57 Deadly marketing Mistakes to avoid
These disastrous mistakes are made everyday in marketing. Most managers don't even know they are mistakes.
Advertising without capturing leads: You buy the airtime or adspace - why not maximise ROI and capture sales leads by making an offer and including a response device. It is not uncool to sell stuff.
Not mentioning the name of the product until the end of the TVC: The big reveal. Dramatic. And forgetable. You've got 30 seconds to make people aware of who is paying for the time and what they sell. "Big reveal" commercials have the highest 'wrong attribution' score - ie. they are often recalled as ads for the competition.
Given the number of mistakes marketers make it is amazing anything gets sold at all. Think of this: if half the retail outlets closed tonight and did not re-open, the same amount of goods would be sold tomorrow. If half the competitors is any category were de-listed do you think your job would become easier? No. Because the greatest competitor any marketing company has is itself. Get out of your own way and you'll succeed.
Renting mailing lists: This might be controversial for a direct marketing practitioner to say, but most lists aren't worth the disk space they occupy. Some are. Can you tell the difference? Renting lists is gambling, so stack the odds in your favour by sampling the list for accuracy - try calling a number of people on the list.
Missing sales opportunities via bouncebacks: If you deliver a product or service, the best opportunity for the next sale is the moment of delivery. Do you make a follow-up offer? Remember, the first sale is the door opener.
Failing to focus on the 80:20: If you think all prospects and customers are worth the same amount of effort, it's time to 'get real'. Some are 10 to 100 times more worthy of your investment than others. How do you find them? It's simple. Ask your database for a list of the customers who have spent the most with you, then look at them closely. What characteristics do they share? What separates them from the others? How did they get to you? Can you find more like them?
Letting your brand speak with many tongues: Brand diffusion It's easy to get the logo right and colours, etc... ducks in a row. But what happens when the real brand building starts - pricing policy, public statements by company reps, structure and usability of web sites, customer experience, staff management...Do these things reflect the brand promise?
Poor targeting: Are you still using demographics? Young females, 18 to 24? As a target for your advertising? Knock knock - it's the 21st century - hello! Giving a stupidly crude target like this is asking everyone to imagine the target from their own limited experience, especially ad agency people who think the world is full of people like them and their friends.
Poor IT integration: The silos of your business are separated by jealousy, fear, politics and a chasm called 'IT integration". Yet customers don't see the company as a collection of warring factions and little empires. They think it's one company. And they are bewildered when they can't get seamless service and standardised responses.
Lack of Internet strategy for e-commerce: This is not a nice to have anymore. Consumers expect you to be available 24/7 and more and more they expect to be able to transact online. Why can't I buy a new refrigerator online?
"Success teaches nothing. You can only learn from failure. But don't go out and double your mistake rate. It's safer to learn from other peoples' mistakes."
Failure to test: Marketers who roll out a response campaign without first testing it are so common, the word 'testing' is like ancient Greek in most marketing departments. But it is the only way to predict what response you will get. Predict the future? Yes, it's possible and it's easy. But it requires effort. Serious deficiency here.
Changing the advertising creative too soon: Boring your agency and yourself is the right way to extract maximum value from your ads. The VB campaign is a good example. It takes viewers 10 times as long to get bored with ads as it takes you and the agency (who have a vested interest in new creative.)
Failing to train salespeople: Apart from the basic assumption that your sales people are equipped with the best skillset they can have - would you send a soldier into battle without training? - there is a subtle power training can have. It turns the gypsy salesperson into a brand delivery vehicle. Like your brand, their selling style and messaging should be unique.
Allowing unqualified people to make marketing decisions: By unqualified, I mean CEOs, sale managers, design engineers, and even CFOs. Not that they can't take decisions - they must be made aware of their marketing implications. CEOs forge strategic alliances. Design engineers decide on product specs. CFOs influence budgets. The marketing department is forced to live with these decisions. But it is the customer who pays all their salaries and delivers the shareholder their profits. When is the customer consulted?
Failing to automate salespeople: The productivity issue is reason alone to invest in systems that track clients and their activities with your company. But an even more sinister threat than poor productivity lurks in your sales force. If you allow the sales reps to control the relationship data, they control the account. IE. they can walk away with the account, because the link is their personal presence rather than your institutional connection. Automation can help you monitor the relationship and run CRM applications.
