Ever heard the story of Rasputin? According to legend, the “mad monk” survived poisoned cake, toxic wine, multiple gunshots, and even a plunge into an icy river before he finally died. Despite the odds, he kept coming back, healthier and scrappier than ever.
Unfortunately, bad marketing practices demonstrate a lot of the same resilience. All the data in the world can be stacked the other way, but companies keep opting for the familiar, ineffective strategies that dilute the brand, isolate audiences, and deliver dismal ROI.
Why? It’s easy to buy into the belief that all exposure is good exposure. Especially when changing your approach takes effort, reevaluation, and time. In reality, misaligned, half-baked, and antiquated techniques drain budget, slow down improvement, and crowd out the work that actually moves the needle.
In HexaGroup’s HEX-Files Energy Marketing Podcast, CEO Arnaud Desperz is joined by Peter Shwetz, a seasoned marketing and technology leader, to dig through the graveyard of low-impact marketing practices and discuss fresh, new, and more effective ways to engage audiences.
Below, we’ll explore Peter’s advice for spotting inefficient habits, aligning sales and marketing, strategically leveraging data and martech, and getting the most from your AI tools.
Listen to the full episode here >
In energy and industrial marketing, familiarity has a way of turning into situational blindness. “We know this conference. We know these people. It worked five years ago.” That comfort makes it easy for marketers and executives to stop asking whether the channel still produces results.
Add a fear of disappearing (“What if our competitors are there and we’re not?”) and, without taking the time to revisit or optimize the strategy, bad marketing tactics quietly turn into permanent line items on the budget.
Booth traffic, page views, and vague “visibility” become a scoreboard for campaign effectiveness, and companies rarely ask themselves the more complex questions: