Trying hard doesn't count
There’s a promise a lot of the marketing world makes, and it goes something like this: we’ll try as hard as we can, but our hands are tied, so no promises.
If a kitchen installer worked that way, it would sound like this.
“We’ll try to install your kitchen. First, we don’t really know if what you’re asking for is reasonable. And we don’t know what the market’s going to do. Or the supplier. Or this, or that. But we’ll do our best, and you’ll pay us to do our best.”
Nobody would ever buy that kitchen. You pay a kitchen installer to get the kitchen installed. Trying hard is assumed. It isn’t the product.
So here’s the theory I keep coming back to: trying hard doesn’t count.
The ethical wave that went the wrong way
I watched something happen in SEO in particular. There was a kind of ethical wave in how it got sold. Promising results came to be seen as dishonest, so the language moved away from promising anything: “It takes at least three months.” “You can’t expect immediate results.” “In the end it’s up to Google.”
Some of that is true. Plenty of it was a correction to people who were overpromising.
But I wonder whether the whole thing turned into a cop-out. When an entire industry’s answer settles into “maybe, we’ll see”, that’s a strange place for an industry to be.
If the parachute industry’s pitch were that the parachute might save you before you hit the ground, there would be no parachute industry. The whole point of the thing is that it does the job.
Should “we’ll see” be paid for at all?
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable for marketing generally.
A lot of agency work starts with onboarding, discovery and market research, and underneath it is a quiet admission: we don’t yet know what’s going to happen with your company, so let’s see how it goes.
I’m thinking out loud here, but maybe “let’s see how it goes” shouldn’t be something a client pays for. Maybe that part is on the agency, done before it charges, until it knows enough to charge for getting actual work done.
I don’t have a clean answer. But it’s worth asking what exactly the money is buying in those first months.
Selling hope
The other side of this is the people who are very good at selling a dream.
I’m not interested in calling anybody out. It’s the phenomenon I’m looking at: selling something that’s very unlikely to happen for the people buying it.
A lottery ticket with the odds printed on it is fair. So is a pack of cigarettes with the warning on the box. The buyer knows the deal and makes their choice.
“We’ll show you how to dominate your market” or “we’ll show you how to make millions” is different, when the people who already bought it mostly didn’t. If the seller knows the success rate is very low and sells the dream anyway, that’s where it starts to feel unethical to me.
Who decides what counts as success? Who decides whether somebody should spend their own money on a long shot? It gets tricky fast. But here’s the part I’m sure of: if your real skill is creating hope, you’re in an ethically difficult spot taking anyone’s money for anything. How would you know whether they’re likely to succeed, or whether you’ve just handed them a feeling?
Where that leaves me
None of this means anyone in marketing can promise a particular result. Markets move, platforms change, and owners make their own calls.
What it means is that “we tried” isn’t a deliverable. The work should be pointed at something real, the money that actually lands, and judged against it in the open, including when it isn’t working. Someone should be accountable for the result, not just the effort.
Trying hard is the minimum. It was never the job.
Chris