Failing to leverage contributions to charity: Most companies have an unmanaged series of donations and support programs for which they fail to maximise ROI. The causes appreciate it when donors get value for their money because it means they'll continue to give support. There are creative and tasteful ways to 'be seen to be doing good' including partnership programs, staff programs, advertising support, etc. Don't let this money be blindly scattered.
Failing to leverage word of mouth by using brand community techniques: Each brand has a small, dedicated cluster of devotees and advocates who are a powerful advertising force. Engage them in behind-the-scenes activities, advance news of new products, etc., and they will spread the word through their networks. Smart companies foster a 'fan club' approach with activities that celebrate the brand. See Harley-Davidson go.
Needless brand extensions: Simply having a tick in the matrix box is not a good enough reason to launch a brand extension, even if the competition has one. Extensions can erode brand values, erode profitability, drive overheads up, and confuse the market and the channels of distribution. You should have good profit-driven reasons for stretching the brand. Read Trout and Ries on extensions.
Untargeted use of premiums (giving stuff away for the sake of it): Many companies give umbrellas and pens and a gaggle of items away to people willy nilly without a communications plan or objectives. They did it before and they will do it again.... By why? Because we've always done it. Unless there can be a measurable objective attached to it, drop it. Every item of expenditure must earn its place on the marketing calendar.
Poor management of corporate entertainment program: Companies spend squillions entertaining people at sporting and entertainment events. But how often are those seats empty or warmed by a low value bum? The last minute ring around by sales people to fill the stadium seats for important matches is a familiar pre-event event. Map the year with the events you are attending, assign valuable names to those events (based on data you have collected on entertainment preferences for each client contact), and get the invitations out to them in enough time to replace those who cannot accept with clients or equal value. Or simply watch your entertainment budget frittered away for little return.
Self-indulgent sponsorships and corporate entertainment: You know the type: the boss likes golf or marlin fishing, so half a mill goes towards it even though the clients/customers don't give a toss about it. Ask the CFO for advice on how to break it to the CEO. I wonder what the shareholders would say if they knew.
Poor targeting of sponsorship dollars: Sponsorship is a big hole into which marketing budgets can disappear for little return. Sponsorship should be judged like awareness advertising and measured as such. Who are you targeting? It can be used creatively to tie in staff, channels and customers to help achieve objectives against several target audiences.
Confusing "creative" advertising with effective advertising: Ad agencies talk about cut through and impact as if that is the only task a commercial must perform. And the logic is impeccable: if they don't notice the ad, they can get the selling message. But how often does the attention-getting device devour the commercial, win an award and do zip for sales?
Burying the offer: The offer - the deal, the proposition, the reason to take action now - is far more important than the creative in stimulating response. Yet often you find it relegated to the back of the mailing or the tail end of the ad. If you want action and your offer is good, lead with it. Put it in their faces.
Poorly promotes sweepstakes and promotions: Smart contest enterers know which promotions to enter - the ones that are nearly invisible in the marketplace - because they will have a better chance to win with such a low entry rate. If you are going to run a promotion, give it enough air to fly. On pack promotions are often invisible.
No crisis management plan: You'll get one after you needed one. Like security bars on the windows, they are usually installed when the damage has been done. A crisis management plan is essential risk management discipline. Who speaks to the media when something catastrophic like a product tampering or major customer incident happens? Who is on the response team? What does an employee do if they uncover a potential public relations disaster? It's in the plan. But where's the plan?
No proactive PR plan: A big mistake, this one, because you have public relations, whether you manage it or not. The media and observers are spreading stories about you unchecked. You have no power to stop them. All you can do is try to direct the content of those stories towards the positive side. Your most powerful public relations is generated by the actions of your organization everyday in contact with stakeholder groups. A truly ethical, customer-centric company would rarely find itself the subject of bad PR.
No contact management strategy: How much money is wasted because client-facing staff do not collect and make available or do not have at their fingertips the essential data about the individuals they hope to impress? Data is flying past you every moment of the day, especially the soft, personal data a good sales person remembers, like the client's favourite entertainment, family background, etc. Tactfully used, this data can build and seal relationships forever. And gathered and managed through a tidy piece of software, it can empower one representative to have deep relations with a large number of individuals.
