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Award Winning Disaster

Written by: Steve Chittenden

Article Overview: Even large corporations can make marketing blunders in their pursuit of excellence. The example and principles here can help you gain a realistic perspective. There is a lesson here we can all learn from. You should not have your desire for growth and good marketing used against you.

Award Winning Disaster

Anyone interested in success has either discovered, or will discover, that excellence is a requirement for winning. Success is a reward for excellence. Without proper balance though, the desire for excellence can bring disaster.

With the competitive nature of business, companies of all sizes can have their quest for excellence used against them. As someone on the inside of the marketing trade, all too often I see the exploitation of clients rather than true marketing.

Every business needs to make a good marketing presentation if they want to win in the market. Appearance is extremely important, but it is also easy to put too much emphasis on it. Creative graphics people naturally love to unleash their design skill and do impressive things with your appearance. This is great as long as your objectives are being met.

Exploitation takes place when artists create things to impress their design industry peers rather than meet the real needs of their clients. The irony is, clients are often wooed too because they are understandably impressed, but their attention can be diverted away from other important considerations. If making everyone feel like a peacock showing off its plumage is the only goal, then the objectives can be met by putting on a good show. If the goal is real excellence, then this is actually exploitation.

Let me illustrate with a real example I witnessed several years ago.

A large company had created a fairly high-end product. When the packaging for this product was designed, they received enviable attention for themselves, and the package designer, because they were awarded a prestigious packaging design award. It was truly an impressive thing of beauty.

This product was a liquid, so a glass bottle was designed. Since the designer needed to do something exciting to achieve the desired results, it was designed with a custom, sculptured shape. It was also decided that a frosted glass would be used, and labeling would be printed on so it would not have the cheaper appearance of a decal label. It seemed that excellence had been achieved.

You have probably guessed by now that things did not turn out well. The custom shape was complicated to produce, with a high volume of bottles not meeting quality standards. The frosted glass was subject to getting easily scuffed during production and handling. The printing was difficult, and also scrapped a large number of bottles; and the printing was done after sorting the low percentage of bottles that were even good enough to print on.

To make matters worse, the sculptured design had a small base which was off center, and used fancy math in its design to defy the normal rules of gravity. This caused production lines to shut down frequently, and a lot of spills to occur as the bottles were easily tipped over on the moving conveyors. I can only imagine how many times consumers must have accidently tipped these bottles over and spilled the expensive contents, or even had glass broken all over the floor.

Obviously, you would not want to have a situation even remotely similar to this. I use this example because it really happened, and because it provides a valuable lesson for anyone in business. I hope you will view marketing as an important part of your success without failing to look at how it affects other parts of your business.

Your business goals are not to fund an artist who needs something impressive in their portfolio. If you can meet your objectives, and get an award in the process, that would be a nice bonus, especially when free publicity and bragging rights come with it. Only when design is kept in its proper perspective can you avoid being exploited, and maybe even avoid becoming the victim of an award winning disaster.

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