Sur­viv­or­ship bias: why you can’t copy someone else’s success story

You can find them at the front of any bookstore year in and year out: best­selling pub­lic­a­tions that analyse the secrets to success among en­tre­pren­eurs, athletes, and artists. They are con­sidered to be guides for success. Yet, these books con­sist­ently bring the most fame and fortune to their authors. The majority of readers fail, even though they faith­fully follow Steve Jobs, Dirk Nowitzki, and Lady Gaga’s in­struc­tions. But why?

The recipes for success them­selves are flawed. The authors of the books are liable to sur­viv­or­ship bias: By only taking suc­cess­ful prot­ag­on­ists into account, their analyses are distorted. All those failed en­tre­pren­eurs, athletes, and artists no one has ever heard of used these same supposed “secrets of success” – only without ever achieving success.

Sur­viv­or­ship bias is among the best-re­searched cognitive dis­tor­tions in psy­cho­logy. Because success in everyday life enjoys greater vis­ib­il­ity, people sys­tem­at­ic­ally over­es­tim­ate their own chances of success. Examples can be found in every sphere of life.

The term sur­viv­or­ship bias was first used by Allied engineers during the Second World War.

In their analysis of how they were better able to arm their airplanes against enemy attacks, they noticed that their im­prove­ments made no impact, even though they strengthened the areas in which the returned planes showed the most bullet holes. It was only when they re­in­forced the armour plating where returning planes showed no hits that the number of pilots returning home increased. This is because shots at these exact spots had a fatal effect: if the planes were hit, they crashed. Planes that didn’t crash and returned con­sequently showed hardly any hits.

The survivor bias had initially narrowed the view of the engineers to the survivors, the planes that had returned. Only when they took all the airplanes into con­sid­er­a­tion, including those that had crashed, did they find the weak spots.

To find examples of how our focus on the suc­cess­ful distorts our overall thinking, we don’t have to go all the way back to the Second World War.

In­vest­ment companies regularly remove un­suc­cess­ful funds from their portfolio so that their poor results are not in­cor­por­ated into the balance of the total portfolio. To investors, the per­form­ance of the fund, thus, appears better at first glance than it actually would be if the loss-making fund was also included in the stat­ist­ics.

Start-up investors are regularly in­flu­enced by sur­viv­or­ship bias. Month by month, billions in exits are reported in the media. Are you thinking of investing in the next Google, Amazon or Apple? Don’t get your hopes up, as the majority of start-ups fail. Nine out of ten start-ups go bankrupt – only no one talks about them. The risk that you would lose your money in the start-up world is high, even if everything you have ever read about it seems to indicate otherwise.

In medicine, sur­viv­or­ship bias plays an important role in the as­sess­ment of survival rates, for example, in cancer patients. If the patients pass away im­me­di­ately after their diagnosis, they are often not even recorded in a study sample, which pos­it­ively distorts the chances of survival.

In marketing too, the risk of falling into the trap of sur­viv­or­ship bias is real. Here are some situ­ation­al examples where a reasoning error can result.

On the Internet you may have already seen one of the many success stories that read a little like this: “Thanks to this email template we increased our sales by 200% in one month”. Be aware that the (many?) con­sult­ants and agencies that don’t achieve any sig­ni­fic­ant success with the same template don’t publish an article about it. Is it even worth looking at them then? Yes, do get inspired, but then consider the in­form­a­tion within its context and also check which self-interests the author is pursuing by pub­lish­ing their “secrets”. It is rare for someone to share in­form­a­tion for purely al­tru­ist­ic reasons. If you would like to borrow a strategy, be sure to adapt it to your target audience, your product, and your industry.

Having a close re­la­tion­ship with customers is always a good idea. Staying in contact means hearing about any de­fi­cien­cies in your product quickly, and possibly getting a chance to persuade unhappy customers to give your brand another chance. However, surveys are only partially suitable for capturing a realistic picture of how customers feel. This is because normally only a fraction of customers par­ti­cip­ate in surveys, with the most (pos­it­ively or neg­at­ively) worked-up ones being the most likely to speak up.

If your customer feedback is over­whelm­ingly negative, you shouldn’t blindly change course to appease the critics. Similarly, if the feedback is over­whelm­ingly positive, don’t let it lull you into a false sense of security. Instead, reflect crit­ic­ally on the sample and validity of the survey. In order to obtain the most com­pre­hens­ive picture, it makes sense to include former customers in the survey sample. This is because you must consider that your current customers are in a sense also “survivors”; they are satisfied enough with your product that they have been buying it up until now.

“Amazon succeeded with this strategy…” “This approach has been working for Facebook for years…” Copying the marketing strategies of suc­cess­ful companies often misses the mark. Why is that?

Cor­rel­a­tions are not caus­al­it­ies. Just because orange-coloured buttons convert to best­sellers for Company A, doesn’t mean this will work for your company. Just because Bill Gates and Steve Jobs dropped out of college, doesn’t mean that a uni­ver­sity degree is anywhere near an obstacle to leading a company to global success. The stat­ist­ics argue the opposite: Those who drop out of college fail as company founders.

If you would like to adapt existing strategies, try to find models with the most similar basic con­di­tions to yours. What is expedient in the real estate sector may have no relevance for the online drink trade or a software provider. Then test the success strategy you believe to be the best and optimise it using your own practical results.

Due to evolution, the human brain is pro­grammed to detect de­vi­ations. That is why we are fas­cin­ated by stories of suc­cess­ful outsiders. It is why success stories remain in our memory more so than other types of news. This is because the majority of us do not belong to the suc­cess­ful elite.

Because success stories sell well, media coverage focuses on this kind of content and strengthens our tendency to notice the suc­cess­ful first.

Not least, the pro­cliv­ity toward the suc­cess­ful provides people with a feeling of control. We want to believe that there is a recipe for success. If we become aware of sur­viv­or­ship bias, we must also come to the painful real­isa­tion that the fast route to success doesn’t exist, and that fortune, chance, and many in­di­vidu­al factors play a crucial role.

Sur­viv­or­ship bias is a cognitive dis­tor­tion that you should always take into con­sid­er­a­tion for marketing campaigns. Whether you are getting in­spir­a­tion from well-known brands or analysing your own data, sur­viv­or­ship bias can cloud your judgment. It’s not in­ev­it­able, however, and studies and analyses do not lose their authority as a result. If you are aware of the reasoning error, you can free yourself from sur­viv­or­ship bias in your marketing by keeping the following in mind:

• Question success stories: Does causality play a role here at all? Could it just be an exception to the rule? How probable is it that you would get the same result if you were to reproduce the approach?
• Expand your focus: Check in advance that your own A/B tests, surveys, and inquiries not only consider “survivors”, but the entire database of results and examples.
• Ask “why?” more often: Marketers are in­ter­ested in the ‘how’. How have others managed to do it? How can we achieve our goals? By thor­oughly picking through their own results and those of others, they will likely be more suc­cess­ful than by blindly copying supposed success recipes.