The invisible risk of over-optimizing
Nobody measures the risk of becoming forgettable. Calvin Ross Carl argues that brands obsessed with measurable data slowly fall apart by never doing anything new.
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl calls this maybe the most important part of the whole discussion: there’s an invisible risk you can’t measure. Measurement and optimization are about reducing risk, so organizations obsess over the measurable risk of trying something new. Nobody measures the cumulative risk of becoming forgettable or indistinct. Without conviction and vision pushing a brand forward, that unmeasured risk is the one that eventually destroys it.
Highlights
- Optimization reduces the risks you can measure.
- Nobody measures the cumulative risk of becoming forgettable.
- Doing nothing new is what slowly breaks a brand.
Key insights
The risk that doesn’t show up in data
Organizations track the measurable risk of trying something new, but the cost of standing still never appears in a report.
Staying memorable takes forward motion
Calvin says the way to avoid being forgettable is to keep pushing forward in whatever way fits your brand, which takes conviction and vision.
Detailed analysis
The point flips how most teams think about safety. Optimization feels safe because its risks are visible and small. But a brand that only optimizes is quietly taking a much larger bet: that staying the same will keep working. By the time that risk becomes measurable, the brand has already started falling apart.
Conclusion
The safest-looking choice can carry the biggest risk. A brand has to keep moving to stay memorable.
The other part of this: I was just talking about how measurement and optimization are all about reducing risk. And honestly, this is maybe the most important part of this whole discussion: there’s an invisible risk you can’t measure. If you are focusing on numbers, on best practices, on gaining measurable data, and you’re not pushing yourself to have conviction and vision about where you can go in the future, there’s a big invisible risk. Organizations end up obsessing over all this measurable data, the measurable risk of trying something new, but nobody measures—or really can measure—the cumulative risk of becoming forgettable or indistinct. That’s something you can’t measure. And usually the way you avoid being forgettable is you have to keep pushing yourself forward in whatever way works for your brand.
So that’s the risk that eventually destroys a brand over time. The org starts obsessing over optimization, nobody can really measure the risk of doing nothing new, and eventually the brand starts falling apart.