communication is essential to business making and it involves more than the ability to name your product, write a tag line or a press release. It's an intricate, rational and scalable effort and, let's face it, not anyone can do it.

1/08/2008

Product development misunderstood

Quote my younger planner colleague: "This client of ours has an uncanny talent for developing less performant products later than any of its competition. What am I expected to do?"

which only goes to show how capitalism is understood in Romania where it is still possible to come out with a useless product and still market it shamelessly

kindof connected to what i was writing below

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Still, the question from the planner remains "what am I expected to do?"

Does an ad man/woman go forward to design comms for this inferior product? Having no belief in it from the start yet striving to satisfy the Client and help him solve his comms need/problem?

Or do you stop right there and then, break the brutal truth about the product deficiency to Client and move no further (risking your contract as the worst case scenario) until the Client "gets his act straight"?

If the latter, how often does it happen?

Bogdana Butnar said...

Andrei, in my experience I have encountered one agency who had the gutts to say "this product is stupid" and none yet who had the courage to say "we won't advertise it". I think some planners think it's their job to come up with a solution no matter how stupid the product is. it kindof makes you a hero planner but sometimes i think you need to say "this is stupid and it won't sell no matter how much we work on it". I always think that our duty is to get the client in front of the counter asking for the product, next it's the client's duty to make a product that the customer will want.