Well, there may be two valuable results. One is that you validate your failing assumptions and learn something. The other is that you succeed (in other words, you fail), and the long-term effort may pay off handsomely. Even if not, you've learned something.

Tweet Making mistakes on purpose has a different flavor. One of my favorite pieces was made by the VP of Marketing at a large B2B company. Their email industry mailing list has amassed tens of thousands of subscribers over the years. Every week they dutifully email nearly 90,000 newsletters, and each week has a very low engagement rate.

So, the VP did an interesting thing. He sent an email to a largely subscribed but uninvolved audience with the subject line: Sorry to see you gone. In the body of the email, the copy told recipients that the company was sorry they unsubscribed from the newsletter. However, the text goes on to say that if they think unsubscribing may be wrong, they can respond by clicking on the survey.