[Three-minute read] Given that he died in 1973, 24 years before the invention of the first app (by Nokia, in 1997), we can assume that Pablo Picasso never used an app, let alone knew much about marketing one.

For someone who knew nothing about marketing apps, however, Picasso perhaps knew one big thing at least that many app founders don’t.

Let me explain.

Brands today need to be constantly in front of people, but few are.

The half-life of an idea is ever shorter. One idea is not enough. You need a production line and conveyor belt of new ideas that keep winning fresh attention, coverage and buzz.

Or, to switch metaphors, you don’t need one bolt of lightning but rolling thunder – marketing’s equivalent of Trotsky’s or Mao’s “permanent revolution” – a perpetual launch.

The key, as Picasso knew better than anyone, is to keep the ideas – large and small – coming.

If there’s a secret to marketing success, perhaps it’s one that both Picasso and Shakespeare knew, despite neither ever having marketed an app: that productivity and volume of output, coupled with a respectable batting average, matter more than stressing over trying to make every work a masterpiece and triumph, which you’re, anyway, never going to manage.

To put it another way, prolific beats perfect.

This means, therefore, having the mindset, ability, budget and resources to be prolific and roll plenty of dice, place plenty of bets and take plenty of shots on goal – and produce lots of quirky, distinctive, eye-catching ideas, even if some of them probably fail.

The aim should be to maximise creative output, while keeping costs down for at least most activations and aiming for a reasonable batting average, based on an ultimately unpredictable mixture of strikeouts, base hits and home runs.

This might be called “the Picasso Principle”, since it was the one exemplified by the iconic artist, whose self-belief was only exceeded by his volume of output. His own lifetime batting average wasn’t even all that sensational but his sheer number of times at bat ended up delivering a dazzling tally of home runs.

Then again, everyone from The Beatles to Bob Dylan and Dolly Parton to Irving Berlin has taken pretty much the same approach. They all had way more flops than hits, but didn’t let that stop them.

Irving Berlin, for example, is probably the most successful popular songwriter of all time. He wrote over 1,500 songs in his 60-year career, including a remarkable number still considered timeless standards (“White Christmas”, “God Bless America”, “Easter Parade”, “There’s No Business Like Show Business”, the list goes on). Yet most of his songs flopped and were soon forgotten, even in his day.

The Beatles released 213 songs in their eight years as a group. How many can you name?

The fact is that most artists that we think of as geniuses failed way more than they succeeded.

(We forget or fail to notice this because of the cognitive bias known as survivorship or survival bias, which means that, with the distance of time, we remember – and get constant reminders of – the successes and forget the failures.)

In truth, most of the cultural industries, from music to movies to book publishing, rely on the same approach; and so, you might argue, does business in general. Steve Jobs, the Picasso of modern business, had his share of failures, now mostly forgotten, while VC investors expect to make their money from maybe one in 10 big wins, while the other startups they back fail or just wash their face.

But then this is perhaps just another instance of Pareto’s Principle, alias the 80:20 rule, here applied to culture and creativity. Was Picasso just Pareto with a paintbrush?

Ken Robertson, the former “Head of Mischief” at Paddy Power, the Irish betting brand famed for its mischievous stunts, told a recent podcast that for every big success, his team had two or three failures.

I might aim for a slightly higher success rate than either Pareto or Paddy Power, but the same principle and expectation of some failure rate applies.

Volume of output not only increases your odds of hitting home runs, but is more important than ever in our age of information overload, when Google data suggests that we only notice something for the first time when we encounter it for the eleventh time.

Or, to put it another way, it helps fuel the cumulative sense among your target customers that they just keep hearing and seeing and reading about your brand, until they have to start noticing, paying attention and checking you out.

Or, as the saying – attributed to Stalin, among others – goes, “Quantity has a quality of its own.”