Mitigating Risk to Improve Marketing Results

Risk & Bricks

Marketing (and business, for that matter) is all about taking risks. “No risk, no reward,” said…somebody. As marketers, we love bold choices and big bets. Those campaigns tend to sweep up the awards every year. They surprise and delight the viewer, as much as an advertisement can. They revitalize the energy around a brand or bring heaps of awareness to a new offer.

However, once your bold marketing strategy is pumping positive results, the idea of taking new risks seems like a bad idea. Even though that’s how the results happened at all. I was reading a recent interview with Cecilia Weckstrom, The Lego Group’s global head of marketing innovation, and she said:

“Perhaps counter-intuitively, I’ve learned that the more wins you have, the more risk-averse people become. From a leadership and organizational development standpoint, we have to ring-fence and protect that spirit of experimentation and ensure that its part of the program remains robust.”

“We need to take risks, evolve and become more data-driven in our decision-making – but also nurture that pioneering creative spirit to ensure that we stay at the forefront of change. We need to always push forward and overcome the fear of failure that plagues so many organizations – including ours.”

There’s clearly a balance we must all find. Bold marketing choices can sometimes fail in a spectacular fashion like we saw with Bumble’s disastrous rebrand launch. However, we can’t allow this fear to smother the idea of innovation. Instead, we can take steps to limit the impact of those risks.

The fear of marketing failure is especially high when it comes to social media. The potential of negative comments, negative reviews, or viral backlash is very real. Beyond that, security-breaches on social media are a constant threat. If you’re reading this I can safely assume you’ve received at least one shady message on a social media platform with a link that you should definitely not click.

To mitigate those risks, it’s important to have an official social media risk management strategy for your business or organization. Here are some helpful tips from SproutSocial:

Applying this same line of thinking to all aspects of your marketing strategy could be the missing key to unlocking that creative risk-taking attitude that creates big wins.