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Contrary to popular belief, every business (even the ones you admire the most) has failures.
Things that don’t go as planned,
Ads that don’t land well (most recently: Apple, Bumble),
And products that don’t sell as quickly as they wanted.
It’s all part of the learning process. When you hit a roadblock like this, the difference between long-term success and failure is your willingness to:
a) figure out what didn’t work, and
b) pivot from there.
Here are a couple of strategies to help you troubleshoot how to fix things, before giving up entirely.
Sometimes you need to refine the product or the product offering
If there’s one thing I could tell you, it’s that it’s not only okay to evolve, it’s essential to evolve.
Times and technologies may have changed but the ‘adapt or die’ principle remains the same. If your product isn’t selling as well as you thought it would watch, listen, and take note of how (potential) customers are responding to it. Then make appropriate tweaks. Even the Instagram team had to do this.
The app, originally called Burbn, was a way for people to check in and track different places they visited socially. However, in the earliest stages, their founders observed that users were more interested in the app’s filters when editing the photos they took.
So instead of sticking to the original plan, they leaned into that. And so, the Burbn evolved into the photo-sharing app that we all know (and perhaps have a love-hate relationship with today).
Other times, you need to invest in doing something different
No doll in the history of dolls could ever rival the mighty Barbie… until Bratz came along and stole her thunder. Bratz’s parent company, MGA Entertainment, a $9billion+ company that’s 100% privately held did just that. But at first, when their products were placed at the very bottom of the shelf in Target, Sasha, Jade, Chloe, and Yasmin (the 4 original Brat’z dolls) didn’t sell.
This forced MGA founder Isaac Larian to rethink his marketing strategy and turn to Nickelodeon. Knowing that the only way to push the product would be via TV Ads, his goal was to focus on a live-action advert with a modern, custom soundtrack to stand out against all the other cookie-cutter children’s ads that played back-to-back on the channel. Listen to the full story at 54:50.
It was a risk.
It could have bombed but it didn’t, it worked.
People always ask me if the clients we work with at SBM are industry-specific and the answer is 'no' because lessons can be learned from EVERY industry. So many companies are concerned with what their competitors are doing, and that’s how you end up following the crowd and never innovating. When your research spans across industries, the scope for innovative ideas increases 100-fold. We call it the Polymath approach at SBM, and it always always proves worthwhile.
And ultimately, it just might need time
For example, did you know that Hermes’ famous Birkin bag didn’t immediately fly off the shelves after celebrity Jane Birkin was photographed wearing the bag? It took five years for the Birkin to really start taking off.
If the family-owned company had abandoned it immediately, we wouldn’t have one of the most sought-after, leather goods items that consistently rivals the stock market in terms of retaining long-term value, and Hermes wouldn’t be the business behemoth it is today.
I know what you’re thinking: “not all of us can afford to have low sales for 5 years straight”. True. However, this was far from the only product Hermes was selling. They had multiple other products that were sustaining the brand during this time. The key is being able to master your product mix (i.e. understanding which products keep the lights on and create a financial runway for the slower products, which products are more profitable vs. Others, which products drive hype vs. Others etc.)
It might sound like we’re getting into business strategy, and you may have thought that “marketing” was purely about what gets posted on social media. However, if you’ve been reading these emails or watching my breakdowns for the last few months, you’ll know that Marketing Strategy is so much more than that.
It goes beyond ‘posting something cool’.
It takes your entire business into consideration. Because without customers, there’d be no business anyway, so any marketer worth her while will take all of the above and more into consideration.
So, in light of this: how’s your business holding up?
Where do you need to give yourself more grace, refine your product features, or rethink your product mix?
Think through these questions this week.
