The Law of Failure - Law #19 under the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
“Failure is to be expected and accepted”. Recognise failure early and cut your losses. Sometime it is better to drop things and move on rather than ‘reorg’ and try again.
It is a very thin line between accepting defeat and giving up. We have grown up with our elders teaching us never to give up and pursue what we have started no matter what happens. How do we know when to give up then? There is no answer to this, one has to be smart and self resilient to know how much to stretch and when to stop.
Like the Law of Success, ego plays a major role here as well in someone resisting to accept failure. An egoistic decision maker within the system can make an entire organisation suffer due to his reluctance towards accepting failure and act fast. History has many examples which shows a ruler’s ego to be the reason behind the fall of an empire. The moral goes ‘had he accepted his mistake, the people would have not paid the price’. This is the same even today where knowingly or unknowingly people defect from accepting their mistakes.
One always gets a clear and better picture of the situation when he stands back and reassesses. This gives you an opportunity to identify where you went wrong, what was the damage and what needs to be done next. This approach is always good for the individual and the organisation collectively. There is always scope for a learning curve, business decisions should always be well calculated, well articulated and monitored. The slightest indication of something not going as planned should raise an alert and closer monitoring should be done to get things back into control.
Digital Media is making things easier than before in terms of getting real time data on marketing campaigns. A slight change in the results can alert the marketer who will immediately change the settings of the campaign accordingly. Take for example an advertising campaign focussed towards teen agers is not getting the right number of hits. This can alert the marketer to redo the adverts or choose alternate publishers or networks and try to get the intended clicks.
Like mentioned in my earlier blogs, data collection is now faster and easier compared to the days of traditional marketing. We always have to have the positive approach or the learning curve approach to accept the misses and avoid serious financial damages to the organisation. Talking about damages, financial is the end result that can happen in business and can be regained with another product or service but think about the damage to reputation and the brand loyalty. There is no looking back once you lose those.
It is therefore very important to capture, analyse and read the signals appropriately to decide on the future of any campaigns that is not going as planned. The solution can be either to stop the campaign completely or stall it for some time for damage control or do some necessary tweaks. There should always be contingency plans before launching any campaigns or making strategic changes to the system. One should know in advance as to would they do if things don’t go as planned and be alert and ready for it.
