Insecticide resistance is a broadly recognized ecological backlash resulting from insecticide use and is widely reported among arthropod pest species with well‐recognized underlying mechanisms and consequences. Nonetheless, insecticide resistance is the subject of evolving conceptual views that introduces a different concept useful if recognized in its own right – the risk or likelihood of control failure. Here we suggest an experimental approach to assess the likelihood of control failure of an insecticide allowing for consistent decision‐making regarding management of insecticide resistance. We also challenge the current emphasis on limited spatial sampling of arthropod populations for resistance diagnosis in favor of comprehensive spatial sampling. This necessarily requires larger population sampling – aiming to use spatial analysis in area‐wide surveys – to recognize focal points of insecticide resistance and/or control failure that will better direct management efforts. The continuous geographical scale of such surveys will depend on the arthropod pest species, the pattern of insecticide use and many other potential factors. Regardless, distance dependence among sampling sites should still hold, following the maxim that the closer two things are, the more they resemble each other, which is the basis of Tobler's First Law of Geography.