Mitigating Risk in Your Marketing Strategy: Why Selling to Everyone Is the Fastest Way to Fail

Stop selling people things they don't want.

The reason for most of the non-successes in advertising is trying to sell people what they do not want.

- Claude Hopkins

In his book, Let My People Go Surfing, Yvon Chouinard captures his disdain for competing on sameness and price with a vivid analogy:

"When I die and go to hell, the devil is going to make me the marketing director for a cola company. I’ll be in charge of trying to sell a product that no one needs, is identical to its competition, and can’t be sold on its merits. I’d be competing head-on in the cola wars, on price, distribution, advertising, and promotion, which would indeed be hell for me…I’d much rather design and sell products so good and unique that they have no competition."

Chouinard's disdain for competing in the "cola wars" isn’t just a critique of the soft drink industry—it’s a rejection of the entire mindset that fuels commodity markets. When you’re stuck playing a zero-sum game, where the only way to win is by outspending, underpricing, or out-shouting the competition, you’ve already lost.

Claude Hopkins, one of the earliest pioneers of modern advertising, would likely agree. In Scientific Advertising, he states bluntly: "The reason for most of the non-successes in advertising is trying to sell people what they do not want." The fastest way to fail is to pitch something nobody wants. Effective marketing isn’t about convincing people they need what you’re selling—it’s about uncovering the desires they already have and showing them how your solution meets that need in a new way.

In agriculture, we talk a lot about mitigating risk.

We buy insurance, hedge with futures contracts, adopt technologies to make informed decisions, and implement conservation practices to build resilience against unpredictable weather and market fluctuations.

But when it comes to marketing, almost nobody thinks about mitigating their risk.
Instead of carving out new categories and owning them, most of us settle for catch-all strategies that try to appeal to everyone but ultimately resonate with no one.

In the quest to capture the broadest market possible, we spread our message so thin that it fails to connect meaningfully with anyone.

Howard Marks captures this idea perfectly in the world of investing with one of my favorite quotes: "If you avoid the losers, the winners will take care of themselves." Marks is talking about investing, but the principle holds true in marketing and category design. Success isn’t just about finding the right audience—it’s about having the courage to exclude the wrong audience.

I was recently listening to one of the latest episodes of Agtech—So What?

An episode where Sarah Nolet, Matthew Pryor, and Shane Thomas discussed the ever-present problem of agtech adoption. In the episode, Sarah held up SwarmFarm Robotics as an example of a company selling directly to farmers, driving positive adoption:

She talked about how SwarmFarm has been able to land and expand with their current user base, and it made me think about what exactly that means. Across the industry, a lot of people are talking about having a “land and expand” strategy today, but very few are executing one.

So what is it that has allowed SwarmFarm to “land and expand” where others have not?

I believe it’s focus.

In my work with the team there, one of the things I find most impressive is their die-hard commitment to the people they are for and their complete indifference to those who aren’t their customers yet.

It might sound simple, but not wasting time on people who don’t want what you’re offering is a huge part of the problem in agtech adoption.

SwarmFarm’s approach is proof that the fastest way to lose isn’t to undersell your product—it’s to sell it to the wrong people. While many agtech companies waste resources trying to educate the uninterested or convert the unconvinced, SwarmFarm doubles down on serving the believers—the farmers who already see the value in integrated autonomy and are ready to invest in it.

Why do most companies refuse to market this way? In my experience, it is either the fear of missing out, the fear of being precise, or a combination of both.

The irony is that casting a wider net doesn’t reduce risk—it increases it. Every dollar spent chasing the wrong customer is a dollar that could have been used to deepen relationships with the right ones.

The most effective risk mitigation in marketing isn’t trying to appeal to everyone; it comes from eliminating the guesswork by focusing only on the audience that matters.

Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.