Snatching Defeat From the Jaws Of Victory

I've had the privilege of working in several very large global marketing organizations and one thing never ceases to amaze me, people's ability to scuttle successes with criticism. When you are working in an organization that deals with tens, or even hundreds of country marketing organizations, one of the hardest things to do is get them all delivering a consistent look, feel and message. My experience is that most of the time they want to comply, but are afraid that if they share their attempt with HQ, they are going to get criticized for what's wrong with their execution and not applauded for what's right.

I am always amazed by the myopic way that HQ staff often see work from the field. Their first instinct is to criticize, often in the harshest terms, the work that they receive. Usually nit-picking the work to death without giving any credit to the office for the effort they put in.

When I was at Coca-Cola I had a really great boss, but it seemed like all of the country offices were scared shitless of sending anything to her. In many cases she would read them the riot act for even the slightest indiscretion and reject their design outright. The only problem was that she often did not provide feedback on how to correct the error. Now, I know we were dealing with what at the time was considered to be the most valuable brand (financially speaking) in the world, but as is the case in most global companies, many of the Coke local offices were small and had only limited marketing staffs and budgets. I think my boss' belief was that every office had the same capabilities large or small.

One of my first jobs at Coke was to review and "reject" any packaging designs that did not comply with corporate standards. Essentially I was the logo police. I had no problem doing this, only when I found a problem with a design (and there were many from the smaller markets in particular) I would send a fairly detailed note about how to correct the errors. In fairly short order we started to see a couple of things happen. One was that the submissions from countries were considerably closer to the outlined standards and second I started getting regular calls from a number of countries early in their design process asking if they could do this or that on a promotional package.

Simply by taking the time to help these countries and let them know that what they were creating was not completely wrong they started to do more things right.

If you are in a marketing organization where standards are not always followed, ask yourself how you respond when there is a problem. Do you simply reject it and send it back to your field office or agency? Or do you work with them to refine what they have already started in order to help them understand how to get it right the first time next time?