Lessons In Business. #Rockstars
In capital-scarce marketing departments, it’s often easy to play the same campaign over and over each time, typically for the same products, with the same budget, offering the same price discounts, often under the same creative banner, and using the same media channels. We’ve always adhered to a no shoehorning policy which simply means we encourage everyone to challenge the status quo and our client’s problems. At Feeney, we’re asked to do many things from brand, strategy, campaign development, websites, performance campaigns - as a full-service agency the list is long. But I see our job as one of problem-solving over task performing. In short, our role should not focus on marketing output, but around customer outcomes.
Do you really want another email from a cookware brand? Or do you want to create easy, low-mess delicious meals - and is a newsletter campaign going to entice you to do that?
Maybe. Maybe not.
And therein lies the rub between an output versus an outcome. When a marketing team only knows how to launch email campaigns, everything looks like a newsletter-shaped problem. But if a marketer is focused on the consumer outcome, a newsletter might be one of only many, many different solutions considered.
The first scenario is a solution looking for a problem. The second scenario is a problem looking for a solution.
The solution looking for a problem uses people experienced in running email marketing campaigns. Why? Because it fits the process.
Problems and outcomes vary from project to project; client to client; business to business; campaign to campaign. At Feeney, we have amazing minds all contributing to the solution end of the equation, not just the problem. Marketing today is often misunderstood particularly by those who don’t have a depth of knowledge in the discipline.
Generating good ideas, challenging the thinking, encouraging new thought, and having in-depth conversations with clients to discover what the outcome needs to be, leads to more successful solutions and this provides the fuel needed to grow a business. A single great idea can make a meager media spend work like a million dollars; it can change the destiny of a campaign. Conversely, I’ve seen multi-million dollar campaigns deliver very underwhelming results and it generally stems from too many yeses in a room and not enough ‘what if's’.
Which brings me to the rockstar principle - coined from research conducted by McKinsey and Bain it identified a key overriding lesson: you don’t need a lot of stars, you just need to concentrate them in areas where their impact can be unlimited, give them permission to challenge the status quo and - surprise - they don’t always say yes.