Everyone knows the famous courtroom scene from “A Few Good Men” starring Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore and Tom Cruise. In his outburst, after Tom Cruise demands to know the truth, Jack Nicholson’s character yells, “You can’t handle the truth!”
When it comes to the business world, he might be right.
When a major brand hires an agency to develop a new marketing program to boost sales for a product that has been hit with year after year of declining sales, what do they truly want to hear from their agency?
Do they want to see slick new advertising campaign ideas?
Do they want to hear about a new demographic focus?
Do they want to see new packaging concepts?
Or would they be open to hearing that the product is a dog and should be removed from shelves for good? Or, at the very least, that the product itself needs to be reworked and reintroduced to the market?
What if the truth about the product is that no one wants to buy it anymore, and that no marketing campaign, no matter how amazing, creative and award-winning, will revive sales?
The client has a lot riding on the answer. Product managers, brand managers, retail managers, customer service, manufacturing, operations, finance and more are all employed to work on only this brand. Shelving a dog brand is not an easy decision, and neither is reworking a stale brand. Jobs may be lost, revenue will be lost, egos may be bruised.
Does the brand fire the new agency and search for an agency that will give them a new coat of paint on the marketing strategy instead of the truth?
And for the agency, does it even risk telling the truth and losing the account, or does it take the easy way out and half-heartedly devise a multi-channel campaign to placate the client, knowing that sales will continue to slide and they’ll eventually lose the account anyway (but only after a few more years of choice billings).
Jack was right…odds are that the client can’t handle the truth. And maybe the agency can’t either.
In the long run, honesty is the best policy, no matter the outcome. Everyone will be better off for it.
