Good morning: The sweet smell of … failure?

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Good morning, Marketers, may the wind blow your troubles away.

When Jim Stengel was CMO of Procter & Gamble he would visit all the marketing departments once a year (there were and are a lot of them). Top of the agenda was discussing failures – his own first. He wanted everyone to know that it’s ok to mess up. That’s because, as our own Jim Pace points out today, you can’t learn any other way.

Technology has made it less expensive than ever to do marketing experiments. Experiments that always succeed only confirm what you already know. It’s the ones that fail that matter. They can change your assumptions, show design flaws and make you realize you weren’t using the right data. Failure. You can’t succeed without it.

Constantine von Hoffman,
Managing Editor