Once you are a brand owner or are in a business where branding becomes very important, you naturally start consuming a lot of content regarding marketing, SEO, branding, consumer psychology, color theory and a host of other things that ideally enable you to sell your products better. Once you are on this journey, you naturally read about successful product launches, great marketing and advertising gigs and other successes that other people have had in their line of work. The idea in this endeavor is to learn from their success.

On one of these learning sessions, curiosity got to the better of me and I tried reading between the lines of successful campaigns. There are case studies and articles that can keep you up for days but the ultimate understanding from all these was rather disheartening. To elaborate, it is a fact that one cannot say at the start of any venture or project, or campaign, that it will be a success. There is a lot of work that goes into building such campaigns and only after they have succeeded, do we write, read and celebrate them. Only after, not at the start, not during the journey, but at the very end.

If so, what we are essentially doing is writing a story from a winners perspective, to put it simply.

There may be a lot of external factors that may have contributed to a campaigns success. Timing, virality from unplanned sources or unplanned reasons, acts of god! Or maybe even an unfortunate incident with the competitors. Whether we like it or not, these factors contribute to a company / product/ or campaigns success.

If any success of a launch or a campaign, is attributed to the advertising or a marketing teams’ skill alone, then it amounts to seeing the success in isolation. The real reason for the success could have been due to inventory, distribution, development (SEO), or even delivery. Since no active planning or more importantly, capital allocation may have gone into these other facets, the success too will not have be attributed to them.

What marketing and advertising agencies seem to sell is the later idea that it is only them that make a campaign succeed, whereas in the real world, the real reasons may be completely different. Does this mean the marketing and advertising teams deserve no credit? They absolutely do, but so do other departments of a company along with them. One department cannot, in isolation, make a campaign / product succeed.

Seeing successes in isolation is akin to when the horse we bet on wins the race, we pride ourselves on our decision. But when the horse we bet on loses, we blame the horse. Unfortunate but true.