Don't Confuse Your Personal Experience With Good Strategy

Author:

Morgan Stewart

Source:

I'll never forget a conversation I had with my graduate advisor my first semester as a sociology grad student. I had scheduled a meeting to discuss my first big research project with him and made the comment, "Well in my experience..." He stopped me mid-sentence, his eyes got large, and he took a deep breath. "Listen to me," he said. "Your personal experience is irrelevant here. You are not a representative sample."
 
Sasha Pasulka published a brilliant post on Seattle 2.0 recently explaining how she learned this lesson firsthand. As she Tweeted about her plans to launch a new email newsletter, she was mocked by a friend who replied, "Welcome to 2003!" Despite her skepticism that her readers would voluntarily provide their email addresses, people signed up "in droves."
 
Her conclusion, "I should have done this years ago. I did not, because I was thinking like me, and not like my market."
 
We Marketers are Freaks of Nature
 
My eyes were really opened when I talked to a friend who runs a website for ranch and farm real estate brokers. He recently told me that every time he sends an email to his customers, his fax machine goes nuts with responses.
 
Talking to my colleagues in email marketing, it would be easy to believe average folk spend the majority of their waking hours online or heads down on a smartphone, receive a couple hundred emails a day, understand Can-SPAM, has read privacy policies, are concerned about "inbox overload," and are shifting their interactions with companies to Facebook and Twitter because these channels give them more control.
 
They aren't. Instead, the majority of consumers ...
 
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