The Adaptive Marketer

How About We Do Some Post-Natal Analysis For A Change?

Posted on 17. May, 2010 by Robert Rose in Content Marketing, Online Marketing

Do a search on Google for the words post-mortem and you’ll most likely get what I got – a first page filled with headlines like “review of small and large post-mortem analysis” and “project post mortem” – all of them discussions of how to conduct analysis of projects after they’re finished.

Do that same search for Post-Natal Analysis – and trust me you’ll get a much different set of results – and none of them have to do with business analysis.

Here’s another Google search to do… Search these two phrases (in quotations).

“Learn From Failures”
and
“Learn From Successes”

The former returns 108,000 results – and the latter 49,000.  Take the plural out of both words and the gap gets wider… 216,000 results for failures and 70,000 for success.

We sometimes do this in Marketing as well right?     We try a particular media or strategy, and when/if it fails we conduct “post-mortem” analysis.   We process it.    We labor over it.   We mea culpa all over it (that sounds mildly dirty when I write it).  We dissect it for all the things where we failed.  And, we do all of this so that we absolutely positively don’t make that same mistake again.  Right?

But how often do we do that when we succeed at something?

Why are we so eager to process our failures – and so reticent to process our victories?

We Learn More.  That’s Not Gloating – It’s Science

There was an article last year published by MIT that concluded that we do, indeed, learn more from our successes than we do our failures.   Their conclusion:

“We have shown that brain cells keep track of whether recent behaviors were successful or not,” Miller said. Furthermore, when a behavior was successful, cells became more finely tuned to what the animal was learning. After a failure, there was little or no change in the brain – nor was there any improvement in behavior.”

Taking out the geek speek – the study basically found that when our brain processes a victory – or is rewarded for a task – our brains process that information much more carefully than when we fail at a task

We Believe Failures Are Habits and Success Is A Fluke

This is a belief that so many of us have – and it is one we need to change.  It’s very easy for us to find our faults when we fail.   It’s easy for us to understand how we might have failed at a particular campaign, or a tactic – to play Monday Morning Quarterback and discuss how we “would have done something differently”.   We believe our “bad habits”, either singularly or collectively got in the way of success.

But when we succeed, and especially when we have a monumental success – we don’t want to appear like we’re overconfident.  We don’t want to pretend like success can become a habit.    We brush it off as “we just got lucky” or it was a “happy accident” of some kind.   Why do we do this?  Well, mainly it’s because if we have a big success we’re deathly afraid that people might expect us to repeat it.

Let’s Do A Post-Natal Analysis

When we do something great – and we birth a new idea or a great new product, or a wonderful new marketing idea – let’s process that.  In fact, let’s look at it the same way we might process a failure.   There’s a wonderful article in Harvard Business Review that discusses how we can “process our mistakes”.   Let’s flip those principles on their head and use them to process a success (at least one).

1. Acknowledge You Had A Success
   No I mean really acknowledge it.  Don’t apologize for the success.  Acknowledge that you and/or your team (especially if it was a team effort) were an instrumental part of the creation of that success.  Just like a failure, the idea is to be focused on the actions you can take to repeat it.  What did you do?  Be as transparent in success as you would in failure.
2. Change Your Ways
   Was it actually fluke?  Probably not.  But is there something you can do now to change your habits and behaviors that will make this success repeatable.  What mistakes did you make along the way to the success that either led or changed the outcome.  What would you do differently?
3. Leverage Your Support Network
   Celebrate the victories – no matter how small.  Your support network is not only there to commiserate and help you through your failures.  They are there to help you process and support your victories.  What can they learn from your victory?
4. Not All Victories Are Created Equally
   Of course not all your successes are worth a weekend trip to Vegas.   Shaving an extra point off the cost of your PPC marketing is much different than producing a physical event that triples the number of qualified deals in the pipeline and brings you the biggest opportunity in your business’ history.  Put your victories into perspective and qualify them.

And Let’s Not Make The Same Mistakes As Our Mistakes

In the HBR article, Paul Shoemaker, the Research Director for the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School is quoted as saying that people tend to overreact to mistakes.  He says people “make asymmetric evaluation of gains and losses so that losses loom much larger than gains.  As a result they may be tempted to hide the mistakes”.

Of course the same risks apply to successes as well.  Let’s not make asymmetric judgements on our successes lest we come off like arrogant jackasses.

But going back to the Google search results for a moment.  Even if we even spend half as much time discovering and processing the many wonderful things we birth, vs dissecting the things that fail and die – how much more fun is our job going to be?

And we’ll learn more about ourselves in the process…..

Photo Credit: by circulating

Tags: Marketing Projects, Post-mortem