Is It Time for a True Goodbye?

This morning we woke up to our first snow in the foothills of the Rockies. Even though it was only a light sprinkling—like powdered sugar on our lawn—it seemed entirely way too soon. We were not ready to say a goodbye to summer. We assumed we had a couple more weeks to enjoy patio dinners, the window boxes in full bloom and the hummingbirds on the feeders. We had to readjust. Later in the day, I read this from Jeffrey McDaniel: "I realize there's something incredibly honest about trees in winter, how they're experts at letting things go." I appreciated this advance lesson about winter ... it helped me set my favorite season aside and anticipate the cozy fires in the woodstove, cross-country skiing and holiday family gatherings. Many of my clients are multichannel retailers who introduce hundreds of new products in a season. Very few of these new rollouts become brand rockstars (as I call their bestsellers); many more end up in the middle of the performance pack and the rest trickle towards the bottom. This is a repeat pattern. I believe there is as much value in the bottom learnings as there are in the top-of-chart learnings. The conversations about the bestsellers are just more fun. As I reflected on a client interaction I had this week, I thought about how helpful it is for organizations to learn from the past and then also to let go. I had facilitated a meeting where we tried to embrace failure not as life-over, but simply as feedback—to have a more positive outlook on the unplanned learning lessons that failure brings a brand. It was a tough sell. These young, smart, good-hearted brand builders were perfectionists. They only ever saw A+ on their report cards. Red Fs would have been scarring. But, here's the thing: Unplanned lessons are the exact opposite of lesson plans ... those neat and tidy curriculum plans teachers try to follow until the students show up and things go awry. We often learn more from things that don't quite go the way we hoped than things that do. If we dare to review our actions. In a BusinessWeek article entitled "Radio Flyer Learns from a Crash," Thomas Schlegel, VP for product development at Radio Flyer shared his thoughts on a product launch that was halted. After months of development and lots of production time and dollars, Schlegel scrapped it. "It didn't live up to Radio Flyer standard," he said. According to the article, "his boss, Robert Pasin, CEO, told Schlegel failure was OK as long as the company learned from it. Pasin now holds a regular breakfast for new employees at which he impresses upon them the idea that failure is inevitable if you want to innovate and valuable if you can learn from it. And after every project ends—whether the project has been shipped or been killed—Radio Flyer is developing what Schlegel describes as an 'autopsy without blame,' in which everyone involved in the development of a product discusses four questions: What went well on the project? What didn't go well on the project? What did we learn? And, what are we going to do next?" Author James Joyce gives us a new perspective on unplanned lessons: "A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery." Bravo to Radio Flyer. They made discoveries and acted on their volitional errors! So, I switched gears in my client meeting and described to these Type A risk-averse professionals how another client actually embraces failures—publicly and light-heartedly. This company even had more than 300,000 customers take a tour of its flops: Ben & Jerry's Flavor Graveyard. It's a real live collection of 31 ice cream mistakes and missteps over the years memorialized for all to see. Ellen Kresky, Creative Director for Ben & Jerry's shares this: "One of my favorite things about Ben & Jerry's is that we're not afraid to acknowledge our shortcomings or failures to consumers. Take our Flavor Graveyard for example. We use it on our website, and you can actually go visit real tombstones at our Waterbury tour. The Flavor Graveyard features limericks to eulogize our flavor bombs. We even sell Flavor Graveyard t shirts. A few years ago we had a contest to bring consumers' favorite flavor back from the dead for a limited time in scoop shops. A lot of us were secretly hoping that a flavor with a low gross margin would win so that consumers would benefit in more ways than one. And our wish came true. For me, this is an example of contrarian brand management. Projects like this help continue to build consumer love and trust, and manage to do that in an un-contrived way that stays true to our roots." I know it used to be a common practice for many multichannelers to take the time to have strategic post-mortem conversations evaluating a season's results by sales channels (retail, on-line and catalog) and by customer segments. Product visual boards would be created and the nuances of what worked and what didn't would be discussed along with promotional strategies and competitive tactics and offerings. In today's attention deficit business culture where every one is chasing the next new thing, I'm afraid these important cross-departmental meetings have morphed into line item reports read individually and acted upon in silos. The subtle underlying threads of what didn't work do not get fully analyzed and the real failure of this short cut practice is that similar mistakes get made again (and possibly again). I am a proponent of serious, slow talk (like the Slow Food, Slow Travel and Slow Christmas movements!) post mortems where true learning and insights can occur. I have both led and participated in these with my clients and they work and are worth it. Stop and think time. Concentrated focus on the previous season's happenings both for your brand and your customers' experience with your brand. Free flow of information. Open agenda. Robust conversations. Potential surprise endings. So, have you dared to slow down and look back with your brand team? Why not take time to better understand and collaboratively converse about your brand faux paus openly and then, and only then, bid them a true goodbye!

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Is It Time for a True Goodbye?

Andrea Syverson

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Andrea Syverson