Thursday, December 29, 2011

Marketers beware of “Perfection Paralysis”


If you ever found yourself in a situation where while putting together a massive integrated marketing communications campaign with all the bells and whistles, and after having researched for weeks and weeks with a mountain of data… you still got nothing, you are suffering from perfection paralysis.

For those lucky to be in marketing, we are inundated with “stuff” on a daily basis: budgets, projections, sales quotas, demographic data, messages, trends, laws, creative direction, production time, conceptualization, logistics, analytics, among many other variables…our mission [often impossible] is putting all of these things together in a comprehensive strategic model, fast.

If you are anything like me, we are often focused on making sure all of it is “perfect”, zero margin of error, and working like clockwork. 9 out of 10 times this won’t happen, and how you react to this fact as the marketing expert for your company is what makes a difference.

Understanding that “perfect” is not efficient, and just plain “good” is a far more practical and strategic route is the key. More to the point, market trends change and evolve faster than you can strategize, so it is better to set in place a “good” campaign to yield results with the ability to tweak it as you go, than not to have anything at all because you are still stuck formulating the “perfect” way to go. 

Fernando

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