good marketing is specific, because our behaviour is specific

(comic by Thad Guy, thadguy.com)I don't just mean good creative. I mean the whole marketing process, when it's good, is specific. Good thinking is specific.

It's tempting for people to generalize, especially about outcomes. If a campaign works, it's great, and everything about it becomes great. If a campaign doesn't work, it's a failure and everything about it gets tossed. Not enough people spend the time to actually examine details, in either agencies or client companies. Senior managers don't want to (or don't have the time to) get down in the weeds. They need to get to the takeaways, or results, or action items, and will blithely skip over the gory details of the PowerPoint deck they're being taken through to get to the last few "recommendations" pages.

Now, I'm all for results; they're a central tenet of direct marketing. But I'm also for learning. I want to do things better in the future, and everything I do now should help me down the line.

The glory of direct marketing – reinforced by the exactitude of digitial – is the discipline to test everything about a campaign, to find out exactly what worked and what didn't. So you can learn. And test again. And learn some more.

Because I want to know what caused X or Y behaviour, not what some group of people sitting in a boardroom thinks caused that behaviour. People's actions aren't caused by generalizations, but by specific triggers. As marketers, we need to know what those triggers are.

Generalizing is something we're all prone to defaulting to, and something we all have to be wary of.