The Intuitive Customer - Helping You Improve Your Customer Experience To Gain Growth

When brands make silly mistakes: 5 rules guaranteed to ensure your failure

Mar 25, 2023

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A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

This podcast is full of bad advice. If you do follow the five rules we present, we guarantee you will fail. We realize this might be different than our usual Five Rules episode content. However, we think that presenting the way to fail might be the way to help you succeed.

(How’s that for a different kettle of fish?)

For example, if you want to fail, we have the rules that will help you do it. They include doing any or all of the following:

Not understanding the marketplace.
Ignoring customer feedback.
Failing to adapt to change.
Not being authentic.
Overlooking diversity and inclusion.

In this episode, we explore why our five rules, otherwise known as what not to do in business, lead to failure for many brands you know, and in some cases, remember from before they crashed and burned. We share what we have learned by watching brands make silly mistakes (and hope none of you will make the same ones.)

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

The critical thing to remember here is that we don’t want you to do these things. Instead, we encourage you to learn from these mistakes. So, if anything, we are telling you to break these five rules instead of following them.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

04:07 We kick it off by explaining how if you don’t understand the marketplace, you are sure to blow it with them, hastening your descent into failure.
10:53 We abandon all pretense of being organized, and share all five rules at once and then fit our examples under the various rules.
12:08 We discuss business guru Charles Handy’s S-curve from The Empty Raincoat about how things ebb and flow in performance, and when is the best time to change.
19:50 Colin relates the five rules back to an article he read, “15 Famous Brands Who Failed to Innovate,” and how hubris plays a role.
23:46 Ryan explains how Victoria Secret might have fared better over time if they had more diversity and inclusion built into their leadership.