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“Never hide the pain” frequently works with another law that hasn’t been numbered and it’s called “Picard’s Law” first mentioned in the pilot episode of Star Trek - The Next Generation. I’ve adopted it as an operational philosophy ever since.
Picard said, “If we’re going to be be damned [judged], then let’s be damned for who we truly are.”
This was on my mind recently, watching a client storm off in a huff because she had just ran her new product launch marketing paragraph (I’ll explain in a minute) by me. Ay-yi-yi! It was a freakishly ill-considered “plan” that she created entirely on her own (read, in a vacuum) and off-camera to my awareness (and most of the department and exec board).
Frankly I was ambushed by it and more than a little annoyed. We hadn’t finished the product launch we were currently putting on the market and here she was proposing another launch that would happen right in the middle of the current campaign.
My campaign. And while it was going quite well, we were in the middle of a series of minor course corrections because their intel on what their market wanted (called a market brief) had proven incorrect.
Turns out they had “assumed” the target market’s hot buttons and never vetted their assumptions.
Oy vey.
This was further compounded by, when I did my due diligence and directly asked, “And how do you know what their hot buttons are?” They assured me they “knew.” And when I asked if they had a marketing brief, I was assured they did.
Now if you know me, you know what the next question was, right?
Since they (purportedly) had a marketing brief, then I asked if they could send me a copy. They agreed and yet somehow it never managed to materialize.
So I sat down with her and I dissected the entire “plan.” And when I say “plan” folks, I’m being charitable. It wasn’t really a plan, it was a paragraph. And yet, she as willing to bet hundreds of thousands of dollars of the company’s money and many more in human resources to make the “paragraph” work. I showed her where it was well thought-out and where it was designed to fail.
I showed her where all the pitfalls were, the challenges with engaging two concurrent product launches into a market that had no experience with either, and the risk that typically happens when the market is confused — they go somewhere else.
And above all, I proved my case with historical examples we were both aware of and told her that with an actual plan, the optimal time to run the new campaign would be the middle of the Quarter 2 of ‘07.
She was not happy. Oh well, this is what waiting lists are for, right?
However, I am (happy that is) . . . because I didn’t sugarcoat it and I refused to kow-tow in the hope of getting further business from them. Nope. I told her the unvarnished truth based on years of experience.
Now, most clients and prospective clients want the unvarnished truth and the accumulated wisdom of hard-won experiences and in the arenas where I play (and have played), hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars are at stake.
Most appreciate the insight and guidance that will save them muy fungoelas and prevent a chain reaction freeway accident in the marketplace.
And btw, this is a two-fer for us all. It’s an actual tale from the trenches and, it’s an isomorphic metaphor as well.
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By Walter |
Topics: Client Top Secret, Inside The Mind, Lessons Learned, Walter's Rules |
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