The Benefits of Failure
Nobody succeeds all the time. Everybody fails some of the time.
Good marketers succeed more than they fail … but when they fail, they still are winners. Why? Because good marketers leave their ego at the door and look at failure as an opportunity to learn and thus improve.
What can you learn from failure? You can learn what you did or didn’t do properly to earn your prospects trust. You can learn why a campaign failed to generate the response you anticipated. You can learn about your own strengths and weaknesses. You can learn how to continue your testing cycle and the evolution of “marketing smarter.”
But too many marketers fail in another way. They are unable to accept failure as a fact of life and, instead, try to rationalize away mistakes, misunderstandings, and ill-conceived ideas. It’s called denial, and it’s the only thing that stands between you and improving yourself and your company after a failure of any sort. Play the denial game long enough, and your rationalizations begin to sound true to you.
If you think you’ve never failed, don’t pat yourself on the back, because it likely means you’ve never had the courage to step outside of your comfort zone. You’ve played it safe, and you’ve never grown; or never hit the proverbial marketing grand slam. The important thing is to step back and evaluate what you did … and if you truly made a mistake, don’t repeat it later on. Rather, use it as ammunition to make your next campaign that much more successful.
Roy Williams, a very smart man who publishes TheMondayMorningMemo online, says “The mind is full of clever ideas. But few of them will actually work.”
If your advertising or PR campaign sags instead of surges, find out why. You’ll be all the better for it.
The less you embrace denial, the more you’ll achieve success!
Happy measurable, direct marketing to you!
August 29th, 2010 at 7:36 pm
There’s a great broad article on failure in this month’s Harvard Business Review:)
E
August 31st, 2010 at 4:49 pm
Thanks Erik. “Great minds” think alike. :)