Changing marketing personnel too often: Some companies allow corporate memory to walk out the door when they churn their marketing staff for whatever reason. It can take 12 months to learn an organisation's capabilities. What is the average lifetime of a marketing manager these days? 30 months? They leave for opportunistic reasons or because the role is unfulfilling. A good marketing chief has the corporate DNA embedded in their genes and knows where the bodies are buried. Marketing is one role that needs stability. Otherwise your customer facing operations take on the stop-start, knee jerk personality of an organization that is unsure of which way to go.
No metrics in marketing plans: Nothing meaningful can be done in marketing unless it is measured. How can anyone be held accountable for their decisions without metrics? How can ROI be calculated? How can a marketing manager assess the value of an activity and apportion budget? Everything a marketing department does can be measured one way or another. Even dodgy metrics are better than none at all.
No plan (nothing meaningful written): Some organizations believe that simply having a marketing function is enough. But a meaningful written plan is essential - so everyone can know the direction and where the goal posts are. The word 'meaningful' is meaningful in itself. See the next entry.
"Fill in the boxes" marketing plans: Many marketing graduates have learned the headings for a marketing plan by rote, but fail to understand what should go under them. For instance, in a SWAT analysis, you will invariable find under the heading "Opportunities" a list of tactics the organization can adopt. But is a SWOT analysis - Strengths and Weaknesses are attributes of the organisation and Opportunities and Threats are characteristics of the external environment. Opportunities are unfolding events that can be exploited to utilise the organizations Strengths or mitigate its Weaknesses. Most marketing plans do not have any strategic strength. There is no big idea behind them - no leap of intuitive brilliance that pulls all the strands together into an explosive whole. Most are 'colouring by numbers' exercises.
Poor graphic design - is possible to design a piece of communication so that it is impossible to consume. Tiny type faces are favourites of art directors. The baby boomers all need reading glasses and would appreciate bigger type. Type reversed out of black or colours - there is research done in Australia which proves conclusively that reverse type is harder to read. Comprehension tests reveal san serif faces are tiring on the eyes. Headlines should appear about copy because they eye has a habit of following a certain pattern around a page. There is an entire science based on the concept of 'reading gravity' - I defy you to produce a single art director who has heard about it.
Wallpaper advertising - is invisible because it's too bland. Safe advertising, that makes you feel comfortable, won't even be noticed. It will, as David Ogilvy put it, be like a ship passing in the night. Your advertising should make you sweat with fear if it has any chance at all. By the way, being noticed is only its first task. Being consumed and understood and finally acted upon (conveniently forgotten by many agencies) are equally essential.
Me-too offers: If the competition is doing it, we should too. Wrong! When they are zigging you should be zagging. Me-too offerings give the customer the opportunity to price shop you down to the ground. They reveal a lack of imagination. And they are boring for the staff involved. Inspire your people with originality and passion form innovation. You cannot bore people into buying.
Failure to brief frontline staff (or involve them in planning and brainstorming) - Often you can be met with blank stares when you ask serving staff about advertised offers, especially in channels that aren't well managed. Frontline staff are where the rubber meets the road - they are a useful source of ideas and they simply must feel part of the team for implementation. All your investment of time and money goes down the drain if they aren't 100% behind the idea.
Locking your customers out by poor packaging design: How often as a consumer have you had trouble opening a "fast moving packaged good"? Some products are impenetrable without the aid of a sharp object. The type size is so small on the instructions only an ant could read it, and the ant market is limited. Packaging that ignores the average person (forget the baby boomers who have declining dexterity and eye sight) is a bad joke... How often does a failed product owe its demise to inhumane packaging? Some companies in overseas markets will film a family opening their packaging and trying to assemble and use the product, searching for barriers to satisfaction. Wise. How do you lock your customers out?
Failing to court your best customers; chasing new ones instead: You'd think this was a given in these days of CRM but marketing is still a male-dominated profession and the lust for the chase of fresh prey still throbs in the loins of the warriors. It is so much more satisfying to bag a new segment (at huge cost) than to consolidate and grow an existing profitable segment. Of course, the hunter usually doesn't know the profit contribution from existing customers. He is looking for a new one night stand and it's hard to turn a man away from the new to romance the familiar. Women should lead marketing organizations, if only in the interests of their financial health.
Management by committee: Fear of taking a decision (because of a lack of knowledge) is often masked by a committee system. Marketing is like war. It requires generalship. The best generals take advice, then take decisions. The worst take cover behind their colleagues. A committee is the best way to kill a marketing initiative that can bring dramatic gains because it precluded boldness. A committee is as brave as its most fearful member. If you want action that causes dramatic change, appoint a person with courage to lead the marketing team. When some mealy-mouthed sycophant complained to President Lincoln that Ulysses S. Grant drank a bottle of whisky every night, Lincoln asked the complainer what brand of whisky it was. "Why do you want to know?" came the stunned reply. "Because I want to send a case to each of my generals."
