Creative Bulletin n.153
This could’ve been us during the intùiti event in Turin but… it’s not! We had so much fun that we forgot to take a picture 😂 thank you again for the marvelous evening ❤️
A huge mistake
An oversight is acceptable: it used to happen in school during a math test, right at the end of the equation, and it happens to this day when we have reviewed a presentation a thousand times yet we miss that one typo staring at us from the page.
Some mistakes have no consequences (the typo, even if it ends up being printed, can be laughed off) others jam the chain of events and ten miles up the road, everything crumbles.
It's a little like the story of the butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing. Well, we got distracted and instead of the sun, we got hit by a thunderstorm 😅
A few weeks ago we had to increase the prices on our products due to rising costs of raw material, shipping and ads. Thankfully it all went well: sales didn’t go down and most of all, the profit margin stayed the same. Except for Italy: in our country sales went lower and lower. We changed the ads, we even thought that we had saturated the market (we thought of everything but the plague but we almost got there).
👉 And then we understood. While we increased prices for the whole world, we got distracted since the operation was so delicate and we forgot that we had supplied a huge bookstore in Italy, a bookstore that has a powerful e-commerce 😱😱😱
🦊 What’s the consequence? Let’s call this user Mario, he sees our ads, he clicks on it, he checks out the website, he decides that he wants the product and, right before buying it he does a quick Google search. There he finds a better offer on another website and the trick is done! We paid to “acquire” Mario and he buys somewhere else. A few days later, our marketing manager analyzes data and deems the ad (yep, just the one that convinced Mario) as a failure (there’s no traceable sale) so he turns it off.
Slowly but surely, all the ads that are actually working are turned off. And we stop selling in Italy 😱
In the end we stopped the bookstore and we started selling in Italy like before 🎉
🌈 Takeaway: let’s pay attention to what we pay attention to
Sometimes we focus so much on typos that we forget to extend the concept of attention to something higher and wider.
We’re going to do it as an exercise: look at the moon beyond the finger pointing at it and don’t forget about the sun illuminating it from the other side.
With ❤️,
Matteo and Andrea
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