I read about survivorship bias some months ago. Now it comes back to my mind almost all the time I am trying to draw conclusions from certain results & experiments.
Take a moment to study the following diagram to understand what Survivorship bias is.
As you might now have figured out, in simple words, survivorship bias is the logical error that occurs when data is only taken from the winning/surviving outcomes and completely ignores the one that did not make it.
In the flight example given above, it’s pretty clear what I’m trying to convey. It doesn’t make sense when you really think about it to make only those parts stronger which got shot by just looking at the flights that survived. There are definitely weaker parts on which shots were fired which resulted in the destructions of the non-survivors - those are the parts that need modification and not the other way around.
Coming to business and marketing, you have to think the same way to make sure you don’t take miserable decisions.
When taking customer surveys, don’t just speak to your current customers and their problems, but you need to speak to your previous customers who are not loyal to you now. (Same goes for employees)
When analysing a marketing campaign, you cannot just look at the winning campaigns and try to improve them but definitely need to relook at the ones one’s that did not perform and need to work on it too.
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