heartharmony.com.au

I’m about to let you into a secret in the marketing industry, one that is only talked about late at night after a few too many red wines. Not every marketing campaign works. Every marketer has failures – campaigns that sparkled with promise, where all the research and market testing came back positive and yet when the campaign launched you could hear the crickets chirruping (at best), or the campaign was roundly condemned across the media (at worst).

Think back a few years, when Coke had lots of wonderfully happy people trying to “teach the world to sing in perfect harmony”. People whistled and sang the jingle on the streets, everyone knew the campaign, and yet the sales of Coke were pretty much constant.This is known as a marketing fail.

Yesterday Westpac Bank tried to explain mortgage interest rates by a cartoon. In this cartoon mortgages were seen as being like a person making banana smoothies. I am sure it seemed like a great idea at the time, but for a short while the Tiger Woods affairs played second banana to an ad campaign by a bank in terms of public condemnation.

Of course there are self inflicted failures – where a beautifully designed website draft is “run past a few people”, usually relatives or friends, and suddenly the design is converted to a patchwork rug complete with kittens and music. There are direct mail pieces (that are never mailed), ads designed to run as an A4 size being printed as an eight of a page, keyword research informing clients what the most searched terms on the net are only to be told to use non-ranking words as the main keywords and so on. Every marketer has war stories they generally only share within the industry – which is a nice way of saying any marketer worth their salt has failed at times.

So how do you recover from non self-inflicted wounds in your marketing. Westpac showed the way yesterday.

1. Pull the ad. Stop showing it wherever possible.
2. Return to your control ad (the one that may be old but you have proven it works) until you can create something else.
3. Apologise to your customers. If the ad was really a poor choice, then a humble public apology will help.
4. Review the ad development process to learn from any mistakes and to listen to the feedback.
5. Review your internal control process. Who has the final delegation on signing off a campaign – were any corners cut?

Mistakes are part of life. How can you learn from someone’s mistake? (and be nice to your local Westpac Branch Manager – no bunches of bananas or lolly bananas as Christmas gifts. It wasn’t their mistake).

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter