Marketing Evolution
Some mistakes cost money. Some cost sleep. Some bruise the ego. However, mistakes, can also become part of your professional education. They teach you something that no textbook, training session or onboarding manual ever could.
Marketing Evolution
Marion Wakahe
The Gift Of Getting It Wrong
She had recently joined the agency as an account manager. It was a boutique agency, deliberately so. The team worked with a small portfolio of clients, which meant the work was intimate, demanding and, in many ways, a fantastic learning environment.
One issue though..., there was little time for handholding. Everyone was busy. You were expected to observe, ask questions when necessary and, more so, figure things out for yourself.
What made it harder for her was that several assumptions had been made about what she already knew. Things that were second nature to more experienced colleagues were never explained because, to them, they were simply obvious.
Two weeks before an event, a client needed branded mugs for attendees to take home afterwards. She was put in charge of getting them done. This was where the assumptions would catch up with her.
She prepared the artwork, sent it to the printer and gave the go-ahead. The supplier was reliable. The timeline was tight, but manageable. There was enough time for the mugs to be printed, delivered to the office and transported to the venue before the event. On screen, everything looked perfect.
Then the boxes arrived. The colour on the mugs was wrong. Not dramatically wrong, but wrong enough to notice. The logo too was misaligned. What had looked crisp and polished on a computer screen didn’ t translate directly and automatically onto the ceramic mugs. Fifty mugs. Fifty unusable mugs. The client could not receive them.
The agency fortunately absorbed the cost rather than passing it on to a junior member of staff who was still finding her feet. Her boss did not berate her. He simply looked at her and said,“ I know you won’ t repeat this again.” That sentence carried more weight than a reprimand would have.
She did not have to pay for the mistake financially, but she paid for it in other ways: a few sleepless nights, self-chastisement and the frantic task of finding a way to recover the lost time so that a new, properly printed consignment would be ready when it was needed.
She hacked it. She secured samples first, chased approvals and got the replacement order delivered in time.
Years later, the lesson remains embedded. The sting fortunately is gone. She learned that what looks right on a screen does not necessarily look right on the material; actual samples were the only way to truly confirm.
Some mistakes cost money. Some cost sleep. Some bruise the ego. However, mistakes, can also become part of your professional education. They teach you something that no textbook, training session or onboarding manual ever could.
Why Mistakes Hurt Much
We’ ve all had moments when we err leading to forehead-smack frustration. These errors tend to take centre-stage in our minds.
Psychologists call it negativity bias: our tendency to register, remember, and dwell on negative experiences more intensely than positive or neutral ones. It made evolutionary sense... a missed threat could kill you. Our brains are built to weigh danger more heavily than gain. This wiring hasn ' t caught up to modern‘ threats’ such as a client ' s disappointed email which is significantly less hazardous than a predator in the bush.
In our minds, one mistake can undo three weeks of good work. We replay it repeatedly, consuming our attention, affecting how we perform other tasks, shaping how we interact with others and, sometimes, even robbing us of the ability to simply rest.
The antidote is not to convince yourself the mistake didn ' t matter; it ' s self-compassion. Researcher Kristin Neff has spent much of her career studying self-compassion. Self-compassion means treating yourself with the same steadiness you ' d offer a colleague who came to you rattled after a bad call: acknowledging that it happened, that it hurt, and that it doesn ' t define your competence. You cannot learn from a mistake you are still busy punishing yourself for. The self-flagellation that feels like accountability is often just noise that delays the actual work of fixing what went wrong.
When you catch yourself spiralling, ask what you would say to a friend in your position. Then say that to yourself, out loud if you must. It may seem strange initially but over time this practice will become a critical part of allowing you to move on from slip-ups.
The Place of Organizational Culture
Some mistakes cost money. Some cost sleep. Some bruise the ego. However, mistakes, can also become part of your professional education. They teach you something that no textbook, training session or onboarding manual ever could.
Going back to the above example of the account manager, her ability to cope with the mistake she made was helped by the fact that the agency absorbed the cost of spoiled mugs. That decision speaks to the culture that had been set- mistakes were expensive, but they weren ' t fatal. She had the opportunity to correct her mistake and took personal responsibility by giving extra time and effort.
O4 MAL74 / 26 ISSUE