The Hindu Business Line : Doomed to fail

I WAS on a market visit in a small Southern town, following up on some of my client's recent launches. Accompanying me was a young salesman, who was educating me with his very definite views of what made different products tick in South India. We began discussing one particular launch which had foxed its creators with a dismal take-off, despite glowing pre-launch market research. I was attempting to understand why it was doing so badly. My young friend hesitated. Finally, he blurted out, "The product is so bad! It just doesn't last. There is no way I would spend money myself on such a poor quality product." I was taken aback at the vehemence of his reply. And yet, as we visited outlet after outlet, I sensed the same reservations about the product performance: a transposition of the foreign version, it failed to address local needs. It was withdrawn soon after.

"So, why did you not tell the marketing team about it?" I probed. "What to do, madam?" was his frank reply. "They don't ask us before the launch. And then, at the launch conference, everyone is so upbeat and confident. How can I be the only negative voice? Everyone will think I am just being pessimistic. And anyway the money has already been spent on the ad, so why bother?"

Contrast this with the experience of a brand manager who had spent a lot of energy — and a bundle of cash — making a new campaign. He commissioned two films, and being an introspective sort of guy, he bounced the themes off most his peers. Everyone told him he was onto a great thing. Something held him back, however, and finally he screened both of them to a cross-section of viewers. Instead of watching the film, he watched the audience instead. And the body language told him everything. The first film induced teeth-flashes all at the right places. The second one saw a frozen audience, with a few facial twitches indicating emotional disconnect. Mind you, everyone in the audience said that both films were great — but for him, the research findings were clear. Based on his own audience analysis, he nixed the second one. Superficially, both these anecdotes seem to be about disparate themes, but if you see the underlying commonality, it gives you a clue to one reason why many new products fail. Unravelling new product failures is rather like solving a perplexing whodunit, and often the post-mortem reveals a mix of the usual suspects: poor planning, shoddy market research, execution snafus, lack of strategic clarity ... Underlying all this, there appears to be one organisational problem as well — the lack of critical debate.

In case after case, as I investigate reasons for new product failures, I am recited a litany of what-went-wrong. Sure, many of these insights surface with the blinding clarity that 20-20 hindsight lends us. Unforeseen problems do crop up, and the best of plans do go awry, as the poet warns us. What is more disturbing, however, is that in most cases, the number of roadblocks is apparent before the launch is executed — at the conceptual stage itself. Sadly, they aren't voiced, and the launch, unimpeded by these critical objections, trundles on like a self-powered juggernaut on its way to almost certain doom.

I always question the post-facto critics as to why they did not voice these concerns. After all, had these been put on record early enough, the project may never have passed through the various gates of approval.

The reasons for the silent objections are many. Few people want to be seen as the wet blanket, the party pooper, the pessimist, the naysayer, the (gasp!) non-team player. Then there are political problems — do you want to run the gauntlet of organisational hara-kiri by telling your boss that his brilliant ideas are ... well ... actually rather pathetic? Sometimes, peer pressure rules — here you have a team of closely-knit brand managers. Do you really want to go rain on someone else's picnic by offering your entirely unsolicited opinions of why their concept is likely to bomb? What if, tomorrow, they do the same to you, and squish one of your bright ideas?

I wonder if Indians lack the ability for dispassionate critical debate. Some replies tell me that criticism will be viewed as a non-friendly, aggressive gesture, a signal of letting one's peers down to curry favour with the bosses. And as the project progresses to each stage of completion, and more and more resources have been invested in it, there is a greater level inertia to be overcome to be the critical commentator. So much money has already been spent. Even if you make your opinions clear, it will hardly make a difference, will it? So why bother?

There is some subtle organisational behaviour at play here. Growth is essential for any organisation, and when a project is believed to be imperative for the future success of the company, it assumes a life of its own, becoming more and more difficult to kill as it grows in power.

Professor Isabelle Royer (`Why Bad Projects Are So Hard to Kill'; Harvard Business Review) defines collective belief as a "strong conviction based on feeling rather than evidence that the project will eventually succeed." In her research of doomed projects, she finds that companies cannot envision failure of a project. In India, where research rigour is conspicuous in its absence, this sense of irrational optimism is all the more dangerous. That's why you have launch after launch, trotting out on a wave of misplaced optimism, despite the existence of compelling reasons for each one to have been either killed early.

There is an interesting paradox here. After all, the very premise of fuzzy front-end of creativity is that tender young ideas should not be subjected to the icy blast of criticism. So, at what stage do you bring in a reality check? How do you tackle this problem without impeding the innovation process? How do you institutionalise debate and make it part of the process? How do you ensure that the project passes gates only after considering all the reasons why it should not go through? We'll be looking at this next time.

(The writer is a Chennai-based management consultant. Karate-gy is the proprietary name of strategic exercises conducted by Paradigm Management Knowhow.)

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