The F Files

Like Charlie Brown, I've always been fascinated by failure. In general, marketing culture suffers from failurephobia. Not that we should strive for it (in which case, it wouldn't be failure I guess) but we're generally unwilling to even admit its existence, which means that we never learn how to work with it. And we do need to learn to work with it because having lots of little, coherent ideas around a brand (most of which will fail) is a better, more adaptive, more robust, more interesting way to do marketing than staking everything on a single big idea.

But that's an old story. Just by way of introduction to the Failure File, where I stash interesting observations about failure, its nature, benefits, inevitability. One of my favorite entries is this one, from Richard Feynman's 1974 commencement speech at Caltech:

Sometimes I imagine how liberating it would be to attend a Marketing Ineffectiveness Awards where prizes are given for campaigns that tell us something new and useful about what didn’t work.

Comments

[Anjali]

You may be interested to know that some people in India are organising a FailCamp. http://barcamp.org/failcamp

The idea of learning from failure in marketing is something I think about a lot as well....isn't it a pity that people don't want to give up information that makes them look bad for the greater common good!!

[Jeffre Jackson]

Thanks for the tip, Anjali. Following that link, I see there was also a Failcamp Philadelphia this summer and that the original proposal was called Losercamp, which is nice.