Time for marketing to learn from failure!

There is a well known and time worn statement which goes, those who can not remember the past will be doomed to repeat it. The worse are attributed to the poet and philosopher George Santayana. These words are as true today as there were when they were first spoken. In fact they seem to be even more relevant because our periods of remembrance seem to be drawing shorter and shorter with each generation.

I bring this up today because there are direct ties into business and specifically marketing and communications. Another cliche that is often used is that success comes from many fathers but failure is an orphan. Both of these statements define what is wrong about business accountability in this day and age. More often than not if something goes wrong, the first thing organizations try to do is look for a scape goat and eliminate that person to keep the baying of the legal wolves in check. This quite honestly is stupid and in many cases counterproductive. If there is a complete and total violation of a companies policies as seems to be the case with Hewlett Packard, then dismissing the head of the company makes some sense. However I am here to talk about the lesser examples that often times do not make a lick of sense.

Having been around the block in marketing a while, I notice that many times senior level executives will wonder why their initiatives are not producing the desired results. More often than not marketing and communications people will look for an excuse or a reason to give as to why they are not. In most cases there is a simple explanation such as marketing conditions or even lack of support from other elements in the organization. It is not improper or unprofessional to refuse to fall on your sword because some other party has failed to participate in the successful development of marketing and communications strategy.

So what's the point here? That is simple. marketing, corporate communications, PR etc need to OWN the communications function and the message. We need to let the C-level know when they are not being reasonable and we need to both educate other groups in the organization and help them understand what marketing and communications is all about and how to work. What is very interesting is that organizations who view marketing and communications as a strategic tool, similar to finance or sales, find the greatest return on investment for their marketing dollar. They tend to stay the course and spend their marketing dollars wisely.

Organizations who are struggling or failing tend to share a common trait as well. They see marketing and communications as purely tactical weapons. Elements to be used only in reaction to market condition and not as a strategic weapon. A perfect case is how McDonald's reinvented itself to offset negative publicity as well as changing marketing conditions. This required a difficult reappraisal of their operations from top to bottom and included a major revision to how they went about marketing their products.

The lesson to be learned from all of this is that in marketing and communications, as well as in any aspect of business, failure is an excellent teacher. This is not a call for everyone to fail, rather it is a call for us to stop treating failure as something that requires a quick trip to the gallows and then carrying on as if nothing has happened. Use marketing as a tool to build brand and build sales. You will fail along the way that can't be helped. What you can help is taking the setbacks, learn from them, and come back even stronger and assume an even strong position in your market.

And, if failure is an orphan then it can join, Nelson Mandela, Alexander Hamilton , Dave Thomas (who founded Wendy's) and Louis Armstrong. So being an orphan is never easy, but can lead to great things!