The current 8 episodes of the Toys That Made Us documentary series on Netflix is a wonderful bath of nostalgia, but it is also an amazing hindsight-is-20/20 course on marketing and product development. While the toys themselves are all very different, there are several core themes that emerge when covering the successes and failures across all of them. These are lessons that too many businesses learn too late.

In a nutshell, magical thinking is a psychological term referring to a common mental error of confusing a correlation to causality. A simple example is, “My sports team seems to win more when I wear my lucky hat.” In business, these mental errors cause major mistakes in marketing and management. We look at things other people are doing in business and misinterpret the effects and results, then try to apply them to ourselves in over simplistic or misunderstood ways. I think the world of marketing is the worst offender bordering on insanity.

Should you change your brand? Is it time to change your logo, your tagline or even your company name? This question is often presented to business owners when they begin to take their marketing seriously. Marketing agencies and designers love making new brands because it’s like getting a brand new car.

Brother and sisters, I confess I have sinned. I, too, have committed that terrible, soul crushing, demoralizing, and unproductive act of telling a designer to "Make it pop." I know, horrifying. However, I have decided that in order to make penance for my crimes, the least I can do is help future designers not have to experience such atrocities again.