Thursday, June 16, 2011

Why Marketing Best Practices Aren't Always Best

As helpful as best practices can be, sadly they’d don’t always work. In fact, sometimes they can hurt.

Take the case of Dropbox, a software start-up that originally followed industry-standard best practices, such as investing in advertising, conferences and in a PR firm. But it didn't work. The cost of customer acquisition was just too high. Essentially, the traditional way to launch and market a company wasn’t allowing Dropbox to scale or grow fast enough.

Why did industry-proven techniques not work for Dropbox? After all, they worked great for other companies? Perhaps because best practices merely present a standardized, cookie-cutter solution, and no business is the same.

“Best practices are an attempt to take a solution to a problem out of the context and apply them across the entire spectrum, and that essentially invalidates the entire thing. A solution is only useful when considered in context.”

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