My family and I went to the Iowa State Fair this year and we had a blast. And I learned a few marketing lessons, too.

For the uninitiated, the Iowa State Fair is the single largest event in the state. Millions of people attend every year, and it’s a rite of passage for us Iowans. I’m pretty sure the Butter Cow has her own clause in our state constitution.

The fair has been around since 1854. The combination of history and continuity of the fair are part of what makes it so endearing. It is a living showcase of technology and culture, and serves as a testament to human ingenuity.

We hadn’t been in a few years and so we decided to hit it hard. We backed out of the driveway at 7:03AM and headed straight to Des Moines –three precious minutes behind schedule. By 10;00AM, we had successfully found parking (FREE!!) and only had to walk a half mile to get to the gate.

Every self-respecting fair-goer knows to go to the fair on an empty stomach, so after a three-hour drive, we were ready to chow down. Once we got our tickets scanned, our hungry group of native sons and daughters headed for the main concourse in search of this year’s gastronomic delights.

Another thing about the 175 year-old fair you should know: people take the food seriously. Like really seriously. Everyone has a favorite.

And in our free market economy, if there is a dollar to be made at the fair, someone will find a way to make it. Every year, food vendors concoct ever-more over-the-top food items in a race to clog up everyone’s social feeds faster than they can clog up their arteries. It is a culinary arms race.

Cha-ching.

I don’t know exactly how many food booths there are at the fair, but I’m gonna say it’s well over 100. Everything from Midwest staples like funnel cakes, hotdogs, BBQ, and ice cream to international cuisines like Middle Eastern, Asian, and Latin American booths dot the landscape.

Points if it’s on a stick, deep-fried, or includes bacon. Major points if you can pack in all three.

The main concourse is like fair food Ground Zero: Over 30 different food stands line a quarter-mile stretch of road where you and 50,000 of your closest hungry friends all jockey for a spot in line or to get a glimpse and a whiff of the delicacies being passed through the serving windows.

Should we get the Korean corndog with mozzarella? The red, white and blue BBQ rib? Should we try the deluxe Greek gyro with extra Ziki sauce? Or maybe the bucket of chocolate chip cookies?

So. Many. Choices.

We divided and conquered, everyone going to the booth if they liked most. A scant $160 later (I’m not making that up), the six of us rendezvoused at a picnic table my wife managed to snag in the shade.

We proceeded to devour our haul.

Approximately 93 seconds later, everything was gone. The plates and wrappers and sticks all picked clean. The reports came in. The beer batter-dipped bacon wrapped cheese balls dusted with bacon bits scored a C. The Korean corndog with Flaming Hot Doritos dust and gochujang mayonnaise got a B. The red, white, and blue BBQ rib earned a B. The bucket of chocolate chip cookies got a C.

Surprisingly, nothing scored an A.

In our zeal to try all the exciting new stuff, fair mainstays like the footlong corn dog and the haystack onion rings – even the OG stick-mounted food item: the pork chop on a stick – didn’t make the cut.

I have to say, after eating (and paying for) all of them, we played our cards all wrong. Sure, the novelty items were fun, but they failed to live up to the hype and definitely not the price tag. Cue the happy family walking by nibbling on their perfectly cooked pork chops, each one half the price of our cheapest item.

Sigh.

We made a rookie mistake and failed to follow the Golden Fair Rule: know what’s available before you buy.

More hard lessons learned that day: buy a beer from the regular beer stand instead of getting the same can from the “27 degree ice-cold beer” stand (with $4 upcharge). Muster up the willpower to walk past the 2-story ice cream trailer with the 50 people in line and head past the horse barn to ice cream stand hasn’t changed in 50 years and sells the same flavors for half the price.

A hungry fool and his money are soon parted. Caveat emptor is in full effect.

And we navigate these exact same pitfalls in our day jobs.

The fair runs on novelty and foundation simultaneously, but they’re not equal partners. Marketing works the same way. New platforms and tactics feel like progress because they’re all the rage in the trade articles and in splashy conference presentations.  But if your foundational signals, channels, and value proposition aren’t solid, chasing the new thing is just like falling for the Korean corndogs or the sub-zero beer. And the tried and true doesn’t maintain itself just because it works. It needs more attention than the flashy stuff, not less, because it’s easy to let atrophy while you’re busy chasing the next shiny object.

Four Tips for Focusing on Foundational Instead of Flashy

1. Know your real signals. Know which numbers actually predict outcomes: inquiries, applications, enrollments. Everything else is just noise dressed up as insight.

2. Get your own channels right before adding a new one. Your email list, website, SEO fundamentals, whatever it is, make sure they’re performing well before chasing a new platform everyone’s buzzing about.

3. Name the pull, then hold the line. Well-meaning colleagues outside marketing fall prey to the flash because they don’t see the system you need to support it. It’s on you to translate that invisible cost for people who mean well but don’t understand operational realities. The unsexy option usually wins the long race.

4. Sample without betting the farm. It’s fine to test something new. You absolutely should budget bandwidth for it. Just don’t rebuild your whole approach around a flavor of the month before you know it has legs.

Truth be told, I’m not quite sure if the patriotic BBQ ribs deserved that B. That’s because one $15 rib lasted three bites. And I was person #4. Had I bought the $8 foot-long corn dog from the old stand with the faded sign, I would have had at least three bites and been very happy with a B.

Next time I go to the fair, I think I’m going to have a little breakfast first. I just might make pick A-grade treats.