Investing time and resources in creative but rushing together offers and lists: This is standard practice. Everyone feels qualified to criticise creative (because they are consumers). But few know anything (or bother to learn) about the other dimensions of a direct marketing proposition (or any marketing for that matter). There are only 3 variables in a marketing campaign: the list or media, the offer or deal, and the creative. Direct marketing testing reveals that the list or media choice is 100% more influential than the offer which in turn is 100% more influential than the creative. Given this, the devotion of time and effort to creative is in inverse proportion to its importance. But it will always be thus. Go figure.
Failing to integrate campaigns: Oh, they say it's integrated. Because they use the same images in the tv commercial in the mail piece, and the slogan is the same in the publicity sheet. But integration is more than that. A truly integrated campaign need not look like it came from the June Dally Watkins School of Deportment for Brands - so long as the spirit of the campaign, the passionate statement of belief that it reflects, is demonstrated at every level. So much "integration" is colouring by numbers by unimaginative, single dimension agencies who hanlker for the days when the tvc was all they needed to make. Media fragmentation is irreversible and human diversity is infinite, so a campaign should express itself in an infinite number of ways. Just as a person does.
Product focus vs customer focus: You don't believe me? This still happens. It is easy to believe in products. They sit there, like a stone, saying "I am your product. Love me or die." Customers come and go and leave no trace. They disguise themselves. And besides that, they're scary. They might say something baaad about our product. And we love our product. How many of you meet customers, spend time with them, listen in on the call centre calls, read the letters that come in. Admit it. None of you do. But how many of you spend your time getting to know and then talking about your product? All of you? Case closed.
Trade show follies 1: This blunder is defined as "Failing to support your trade show investment with PR, mail and ads". Trade show stands cost big bickies and when you add the value of the time your "manning" the stand costs, plus building the stand (see next item) you can see a big bucket of marketing dollars flowing out the door. Do you rely on the show organisers to attract people to your stand? (And enjoy the luxury of bitching after it's over, the dust settling on your feeling of desolation as you pull the stand down...). The Americans are the best in the world at squeezing juice out of a stone when it's pitching products at a show. Their show organisers stage seminars for exhibitors on how to maximise their visitor numbers and manage the stand for ROI. They tell the new exhibitor how to use direct mail to get customers and prospects along. How to get media coverage for your stand and product. And other stuff you'll read about in the next item (below). So many Australians think buying a stand is all you need to do. But it's like buying space in a newspapers - it's what you do with the space that decides your fate.
Trade show follies 2: This one is defined as "Poor usage of trade show investment." And it has two problem areas: the stand itself and the way it is manned. The stand has got to have all the basic elements of a good add: AIDA. Attention - it must have an eye-grabbing/attention trapping device that competes and beats the others. It must also have "Interest" - that is, be related to the product. It must create "Desire" for the product - be manned by competent salespeople. And finally it must get "Action" - the major KPI should not be brochures handed out but orders handed in. This brings us to staffing. Your everyday sales person is not equipped to do it. They chaff at standing around, they are better off out running around - movement and action they thrive on. Stand specialists (you may need to grow and train your own) are intensely interested in the technical details - sometimes it pays to have technical people on the stand. They sell without knowing how - just by enthusing over the product's design and exhibiting in a real sense the intellectual fire power your organization has. This is comforting for a buyer. Then there are the 'standsmanship' issues - no eating, no smoking, no slouching and sitting around looking bored. Smiling all the time. Look inviting. Have an activity related to the product you can do between speaking to prospects. Go for walkabouts and engage prospects away from the stand. Look neat and fresh at all times. (You can help by taking a room at a nearby hotel where stand staff can shower and change during the day, snooze, eat, and stay overnight if needed.)
