Marketing Intelligence by Iain Johnston

I promised myself I wouldn’t allow my blog to get overrun with football metaphors, but some are just too good to resist.

I’ve been writing about failed agency pitch teams’ denial of reality to make themselves feel better.

Why do we do this? Of course there will be an understandable degree of wanting to paint oneself in the best possible light. More worrying would be denial of the real reasons for pitch loss because we just can’t see the truth even when it’s pointed out.

A more rational reason for the bravado inherent in maintaining the “brilliance” and energy of a failing pitch team is that success breeds confidence which breeds success in a virtuous circle.

On the back of Manchester United’s humiliating home defeat to arch rivals Liverpool ten days ago, Alex Ferguson’s claim that Man Utd were the better team, was rightly ridiculed in the press. This is classic scorned pitch team denial. His team had been thumped 4-1 at home in the biggest game of the season. Everyone except a few die-hard Utd fans could see their team were second best, even the local fans could see the writing on the wall and at least 20,000 had left before the end. Yet up pops Sir Alex afterwards in a classic “client chose the wrong agency” denial.

Of course the empirical (and highly scientific) test of whether Sir Alex was right to talk up his team would be the following game’s result. Hmm, Man Utd lost 2-0 to Fulham <cheers> with two players sent off, rather than just the one the previous week. So the bad tempered response of his team seemed to be spoiled sulking at the “injustice” rather than “must do better”.

My main concern about the “don’t worry about a loss, we didn’t want to win it anyway/it was someone else’s fault” cover up is that it hinders our ability to learn and progress.