All Apologies!

There’s a lot of talk about embracing failure these days. Mostly, I think this is healthy. In my last role at Taylors of Harrogate, I moved from marketing to focussing specifically on innovation and diversification, and one of the biggest shifts we needed to make was from a culture of perfectionism to one of experimentation. That wasn’t easy when the former was what had made us successful.

The argument for embracing mistakes in your own decisions and behaviour is harder still. Developing a prototype that flops is something you can quickly recover from, and focussing on how to use the learnings is a great way to move on. That can be tougher to do when it’s something you did wrong.

I have found, though, that being open about these things can be pretty transformative. It’s becoming more common in the many marketing WhatsApp communities I’m part of (quite a lot of those now aren’t there!) and there’s a definite collective strength that comes from being open with peers. I also found it can help establish a more open, psychologically safer culture within teams when the person with positional power is comfortable admitting when they messed up. 

Broadcasting my errors to such a wide audience is a step up from that, but such is my love for the MAD//Fest team, I found myself saying yes to sharing three of my best/worst examples. Here goes nothing:

1

Back in the days when X was Twitter and still a big platform for Yorkshire Tea, I was no longer managing our social content directly but still had access. Unfortunately, so did my other apps, unbeknown to me. This was also back in the days before Strava, when Nike+ was an interesting novelty. For my sins, I was briefly one of those people who saw nothing wrong with sharing my latest run time with strangers. 

One day, after a long and very muddy winter run following a big night out, (it might even have been New Year’s Day), I smugly posted my time and the words, ‘Not bad, considering how hungover I am,’ then jumped in the shower. About 20 minutes later I checked my phone to discover rather a lot of missed calls from my team. Yes, you guessed it, I had posted this from the Yorkshire Tea account. Thankfully, the comments were overwhelmingly positive and quite funny. (I’d love to say I learned from this and the robust systems we put in place meant this never happened again, but that would be a lie. About six months later my five year old son was playing Tin Can Knockdown on my iPad and managed to share his score with the whole Yorkshire Tea community!

2

Many years later, I was on a mission to transform the way the Taylors of Harrogate brand was marketed. In the UK, we were best known for coffee, although we made fantastic speciality teas too. Up to this point, we’d managed these two sides of the brand separately but I felt we were missing a trick. I believed that if we combined our efforts, we’d have more firepower, wider reach, and, given that we were almost unique in doing this, I thought it would give us an advantage.

Sadly, this was not one of those times when conviction won out. It turned out that all those sensible objections that these were two quite different categories, and should be treated as such, were right. And even though many of the audience sat in both camps, the psychology behind the two different types of product were too far apart for one overarching message. Perhaps we could have made it work if we were bigger and had been prepared to back this play over a longer time, but that’s not how it went. We eventually parked the tea side of our campaign and focussed on coffee, which was working.

I think the main learning from this, for me, was that I became too attracted to a strategy based on how neat and perfect it would be if only it worked, and I didn’t step back and look at it with enough critical distance and perspective.

3

The whole time I worked on Yorkshire Tea, we had done a pretty robust econometric evaluation of our marketing investment on an annual basis. Each year’s report was similar: your marketing is working, your investment in media is at a good level but could be higher, and here are some small ways to optimise. And each year, the internal response was roughly the same.

Then the pandemic hit, and normal behaviour went out the window. We couldn’t promote, demand was high but completely unpredictable and steady supply was our major challenge. Conducting econometrics during this point seemed crazy so we paused.

In the years that followed, I hesitated to reinstate it – at first because things still felt so unstable, but eventually because we didn’t seem to miss it, and with tight budgets, every penny saved is useful.

This very quickly came back to bite me. Post-pandemic, demand was all over the place, costs were climbing, and marketing investment was under serious scrutiny – all of a sudden, things that felt obvious for years were suddenly in question, and I didn’t have the back up of a really rigorous data analysis to help me win the argument. We got through it, but it was exhausting, and I was frustrated with myself for a long time. Lesson learned, I hope.

So those are my three examples of where I got it wrong, but I need to confess something. The truth is, while those things are all true, I don’t feel particularly brave for opening up about them. I made a mistake, learned from it, and whatever damage was done I repaired and then built on. There’s not really much risk in admitting these things.

If I’m really honest, these aren’t the mistakes that bother me. The ones I dwell on, years later, are the calls I got wrong that impacted other people: recruitment processes I could’ve handled better, moments when I missed how a structural change might impact someone in my team, things I said in the heat of the moment that I should’ve handled differently. 

I hope it’s true to say that I mostly got such things right, and when I got it wrong, I learned, but with the personal stuff, while I might be ready to face my mistakes, but I don’t think I’m quite ready to embrace them. I suspect I’m not alone in this.