Parading your ego: This is defined as "No 'What's In It For Me' in communications" and is the easiest blunder to commit. It's hard to get out of your own shoes to walk a mile in someone else's and understand what they want to hear about. (Read Dale Carnegie's book "How To Win Friends And Influence People".) Ads talk all about the company and its products, not users and their problems. Brands are constructed from the company outwards rather than from the consumer inwards. Direct mail is laughably a chance for a company to right love letters to itself. I read some automotive mail this morning from a big name agency - arrogantly dribbled on about how good we are and how good our product is. Criminal waste of money, but I am too old to worry anymore. Clients deserve the crap they get from agencies - it is so easy to sell it to them. To overcome your natural tendency to want to tell people what you want them to hear (the most stupid mistake you can make) and not talk about what they want to hear (the rarest style of communications), I recommend you become and customer and spend time with them undercover. If you can't stop yourself being an ego-maniac, take yourself out of the decisionchain. You're endangering the mission, Luke.
Bugger the brand: Defined as "Failing to conduct a 'brand image impact study' on all major new activities", this failing is death to brands because - despite what ad agencies tell you - brands are built by what companies do to people far more than by what their clever irrelevant self-indulgences they call advertising can possibly do. A new billing system, an irritating service delivery 'enhancement' - such as when ATMs were introduced - anything that makes the experience of the customer less attractive will damage your brand. Don't let the CEO and the operations people screw the brand. Terrorise them, kidnap their children, risk your job for the brand. The shareholders will thank you.
Do something, anything! I urge all marketing people to try to separate the two categories of "action" and "intelligent action". I had a client say they liked a certain supplier because they "made things happen". The things that happened were not always ultimately productive, but the veneer of action served the client's purpose. Marketing is a bit like politics. The appearance of competence is usually enough to get you by.
Conservative planning - It's fine to play safe when you are market leader and you have no competition. But everyone else has to take big risks to make big gains. If your planning is "same same" as last year, with no strategic breakthroughs, someone can eat your lunch. Gillette has adopted the strategy of attacking itself - developing new and better products to attack its own line up so that it can run fast enough ahead of the pack to styay out in front.
Failure to build perceived quality - In the 1980s a research company in the USA called PIMS used actual company performance data to identify the elements of success in marketing. They discovered that companies with the highest perceived quality for their products or services had the highest ROI. Perceived quality is a by-product of product performance and awareness. Companies which advertised and promoted consistently throughout the recession had higher perceived quality - and thus higher profits and afster bounceback when good times returned - than the rest.
Failure to differentiate - How is your proposition different from your competitor's? It's not? Hello... This marketing business is about differentiation - being different - better - more competitive... Most companies emulate their competitor's strategy, advertising in the same places, using the same types of promotional offers. Naturally they work to some degree, but everyone stays at the same mediocre level. Stalemate. Lexus shook the luxury car market with a new offering. How can you differentiate your offering?
Collecting too much data: More money has been wasted in the holy name of getting close to the customer and using database management for more efficient sales than in any other field of marketing (except advertising, where, as you know, 50% is wasted.) The fundamental reason why database projects (lately called CRM, but there;ll be a new buzz term once the sexiness leaches out of CRM) fail is this: there is no clear vision for how it will fit the company's needs. Data is collected on the assumption it will be useful... No data should be collected unless it has a use. Data costs money to collect, costs money to hold, costs money to keep updated.... Data costs. It should be treated with more respect.
Failing to clarify the value proposition of the brand: Too many brands clearly do not have a value proposition. Or it is assumed the customer can see it. As PT Barnum said, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the public. Everything must be spelled out. People do not hang out to decode your marketing messages. They don't give a **** about you. Don't make it hard for them.
Failing to differentiate the brand: Ever wondered why there is usually one big market leader, a mid sized challenger, then a gaggle of rats and mice in most markets? It's because of the lemming factor - most marketing execs play follow the leader with their brands. They don't have the courage - or don't have the ability to instill in their senior management with the courage - to be different. It takes guts to stand out from the crowd. And not in terms of advertising creative - that's a con. Wacky advertising is not courageous. It's stupid. It's acceptable practice. It is what some marketing peole use as a substitute for real differentiation. But actually doing something different to stand out - substantially different - separates the players from the pretenders.
Failure to research media habits and lifestyles of best customers: Your best customers are underwriting your entire operation because they enable you to styay open to service unprofitable customers. So you need lots of new "best customers". Where are they and what are they thinking? The fastest way to get a picture of them is to inspect your best customers and clone them. I have always found media habits define consumers well - content is comment. Build a 3D image of the best customer and drill down into their location via data management services, and you could end up with a list of your soon to be newest 'best customers'.
