As managers we often value change more than continuity. Brand managers get promoting for changing packaging or advertising, business development managers succeed when they change the strategy. We all have stories of success following change.
Consistency is a strongly undervalued virtue in business.
We get easily bored with the things that we have done in the past, and seek the new, to change, certainly well before our customers actively seek changes. (This of course presupposes that the strategy you have in place is effective and does what it is designed to do.)
Talk of consistency takes me back to the year 2001, when i worked in Singapore managing the Tiger beer brand. Each year the marketing team wracked their agencies brains for yet another new promotion to celebrate the impending Lunar new year. And each year the brand manager sought to have something new, exciting, different… it was a chance to get noticed, to build a pathway to promotion.
On this occasion, after a long discussion on who the target customer was for the brand, what were their motivations, what they desired from a new year promotion and what we desired for the same promotion, we agreed to giveaway a series of gold coins with the image of the Lunar new year animal with bulk purchase. And subsequently to create a collectors set for the specific year and for subsequent years. It researched very well with consumers who saw the value in this unique offering. Even our trade partners saw the utility and fully supported our plan.
The benefit to the team was that they had a sought after promotion, an agreed mechanism and fantastic design… for the next twelve years Chinese New year promotion was effectively decided… or so I thought.
And for the succeeding four years it worked successfully.
After i departed the Singapore operation the Brand team decided that they were bored with this gold collectible coin series idea, and that they should re-enter the merry-go-around of changing each CNY promotion annually. And the powerful insight of the idea of a 12 year cycle of promotion, which was supported by the target market who loved collecting was lost.
Our consumers certainly were not bored with the idea- it was brought back to resounding success in Malaysia during the 2010 year of the Tiger to great acclaim. We were bored the idea.
A management insight is that brand managers and marketing managers get bored with their own ideas much sooner than consumers. Living with the same creative idea day-in and day-out quickly saps the ideas novelty and transcends quickly to boredom and the consequence unnecessary change. Where businesses have sufficient resources, this leads to the waste of enormous amounts of investment changing things that work perfectly well and could have worked for several more years.
I learned the lesson of consistency in New Zealand, 25 years ago, when a then colleague of mine introduced Tui’s “Yeah, right” campaign. The campaign resonated with consumers and 25 years later it’s still a roaring success. Each year the advertising agency is challenged with having to develop new creative for this evergreen campaign, but its success is supported by Tui being New Zealand’s favourite beer brand, an accolade built around the consistent success of this campaign.
I have a simple insight for you- within your own business there is far too much work for people to do.
And a key skill of senior management is to understand where the business really does need to change things and where you can afford not to change and must remain consistent. Not only will this make for a more effective business, its also more efficient, its a potentially significant cost saving proposition.
Consistency is certainly an undervalued virtue, especially within the commercial area of business. Think where consistency can assist you to become more effective and efficient. Have you examples of consistent campaigns or where ideas were unnecessarily changed at much cost, please share it with us.