Ep. 131 – STOP Doing What WORKS! 🛑 How Confirmation Bias Is DESTROYING Your Marketing! and INVITE ME NEVER! l Jay’s Scoop

Foreign. Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. Also, dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that. We are here for do this, not that.

And today we're going to talk about something that I think is holding back the performance of possibly every marketer on the planet. Business, consumer, small company, big company, does not matter. And that's this idea of confirmation bias. Confirmation bias.

You know, this whole feeling of, hey, we're going to do this thing in marketing, because this is the way it's always been done at our company, and it works really well. And I don't think there's a company on the planet that doesn't kind of navigate that.

And confirmation bias is when you only notice or believe things that agree with what you already think, and you ignore or dismiss anything that doesn't fit in with your beliefs. And that is a mess. That is a mess. And it. It ruins performance. What do I mean? It ruins performance, Right? So you send out an email campaign, okay.

And you start the subject line with a number. The seven pitfalls to avoid whatever, the three new fashion trends of whatever. And the email does great, right? And now you have this tactic.

Oh, we started our subject line with a number. It did so well. Let's start all of our subject lines with a number because it did so well. That is the confirmation bias.

This is how you become wallpaper. And in marketing, this is what we do. We do these tests. Something works well, we don't just double down on it and do it again.

We do it again and again and again. And this is how we fail. This is why I hate email templates. Right? Email templates or social media creative templates are the worst.

Why are they the worst? You create this template, it checks every box, every best practice you could possibly imagine.

And then you send it out a few times, and it does great. And it does great for like a week or two. And then, you know what? We're on autopilot. Let's use this template now for the next step. Six months?

Are you kidding me? And it's all about this idea of confirmation bias. That because it did well a few times, we're going to do it all the time.

And what happens is you stop really innovating, you stop really pushing, and you don't realize it's just because it did well once. It did well because it was new, it did well because it stood out. And now if you do it over and over again, it doesn't work.

So what you need to do, what you need to do, whether it's your social media creative or your email creative, not just creative. Your subject, subject lines, your landing pages, everything. You need to have about 10 things in your arsenal.

10 things in your email arsenal, 10 things in your social media arsenal that you can kind of rotate through that. That way you're not going to become wallpaper. So if it's in your subject line, you're like, okay, great.

I'm going to start my subject line with a number one time. I'm going to start my subject line with brackets. I'm going to start my subject line with a capitalized word.

I'm going to make my subject line a question, right? And if it's on. On the social media side, maybe you'll make your social media post a day in the life of. Maybe you'll make it a.

Did you know you can't just use the same thing over and over again because it works. But I think what may be even worse than confirmation bias is disconfirmation bias. This drives me crazy. Yes, Disconfirmation bias is a thing, right?

And this is the one that crushes marketing.

And what I mean by that is things like this, let's say you, a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, you sent out some emails on a Friday and it didn't do well. So now in your organization is we never send out emails on a Friday. We'll never have our webinar on a Friday.

We won't have our sale on a Friday because some random marketing executive two years ago tried it out and it didn't do well. And it went on. Some never do. Listen, in my organization or any organization, I would ever be a part of whatever is the never do list.

The things that in my organization say we will never do that. That is immediately the first things that I want to test immediately, right? So disconfirmation bias, right?

So we avoid things because something did bad, right? The world keeps changing. The world every year, the world keeps changing. Think about like personalization in the subject line.

It used to be that if you put the person's name J comma, blah, blah, blah, and the subject line, it did incredible, right? And then everybody started doing it.

But there are marketing organizations out there, but because they did it three years ago, they're still Using J comma in the first name in the subject line. That's ridiculous. That's one of the worst tactics you could do now in marketing. It's so overdone.

So this idea of confirmation bias and disconfirmation bias, it holds you back. You know, Michael Dell said something once that really resonated with me and I think about it all the time. He said, if it's not broken, break it.

And I think that that is at the core of how you have to think about your marketing, especially as it relates to confirmation bias. Right. Proactive innovation, that is what you need to have in your organization at all times.

The idea is you need to innovate continuously rather than waiting for something to fail before improving it. That's the way you stay ahead of the market. I saw this stat from McKinsey that kind of blew my mind. 50%.

