5 Underrated Marketing Lessons We Wish Schools Taught Better

Today, we are going to talk about 5 underrated marketing lessons we wish schools taught better. I'll go first. So the first one is, this is just general for all schools, how to fail. Because if you're taught that failure is the ticket to success, then you're okay failing. You learn a lot in marketing really quickly, especially if you're in digital, that, hey, you're going to be testing all the time. Most of your tests are going to fail. Let's say with most A/B tests, I think it's 88% or something like that fail. And then at the end of the day, you're going to keep testing until it becomes incremental, right? So you learn to love or expect failure, and you learn to become numb to it. So I wish schools taught us how to fail more.

Funny enough, I have a degree in marketing. That's what I was taught at school. And I learned some interesting things there. When I was young, one of the lessons that I was taught at my college was it's all about the customer and figuring out what they want. And that was great, but they never really got into customer development or how to truly understand what your customer wants, how to find the right customers, how just because people give you feedback, it doesn't necessarily mean that's what they want. As Steve Jobs would always say, like, I'm not going to ask people what they want because they don't necessarily know what they want. Now, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't get feedback from your ideal customer, but I wish I was just taught how to do customer development better because in marketing, you're selling to someone. And if you don't understand who you're selling to, why you're selling to them, what's really going to get them to move, and how to really push their buttons in a good way, you're not going to do as well. And they just told me, you got to do customer— that's pretty much it.

Yep. And we recommend the book The Mom Test if you want to take a look at that. The third thing I'll say is I wish schools taught me to look at the numbers more, look at the numbers to guide me, because at the end of the day, the numbers tell a story and the story will eventually, hopefully guide you in the right direction versus guessing. Because I learned in school— well, I actually didn't learn this in school, but I was guessing a lot. A lot was, oh, I got this gut feeling, I got this gut feeling. And then when you end up working in not just marketing in general, but you just in a more modern company, you have to look at the numbers. And from there you have to make the decision. I think when I came out of college, when I was 22 or so, my first job, I think I messaged my friend. I was like, hey, What does a metric mean? So I didn't even know what a metric meant and I was 22 years old.

So Neil, the last one from my end, and I think you'll wrap it up with number 5, is actually branding. Branding is age-old in marketing. We all know about it. It's been around for ages. They talk about it in school, but I never really understood the power of branding. And it was funny, school was never able to explain to me like, why do people just buy BMWs because of the brand or Nike or sign up for American Express or Range Rover or Tesla or whatever it may be? And those brands are powerful. And how do you build a brand? And why should you build a brand? And it's funny, if you look at the data, more people search Nike every single month than the word shoes. Nike's in the shoe market. Yes, they have apparel and other stuff, but they're mainly known for shoes. And it's so funny on how they're bigger than the actual market when it comes to just searches on Google. That's the power of a brand.

All right. Number 5, last but not least, the hook. And so David Ogilvy, super advertiser, once said that when you write your headline, 80 cents of the dollar has already been spent. So oftentimes you're reading, for example, this podcast or looking at other podcasts to listen to, or maybe you're looking at YouTube videos to watch. You're looking at the headline and the headline's gotta hook you. Or if you have an ad, it's gotta hook you. It's gotta catch your attention because you're scrolling through the social feeds. And you're just looking to mess around. But if, if an ad catches your attention, it hooks you. And then from there, you got, basically you got someone's attention and you get a chance to close the deal. Same thing with the headlines, which is super important. So I wish schools taught us more about how to write good copy. That's the first thing. And then also good copy that sells. I wish that we didn't have to go and, and look for books on copywriting on our own. Just a lot around that. So that is it for today. Go to marketingschool.io. /jobs, J-O-B-S. If you wanna post a job or if you wanna find a marketing job, we got on our job board right now, we got companies like Aura, Wealthfront, InVision, Roku, all these amazing companies. So go there, check it out, and we'll catch you later.