Friday, September 02, 2011

The Don Quixote in the Marketing Department

While reading Don Quixote, an interesting thought crossed my mind while on the chapter where the character prepares to go on his mission. The knight had made a helmet and tested it with his lance. The helmet broke on the first contact. Thereafter, I quote from the book --

"He did not like its being broke with so much ease, and therefore to secure it from the like accident, he made it anew, and fenced it with thin plates of iron, which he fixed in the inside of it so artificially, that at last he had reason to be satisfied with the solidity of the work and so, without any experiment, he resolved it should pass to all intents and purposes for a full and sufficient helmet."

In case you have not noticed, that is one single sentence. I caught myself chuckling when I was reading the text matter. Not from the confidence of the knight in the book but from remembering some of my discussions with marketing people. At one such discussion with a CMO, I was presenting a plan to execute the campaign. The initial phase was to test the campaign offer in a pilot. The CMO was aghast at this suggestion. He said that they know their customer and he knows what they want and the offer is the best that could happen to his customers. He wanted us to guarantee a minimum uptake on the offer. Since there was no history of similar offers neither was there any results of any testing on the offer, I refused to guarantee unless he agrees to do a pilot campaign. The CMO refused and I did not pick up the assignment. Needless to say, the CMO did not last long in the company.

At another assignment that I was involved for a promotion campaign, the client had designed a "intersting" campaign for his customers. On discussing, I found out that the campaign was "interesting" because people who heard about it found it interesting. These people were apparently collegues from other departments. I did a quick dip-stick and found that no one from my project team are the customers of the client. That is, no body bought their products. Now, when I discussed the promotion with my team members, they sure found it interesting. Then, I made one of them call up the office boy who was manning the reception desk to explain the promotion. The office boy was confused and wondered if he had intercepted a key message from the extra-terrestrials (okay I am over doing this last part). I asked the office boy if he bought the products of the client. He said yes and he did not seem too keen on the promotion. When I took this finding to the client, they just blew into my face. I asked them to repeat the exercise with the security guard. But the client refused to go ahead with the experiment and moved on to other activity in the execution plan. It would not be a surprise that the promotion did not perform as per expectation.

These two scenarios reflected the Don Quixote mindset in the real world. Sometimes we are so confident on what we believe will work with the customer that we just refuse to do any test marketing. It is a surprise that when one launches a new product, there is a whole lot of science applied to the pilot launch. But when it comes to campaigns, everyone just believes the campaign offer is the best idea and wants to execute it immediately. Is it because a new product has hundreds of crores of rupees spent on it whereas a campaign would relatively cost only a couple of crores of rupees? But if one clubs all the campaign costs as well as the costs of opportunities lost when a customer signs for do-not-disturb or moves to the competitor, the combined cost will eventually overrun the development cost.

At one telco, we were discussing with the campaign manager on his campaign activities. This person had recently run a "successful" campaign selling 100 Rupee voucher to people who recharge with 50 Rupee voucher. For this, he was giving 15 Rupee talk time free. His definition of success was he sold 30 Crore Rupee worth of recharge vouchers. When asked how does he know that the same customers would have anyhow bought the 100 Rupee voucher or more without any offer and he would have perhaps sold 38 crore Rupee worth of recharges, he was stumped. We persisted, highlighting that he has given off atleast 30% of the revenue in free talk time which further increased the cost of the offer. We told him, he should have test/control the offer before launching it. He was so angry with us and refused to meet us for the next two months. The communication restarted when he ran into some problem on new campaigns and wanted help. So he called us back for a discussion. Well, the prodigal son deserves a feast... so we went to meet him.

So many Don Quixotes in real life. This reminds me of a recent post on a social platform. The post was from a "vegetarian" guy who was angry because his grocery store sent him offers on non-vegetarian fare. He was upset that the store did not bother to check that he has NEVER bought a non-vegetarian item from the store ever.
 
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