Before that, Paul was with PokerStars, the world’s largest online poker brand, as Creative Director for their Full Tilt brand. He was responsible for repositioning and relaunching the brand as part of their brand portfolio, targeting new mobile audiences.
Prior to this Paul worked for Telefonica, in various roles. He was Brand Director in their Digital Unit in London, focusing on launching youth brands in Ireland and Latin America. He was Head of Brand for O2 in Ireland during the brand’s most successful period, becoming market leader of postpaid segments, with 35% market share.
Preface
I was in a client-agency meeting several months ago where I was referred to as the ‘numbers guy’. While somewhat amusing, it was a little worrying. I’m not the numbers guy. I was the only marketer in my MBA class, where colleagues called me the ‘colouring-in guy’.
As long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with how brands and marketing communications work. Measurement is not really what excites me. Doing better work excites me. And if I really wanted to get better at this marketing gig, I needed to understand this effectiveness stuff. As it turns out, the numbers are the easy bit. Persuading people to believe them is far harder.
I’m not the same marketer I was 15, or even ten, years ago. There are things I believed then that I do not now. And things I believe now that I too quickly dismissed back then. Truth be told, I’m far less certain in my decisions, less sure about what works, and far happier to be this way.
I wrote this book for client-side marketers. Folks like me. The goal is to offer up some humble views that may help your own decision-making. The decisions we face year in, year out. I write here about brand positioning, about acquiring new customers and about keeping them. I dip into the complexity of advertising decisions. Making ads. Getting ads approved. There is arguably a very fine line between bravery and unnecessary risk. I dig into the evidence of what works, and try to answer honestly why, at times, I ignored it.
This is not a book of answers. Mostly because, more often than not, the best answer is ‘it depends’. That said, I do believe that some bets are better than others. I’ve placed my fair share of wrong bets and reflect on them here. I’ve tried to write a book that I believe would have helped me 15 years ago. I’d like to believe that I would have made fewer mistakes if I had. Who knows. While writing this, I interviewed and quizzed about 40 marketers, many of whom are global experts and authorities. These interactions forced me to go back and challenge some of the beliefs I held as gospel. It was genuinely painful at times.
The chapters are only a few pages each. “Keep them short” was the advice I received from the talented marketer, and my close friend, Conor Byrne. “And none of your usual meandering shite” he added. I do have a structure and loose narrative throughout the book, and some chapters start when the previous one finished. But you don’t need to rigidly follow this. You may not even notice it.
A final note. Many of my stories involve advertising. The simple reason for this is that much of my experience, my mistakes and learnings included advertising or communications of some sort. But marketing and advertising are not the same. I would hate for this book to add to this misunderstanding. Advertising is just one piece of this. And a far smaller piece perhaps, than I once believed. Even if advertising is not part of your marketing world, I’m hoping you see this as a specialist book that offers up nuggets of general wisdom.
1
I didn’t wear a seat belt
I spent seven months working on a new, global, multi-million-euro marketing campaign. Too long – I know. It was full on. A passionate, smart, hard-working team sweated the details to create something of which we could be proud.
Internally, there was a strong reaction to the campaign. Many loved it. Some didn’t. I’d have preferred it if everybody loved it, but could live with polarised views. Beats indifference, I told myself.
After the normal last-minute panics, edits and challenges, we launched. We saw an initial uptick in our metrics in the first week. Then a small gradual decline, after which it levelled out – back to where we had started.
And I had predicted great things. Stupid. Stupid.
So, did I fail? Yes, of course. It still pains me to say it, but it was a failure. My failure. The temptation is to skirt around failure. Call it something else. Talk about unforeseen competitor activity. Or simply move the goalposts – easy to do in marketing.
But the fact was that I had predicted we’d hit certain goals within a time frame and this hadn’t happened.
Was it a bad decision? Or just a poor outcome? I’ve subsequently learned that it is better to evaluate decisions based on the actual decision-making process you use – not the outcome. A decision to drive a car without a seat belt is a bad one. Just because you didn’t crash this time, doesn’t change this. It is possible to make a good decision and the outcome still not go your way. One way to think about this is to ask if, given the opportunity to make this decision again, would I? With this campaign, I would not. It was a bad decision.
While I am not 100% certain, I believe I made a tactical marketing error. A rookie error. But I wasn’t a rookie. Nor were the people working with me. I’ll get to this specific marketing mistake later. I’ve a full chapter on it. But the more interesting question is: how did I make it?
Professor James Reason writes about human error. He distinguishes between slips, violations and mistakes.1 Slips are execution errors. You did something by accident. Violations are when someone deliberately does the wrong thing. Such as fraud.
And then there are mistakes. Mistakes sound innocuous. But they are dangerous – because they’re difficult to spot. Mistakes are things you do on purpose but which end with unintended consequences. Your mental model of the world was wrong. The problem is, we often don’t know we’ve made them. So we don’t improve next time.
That is what happened to me: my mental model was wrong. Several years earlier, I launched a campaign that was very successful. Don’t worry, you’ll hear all about it. This success partly shaped my views about advertising. Because the results were so good, I assumed that the decisions I made were good ones. Some were. But others were not. I had missed the other possible reasons that might have contributed to this success. I was guilty of what is known as a narrative fallacy.2 This is where we use flawed stories of the past to shape our views of the world and our expectations for the future.
My success led to a later failure. I didn’t wear a seat belt all those years ago. And because I didn’t crash, I stopped wearing one.
Then I crashed.
2
We are hedgehogs
This is a book about decision-making. Specifically marketing decisions. I’ve spent 20 years in marketing. Every year I discover new things that make me seriously question the beliefs I’ve held and the decisions I’ve made along the way. It’s pretty humbling.
I’ve been lucky, though. I’ve been tasked to manage some truly wonderful brands. To create new ones. To take a stab at troubled ones. I was even given the opportunity to build a marketing lab – to create hundreds of experiments. To test theories. And I got up-and-close with some of the world’s finest marketers, incredible people who challenged and changed how I think.
I’ve had some successes and failures. While I’ve enjoyed the pleasure the successes brought, the failures are more interesting. To be absolutely clear on this – I’d rather not fail. Nobody wants to. I don’t care what they say. But we do fail. More than we admit. Often more than we even know.
I’m convinced that our failures teach us more about our own decision-making than our successes do… if we let them.
If I were pushed to offer just one way to improve decision-making, it would be this: focus on how you react to