Are you making this common marketing mistake?
Marketing can be a massive pain. When it starts draining your time, money, and energy, it’s easy to fall into common marketing mistakes, like wishful thinking.
If you’re a small business, charity, or community organisation, you probably don’t have time or budget to spare. But without marketing, how will anyone know what you do?
So you get to work on a marketing campaign. Maybe you DIY, maybe you hire someone. But what if your marketing isn’t working?
Hopefully, you’re tracking performance. But this is where wishful thinking can creep in. Like a waterfall, it can drown out the warning signs. I’ve seen this in my own business. I’ve been carried away in the current of an exciting new idea. When you’re emotionally invested in seeing your efforts as a success, it’s easy to overlook the evidence that something isn’t right. You might plough ahead and refuse to change course, instead of cutting your losses and coming up with a better plan.
This is what I call the Wishful Thinking Waterfall. Here’s what I’ve learned from making this costly marketing mistake.
Why are business founders so vulnerable to wishful thinking?
Surveys (see HubSpot and 1st Formations) show that making money isn’t the only reason people start a business. Financial freedom and flexibility come top, closely followed by passion. These are deeply emotional desires. Starting a business isn’t just making a living: it becomes part of our identity. This makes it much harder to admit when something isn’t working, and to let go. Our business is our baby!
Many entrepreneurs are also optimists. This is a good thing: starting a business is risky. Optimism encourages us to be courageous innovators, facing problems and uncertainty with resilience.
Still, optimism makes us vulnerable to marketing mistakes like wishful thinking. We focus on the positives and neglect signs that all is not well. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman discusses the upsides and downsides of having an optimistic bias. One of the main disadvantages is overconfidence and a tendency to take “excessive risks” such as overpaying for questionable assets (p. 295).
In fact, wishful thinking is just one of many cognitive biases entrepreneurs face. We’re often hit with a double whammy of wishful thinking combined with another fallacy.
Take the sunk cost fallacy, for example. When you’ve invested time, effort and money in your business, it’s hard to walk away, even when signs of failure are everywhere. The Wishful Thinking Waterfall whispers, “Success is just around the next corner.”
How wishful thinking sabotages your marketing
Wishful thinking can water down marketing at every level, from the success of the marketing campaign to the strategy behind it, right down to the product itself.
As a copywriter, I’ve invested time, energy and passion in my work. Blood, sweat and tears. Low social media engagement? It’s much easier to believe my copy is great and the algorithm is screwing me over than to go back and take a hard look at what I’ve written. No response to marketing emails? Well, it’s a numbers game. Just reach out to more people and eventually I’ll get a reply. Nobody reading my blog? Well, my ideal client just hasn’t stumbled on it yet. Wishful thinking? Me? Never!
Clever, thoughtful copy can convert, but it’s not a foregone conclusion. Sometimes small businesses go “viral” on social media and take their foot off the gas, not noticing that the virality hasn’t led to new customers until it’s too late.
In a larger organisation, this might look like going ahead with an idea that everyone on the team loves, without doing enough research to see if the target audience will feel the same way. Or any form of groupthink, where teams reinforce each other’s optimism instead of asking hard questions. Teams that say yes to everything become their own Wishful Thinking Waterfall!
5 Signs your marketing has gone over the Wishful Thinking Waterfall
- You’re writing what sounds good to you, but you haven’t checked with your audience.
- You haven’t tested your copy (even though you have all the tools to) – no A/B testing, no feedback, just vibes.
- You’re hearing crickets from your social media posts and marketing emails, despite a high volume (plus you’re blaming the algorithm or spam filters).
- Your campaign doesn’t reach its goals, so you redefine them after the fact.
- Warning signs are flashing in the corner of your eye, but you’re looking away.
Stop wishful thinking from watering down your marketing
Perhaps you’re recognising yourself in some of this (or is that just my wishful thinking?) but how do you avoid making these kinds of mistakes? Here are a few tips:
Doubt, data and distance
Doubt may not be as warm and fuzzy as hope, but it serves a very useful purpose. Encouraging teammates to express doubt, and exploring our own doubts, can help us to ignore the seductive whispers of wishful thinking.
Data is much maligned for being cold and unemotional. But it’s your warning sign not to take a dip in the Wishful Thinking Waterfall. Ignore at your peril. Smaller businesses who don’t have vast amounts of data available can still seek feedback from potential customers or trusted mentors from outside the organisation. Getting input from someone outside of your digital echo chamber is also worthwhile. Get out into the real world and talk to customers. In Kahneman’s words, look for the “outside view”.
Distance yourself from your pet project for a while. Take a break or work on something different. This can interrupt the inertia that allows wishful thinking to run the show. Focusing on other priorities helps you to put things in perspective… and perspective is what’s missing from wishful thinking.
Get out your forceps and conduct a premortem!
Another idea from our old pal, Daniel Kahneman (maybe you’re better off just reading his book?). Well actually, it’s from his old pal, Gary Klein. A post-mortem is a medical examination of a body to find out the cause of death. Imagine if, instead, you could find out how someone died before it happened. The pre-mortem is the business version of this: finding out what went wrong, before it all goes wrong.
Get together, ideally as a team comprised of divergent thinkers, and imagine you fail. Write down how this happened, in as much vivid detail as possible. As an example, here’s a pre-mortem for my freelancing business. To get the “outside view”, I wrote my own version and asked ChatGPT to evaluate and amend it:
Cause of death: wishful thinking.
Amy got carried away with branding, spending hours writing imaginative fantasy blogs which had low SEO potential, rather than focusing on client outreach. This meant that she wasted a lot of time when she could have been gaining valuable experience.
The unfortunate consequence of this was that she ran out of savings before securing a single client, but the sunk cost fallacy led her to take out a loan. Wishful thinking convinced her that success was just around the corner. By the time Amy abandoned her business, she was already in debt.
Writing this helped me spot where I was drifting. I made a few small course corrections… and got back on track.
10 Questions to ask yourself if you think you’ve tumbled into the Wishful Thinking Waterfall
Perspective and feedback
- Who might have a different perspective to offer here?
- Could there be another way of thinking about this that I haven’t considered?
- Have I asked for feedback from people who think differently to me?
- Are the people around me (team, collaborators, mentors) comfortable expressing doubts?
Evidence and Logic
- Is this strategy backed by research?
- Am I missing any key information that could change my view?
- What evidence could prove me wrong about this?
Outcome and Risk
- What am I trying to achieve? Is there another way of reaching the same goal?
- What might happen if I was really unlucky?
- If this didn’t work out, what would the reason be?
Wishful thinking is only human – but it can lead to marketing mistakes
Wishful thinking is a powerful threat to business owners because it is motivated by our own strong desire to succeed. Visualising success is fine, but it’s worth imagining what failure and disappointment might look like as a counterbalance.
Rather than a flaw, wishful thinking is a byproduct of caring deeply. But with awareness, data, and a few cognitive tools, you can stop it from sabotaging your success.
Wow, that was a bit depressing. Need a bit of escapism? → Take me back to Freelancia!
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