Everyone is given the motivational talk about Edison and that he failed to 9000 times before he was successful with the light bulb. While you cannot take away the fact that he was a master inventor, he also utilized the principles of mass testing. He tested vigorously and kept learning from each test….so they were iterations not failures.

When a company says that the electric motor they manufacture has an average life of 3000 hours, they would not test each motor for 3000 hours. They would typically create a sample and then keep the sample on for 3000 motor-hours. If no motor fails then 3000 hours is a safe figure to commit. By continuously testing samples over a long period of time you will be able to come to a figure which is then extremely reliable.

What Edison did was employ multiple people for testing different filament options at a mass level on the electric bulb. So even though there were more than 9000 failures, these failures were not all sequential done by one man, but parallel tests.

In messaging also you can’t keep trying to check which message will stick to your target audience in B2B. What you need to do is test parallel messages and see on which message you get traction. Then the message that gets you the best traction, becomes your “control” piece. Now you start testing against this message by changing one variable at a time.

You need to test very fast at mass scale. One of the challenges I have faced in doing these mass testing procedures is that the people involved lose patience and the tests go haywire because people start compromising. The testing process has to be rigorous, for you to get a clear winner.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!