They fail to adapt because all they were doing was sticking with what they had always done. So what do I do in my company? How do we deal with this? It's a little bit extreme what we do, but this is actually what we do.

Every three months, we take our top five best performing marketing tactics, whatever they are, and we pause them for 30 days. I know that sounds crazy, but we do. Every three months we take our top five and we pause our top five tactics for 30 days.

And it felt forces us to test things. And maybe, maybe our performance won't be as good as it could be because we're not using our best performing tactics. But I'll tell you what happens.

Every time we do this, something new comes out of all of our testing and it's awesome. And now that becomes part of our arsenal. So forcing this idea of innovation is how you win. All right, before we get into.

Since you didn't ask, which is the ridiculous portion, I mean really ridiculous portion of this podcast, I want to let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. Listen, I've talked about Marigold a bunch of times, but maybe you ignore it, maybe you don't listen to it, but you got to listen to.

I'm going to tell you why I use Marigold as my email sending platform.

We send out 6 billion emails a year, business and consumer, and they are good for small marketers, medium sized marketers, large marketers, Business, consumer. I know all of you out there, you don't love your email signing platform. You might be thinking, could there be a better solution out there?

And I'm telling you, Marigold is it. You could check Marigold out@meet marigold.com and if you want to DM me on LinkedIn, I will introduce you to the best people.

Everybody there is great at Marigold, but dme and I'll introduce you to the absolute best people to get you connected to the right person at Marigold. Just drop me a DM on LinkedIn or, or just go and check out meetmargold.com. they are a terrific platform. All right, let's get into.

Since you didn't ask. So the summer's upon us and I just went to a barbecue and I'm. There's something actually wrong with me.

I don't know exactly what it is, but I just don't like going to things. I just like sitting on my couch and watching reality tv. That's just what I like to do.

So I went to this barbecue over these people's house that I've never been to before, which in and of itself made me want to leave before I got there because I'm like, you know, I don't know what it's going to be like. I don't know who's going to be there. And yeah, I was right. My radar was completely correct. I could not wait to leave right from the jump.

So the dude that was on the grill, all right, and hopefully none of these people are listening, but the dude that was on the grill was one of these, like, people that, that like, have such an ego about their grilling, which to me is the weirdest thing in the world to care about your grilling skills. Like, who cares? And he said this while I was standing next to him watching him cook a burger. He goes, step back. This is a one man show. Who says that?

What type of clown do you need to be to say something that ridiculous? I actually hope he is listening because I don't want to be invited to another barbecue. And I mean, it's unbelievable.

And then so my wife's a dermatologist, right? And there are all these people. It's really hot out, we're in Florida and we're seeing people just getting like, like burned, like sunburns.

Again, the worst, like tan. It's like red, whatever. So my wife hands me sunscreen. She goes, I mean, we got to put more of this on whatever. And I, that's fine.

I don't I only issues with, with all that because, you know, dermatology land. So I. Why am I telling you this? I don't know. I put it on and then I got sunscreen in my eyes.

And then I was walking around this barbecue like, like, like something was. Well, something was wrong with me. I had sunscreen in my eyes.

But I didn't know half these people and they thought I was insane because I was like splashing water in my eyes. The whole thing was terrible. And then. This story is ridiculous. There's no story here. But I'm just telling you about my experience.

And then I got into a conversation with a complete random dude. I have no idea what his story was, but he was eating corn on the cob.

And the only thing I'm taking from this barbecue is I will try to never again in my life have a one on one conversation with somebody eating corn on the cob. Because first of all, it's completely disgusting. I mean, I mean, things were flying out of his mouth. And just watching him eat it, I was like.

I couldn't listen to a word he was saying because it was just, it was just gross. And oh, the other gross thing is the dude that was cooking was sweating like, like, like a faucet was coming out of his forehead.

And I'm like, I'm gonna have to eat this thing. So anyway, all I did was sit around and wait for the first person to leave because then they, you know, they, they broke the seal, right?

As soon as they left, I'm like, all right, dude, we could bail. We can absolutely bail. So this is what's on my mind.

You never want to invite me to a barbecue because I will wind up talking about it like, like this is what I do. I don't know. I need to stay home. I just need to stay home. Anyway, I appreciate you listening this. Please leave this review. It helps to circulate it.

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Please leave this review. Thanks for being here and don't invite me to your barbecue later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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