in partnership with

Lucky you!

Maybe the triumph of your last campaign was less about your prowess than you’d like to think; maybe its failure wasn’t your fault. Insights experts Carl Davidson and Duncan Stuart weigh in on how much of marketing can be a roll of the dice.


John Wanamaker (1838-1922) is regarded as a marketing pioneer. A hugely successful Philadelphia-based retail merchant, he’s lauded by marketers both for developing the modern concept of the department store and for his prodigious use of advertising to drive sales, but the late, great Wanamaker is perhaps most famous for his quip:

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted – the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

What was true for Wannamaker in 1919 remains true for you and your marketing team today. For instance, one US study from 2006, which examined a billion dollars of ad-spend by 30 major corporations, put the actual wastage at 63 percent. Today, somewhere between one-third and half of all new products launched fail to thrive.

The failure rate is even higher for consumer packaged goods – only three percent of those achieve what the Harvard Business Review describes as “a highly successful launch”.

All this wastage occurs despite the undoubted skill and professionalism of the advertising professionals, the dedication of the marketers, and the diligence of the insights professionals, yet when a campaign fails, it’s common to find experts to helpfully explain what can be learned from the wreckage. We believe that what marketers need is not more wise-after-the-fact hindsight, but a better understanding of the role of sheer dumb luck. 

Consider this. Back in February 1989, Management magazine was at the printer. Taking up a double-page spread inside it was an ad for United Airlines that presented a couple of dozen doors and United as your doorway to these locations.

Alas, that same day, United Airlines flight 811 leaving Honolulu suffered an explosive decompression that ripped open a door, leading to nine passengers being sucked out of the aircraft 22,000 feet above the Pacific. United’s comms team tried to pull the ‘Your Doorway’ advert, but it was already too late. The presses had rolled. 

Luck, both good and bad, plays a bigger part in our lives than we care to admit, but you’d never know this from opening most books on marketing.

They’re much more likely to outline a set of sure-fire rules to attain marketing success. To take just one example, in his 2009 book Buyology, Martin Lindstrom talks about “a new era” of precision marketing that thanks to advances in neuroscience will banish the crapshoot lottery of marketing forever.

Open any media stream in the past year and it’s not neuroscience but AI that will solve Wanamaker’s riddle. 

Hardly anyone seriously suggests that marketing is as much about luck as pluck. Indeed, where luck is discussed, it’s usually to demand that it’s a refuge for the weak. The standard refrain is that “There’s no such thing as luck”.

Through hard work and leaving nothing to chance, the marketer can increase their odds of success.

But luck doesn’t care about that.

A few years ago, Coca-Cola launched a New Zealand campaign designed to capture the spirit of the classic Kiwi summer. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t get the memo. As a marketer, it pays to evaluate the risks.

In Coke’s case, a lousy summer contingency strategy might have been a useful standby.

Risk shouldn’t be viewed purely as a drawback. When Frucor launched V, the common market wisdom was thatn the energy drink’s popularity was a flash in the pan, but sales were so brisk during that summer that Frucor were running out of cans. They were staring down the barrel of an out-of-stock situation.

A long-time bottling plant worker pointed out that there was a disused bottling machine taking up space at the back of the plant, and reckoned he could get it going again. In those days, the energy drink category was defined by the slim can (although absent in Thailand, where Red Bull came in a small, syrupy bottle) – nobody was selling energy drinks in a screw-top bottle.

Frucor decided to risk breaking the rules and ignore the sector language. They sourced bottles, (Valima from Fiji) and commissioned a wrapper. By the time these elements were ready, the old bottling machine was too. 

To be honest, the exercise was nothing more than a roll of the dice, but it went gangbusters. The resealable screw-top opened up new occasions for V and as a result of the lucky turn of events, they significantly increased market share.

Luck is part of the marketing world. When you next run a planning session, open up the discussion by asking what factors dwell outside your direct control. From there, consider what bad luck would look like, and how you might turn the situation around. 

Wanamaker understood the role of luck in his great success, so let’s give him the final word: “No mistake or failure is as bad as to stop and not try again.”


Want to learn more?

Richard Wiseman is one of the most interesting psychologists writing today. Britain’s only professor in the Public Understanding of Psychology, he’s published more than 100 academic papers and created psychology-based YouTube videos that have attracted over 800 million views.

In addition to all that, Wiseman is a highly regarded magician, a member of the Inner Magic Circle, and a consultant to illusionists David Copperfield and Derren Brown. The Luck Factor is a product of Wiseman’s decade-long Luck Project that involved interviews with 400-plus people in an attempt to understand why some seem luckier than others. It details what Wiseman learned about luck and how it works – and even how you can get more of it. 


This was first published in our March/April issue.

About Carl Davidson and Duncan Stuart

Duncan Stuart and Carl Davidson are stalwarts of the insights world. Proponents of Research Noir, they explore the murky dark side of doubts and decisions. Together they have more than 60 years’ experience

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *