---
title: "Li Jiaoshou's Missed Shot Is No Big Deal; Sharpshooters Are Made of Bullets!"
description: "Rumors are often true, and Li Jiaoshou has indeed left Baidu. Despite his failure in practice, his marketing methodologies remain valuable, and all marketers should learn from his dedication to consumer communication and behavior."
author: "苗庆显"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2018-04-20"
language: "en"
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# Li Jiaoshou's Missed Shot Is No Big Deal; Sharpshooters Are Made of Bullets!

> Rumors are often true, and Li Jiaoshou has indeed left Baidu. Despite his failure in practice, his marketing methodologies remain valuable, and all marketers should learn from his dedication to consumer communication and behavior.

Introduction
****************Sharpshooters are made of bullets****************
Rumors are often true, and Li Jiaoshou has indeed left Baidu.
I remember when Baidu first acquired Li Jiaoshou's team, amidst the industry's amazement and sighs of "peers are leaving you behind," Lao Miao expressed regret more than once:
"With hundreds of thousands of followers and broad internet influence, Li Jiaoshou could have found more valuable and sustainable ways to monetize."
His departure now carries a natural topic for dissemination. Young fame, a billion-yuan acquisition, Baidu's youngest vice president, rumors of being sidelined, and now the rumors coming true—these are bound to spark a wave of online discussion.
Though young, as a "celebrity," he must withstand such consumption.
But what Lao Miao least wants to see, and what marketers are most eager to spread, is:
"Li Jiaoshou only knows marketing theory, not practical operation, and thus failed in real corporate combat." The business world is like a battlefield; for thousands of years, "armchair strategizing" has been a target of ridicule. After this "battle," many people have dubbed Li Jiaoshou the marketing version of "Zhao Kuo."
What Lao Miao wants to express is:
> **********All of the so-called 80 million marketers in China should learn from Li Jiaoshou to some extent. Learn from his dedication to consumer communication, his understanding of consumer behavior, and his organization of marketing tools.**********
Among the valuable marketing professional public accounts in Lao Miao's view, Li Jiaoshou ranks at least in the top five. In fact, reading Li Jiaoshou's articles has inspired me a lot.
As the focus of domestic marketing shifts from B2B to C2C, while many old-school marketers are still obsessed with channels, relationships, connections, and resources, people like Li Jiaoshou are the rarest.
Some readers might ask: Since you say Li Jiaoshou is so great, why did he fail at Baidu? More importantly, we haven't seen successful cases he operated; instead, his copywriting for Nanfu batteries is often ridiculed.
There must be reasons on the company's side, but Li Jiaoshou himself surely knows his own shortcomings.
First is the degree of practice and training, which Li Jiaoshou seems to have mentioned in an article. Lao Miao will use a joke he made up to illustrate.
"Hold the ball with one hand, support it with the other, place it in front of you, with upper arm and forearm at a ninety-degree angle, eyes on the top of the hoop. Start from the waist and abdomen, use upper arm and forearm strength to push the ball to the highest point, concentrate wrist strength, and use fingers to flick the ball out. After release, the ball should rotate backward as it flies forward."
The above is almost all the basic knowledge for teaching basketball shooting.
After knowing this, how far are you from becoming a sharpshooter?
The answer is simple: knowing this knowledge has little to do with becoming a sharpshooter, because becoming a sharpshooter requires hundreds of thousands or millions of effective shooting practices.
The only way to improve abilities and skills is effective training; in behavioral science, there is a term called "deliberate practice."
What truly enables you to apply what you've learned are your skills and abilities, which no one else can give you—only through your own effective practice can you achieve them.
Li Jiaoshou's methodology comes from theoretical learning, case observation, and his own systematic deep thinking. In Lao Miao's view, these methodologies are mostly effective, even efficient, and at least valuable.
But can Li Jiaoshou himself use these methods?
Not necessarily!
At least from current performance, his own application of these methods is not good. This is like the example above: Li Jiaoshou discovered the correct shooting form and power point, while most people throw randomly; but even so, if Li Jiaoshou competed in a shooting contest, he might still lose because he hasn't had as many practice opportunities, while those random throwers have already thrown thousands of times. But you can't conclude that Li Jiaoshou's shooting method is wrong.
