. things that are universally recommended for every business out there)
- Best practices are not religious dogma. Yes, you should know the “rules”—but you also shouldn’t be afraid to break them
How do you avoid copycat marketing?
The best way I have found to avoid marketing incest is to spend way more time talking to my clients about their company:
- What their values are,
- how they desire to be perceived,
- what makes them unique,
- what sort of person their ideal customer is,
- etc.
The answers to these questions become the basis for all my decisions about design and messaging. And when my clients ask me if they should pursue this or that marketing tactic, we can very easily check if it’s aligned with their core values and their desired brand image (or if they’re just having shiny-object syndrome).
