Dogmatic Implementation, Sunk Costs, and the $40 Sunscreen
Updated: Oct 8
Why blindly following marketing best practices and playbooks can alienate your best customers.
Years ago, I attended a major marketing and tech conference in San Diego. At one of the keynotes, I heard a marketing expert say, “If you aren’t emailing your customers every day, you aren’t doing it right.”
While that could be true in certain scenarios, as a general rule of thumb, it was insane advice to sternly provide to a massive crowd from every industry imaginable. Because people will believe it. We all paid a large chunk of change to be there.
A one year later, I experienced this guy’s advice firsthand from a company that obviously bought into the message and ended up purchasing the speaker’s packaged email courses and strategy.
I found a company online that produces and sells higher-end sunscreen, and I decided to buy a handful of items that would get my household through the summer and fall.
Right after the initial purchase, I received four emails—confirmation, welcome, a starter guide email for the sunscreen, and another strongly suggesting auto-refills of each product. And I know I know…the “starter guide” for sunscreen was a stretch for sure.
From then on out, I received an email every day for an entire month. I only stayed on the list out of curiosity. When I finally changed the email frequency to “less frequent”, it went down to four days per week. I then unsubscribed for good.
While I still buy their products, I have no idea what they were thinking from an email marketing perspective. I am not sure how in the hell I would use that much of their products every day. And even if I did, why would I need to hear from them that often?
And here is the kicker: the emails were typically very good. I’m talking A+ as far as content and design. But all that effort was wasted on me.
Sunk Cost Fallacy & Dogmatic Implementation
This was a classic case of the sunk cost fallacy merged with dogmatic implementation. I am not a fan of jargon (I actually hate it). So let me explain what I mean.
That company paid top dollar for a high-ticket philosophy, bought into the strategy, and felt so financially and operationally invested that they refused to deviate—even when it meant blasting a Midwest customer seven times a week about sunscreen in October. When a business invests heavily in a platform or a framework, they feel obligated to execute every single feature and rule, despite common sense screaming at them to pull back.
They drank the Kool-Aid, paid for the playbook, and followed it with meticulous precision. But treating a general framework like divine law ignores the reality of how people actually buy your product.
When a charismatic, highly successful speaker at a conference strolls across a stage preaching a strategy they claim applies to everything from enterprise SaaS to sunscreen, remember that "best practice blindness" can be a killer.
No best practice is gospel. A general framework is a great starting point, but it's never an unbreakable rule.
Understanding What Best Practices Apply to You
Don't get me wrong—I'm not anti-framework. Packaged marketing playbooks can be very important.
Frameworks give you structure and establish a baseline so you can properly analyze your results. If everything your team produces is done completely on the fly "as it happens," it becomes remarkably more challenging to figure out why a campaign worked—or why it flopped.
And if you are a company starting a plan from scratch or are new to marketing, an organized approach helps even more. Playbooks are good. And marketing systems are good. But every playbook or system needs to be taken with a heavy grain of salt.
Let’s take my website platform, Wix, as an example.
Wix offers a large array of built-in marketing tools, add-ons, and best practice recommendations. If I took them up on every single tool and suggestion, I’d spend 10x more money and time on my marketing, all for what likely would be a tiny fraction of new business or return.
In fact, my core business would likely suffer. I’d be too busy maintaining the marketing machine that I’d have less bandwidth to actually support my clients. I would also risk alienating and overwhelming the audiences I’m trying to reach.
Given my company’s set-up, those additional approaches to marketing don’t make sense for me. The juice would not be worth the squeeze.
As a business leader, your job isn't to execute every tool available to you. Your job is to filter the noise, evaluate your specific business model, and make deliberate choices about what best serves your audience.
Common Sense Over Dogma
The goal here isn’t to get theoretical about marketing best practices. It’s about replacing dogmatic implementation with basic business acumen to figure out what actually makes sense for your audience.
That starts with putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. Ask the obvious question: "If I were the customer, would I want 30 emails a month about sunscreen?" Probably not.
Before you bet the farm on a marketing framework or playbook, run it through a few common-sense filters:
Respect the buying cycle: Do your products or services innately call for frequent touchpoints? Or is it an infrequent purchase? Forcing a daily or weekly schedule on a seasonal or low-touch product doesn't create demand—it creates customer fatigue.
Protect your team’s capacity: Does your team actually have the bandwidth to execute the strategy without sacrificing product quality, client work, or their own sanity? If feeding the marketing machine distracts from your core operations, it's time to pump the brakes on the playbook.
Follow the data and customer behavior: Are you seeing high open rates but too many unsubscribes? Are you noticing customers getting stuck partway through the journey? Track engagement drop-offs and actual customer feedback to make informed decisions.
Your flexibility is a benefit, not a flaw. Adapt your marketing plans with real-world experience and trust what the data is telling you. If the data conflicts with the playbook’s suggestion, that likely means you can change the approach.
Need Help Reviewing Your Marketing Best Practices and Framework?
Outside perspective goes a long way. If you’re heavily invested in a marketing system or are overwhelmed by the set-up of one, you’re on a road well traveled.
Feel free to reach out and I’d be happy to take a look under the hood of your operations for no cost or obligation. I love helping businesses move in the right direction. And if it makes sense to partner together at some point, I’m always around.
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