Failing to make personal contact with journalists: Don't leave this to PR agencies. Contact with journalists is an investment in an important relationship. And the journo wants it rather than a PR flack (apologies to my colleagues in this august profession - but you have flacks among you, n'est ce pas?). Just observe the following rules: 1. Nothing is off the record. Assume every word you say to them can appear on the front page. 2. They want a story. You've got to help them keep their readers happy. 3. Treat them with respect - they may have the instincts and principles of gutter rats (I speak as one of them), but they are powerful and can do you harm.
Failing to explore direct distribution: The direct channel has made some companies unbelievably successful (like Dell, which rose to No. 1 with no retail outlets.) Nearly every company can use some form of direct distribution - but most haven't explored it. It's a different world and you need a guide. But the potential for opening up a new battlefield and being first into it in your industry is a powerful opportunity.
Poor research briefs. Research agencies are plagued by these things, coming from clients who haven't thought through their problem. They know they don't know something, but they don't know what it is. The chances are they won't find it, even after the research has been conducted, because they haven't asked the right questions or the right people. For instance, a sales slump will be automatically attributed to a brand problem when it could be competitive activity or social change or economic conditions or... Many clients rely on the research agency to sort out the issues for them. Often they won't do it. Instead they will accept the brief and execute whatever you ask for. The muddled thinking in the client becomes muddled research and produces muddled results. Ask any research agency. This would be the cause of 50% of client dissatisfaction.
Research for the sake of it or for fear of making a decision: A close relative of the muddled brief is the research commissioned 'because that's what we always do' or because no one in management has the balls to make a call without it. The research industry would lose many millions if it wasn't for the jellybacks who commission this type of research. Much research is evidence of the failure of marketing decision makers to spend enough personal time mixing with customers. Some of the questions asked of researchers would be redundant were sufficient energy spent rubbing shoulders with ordinary punters. The fear of making a decision drives many research briefs. Most marketing decision makers lack sufficient courage to do their jobs and research is used much like a drunk man uses a lamp post - more for support than illumination.
Failing to conduct exit interviews with customers: Here's some practical research that will really yield valuable insights. It takes guts to ask someone who is rejecting you their reasons. Naturally we all hate rejection. But the cold shower of the customer who is churning laying it on the line can be the best advice you'll ever get. They have the perspective you need - the key to your problem. Call them up, offer them an incentive to tell you, then listen. Probe. Dig deep, below the bull**** of "price" to the real value proposition issue you have.
Failing to find out why non-buyers are so: This is also a hard lesson. Asking someone why they don't like you is character forming. But necessary. You might discover that your brand is daggy and out of date. You might discover that your products are behind the times and uncompetitive. The hardest part is to take this information seriously because most marketing people are in love with their products (out of necessity), no matter how ugly and out-of-date they are.
Putting creative into research: Here is a general principle to live by: research propositions and buying motivations to help develop creative, but do not research creative. Why? Because creative, by its nature, defies research. It is entirely subjective and intuitive in the way it is consumed. It cannot be accurately tested by asking people to give their opinions about it. Sitting in the artificial environment of a research room, the subjects tend to play the game they think is expected of them: "find the problem in the ad". And they come up with as many objections as you want. Or they can "like" the ad and find reasons for that. But as for being motivated to buy something as a result, they can't tell you because they are not sufficiently self aware as to know how they react subconsciously to buying stimuli. Good creative is challenging, breakthrough stuff that scares the hell out of clients and consumers. It can be entertaining - but bad creative can also be entertaining. In fact, most bad creative tries too hard to be entertaining. Viewers like it, but don't act on it. So how can you tell if your ad works? Test market it in real conditions.
Refusing to believe the results of research: Sometimes research reveals that a sacred cow deserves slaughtering. It's harder to believe the truth and slaughtering the sacred cow than it is to find reasons for slaughtering the messenger instead. There are usually 101 excuses for poor results in research: timing, sample skew, misinterpretation of responses, language confusion, etc.
Failure to tap customers for new product ideas: An ancient marketer from the US - one of those old gentlemanly fellows who look like a stately oak tree and exude wisdom - once said to me, "Spend half an hour in the living room of your customer or prospect and you'll never ask another question about how to reach them and what to say to them when you do." What he could have added was, "And you'll come away with a swag of good ideas for new products." New product ideas are simply solutions to problems consumers encounter in their daily lives. How better to discover them than to tap into their daily lives. It also helps overcome the 'customer-phobia' many marketing executives experience