There is in old saying in our business that there is nothing like great marketing to kill a bad product. Perhaps this is why I found last week’s Onion story called “Perfectly Marketed TV Show somehow fails” so funny. Here are a couple of quotes from that story:
Kinney added that it was “inconceivable” that a television program
supported by 1.25 million promotional coffee-cup sleeves could
perform so poorly.
Most disappointing to NBC executives was a weeklong interactive
“roadblock” the network purchased on the home page of the popular
social-networking website MySpace. The full-screen pop-up ad
described the series as “Just Shoot Me on a half-caff cappuccino—to
go!” Experts say that, while there have been several documented
cases in the past of television programs underperforming in the face
of brilliant marketing campaigns, a direct cause for the bizarre
phenomenon has not yet been determined.
I call this to your attention because way too many times we agency folk are asked to work with inferior products and blamed when the marketing “doesn’t work.” If you know your product needs fixing, fix it first or risk the consequences. When Gordon Bethune took over Continental, he realized his airlines was broken. Flights were late. Baggage was lost. Customer complaints were endless. To focus his entire organization on the problem, he rallied the company around the simple promise “on time with bags.” He offered every single employee $100 for every quarter in which Continental was among the top 3 in on-time arrivals. Within a few months, the company went from worst to first. The advertising then made the simple promise that Continental would “Work hard. Fly right.” This one-two punch of product improvement and focused messaging helped Continental recover when most had already written them off as dead.
Just this morning at a Likemind gathering I had interesting conversation with a client and a fellow agency-type about if and when an agency can tell their prospective client’s that their “baby is ugly.” All agreed that this message must be delivered but the debate centered around timing. Do you win the business first and then tell them or be honest from the beginning? The reality is that you are damned either way. If you don’t tell them early on, then you will probably be in it too deep too quickly to be honest later on. And if they don’t fix the product/service, then you’re doomed to failure regardless of the brilliance of your marketing. If you do tell them early on, I can assure you that 9 out of 10 times you will not win the business or keep it for long.
We have tried to be honest in two recent pitches and though the client thanked us for our frankness, they frankly chose another agency. In both cases it was a Pyhrric victory for our competitors since within six months both companies had either gone bankrupt or canceled all marketing activity. This was little comfort to us because we actually believed had these clients pursued a different course they could have been successful. In both cases we had proposed addressing their problems head-on by transforming marketing from mere messaging into “marketing as service.” We still have a lot of heart for this approach and fortunately so do a lot of clients.
In the final analysis honesty may be the best policy but it does have its price. Perhaps it is simply an issue of diplomacy. What do you think?