Flip the Axis
I was working on a business plan with one of my fellow brand managers, and we had been going back and forth over the week with our VP about part of the plan. We finally had a quick meeting to discuss—it was me, the other BM, our director and the VP. As we’re talking through it, the VP explains what she’d like to see. After a few minutes, the other manager and I look at each other and realize what she wants, and that it’s really quite simple. So we tell her that we’ve got it, and the VP runs off to her next thing. Our director looks at us and says, “You understand what she’s asking?” We explain that what we’re going to do, and his response is, “But this is the same thing. It’s just flipping the axis!” Our response: Exactly.
Most marketers, particularly at large companies, will tell you that that spend about as much time worrying about managing their internal stakeholders as they do about their consumers. It’s funny, then, that we sometimes forget that these internal stakeholders can have the same nuances, biases, or idiosyncrasies that our consumers have. Our VP couldn’t internalize the business story because she couldn’t assess the data the way we were showing it. Regardless of the fact that the information itself was the same, it wasn’t until we flipped the axis that she could get comfortable with it. As the storytellers, we have to say things in a way that a person is able to hear us.
When it’s an external audience, we rarely get the luxury of them telling us directly that our brand story just doesn’t make any sense. Instead, it’s a lost sale that we never get to learn more about. It’s critical to have metrics established so that you clearly know what content is working and what’s not along the consumer journey. If you find pieces that aren’t working, do you know why they’re not working so that you know how to improve them? The reason why something is working or not is the most important part—we don’t want to do analysis to find out that execution A is worse than B if we can’t ever understand why. Otherwise, we’d just run more of execution B but never know how to improve it to get to version C.
Learn from what your customers are telling you, whether it’s through calls to customer relations or certain ads being more effective than others. Especially if it’s as simple as flipping the axis, it’s well worth your time to ensure that your audience hears the story that you’re trying to tell them.