Someone thought enough to go wide with this thing, and has lit up social, paid, referral, even paid some students to twirl signboards. Problem is, like Brian Johnson, they’ve done the most statistically useless thing: sample size of one, a bazillion simultaneous interventions, and no clue which one(s) is doing the heavy lifting
Disproof
Hard numbers isolating the most successful channel path and a rationale to back it up
Consequences
Problem 1: confidence in the wrong thing
You think you’ve found ‘the’ channel because that’s where you convert from
You double down on it only for it to flop because they haven’t had the 5 previous touches across paid, search, etc.
You waste money trying to score on the first date with cold users who get grossed out and you burn your general reputation
Problem 2: confidence in no thing
Your only followup move is to attempt to get lighting to strike twice by going full macross-missile-massacre on it
You burn money that could be used to make the product better or (gasp) profit and build some cash position to insulate against future stupidity
Your acquisition costs grows linearly, but the marginal value of your customers is likely to decrease logarithmically, meaning at some point this makes negative money
Firing blind whilst money gun marketing has a 50/50 chance of you running out of ammo before you bring in enough customers to reload
Causes
Especially common where several teams and external agencies are responsible for customer acquisition and there is no joined up thinking between the social and the paid team, for example
Occasional skill issue
Making it some people’s sole jobs to spend money and not aligning their outcomes with the rest of the company
The user’s journey from first contact to conversion can take up to 50 touches - most companies don't track this
Approaches
Consider an ever so slight bureaucratic burden of asking people to write down why they think the sign twirling is going to be more successful than the NFT campaign or billboard on the interstate, and by how much.