The Realist and the Idealist.

Today's Marketing Cookie is about the difference between the real and the ideal.

Most people are idealistic creatures. We hold a utopian image of what should or shouldn't be for our world, our family, our friends, our possessions, and ourselves. Anything short of that image is imperfect and unacceptable. We think our government is too liberal, or maybe it's too conservative. Our coworkers are too serious, or not serious enough. We should have zero percent body fat, or we think we're too skinny. We either dye our hair blonde, black, or red, or some of us wish we had hair at all. We think we're too short, or we wish we weren't so tall. For most people, whatever we have and whatever we are, is not ideal.

The same thing happens in marketing. Idealistically, we would have enough time and money to conduct exhaustive market research, which would spell out in no uncertain terms exactly what we should do with our marketing. In this ideal world, we would have three months to prepare a perfect marketing plan, perfect messaging, and six months to get the creative just right. We'd also have an unlimited budget to put all of this into play and if this were the case, you'd probably do pretty well with the campaign.

The reality in most marketing campaigns is that we don't have unlimited time or money. In fact, it's more likely that time is cut short and budgets are trimmed even shorter. There's no time for formal research. There's very little time for planning, and even less time to build it. We lift off, start flying, and make course corrections and campaign optimizations from the air. We use brute force to push the flywheel, we rely on our experience to pull the right levers, and while the idealists are still developing theories, we're out of the starting gate with a head start.

Even if the idealists had their way and could develop a perfect marketing plan, there's no promise that it will actually work. Ideally, their marketing video will go viral and make Psy's "Gangnam Style" video look like child's play, but that's more likely to happen by accident. They may plan for every one of their Tweets to trend for two days on Twitter, and for their Facebook page to grow to 100 million likes overnight, but it probably won't happen as planned.

At the end of the day, a great idea put into play trumps a good theory that's still under review in the boardroom. If you can stomach the risk of imperfection and are willing to make refinements as you go, you may find you've got the right stuff for a career in marketing. It won't be easy and it won't be ideal, but if you are willing to do the work, it will be as today's fortune says, "Theories get you thinking. Sweat gets you results."