There’s an old adage in business that if you see something being done long enough, it’s probably because it’s profitable, even if you can’t understand it right away.
And that’s probably true, in a lot of markets. Infomercials, for example, contain dozens (if not hundreds) of tactics that have been individually tested, so even if “but wait there’s more” seems like a cliche, it’s likely a profitable one.
Search engine marketers know that if someone’s running an ad for, say, $2 a click, and it’s been running for weeks, there’s something going on at the front or back end that makes at least $2.01.
But then there are the fools who hold on for longer than they should, and even worse, the dreamers: things like the restaurant on the corner that seems to change hands every 6 months as a new owner comes in to follow their imagined destiny, somehow failing to notice that even though people run successful restaurants all over the place, nobody’s ever managed to make it at this spot (the landlord, however, probably makes out OK, which is another topic altogether.)
I believe that the bar is being raised in business all the time, and while the fundamentals still work, more people know about them. This can create a competitive environment, but alongside that there’s noise in the system of What’s Working Now. People are learning, a little, and taking notice of what they think is working, and trying to copy it, probably now more than ever.
And the result, increasingly, is a system full of copycats with partial implementations based on flawed assumptions. And these businesses last a little longer than before, fuelled by happy accidents along the way and the hope and faith based on the simple fact that dammit, someone else did this and it worked, didn’t it?
It’s going to get harder to model other systems, to find the ones that are generating real results and not just getting a brief flash of attention before burning out. It’s still hugely important to look for these clues, but even more so to come up with tests to validate the ideas you bring into your existing systems.
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