What to do when your campaign tanks
I'd be extremely surprised if Jaguar hadn't planned for all this drama. But if they didn't, they might want to read this.
Regardless of whether you’re running marketing at Coca Cola, some random SAAS startup or your local chip shop – you’re typically expected to do the impossible.
Take big bets, but don’t change anything. Go viral, but let seventeen people sign it off. Follow our brand guidelines, but make it social-first. Marketing is hard, it says it on the tin. Sometimes it doesn’t go the way you want.
This week Jaguar released a new brand identity and the internet has had it’s say. For what it’s worth, I don’t really have an opinion on it. Ask me in ten years, which is probably what their CMO is saying as well.
For some reason, they’ve decided this is the right direction for the company. I would be incredibly surprised if the leadership team at Jaguar didn’t expect this kind of response. Unless they’re completely out of touch, which I guess some leadership teams are. Who knows for sure.
We won’t really know for a while if this bet pays off. History is on their side though. Brands that can take big swings like this tell me they’re willing to do whatever it takes to survive and grow. Jaguar have had a slow few years, were they supposed to keep flogging cars to posh, double-barrelled lords in the UK and expect different results? Doing nothing is probably worse.
There’s no doubting they’ll have lost a huge amount of their brand equity, but again, with a fifty year lens you can potentially see that positioning themselves as the coolest electric car brand on the planet is a decent bet to make. Especially now that the other electric car brand has lost some of their own brand equity by virtue of being run by a psychotic snake oil salesman who bought a social media platform because people on their internet weren’t being nice to him.
Anyway, this post isn’t really about Jaguar. It’s about what to do when one of the worst things in the world happens to a marketer - either everyone hates you or whatever you did had no impact at all. Hard to know what’s worst. I’ve done both.
The work starts early
Like any good campaign, it won’t just happen on accident. You can limit the likelihood of a campaign blowing up in the wrong way or tanking completely by making sure that you’re doing it for the right reasons.
What is the one true insight behind your work? What is the clearly defined business goal? Marketing should never be done for marketing’s sake. So if you can’t answer those questions and you’re betting the house on your campaign landing you that promotion then I’d suggest you go back to the beginning. You’ve missed some steps.
Once you’ve got your insight and business goals, it’s important to set expectations. What could you feasibly achieve? Sure, it could go viral or it could go down well without a hiccup, but what is actually most likely to happen? It’s usually never as bad or as good as you think it will be, so once you set your expectations make sure you’re socialising them throughout your business. This part is important, don’t let potential outcomes be a surprised to anyone.
When I would launch campaigns as a product marketer at Wise or Monzo, we’d get on all-team calls and tell the whole company what we were launching and, crucially, what we expected to happen as a result.
You should also be getting into the habit of running pre-mortems (never did like that name, perhaps I can think of something else) to think through all the ways your campaign could go wrong, then taking steps to address them before they happen. When’s the last time you were over-prepared? Doesn’t happen.
The good news, on reflection, is that if I followed my advice above then many of the major fuck ups in my career wouldn’t have happened. So it’s not to say they won’t still happen, but don’t underestimate the importance of the pre-work.
When it all blows up in your face
If you’re in marketing long enough, it’s going to happen. And just so you know, it’s never nice. I’ve had a few moments in my career when campaigns and marketing moments have blown up on me and while you get better at you managing when they happen, you never truly can treat them like any other day.
So first of all, look after yourself. I’ve been harassed on the internet by trolls, named by journalists in the media and had people try and get me fired. When I look back on those moments I was always a bit too hard on myself and so it’s something I want to be more aware of moving forward.
If you’re a marketer taking a creative gamble then I have a huge amount of respect for you and what you’re trying, regardless of the outcome. And you should too.
Anyway, back to when I fucked it.
When I was at Monzo I wrote a blog post about a new product initiative and as part of that announcement we talked about new people coming into the team and the existing team members going to work on other projects. If you work in tech it’s a fairly standard thing. We move engineers, designers and marketers around Yonder all the time.
I was advised by our PR team that writing this article could lead to quite a lot of negative press coverage. At the time we were under the pump, mostly because the media had had its fun with Monzo by then, and were chomping at the bit to chop down the tall poppy they had created.
We made a decision to do it anyway. We were under a lot of pressure to rebuild the product quickly. I’m sure you can see where this is going.
The next morning there were like 20 articles about it. But here’s one with an article screenshot.
The learning here was, obviously, follow the advice of the people who know their job best. It was a difficult, humbling moment for me and something I’m glad to have experienced but for the stress and pain it caused my colleagues. If you’re reading this, please text me back.
