Have I mentioned I’m a big movie fan?  Very excited about a couple of upcoming new movies.  The new “Indiana Jones” episode and the “Iron Man” movie (yup, I’m a big comic book fan too!).

Interesting, of course, to observe the build up to a big movie release.  Marketing lessons there for product launches and building up anticipation.  Video trailers are an obvious way to promote new movies.  Checking out the “Iron Man” trailer on YouTube I was amazed (or maybe not) to see that almost 4 million people had viewed the video.  An example of the incredible “reach” that the internet provides marketers.

Anyway, that’s not what this post is about.  As you might have deduced from the title this is about “Star Wars”, more precisely something from “The Empire Strikes Back”.  There’s a scene in the middle of the movie where Yoda is training Luke in the ways of the Force and he instructs Luke to raise his crashed space fighter out of the swamp.

Luke looks dubious about the whole thing but says “OK, I’ll try”.  At this point Yoda turns on him and says…

“Try not – do or do not – there is no try”.

What a great line!  When you think about it, the word “Try” is so weak.  It kind of contains an expectation of failure.

So, I have banned the word from my vocabulary as far as possible and substituted instead the word “Test”.  You might like to consider doing that yourself.

For marketers in particular, this might be worth thinking about.  Instead of “trying” something, how about “testing” a new approach?  Testing should be an integral approach of your marketing in any case.  It’s amazing the difference in response you get from different approaches.

Talking of testing, I recently purchased “The Secrets Of A 10% Conversion Rate” by Paul Hancox.  Despite being in a self-imposed period of not buying any new copywriting or marketing products, Michel Fortin wrote such a great review I felt compelled to check out the report for myself!

(As an aside, I guess that’s a good marketing example of the power of an endorsement from a “trusted source”!)

Now, a great deal of the report is about testing and that is one of the secrets of getting a high response rate.  But there’s more and when I’ve finished the report I’ll let you know what I think about it.

In the meantime…”Do or do not”!