Emulating someone else’s proven system provides no assurance that it will work for you.
One of the greatest patent battles in history was over who invented the regenerative circuit, i.e. the positive feedback loop. This is a battle that dragged through the courts for 12 years and ended in 1934. The legal victor was Lee de Forest. Yet his adversary, Edwin Howard Armstrong was still accepted by most in the engineering community as the true inventor. In simple terms the battle was won, not by who filed first, nor by who actually got something to work first, nor by who could properly explain how the circuit worked, but rather, by who had a dated drawing and some lab notes. So much for the old patent laws.
One of the things that is most striking is the nature of the two individuals themselves. Certainly both men were driven inventors in their own right. But they couldn’t be more opposite in how they operated. Lee de Forest was a voracious reader and consumed all of the technical content that was published; and in fact, he was a Yale PhD. From this vantage point, he sought to emulate and build on the concepts of others. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the approach. It’s just that building on the proven systems of others, or the thinking of others, just did not result in a breakthrough. It may be true that he hooked up a vacuum tube in some manner that resembled a regenerative circuit. But he just did not understand how it worked, and it certainly did not result in amplification; (which was the whole point of the circuit).
Edwin Howard Armstrong on the other hand, did not put a lot of faith in the knowledge published by others, nor in mathematical explanations of how things worked. It may have served as a starting point, as it did for de Forest, but Armstrong’s focus on proving things for himself through his own experiments, was unstoppable. Through his understanding of electronics, he was all about theorizing, experimenting, analyzing, and seeking to understand. Even in the courts, there was no doubt that he truly and intimately understood everything about the regenerative circuit.
The same distinction of efforts must be made when you are formulating your demand generation methods. You can’t just do what worked for others. It may not work for you. Especially in a marketing world that is constantly changing, what worked yesterday, may not work today. In fact, you must be even more conscientious that what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow.
Your return on investment will not be the greatest by soaking up all those case studies, and studying excessively as to what and how others are driving their marketing. But rather, you must be driven to experiment in order to derive, discover and understand both what combination, and what sequence of activities, will yield predictable results. You need to elevate yourself to the point where you have developed a “sense” of the dynamics. And metaphorically speaking, an understanding of how your regeneration circuit works.
This means that you can’t design your demand generation system based on someone else’s proven system, unless it is your own proof. For the emulation approach to work, your situation would need to be exactly like the organization that derived the proven system. It happens all the time with CEOs and executives when they succeed marvelously in one company. And when they apply the same model to their new company, they at times fail dramatically. At the end of the day, you can’t get around it. Developing “your” marketing messages and deriving “your” demand generation system is a key investment to your overall success.