So how do you respond?
Importantly, we had to resolve the immediate issue. But the response was mostly in the learning around how to better collaborate with other members of team so we could give ourselves the very best chance of success in future.
When we did eventually re-launch Monzo Plus, we structured the entire launch around the advice and guidance of our PR team. Ironically, the goal of that product launch was, for the first time in my career, silence. We suspected that there was still some meat on the bone for some media to have another kick so a successful launch would be one that landed reasonably well with a neutral tone. We could build from there.
When should you walk it back?
I couldn’t walk back my blog post of death, but I’m sure a couple Jaguar execs around the water cooler today were having this chat.
Again, this should always come back to all the pre-work you’re doing. What is the window of evaluation for your campaign? Some take longer to get going, or to settle in, so making decisions internally after a couple bad tweets should generally be avoided unless someone has said something racist in which case that’s the perfect thing to do. Then fire them.
Setting this expectation before your campaign runs is so important. Good marketers are good communicators, and can tell the story around why a campaign is important to a business’s success.
If you’re rebranding, then a good marketer would already have prepared a business for all the different ways that rebrand could impact them. What do you do if the response is negative? What should you do if the response is indifferent (in a way, another kind of negative)? And what are the milestones by which you’ll take stock of everything and make a decision as to what to do next?
Most people aren’t paying attention to marketing like you think they are
I remember back when I was living in San Francisco, Uber had a new logo every few months. Literally. I remember not finding the app on my phone because it kept changing so often.
I’m sure several people at Uber were fired during this period. That was very much their brand at the time. But apart from the logo changing every six months it didn’t really have much impact on me. I kept using Uber. In going through this wild cycle of rebrands, they proved that actually it’s probably never too late to change things if it isn’t working. It’s ultimately just some pixels on a screen for the most part. If Jaguar really wanted to, they could launch a new brand tomorrow and in a few months we’d all be talking about something else.
When you launch and nothing happens
Not a fun experience for any marketer determined to make an impact, a campaign that falls flat is a dejecting and painful experience but very much part of taking creative and strategic bets. The sooner you can accept this is part of the job the sooner you’ll become a better marketer.
People tell me all the time that they love some of the marketing we do at Yonder. It’s great to hear, I often record them saying it send it directly to my CEO.
Sadly, you can’t have the good without the bad. We’ve also done a bunch of campaigns that fell quite flat and through no fault of anyone involved. It’s just that some campaigns are better than others and a million changing circumstances can have an impact on what you’re trying to do.
We launched a campaign last year called "Battle of The Bill” which was designed to be quite a fun consumer activation around the insight of people paying more at dinner to earn the credit card points. It was pre-planned immaculately, had a strong consumer insight at it’s core and we executed it well. And yet it just didn’t land like some of our campaigns earlier in the year that did. You win some, you lose some.
So how do you respond?
So it’s crickets and you have to work out what to do next.
It’s extremely tempting to try and spend your way out of a hole. Trust me, I’ve tried. And I’ve rarely ever seen it work. No bad idea was ever made good by spending more on it. Now read that sentence again lol.
But you can change direction, try a new approach and probably most crucially of all, you can just stop it early. If you’ve got a big summer campaign in the works with a generous budget to spend over that period and it feels a bit like walking through treacle at the beginning, you can just pack up shop, save your budget, and come back with a better idea or concept later on. You don’t have to spend it.
Good marketers are comfortable admitting when something just isn’t working. And it gets easier when you’ve prepared the business for a variety of outcomes ahead of time. Remember, the pre-work. I’ll keep saying it.
Once the dust settles
A big, honest, humble retro is always the best way to wrap up a project that hasn’t landed link you hoped. And actually, one that has. Retro’s are incredible reflective moments and something all marketers should be doing. It’s where all the learning and growth happens for next time.
If I were Jaguar, I might be reflecting on a few things.
Did we need to roll out all the changes in the way we did? If we just did the logo first, would that have given us license to then slowly introduce other changes over time? (I know that’s not how rebrands work, but how you roll out a campaign should always be under the microscope.)
What if we explained some of our thinking more, took it on the chin? Could we have acknowledge our past more as key part of what got us here? How could we have better connected Jaguar old with Jaguar new?
Did we do enough to prepare the business for this huge once-in-a-100-year change? Could we have been more prepared with a reactionary media plan?
In all likelihood, Jaguar are absolutely buzzing that they’ve become the most famous brand in the world this week. So it’s possible their retro is covered in champagne now they’ve set themselves up for the next stage of their company’s history.
What do I know.