Best practice is one of the most dangerous phrases in modern marketing operations.
It sounds reassuring. Sensible. Safe. It implies that someone smarter, richer, or more experienced has already figured this out, and all you need to do is follow the steps. No risk. No mistakes. No awkward conversations with leadership when things do not work.
And that is exactly the problem.
Because "best practice" marketing rarely produces the best results. More often, it produces average outcomes wrapped in confident language. It creates teams that are busy but not effective, sophisticated but not sharp, compliant but not competitive.
"Best practice" is not a strategy. It is a comfort blanket.
Where “best practice” actually comes from
Most so called best practices come from a small and predictable set of sources. Large software vendors. Analyst firms. Agencies with templated offerings. Case studies from organisations operating at a completely different scale, budget, and level of complexity than yours.
None of these sources are malicious. But they all share the same incentive. To standardise.
Standardisation is how vendors scale. It is how agencies deliver repeatable revenue. It is how analysts create neat frameworks that look great on slides, but the messiness of reality does not travel well. So "best practice" becomes whatever works often enough, for enough people, under ideal conditions.
What gets lost is context.
Your market. Your buying cycle. Your internal politics. Your data quality. Your operating model. Your actual ability to execute consistently rather than theoretically.
"Best practice" rarely asks whether something fits your organisation. It simply asks whether you are willing to adopt it.
Why "best practice" spreads so easily
Best practice spreads because it removes accountability. If something fails, the answer is ready made. We followed "best practice". We implemented what everyone recommended. We did what the vendor suggested. We aligned to the framework.
Nobody gets fired for following "best practice". Even if the results are underwhelming.
In fact, many Marketing Ops teams quietly rely on this. "Best practice" provides cover. It allows teams to look progressive while avoiding the harder work of deciding what actually matters.
It feels safer to copy than to choose.
The copy and paste problem...
Spend enough time inside Marketing Ops teams and you start to notice a pattern. Campaign structures look eerily similar. Lifecycle stages are named the same. Lead scoring models differ only slightly. Dashboards track identical metrics.
Different brands. Same playbook.
This is not coincidence. It is the natural outcome of "best practice" thinking.
When everyone copies the same approach, differentiation disappears at the operational level. Creativity becomes superficial rather than structural. Messaging might change, but the experience feels familiar. Predictable. Easy to ignore.
The irony is that many teams believe they are being innovative because they have adopted the latest recommended approach. In reality, they have joined a very crowded middle.
"Best practice" optimises for safety, not success
"Best practice" is designed to minimise risk, not maximise impact.
It optimises for not being wrong... rather than being right.
This shows up everywhere. In channel choices that favour what is popular over what is effective. In metrics that are easy to measure rather than meaningful. In processes that prioritise governance over momentum.
The result is Marketing Operations that looks impressive in presentations but struggles to move the needle in the real world.
Safe MOPs rarely wins.
When "best practice" becomes a ceiling
One of the least discussed consequences of "best practice" is how quickly it becomes a ceiling.
Once a team aligns to "best practice", questioning it becomes difficult. Any deviation requires justification. Any experiment must be defended. Any failure is seen as evidence that "best practice" was the correct choice all along.
Over time, this creates organisational muscle memory. Teams stop asking why. They focus on execution within predefined boundaries.
Growth stalls not because the team lacks talent, but because the system discourages thinking beyond what is already accepted.
"Best practice" ignores organisational maturity
A major flaw in "best practice" thinking is the assumption that all organisations are equally ready to adopt the same approaches.
They are not.
Marketing Ops maturity varies wildly. Some teams struggle with basic data hygiene. Others have robust governance and advanced capabilities. Applying the same playbook to both is not ambitious. It is reckless.
What works for a team with dedicated Operations support, executive alignment, and clean data, will fail spectacularly in an organisation still negotiating ownership and process.
"Best practice" does not account for this. It assumes a level playing field that does not exist.
The cost of premature sophistication
One of the most common consequences of "best practice" adoption is premature sophistication.
Teams implement complex models before they have mastered the fundamentals. They chase advanced techniques without the operational discipline to support them. They build intricate systems that collapse under their own weight.
This is how marketing stacks become bloated. How dashboards multiply without clarity. How automation programs decay quietly in the background.
It looks advanced. It feels modern. It is deeply inefficient.
"Best practice" vs right practice
There is an alternative, but it requires more thought and more honesty.
Right practice.
Right practice starts with your reality, not someone else’s success story. It considers constraints as design inputs rather than obstacles. It evolves over time rather than being imposed all at once.
Right practice asks different questions.
What can we execute consistently today?
What creates the most leverage for our team, not an idealised version of it?
What will still work when attention shifts and priorities change?
It is less elegant on paper. More effective in practice.
Why right practice feels uncomfortable
Right practice feels uncomfortable because it removes the safety net.
There is no external authority to hide behind. No vendor deck to point to. No analyst quote to justify the decision.
It requires teams to own their choices and their outcomes.
This is why many organisations avoid it. It is easier to say we followed "best practice" than to say we made a deliberate trade off based on what we know about our business.
But ownership is exactly what drives performance.
How "best practice" dulls curiosity
Over time, "best practice" thinking erodes curiosity.
When answers are prepackaged, questions become unnecessary. Teams stop exploring alternatives. They stop challenging assumptions. They stop learning from their own data because the framework already knows best.
Marketing Operations becomes procedural rather than exploratory.
The danger is not stagnation alone. It is misalignment. The market changes, buyers evolve, channels shift, and yet the playbook remains the same.
By the time teams realise something is wrong, they are deeply invested in an approach that no longer fits.
The myth of universal maturity
"Best practice" assumes that success looks the same everywhere.
It does not.
Some organisations win through speed. Others through depth. Some through consistency. Others through creativity. There is no single optimal path.
Trying to force every team into the same mould ignores this reality. It flattens strategic diversity in favour of operational uniformity.
Uniformity is easy to manage. Diversity is harder. But diversity is where advantage lives.
What high performing teams actually do differently
High performing MOPs teams are not anti "best practice". They are selectively sceptical.
They understand the intent behind recommended approaches, but they adapt ruthlessly. They borrow principles, not processes. They test ideas before scaling them. They simplify aggressively.
Most importantly, they revisit decisions regularly. What was right practice six months ago might not be right today. They treat it as a system, not a checklist.
Letting go of borrowed confidence
"Best practice" gives borrowed confidence. It feels like certainty, but it is second hand.
Right practice builds earned confidence. It comes from understanding your own performance, limitations, and strengths, and this shift is subtle but powerful.
Teams stop asking whether they are doing what they should be doing and start asking whether what they are doing is working. That question changes everything.
The real reason "best practice" is so hard to abandon
"Best practice" is hard to abandon because it is socially reinforced.
Peers talk about it. Conferences celebrate it. Vendors reward it. Recruiters expect it. Job descriptions demand experience with it.
Opting out feels risky. It feels like stepping off a well lit path into something less certain.
But growth rarely happens on well lit paths.
Choosing effectiveness over elegance
"Best practice Marketing Ops" often looks elegant. Clean diagrams. Neat stages. Clear labels. Right practice is messier. It reflects reality. It evolves. It sometimes contradicts itself as conditions change.
Elegance is overrated. Effectiveness is not.
The goal of Marketing Operations is not to look mature. It is to create impact.
The question worth asking
Instead of asking whether something is "best practice", ask a better question.
Is this right for us, right now?
That question forces honesty. It invites trade offs. It creates ownership.
It also opens the door to something far more valuable than best practice...
Progress.
