The same advert, twice as often

A man in Dammam sells gym wear online. His adverts have stopped working. Fewer people stop on them, and fewer of those who stop end up buying.

His answer is to post more. Twice as often, the same photograph, the same caption, a little more money behind it.

It is an understandable instinct. When something is not working, effort feels like the responsible response. It is also the one choice almost certain to give him more of what he already has.

The sellers whose adverts do work are not running his advert with more force. Look at them closely and they are doing something else entirely. They show the shirt on a person halfway through a workout rather than folded on a table. They answer the question a buyer actually has, about fit or about sweat. They speak to one kind of person instead of to everyone scrolling past.

It is the same in any field where skill shows. A strong swimmer is not a weak swimmer who kicks more. A good teacher is not a poor teacher who talks louder. Somewhere along the way they changed the method, not the volume.

Trying harder is a comfortable instruction because it asks for no new thinking. You already know how to do what you did yesterday. Doing more of it feels like progress and demands nothing awkward of you.

Trying differently is harder to hear, because it implies that yesterday's way was the problem.

Usually it was. More of it will not fix that.