Polina Buchan

My favourite professional mistake…

I like to tell my students about my professional screw-ups. Both because I, of course, hope they learn from my mistakes, and because I want them to embrace and own the mistakes they will most certainly make.

One of my favourite stories is from my first year as a marketer, fresh out of university. I was working on a salted snack brand. We had a partnership with a major football team. As part of the partnership, we were offered an opportunity to distribute free samples at home games. I was to organize a shipment of several weeks worth of inventory.

I checked our inventory management system. I saw that one of the flavours of the product had substantial inventory on hand, and a bunch of it was going to expire in a couple of months, meaning it would be scrapped at that point. I thought, let’s apply the FIFO method here (ooh, fancy!), rescue this older inventory, and ship this flavour for samples.

Did I pause to wonder why we had so much inventory of it on hand? Did I ponder whether sampling a product version that had already proven to NOT be our best-seller was the best idea? Not really. I was thinking of the gold star I was going to get for the cost-saving effort to find use for expiring inventory.

A week later, my contact at the sports venue calls and tells me to get my product picked up and out of there. They had handed out one game’s worth of samples and said they would not be handing out any more. They said that the fans were throwing the uneaten packages on the floor, the whole place was littered with them.

Guys, the flavour was vanilla… Vanilla! At a football game! To eat with beer! Vanilla, a weird flavour that people were already not buying, and that would taste even worse with beer than on its own. (Side note, that flavour was discontinued not too long after. Why would a grown-up salted snack brand even have a vanilla product?)

I don’t remember if I had consulted with anyone before choosing this flavour to ship. Even if I had, it doesn’t matter. As the brand’s only fully dedicated marketer, it was my job to think from the consumers’ perspective first and foremost, and I didn’t do that.

I kicked into gear and did my best to fix the mistake. I worked with logistics and regulatory to trace chain of custody for the product (worth tens of thousands of dollars), so it could at least be returned into inventory instead of into the dumpster. I owned my error and explained to the bosses how it happened and how I would approach it differently next time.

Most importantly, it was a wake up call. I had to take my business school blinders off. As a marketer, I needed to put the customer at the forefront of everything I did. First, wonder about the customer’s perspective. Second, balance that against everything else.

Anyone else feel like sharing their favourite blunder? 🙂