This is not his fault; for a young person born in 1991, he hasn't had that many practice opportunities.
Ye Maozhong is a "master" in the domestic marketing world, but what insiders may not know is that during the heyday of TV advertising, Ye Maozhong's company produced over a hundred commercials annually, not to mention over a dozen full-service clients each year. All the domestic peers who curse Old Ye combined may not have served as many clients as Ye himself.
Besides current clients, marketing service companies of Lao Miao's scale receive no fewer than a hundred client meetings each year.
"Sharpshooters are made of bullets." This is a phrase Lao Miao often says in the company.
Whenever a colleague proposes a plan, as long as it's not too far-fetched, my only response is, "Go do it quickly." After the plan is out, we give feedback and suggestions, then adjust and give feedback again. That's the process of practice.
Second, there is a qualitative difference between actual operation and case analysis.
**When you analyze a case, all conditions are known, at least for your conclusion. But in actual operation, there are always unknown factors.**
Take the battery ad Li Jiaoshou did for Nanfu as an example. First, the client's strategy was debatable, and Li Jiaoshou's copywriting had major problems. He used a series of battery usage scenarios to express the long usage time of Nanfu batteries, but in these creative scenarios, Li Jiaoshou committed the "self-indulgence" mistake he himself talked about.
For instance, the electronic clock scenario: "When will you save enough money to marry me? Soon, the time of one Nanfu battery."
The mistake here is that most people have no concept of how long one battery can power an electronic clock. Li Jiaoshou might have been unaware of this external condition, using a vague thing to express a clear concept, which is both roundabout and unclear, and the effect is certainly far inferior to "One is better than six."
Another scenario is even more absurd: the female vibrator scenario: "Husband is on a business trip for three months; one Nanfu battery is enough."
This creates a purchasing barrier for female consumers buying Nanfu batteries, making them feel like they are using a vibrator. This might be an unknown factor for Li Jiaoshou.
**Unknown factors are the norm for marketers; they require experience, teamwork, feedback mechanisms, trial and error, and even then, they cannot be completely avoided.** As a young newcomer, it's normal for Li Jiaoshou to occasionally fall into such traps.
The third potential issue is that marketing practitioners must be judged by results. Li Jiaoshou was rumored to have failed his KPI assessment at Baidu, which I think is understandable.
**The only thing that can produce marketing results is marketing actions.** How to execute marketing actions, especially as a leader?
It should be: **After completing the plan, coordinate who does what by when, what the completion standards are, what resources are matched, how tasks connect, where the key points are, what the feedback mechanism is, what the early warning is, and what the incentive mechanism is.**
I think for such a young guy, completing marketing actions as a leader in a huge company like Baidu is very difficult. Even his own marketing actions were not handled well.
For example, when rumors circulated that he was sidelined, he came out to deny them: "Well written, I almost believed it myself." Such a statement is really not good. Why it's not good, readers can figure out for themselves.
Online comments say his biggest growth at Baidu was "from looking like a student to looking like a Baidu executive," which is nonsense and sounds more like sarcasm. Baidu was simply not suitable for him.
Having said all this, I'm not defending Li Jiaoshou, nor am I trying to blacken him. I want to tell readers that Li Jiaoshou's methodology, including the methodologies of many domestic marketers, is very valuable. We should not deny the value of the methodology just because he made some operational mistakes.
New marketing logic is forming, marketing is transforming, marketing organizations are transforming, and marketers are transforming. These fresh thoughts are extremely scarce and precious.
I don't know Li Jiaoshou personally, but I remember he was among the people I followed early on. I heard Ye Maozhong mention him twice, and Ye praised this young man without stint. I believe he will have a brighter future, and I will continue to read his public account if it updates.
By leveraging his existing influence, playing to his strengths in summarization, analysis, and reasoning, and developing more valuable tools and methodologies, he will surely have more opportunities for monetization and value realization. That is his ideal stage. Of course, he also needs to make up for the lack of practice.
"Sharpshooters are made of bullets," and I share this with readers and Li Jiaoshou himself.
Source: Lao Miao Tears Marketing (ID: yiheyingxiao)
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