For Anjali and other failurephiles, there's a nice piece on the New York Times songwriting blog by Peter Holsapple of the dB's about how one of their best songs, "Love Is For Lovers", ended in commercial failure. I preferred the song "Amplifier" whose demise he describes in passing, but in general, the dB's were one of the bands that me and my high-school friends most wanted to sound like. (The other being Rush, so we were handicapped by our confused aspirations as well as our limited skills.)
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.
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