I have just completed a post mortem on a failed campaign for a client who spent five figures on Adwords over the last 12 months. Adwords drove a traffic to their site, but the product didn’t sell.
During a meeting there were mumbles about wasted money and click fraud, the term being used incorrectly but manipulated to meet the cause of the internal politicians trying to move focus of blame onto something out of their control.
Another target, and the reason I was asked to perform a review, was the web marketing company. They felt the campaign was inadequate for their budget and they had been let down.
I took my fee up front before I revealed the result, I knew they wouldn’t like it. Given the time and material afforded to the marketing company their strategy was excellent. They had provided a complete package, a sales site that took orders with professionally written text coordinated with easy to understand technical information through to advertising copy for Google Adsense and it did a great job of driving traffic to them.
The failure was due to a premanufacturing market research disaster. The product, a portable power cell popular with the military and now adapted for civilian use, is interesting. It’s a leap in tech achievement providing an eco friendly solution that extends the duration of useful operation in the field. However current technology is cheaper and the duration adequate. As distributors weren’t queueing up to sell the product they turned to the web expecting instant success (they were certainly paying enough).
A compelling campaign at the beginning of their project would have helped them understand customer reaction and requirements before product design had begun.
Branding and careful placement in the social phenomenon would have created a review market ready for their product and provided improvements before full production started.
But they left marketing after the production process began. Tooling, offices, manufacturing plant all in the good cause of creating their unique and eco friendly technology was paid for before they told anyone about it.
They spent too much money at the wrong time and the wrong way. If they had buzzed their product ideas, if they had been rated in Digg or Del.icio.us they would have been given a meter to judge their products market worthiness and production would have been more informed and less of a gamble.
They have since licensed the product to another organisation who will mass produce them in China. They’ll be sold at a fraction of the cost and through distribution channels. The only recognisable improvement their product will offer is a lower cost. The technological achievement and advances they brought to the market will go unnoticed. Had they created a Buzz at the beginning of their project it could have been a different story.
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