Saturday, January 1, 2011

The Value of Failure (aka Prototyping)

Two months ago, I wrote that Marketing is the Art of Managing Failure. I.e. that trying, and failing, is basically what we Marketing folks do for a living.

Then, I saw this video about the "marshmallow challenge."

I'm sure you can put two and two together.

And when you put pressure on your marketing folks (read: up the ante), you are likely going to ensure their failure and, worse still, put more emphasis on the output than on the learning.

If they succeed, great. But, based on the results of the marshmallow challenge, we can see that success lies not in getting it right the first few times, but in learning how to get it right by "prototyping" (read: failing.)

In shorter words:
1) Watch the video.
2) Allow your marketers to take calculated risks.
3) Expect (and require) them to track the results for future attempts.

The only real failure is failing to learn from failure.

No comments:

Post a Comment