Is your client’s business catastrophising?

I'd guess that 95% of 'great ideas' never make it to the world. And agencies often assume this is because clients are not smart enough.

I want to challenge that.

It has nothing to do with individual smartness, but with corporate trauma. Consider the words of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott:

“The catastrophe you fear will happen has already happened.”

It's a useful aphorism when you think about how businesses buy into ideas. I once worked on a massive FMCG brand, and we were struggling to sell unconventional, non-broadcast work.

Turns out the problem wasn't the quality of the ideas we were putting on the table. It was that the entire business had done those sorts of ideas before, and the ROI was horrible. And so they had re-oriented their marketing around all things How Brands Grow.

Now, you could argue that focusing on ROI alone was short-sighted if equity was eroding anyway. But fact was, the business was literally scared of going back to what they considered to be ineffective times. And so, they never bought our 'great ideas'.

One way to solve this: make unconventional work integral to broadcast comms, instead of incremental to them. So you can have your ROI cake and, eat your equity one too. But the real lesson is this: don't dismiss lack of buy-in as lack of intelligence.

Consider instead:

• What does the business fear will happen?

• Has it happened before?

And go from there.