For the last two weeks, we’ve been strolling through a land more bizarre and nonsensical than Alice traveling through Wonderland.  It is the land of marketing delusions.  These are notions that business leaders and marketers believe part and parcel as truth but are actually fantastic nonsense.  These included such falsehoods as “All I need is a big marketing budget to succeed” and “More content is always better.”  And let’s not forget such fantasies as “The brand story you tell in your marketing is true and people believe it” and “Great marketing comes from the “Collective Wisdom” of groups.: But even after refuting ten common marketing delusions, we’ve only uncovered the tip of the iceberg.  The list of marketing delusions is long because the number of products, services, software programs and mediums promising explosive growth, bountiful lead generation and booming sales are too many to count and multiplying daily. 

So what’s a business leader to do?  Read on.  Identifying a delusion is the fastest way to drain it of its power to deceive or mislead.  Let’s look at some marketing delusions that have a big impact on the bottom line.

In the competitive landscape of business, marketing holds the key to success and survival. However, amidst the dizzying array of strategies and tactics, it’s easy for business owners to fall prey to marketing delusions: false beliefs about what works and what doesn’t. These delusions can lead to wasted resources, missed opportunities, and ultimately, hinder the growth of the business. 

Last week, we looked at seven common marketing delusions that business leaders believe and we dispelled each with the truth.  But those were just the tip of the iceberg of misconceptions that plague business marketing.  And some delusions are worse than others.  Some can be really damaging.  Here are three more widely-believed but utterly false marketing delusions to avoid in order to do marketing right in 2024 and beyond.  

In the competitive world of business, marketing plays a crucial role in driving brand awareness, generating leads, and ultimately, achieving success. However, many business owners and leaders fall prey to “marketing delusions”.  These delusions often lead to wasted resources, ineffective campaigns, and missed opportunities for growth.  As 2023 draws to a close and leadership teams plan their sales and marketing efforts for 2024, it is important to understand what marketing delusions are, what causes them, and how to not fall prey to them.  

People like cast-iron certainty and steadfastness.  We expect decisive action by our leaders in government, work, medical care and place of worship.  But this culture of performative certainty is especially prevalent in business.  Organizations applaud those who are not just confident… but overconfident.  We hire and promote those who are bullish and brazenly certain of every step while those who are modestly unsure, vague or hesitant are seen as weak and incapable.  However, this demand for societal and organizational certitude is a problem because it is in moments of ambiguity and stillness that we often find clarity and direction.  It is from indecision and inaction that epiphanies and breakthroughs emerge.

In his blog, Morgan Housel — a partner at the venture capital firm, The Collaborative Fund, and author of “The Psychology of Money” and “Same as Ever:  A Guide to What Never Changes” — points out that most endeavors fall into one of two kinds of actions:  fields of precision vs. fields of uncertainty.  For example, Astrophysics is a field of precision.  NASA’s forecasts are typically highly accurate, such as their projection of when the New Horizon’s spacecraft would pass Pluto.  It was one minute less than predicted, which means it was 99.99998% accurate.  But the field of Meteorology is less accurate.  A weather forecast of more than 10 days into the future is only about 50% accurate.  And Entertainment is even less accurate.  Although AI is thought to be improving the ability to predict which programs or movies will be “a box office hit”, it is still a highly inaccurate field, especially at the preproduction phase which is when it is decided whether to make a movie. 

Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning

AI is on the cusp of changing the world.  While it will one day revolutionize how we work in every way, today it is already transforming how proactive businesses perform certain tasks.  For example, Deep Learning — a subset of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks to learn from data – is having a big impact on how companies use data.  Neural networks are inspired by the structure and function of the human brain.  Like humans, deep learning algorithms can spot complex patterns from data only better. Deep learning has been used to achieve state-of-the-art results in a wide range of tasks.   

While there are countless areas where deep learning can be used in business today, let’s look at just a few ways deep learning is being used for business:  speech recognition, recognition systems and anomaly detection.

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Ask any business owner or manager and they will likely agree that the hardest part of running a business is managing people.  After all, employees must be recruited, hired, trained, and supervised.  At practically every level, workers need to cooperate and collaborate with others regularly.  And, they must be reliable, trustworthy, and capable, as well as willing and able to learn and grow as the marketplace changes and the company evolves.  In addition to skills and talents, employees need to be even-tempered, kind, polite and pleasant when they deal with coworkers, bosses and customers. 

Finding people who fit that description has become increasingly challenging for business owners and managers.  After all, people are… human.  They are different in their temperaments, qualities, and attitudes.  They can get sick and experience personal problems that affect their ability to show up for work and be consistently productive and effective.  On top of that, Millennial and Zellenial workers have become increasingly harder to hire and retain, especially as more young people opt into the gig economy, preferring to be solopreneurs with multiple income streams and increased flexibility.  But, until now, what other option did companies have?  Employees have been the lifeblood and most valuable resource of any business.  Until now.  Enter AI-powered robots.   

Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing (NLP)

There is so much buzz about AI that most everyone has heard warnings of how artificial intelligence is going to take over the world.  The concern comes with the idea that, thanks to AI, machines can now “learn.”  Some think that if machines can learn, eventually they will become sentient… meaning they will be conscious, aware, and be able to feel.  While some of that is up for debate, the part about machines being able to learn is true and real… now.   With artificial intelligence, there are a wide range of tasks that can be done better and/or faster.  Here is some of what AI can do.

Artificial Intelligence and Image Recognition

Despite the avalanche of platforms and programs using Artificial Intelligence (AI) that have debuted in the last year, AI is not really “new.”  In fact, it has been a long time coming.   As early as 1949, Donald Hebb had developed Hebbian Learning, a possible algorithm for learning in neural networks, which is what today’s AI programs use.  And by 1955, Arthur Samuel at IBM had written the first game-playing program for checkers that could “learn” to play.  A computer that can learn is, by definition, artificial intelligence.  But those innovations were preceded by a century of mathematical and computational advances.  And, it took another 75 years for mathematicians, programmers, engineers and linguists to advance the field of computing and neural networks to produce the advanced AI platforms emerging now.  So for anyone paying attention, the advent of AI was surely no surprise.

Dealing with Isolation, Communication and Motivation

Remote work also known as Work-From-Home (WFH) has not disappeared from the workplace landscape.  Even now, long after the end of Covid restrictions, about 40% of U.S. employees work remotely either all the time or part-time.  But when asked, well over 90% of workers say they want to work remotely at least part-time in the future.  If anything, full-time or part-time remote work is expected to rise to over 50% by 2025.  So it seems WFH is here to stay.