The playbook mentality in marketing is one of the most damaging mindsets for an organization because it can lead your company to negative outcomes all while making it seem like you are doing the right thing. It is the “road to hell is paved with good intentions”.The most popular posts on LinkedIn are some sort of playbook, tips, hacks or rule;  Increase your LinkedIn presence, here is how I closed X number of deals through cold email, the ABM playbook, tips to grow organic search through AI etc… Learning about what others have done is important, but just following a playbook will not lead to meaningful results and can be harmful. The playbook mindset is thinking that executing simple steps can replace complex ideas and hard work. It is very appealing, the promise of the playbook is that you follow these steps and you will achieve these results.  Who doesn’t want a simple guide to success? Except it doesn't work that way. The deception is that you think you are doing the right thing because you are following steps that resulted in success for someone else. - Companies follow the product-led growth playbook and ruin their inbound marketing efforts.- Companies follow a Lean Startup playbook and put out low-quality MVPs that kill their business.- Teams execute the demand gen playbook wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars to no results. These companies thought they were doing the right thing while headed in the wrong direction. There is value in all of these strategies, but the value is never in simple steps. Why does the playbook mentality exist? Because it is easier. - It is easier to read an article on customer satisfaction than to talk to our customers and prospects- It is easier to have AI generate an article for SEO than create great content. - It is easier to justify the strategy by using someone else’s results than doing the analysis yourself. - It is easier to buy branded paid search terms than taking the time to build our brand awareness. It is so important to get out of that mindset. There is no playbook to get out of the playbook mindset, but there are some steps that will help get out of the marketing playbook mentality- Set a vision and create a brand based on truly understanding your customers’ needs. - Require your team to do customer research that has them communicating with customers and prospects- Give your team goals to go out and build relationships within the industry and their area of expertise- Before running any playbook, have them speak with others who have run the playbook to hear about the successes and challenges- Do not rely just on the results of others, have your team do their own analysis on how the changes will impact the business and define the goals of the effortIt would be great if there were simple steps we could follow to success, but success requires hard work and thinking.