And this famous Nike and Michael Jordan commercial is an unmistakable reminder of that.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=eEaDbFWR8DQ
In fact, at Tribu we are convinced that, in a healthy relationship with our clients, we need ample room for failure. When the client celebrates that they approve of everything presented to them, they may be missing an important point: a healthy dose of rejection, controversy, or lip-smacking approvals and butterflies in the stomach is key .
When a creative team celebrates that everything was approved by the client, without intending to, they may also be celebrating that they didn’t take enough risks or develop an initiative that sought to push the envelope. Client approval does not necessarily mean success in our management, and this is important to emphasize. Often, it rather means defeat, and although this is contradictory and definitely paradoxical, it does happen. It is a vital dynamic that must be understood.
When the client is frustrated by a proposal outside the range of his or her “approvable” ones, and does not accept it as desirable, he or she pressures his or her creative team to bring him or her only what he or she asks for. Conversely, if you make room for innovative and daring proposals, you accept flaws, mistakes, rejections and failures as desirable to achieve success.
“I have failed over and over again in my life. This is why I am successful,” Jordan says after recalling some statistics that prove his massive failure as inevitable to obtain the success we all remember from his spectacular career.
Equally important is to emphasize that no idea is bad, and that if client and agency accept it, in all proposals they will be able to find ground to make ideas grow, to evolve, mutate and enrich them. Rejecting a campaign or a proposal, generally, is to send to the drawer ideas that could simply require more time, opportunity, polishing or evolution.
Likewise, it is extremely important to reiterate that, very often, the idea exceeds the strategy or the brief. I like to call “circular thinking” the thinking that admits that in such a situation, we go back to rewrite the strategic fundamentals, to modify them according to the idea. The creative process is not and will not be a product of the sequential, orderly, structured and systematic, so we have to open avenues to this type of failure as well, the one that forces a strategy to have to be written a second, third and even fourth time.
Our customers, as we have mentioned in another article called “The customer is not always right” published in this blog, have the most important power: that of approval or rejection. It also, however, has the power of inspiration, the speed of trust and the power to bring about innovation and creative ideas, which are undoubtedly a shortcut to the desired branding , the search in the direction of Lovemark and the targeted results .
It is important to mention that, in all that concerns us, possibly no other area requires more transformation than research. Conventional models have brought us data and not pulses, they have filled us with reasons and little explored the most intimate emotions, they have relied too much on statistics and little have scrutinized the motivational. The most common models have led us to wrong assumptions, and this type of error can easily lead to costly and often irreparable mistakes. This topic, however, should be the subject of another article for discussion.
In any case, and to conclude, the road to a creative transformation in Costa Rica will require a stellar role in the sphere of clients and advertisers, so today we send a clear message to all: The key to success is massive failure.
(Article originally published on December 4, 2006)
