During our first few days of kindergarten, we were quickly learned the embarrassment of being wrong. Standing in front of a room full of our peers who were eagerly waiting for an answer that we didn’t have, we realized that not taking chances often means avoiding the embarrassment of being wrong. For many of us, this became solidly reinforced over the next several years of school, and then followed us into our careers. Today, many of us are still paralyzed by this fear, caused by a tragic flaw in our school system.
What most people don’t realize is not only is being wrong not a bad thing, it can actually be a good thing because it enables us to learn new things. Leonardo DaVinci, Albert Einstein and George Washington Carver didn’t become prolific inventors by playing it safe. They pushed the limits of conventional wisdom and even of their own minds. They made mistakes and achieved their goals through a long, often laborious process of trial and error.
This applies to marketing your company as well. No company ever became an industry leader by simply following what everyone else was doing. Your marketing should push the edge, create buzz, maybe even controversy, enabling you to stand out from our competitors. Henry Ford became one of the riches men in the world by throwing conventional wisdom to the wind and taking his marketing in a completely different direction than his competitors. While all of the other auto manufacturers were battling other over market share to sell a product that was priced at five times the annual salary of the average American, he developed a way to reduce the cost of an automobile to be competitive with the horse-drawn carriages. This made the existing automobile manufacturers as well as the horse-drawn carriage manufacturers almost completely irrelevant to the consumer. Bath and Body Works eschewed the traditional marketing approach followed by just about every other company in their industry at the time by avoiding the glitzy packaging and air-brushed models in favor of a natural, average image that just about anyone can relate to.
Is it time for you to be wrong every now and then? If you want to become ultra successful, the answer is an obvious yes!
