Desire to Improve.

Today's Marketing Cookie is about the courage it takes to improve.

I often hear people talk about the "desire to change," especially in an election year. People want to change their look, lifestyle, habits, or job. They are unhappy with how much they weigh, drink, or watch TV. They dislike how little they earn, how little time they spend with family, or how seldom they laugh. All these situations can spark a desire for change, sometimes dramatically.

Today's fortune doesn't talk about the desire for change. No, it speaks of the desire for improvement.

While the desire for improvement could result in a change, I think of improvement as optimization, enhancement, or refinement. In my mind, change requires a wholesale departure from the present course and redeployment in a new direction. More simply, improvement is making something better, while change is making something different.

In marketing, you'll need to practice both change and improvement, but almost never at the same time.

Once you've set your marketing goals, objectives, and plans, you should stay the course. Don't be tempted to pan for gold, chasing every shiny new thing that comes along. Stick with your plan and seek to optimize it. It may take longer than expected to achieve the results you want. You will need to exercise patience and courage to feed, nurture, and improve a stalled campaign—rather than kill it and start over. The only time you must kill a campaign is if it has already died or is threatening to kill you.

Change takes courage, too. Sure, it's easy to throw a bad or nearly dead campaign in the trash. No, I'm talking about killing a campaign that has been working. We've had clients in the past where we developed a breakthrough campaign that knocked the socks off the competition, providing double-digit response. However, the competition will notice their sales dip and customer retention attrition as our client's awesome campaign cleans their clocks. The competitor will eventually respond with a competitive "me too" campaign that looks a lot like ours.

Although we were still beating them by a landslide, there were two of us now on the same path, making similar claims. This is the moment when we must change our killer campaign, stake a claim in uncharted waters, and go in a new direction. This move keeps your company relevant and one step ahead of the competition. It takes a lot of courage to break something that is not broken. We don't make such changes because we desire change. No, as the fortune says, we make changes because we desire improvement.