Here’s a bit of wisdom from the Conversation Marketing blog: Of Mythology and Marketing | Internet Marketing Strategy:
“Mythology is what makes people say “I don’t know why, but I just need a web site”. Or “We should add some social media stuff to our site”. Marketing is what makes people say “We have a national audience. A web site will help us reach them”. Or “Our customers want to talk to each other. Let’s add a comments feature.”"
There are a lot of reasons why mythology rears its ugly head. Some of them stem from the “it’s how we’ve always done things” line of reasoning. Some of them are so-called “best practices,” although I’ve seen some pretty jarring examples of ideas that fail in practice despite the fact that you and everyone in the industry KNOWS that they should work.
In related news, data is more reliable than opinion. And where possible, you should be putting your opinions to the test to see if they are either made-up biases not borne of reality, or outdated or practices that no longer have relevance to the current market, or even totally valid insights that just overlook some nuance of the marketing environment and won’t work.
And when they do work, you’ll feel really validated and smart.
But don’t let that newfound confidence keep you from testing your instincts the next time. That’s how opinions become mythology.