Gone Fishing

One of the shifts I see across feedback from y'all is a shift in thinking about what you sell.

Here's an analogy.

Maybe you've gone fishing. Lake perch. Ohhhhh ... so yummy. The best perch sandwich in the world is at Late's in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The bun is a big part of the story there. But I digress.

Anyway, you could go perch fishing ... you'd pick a lake and choose some bait (#silverwigglers) and away you go. You might have some success, you might not. Then somebody tells you that there are twenty lakes where you could go fishing ... so you spend every day going to all of these lakes with your silver wigglers and it's exhausting.

Then, one day, somebody tells you they catch three times as many perch as you catch on the original lake ... but they're using wax worms. You try wax worms, and you realize that was worms are the secret ... you could have gone to your neighborhood lake forever using wax worms and had success. You realize that bait matters ... a lot more than you thought it did.

In the analogy, lakes are channels, fish are customers, and bait is merchandise.

In 2024, as catalog marketing dies and Facebook/Google become expensive places that deliver customers with low long-term value, I'm seeing more professionals (i.e. you) focusing on the bait ... on the merchandise. As has happened since the beginning of time, we shift back and forth on the pendulum ... there was a time 25 years ago when optimizing for customer lifetime value was very important. Then we spent fifteen years optimizing for clicks (which, if you look at politics, was/is an unmitigated disaster), we then spent a decade optimizing for channels (which bankrupted retailers and ended catalog marketing ... the opposite of the desired effect). The pendulum is now shifting back to what you sell ... it's like looking at a spread analysis from 1991, except adapted to a digital reality. 

Instead of saying that the creative in an email message must look like "x" and we A/B test to find out the best "x", we're shifting ... "what" we sell in an email marketing message is the bait, and it turns out that bait is incredibly important. Duh! But each generation learns old lessons anew, and I'm thrilled that we're heading in this direction now.

It's time for marketers to post a "Gone Fishing" sign.