Modern marketing departments are suffering from stagnation. How to make your marketing efforts multiply by exploring not exploiting.

If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, why then, are so many marketers wasting valuable time doing exactly that? Because modern businesses prioritise known performance over untapped potential and possibilities.

I’ve been there. Wondering why things aren’t working, trying it again just to be sure, questioning the impact of market changes outside of my control, and making decisions based only on protecting existing performance instead of trying something new. It is insane. If it’s not working, it needs to change.

That’s not a marketing lesson; that’s an evolutionary lesson. 

No birds, just bees, Rory Sutherland & #Nudgestock

Full credit goes to none other than the perpetually prolific Rory Sutherland for the insight and the inspiration here, thanks to his opening remarks at #Nudgestock2025 (and his book Alchemy).

The premise is this: nature hates waste. Repeatedly, through mechanisms like evolution and decomposition, nature creates closed loop systems that prevent waste. Nature is ruthlessly efficient. 

Bees are one of nature’s most efficient systems. As Rory explains, worker bees follow the waggle dance. A method of communication used to tell other bees which direction to take to find relevant food sources. They follow those directions, find the source of nectar, harvest it, return to the hive, possibly make honey, rest and repeat. It works beautifully.

So, Rory’s question is why has nature tolerated a small percentage of worker bees ignoring the waggle dance, going rogue and heading off on their own? Based on efficiency, you’d expect nature to evolve greater compliance in the behaviour of bees, so those rogues eventually die out… but it hasn’t. So, the logical conclusion must be that these rogue bees have value. And indeed, they do.

Rogue bees are exploratory bees. They head off to discover and investigate new, sources of food for the hive. So, while the rest of the hive exploit the known sources, these rogue bees explore the unknown in the hopes of ultimately “getting lucky” and finding a new, abundant source of nectar.

As Rory explains, the trade-off is valuable because, while in the short term, if all bees succumbed to the waggle dance, the efficiency of the hive would be greatly increased, with no time wasted on exploration, eventually the known sources of pollen and nectar would inevitably run out, the bees wouldn’t know where else to look for new sources and so the hive dies. The value of those exploratory bees can’t be overstated. 

By ignoring short-term efficiency, the rogues have effectively secured the long-term survival (quite literally millions of years) of the bee. As Rory puts it, “the rogue bees are, in a sense, the hive’s research and development function, and their inefficiency pays off handsomely when they discover a fresh source of food”. 

What have bees got to do with digital marketing though? It’s a known model for supporting the value of research & innovation, one I think most CFOs, CEOs and Directors need reacquainting with... 

Businesses often run and make decisions based on data. It’s the waggle dance of the digital age: constant optimisation and iteration of what is known. A big reason for this, is that CMOs and heads of marketing are increasingly expected to justify everything quantitatively because the CFO’s logic dominates the budget conversations. Finance and marketing are separate departments because it requires different thinking. Being asked to show the results we can expect from an untested marketing initiative is asking marketers to predict the future, but without space for failing fast, innovating, and experimenting. It demands results, sets expectations, and creates a bias towards “safe” ideas.

Not only that, but attribution models also reward short-term exploitation, algorithms do too. Optimise a campaign, enjoy a temporary lift in performance before results dwindle back to the status quo and the need for more spend is flagged.

That’s not cynicism on my part either. Machine learning systems face this same explore-versus-exploit dilemma. Yet the advertising platforms leveraging them are built to maximise growth and revenue (particularly their own), naturally biasing algorithms towards exploiting what already performs.

On top of that employers punish failure far more than stagnation, yet marketing job descriptions invariably ask for creativity, innovative thinking and most laughably, adaptability in a fast-paced environment. Start rewarding ideas over results and perhaps those attributions can shine through and deliver, but as it stands, the fastest way I’ve seen to kill an idea, is to ask for its expected performance before it’s even made it off paper.

And all those problems collectively contribute to one truly fundamental flaw: businesses only focusing on data-driven recommendations, ideas and insights. Over-relying on data, especially as a predictor of future success, creates more vulnerability in changing environments than simply experimenting and trying something new. It’s the systemic throttling of innovative ideas. 

Exploiting the known works (to a point) until something unknown happens. For our bees, that might be a landowner deciding to turn the wildflower meadow into agricultural crop fields.

For us, the equivalent might be our only brand influencer getting cancelled, all the traffic they were driving to our website curtailing overnight, our brand reputation suffering damage by association and ultimately our sales falling off a cliff. Without other sources of brand awareness, demand generation and traffic, we’d be in a crisis. 

And if you think you’re not at risk of a business, market or life changing event, just remember the Dot-Com Bubble Burst, mass adoption of the internet, the smartphone revolution, Brexit, the Blockchain Boom, the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine War and the rise of AI and generative technologies… just some of the most disruptive events in recent years.

In the end, the conclusion is this, most modern marketing departments are relying on the past. Hamstrung by economic principles that demand quantifiable results, in some cases before the campaign’s even launched, and arguing with finance departments that dictate budgets based on their own rules, not ours. The brands, agencies and marketers that will succeed are those who champion the value of innovation.

Explore new ideas, reward experimentation and create safe spaces for ideation and innovation to thrive. We need more conversations to start with “what if” and more sign offs to say, “let’s try”. If fortune favours the brave, modern marketing needs more bravery.

Exploration isn’t a detriment to performance; it’s the protection from irrelevance.

Further reading:

• Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life available at Waterstones 

• Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions also available at Waterstones