Just rats with better outfits, in my opinion. However, I love, love, love Marketing Experiments, and, I'm IN LOVE with their Fight the Squirrel campaign.  Basically, Fight the Squirrel is a pitch for using testing methodologies to improve your marketing ROI, which I too am a huge fan of - both testing and improving ROI!  Marketing Experiments defines “the squirrel,” as:

“… that one bad marketing idea on the site that you just know deep-down is hurting your conversion, but that someone with more authority in your organization loves.”

Watching the videos of the poor marketers fight the evil “founder” hit a little too close to home to find truly funny, but appreciate the ammunition Marketing Experiments gives the marketers fighting those #@$& squirrels that wreck campaign objectives.

Wish I would have had live site testing data when a start-up founder insisted his wife be included in the prototype testing (she was sooo not the target audience), and then we had to do a re-design because, “yellow is such an unhappy color!”  Really?  Yellow?  Any who . . .

Fight the squirrel with testing – it works! (Unless the squirrel is a yellow prototype!)