Silver Lessons
2009
What can you learn from a marketing campaign that misses the mark? Plenty.
We invited two printing company CEOs who succeed at marketing to be part of an NAPL panel at the 2009 Top Management Conference in Tucson. Both had won awards and we wanted them to share their knowledge and approach to marketing with the other attendees. One of the panelists had won a total of four marketing awards — two gold and two silver. I assumed he would discuss the gold awards. Wrong. He insisted he only wanted to discuss one of the silver awards and talk about why it didn't win a gold.
He started his discussion with "Let me tell you why this campaign didn't win a gold." He went on to discuss how it was a great campaign, got the company entry into key decision makers at targeted companies, but didn't succeed largely due to timing (he was targeting retail just as the economy soured particularly for that sector). But, he noted, the program worked on many levels and they are not abandoning it. Rather, they are fine tuning it in the coming year for other market segments.
Hazzah – a CEO who realizes that marketing is not always perfect out of the gate and that we can all learn valuable lessons from failures as well as successes. Ironically, the panel followed a key note address by leadership guru David Ulrich in which Ulrich noted that all great leaders have experienced failure in their lives. The distinguishing factor about a great leader is that he or she learns from the mistakes and goes on to even greater things. The famous example is always Abraham Lincoln, but I have a new hero — David Pitts, from Classic Graphics in North Carolina. He's the guy on the panel who was determined to discuss lessons learned in missing the Gold.
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