Last month I attempted to rally everyone around the flag of sustainability and encourage all to make the radical changes needed to save our planet. This month I want to address one of the consequences, or rather hinderances to these bold moves. The fear of failing.
Humans spend an awful lot of their time perfecting things: the quickest route to work, the best artistic cappuccino, the most reliable aircraft, the fastest Formula One car. Doing this makes our lives more efficient, delightful, safer and successful. Our world is surrounded by human perfection so no wonder we fear failure and imperfection.
It wasn’t always so. Medieval craftsmen deliberately included imperfections in their work as God should be the only perfect craftsman. My own personal view is these were not deliberate at all, but an infallible excuse for mistakes easily done when pews and pulpits were all made by hand. Over the centuries, our perfection of machines that make things has taken the craftsman out of the loop and accelerated the perfection of the things we make so we can make perfection on mass. What better example than the mobile phone – there are globally 17 billion of these amazingly intricate reliable machines in our fumbling fingers.
It’s little surprise then, that we all expect everything to go right all the time because an incredible amount does. So, when it goes wrong, we are immediately damming. If a train doesn’t turn up at the station because the driver didn’t make it to the depot in time, we are apoplectic and only a little less so if its adverse weather that causes the delay.
Similarly, Airlines are incredibly reliable with things like safety, but it all goes to pot when the variabilities of the weather cause problems and irate travellers. However, I was once told by an Airline brand manager that she believed that travellers invariably couldn’t recall the experience they had on on-time, hassle free, flight, and in many cases couldn’t even remember the brand. But when things went wrong, they could very clearly remember every detail. She saw this awareness as an opportunity rather than a problem and worked hard to develop a positive and immediate response to the delay to ease the passengers’ woes. One example was getting the pilot to leave his plane, go into the lounge, and explain to the passengers the situation and all their efforts to sort it out. Passengers really appreciated a senior respected person connecting with them directly. This, she said, would be the brand story they would tell their friends, colleagues and family – not the bad stuff. Good can come from bad situations, but it requires humility and ideally human interaction to make it work.
We all know about our human frailty and forgive it from our friends and loved ones. So being reminded that there are real people behind brands and business builds not only tolerance, but also connection. I’ve been using a new direct-to-consumer refillable personal care brand over the last year. They have stuck their neck out and are trying to build a reliable but new form of service. They have a great product, but things keep going wrong like their couriers crushing their packaging on route. I have had quite a few email exchanges with Natalie their Head of Customer Happiness as a result. You may wonder why I persevere with them. Well, I do because I’ve grown to like them as people, they always correct, or recompense, mistakes and most importantly they are persevering themselves and constantly looking to improve. After humility, perseverance is the other vital ingredient to making good from a bad situation. If consumer doesn’t see you trying and then succeeding to make improvements, you are lost. As I said at the beginning, we are all hard wired to seek perfection and we admire it when we see it in action. I’m reminded of KFC’s apology ad in 2018 when they ran out of chicken with a big empty bucket and ‘We’re Sorry’ underneath. It’s humour and humility worked wonders for the brand – it had become human again.
So, all you entrepreneurs and innovators out there don’t fear failing, use it to your advantage through humility and perseverance to make human connection with you brand and take your consumers along with you on your journey- just make sure you hire your Natalie as your Head of Customer Happiness (did you see what I did there).
