How do you shape your marketing efforts and sales techniques? Do you adopt a popular standard? Mimic someone you know and admire? Make it up as you go? Or do you follow popular marketing and business experts, scrambling to keep up with everything they say you should do?

Obviously, ignoring the experts altogether isn’t a smart business strategy. There are intelligent people out there who are genuinely interested in buying trends, demographics and customer psychology. You can benefit greatly from their work.

On the other hand, chasing their advice like a tweenage groupie panting over the Jonas Brothers isn’t much of a plan, either.

You have to know why you’re following someone’s advice. You have to think carefully about whether or not it applies to you. When you ask a question, you need to make sure the right person answers it.

I once attended a workshop given by someone who was touted as an expert in my field. I paid the fee, took a day out of my studio schedule, and got exactly the wrong information. The expert operated at a completely different level, and (as I only discovered months later) didn’t understand my business at all. Eventually I got the right information by way of a customer. I found someone with the right information—the solution came in a five word sentence.

That, I suppose, would be irony.

There’s nothing wrong with following business gurus, or for that matter, gurus of any kind. You run into problems when you follow blindly.

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2. Find your Unique Selling Proposition without really trying
3. The wisdom of failure