If you have time, it's worth listening to the Revisionist History podcast. Every episode re-interprets a historic event and finds new evidence or focuses on something previously overlooked.
Now, look at that keyboard on your computer or phone, the one with the QWERTY structure. It's like that because it's not the best structure for fast typing, it's pretty much the least effective option. Because when they designed the original mechanical typewriters, if folks typed too fast, they wold break the machine's mechanism. So they designed the keyboard to SLOW them down. It's simply survived because no one questioned it and eventually, we all became so used to it changing it would be simply too difficult.
History is written by the winners, who always want to put the best spin on why they are there, and create even more success. Or sometimes gloss over the uncomfortable truth about where success came from.
Which is why you should never believe most of the case studies in advertising and marketing. No one really knows if anything is going to be a wild success, it's fair to say that there's some solid performances that do the job but are not the be and end all....and most of these follow some sort of pattern. But then then there is the 95% of campaigns that achieve nothing (which is why tracking studies are so important, even if they have little commercial impact, one can fall back on claimed brand impact). Created by the same organisations sometimes.
Losing the opportunity to learn from failure. Pretending we know what will create incredible success. When we don't really.
Just as most new brands fail, yet all sorts of organisations have tried and tested rules to 'guarantee success'.
Based on the stuff that worked, rather than being honest and learning from what brands failed.
Which flies in the face of how most great leaps forward in any discipline really happen. One step forward, two steps back, failure after failure showing what works by what doesn't work. Dyson wasn't the only one who thought of the bagless vacume cleaner, he was just the only one who stuck with developing prototype after prototype until he found one that worked.
Darwin's theory of evolution was only published when he realised Wallace had the same idea. They both had the same 'insight' because they were building on the success and failure of many, many great minds that came before them.
So next time you want to hire an agency if you're a CMO, ask them what their worst work was and what they learned from it.
Which is a good policy for hiring people come to think of it.
And don't bother with most case studies and certainly don't copy them, as any new formula for success, even if there was such a thing, won't be a formula for long, as everyone will be copying it too.
Or if you wan to flip it, Fox were so sure Star Wars would flop, they let George Lucas have the merchandising rights. We all all know what happened next.
Comments