When I was a teenager, the most interesting show on television was Star Trek.  “To boldly go where no man has gone before”.  That was the mantra that excited us all.  And by the look of things – it still excites a lot of folks who populate the world of marketing.

Here’s the problem.  Most folks who decide for one reason or another to “boldly go where no man has gone before”, never come back.  To compound things, they not only lose a lot of money on some leading edge marketing ploy – they sometimes take down solid companies in the process.

The fact is that risk for the sake of risk has never been a good thing.   And as much as I like to romanticize the idea of risk in cocktail party conversation – it’s something I stopped engaging in more than two decades ago.

The truth is that most marketing risk is unnecessary because of the existence of testing.  Long ago an old mentor told me something that I will never forget.  He said, “If you’re wondering what the consumer will do in any particular set of circumstances, the best policy is to come right out and ask the consumer. And the way you ask is to test.”

If it’s a mailing list – mail one thousand names before you roll it out to one million. If it’s print, run two different headlines in the same publication.  If it’s a radio campaign, try a small inexpensive AM before you send it to the 50,000-watt monster. If it’s TV – try local cable before you buy the Super Bowl.

Testing today is a lot easier than it used to be.  Now, for less than one hundred dollars,  you can run a small ad on the Internet and find out in hours what used to take weeks or even months.  So there’s really no excuse to waste a small fortune on some untested speculation.

I know.  It’s not as sexy as betting the farm on a single pass of the roulette wheel.  On the other hand, being able to feed your family also has a certain appeal.