Today's Marketing Cookie - Desire to Improve

Today's fortune came from Yue Niu of Brookline, MA. Yue is originally from Beijing and attended Beijing Forestry University before attending Emerson College in Boston, MA. She joined CommCreative two years ago as our Search Engine Marketing Specialist and is the nicest, smartest, hardest working person I know. We're lucky to have Yue on our team and I am thrilled to dedicate today's cookie to her. You should follow Yue on Twitter:  @Yue_Niu_GMCA

Today's Marketing Cookie is about the courage it takes to improve.

I often hear people talk about the "desire to change"... especially in an election year. People want to change their look, change their lifestyle, change their habits, or change their job. They are unhappy with how much they weigh, how much they drink, or how much they watch TV.  They don't like how little they earn, how little time they have with family, or how little they laugh. All of these situations, and many more, can cause a person to desire a change.  In some cases, the change they desire is very dramatic.

Today's fortune doesn't talk about the desire for change. No. In fact, it is speaking of the desire for improvement.

While the desire for improvement, could still result in a change, I think of improvement as optimization, enhancement or refinement. In my mind, change requires a wholesale departure from the present course, and redeployment in a new direction. More simply, improvement is making something better, while change is making something different.

In marketing, you'll need to practice both change and improvement, but almost never at the same time. 

Once you've set your marketing goals, objectives and plans, you should stay the course. Don't be tempted to pan for gold, chasing every shiny new thing that comes along. Stick with your plan and seek to optimize it. It may take longer than you expected for the results you want. You will have to exercise patience and courage to feed, nurture and improve a stalled campaign - rather then kill it and start over. The only time you must kill a campaign, is if it has already died, or if it is threatening to kill you.

Change on the other hand, takes courage too.  Oh sure, it is easy to throw a bad or nearly dead campaign in the round file. No. I'm talking about killing a campaign that has been working. We've had clients in the past where we developed a breakthrough campaign that knocked the socks off of the competition, and provided double digit response. However, the competition will notice the dip in their sales and some attrition in their customer retention as our client's awesome campaign has cleaned their clocks. The competitor will eventually answer back with a competitive "me too" campaign that looks a lot like ours.

Although we were still beating them by a landslide, there were two of us now on the same path, making similar claims. This is the moment when we must change our killer campaign, stake a claim in unchartered waters and go in a new direction. This move keeps your company relevant and one step ahead of the competition. It takes a lot of courage to break something that is not broken. We don't make such changes because we desire change. No. As the fortune says, we make changes because we desire improvement.