They say “failing to plan is planning to fail.” But what happens when you plan well 
and your intervention still fails?
The textbook Marketing Public Health discusses four types of common failures of communications interventions.
- Strategy failures occur when external barriers exist in the community that cannot be overcome by communication messages. For example, a condom usage campaign may be very effective in raising awareness, but if condoms are not available in the community, the campaign is moot.
- Execution failures are the result of poorly constructed messaging or targeting the wrong audience. We must always remember to do our homework and study our audiences.
- Measurement failures happen when we planned the communication strategy appropriately and delivered it well, but we had a poor evaluation strategy. Check out our post on evaluating social media.
- Expectation failure results from overestimating the campaign’s impact in the community. Change occurred but not to the level stakeholder’s expected.
We must remember that people and environments are complex. We can’t just wave our magic marketing wands and change human behavior without some careful consideration of human circumstances. Marketing and communications professionals must work together to avoid committing any of these fatal errors. Have you ever experienced one of these failures? If so, how did you overcome it?
Editor’s Note
See additional content on Living the Path focusing on recognizing, learning from and preventing failure:
Keep up with the Path of the Blue Eye project by subscribing to our RSS feed and/or downloading our nifty widget. Also, get more insight and information at our knowledge community, Living the Path, by clicking here.
Read More from Walking the Path:
New blog post: “Failure Happens” – It focuses on understanding + preventing health communications failure – http://pbeye.info/3F8 #hcmktg
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Helpful post by Sarah Ragsdale: ways comms campaigns fail & why it’s important to understand them on Walking The Path http://bit.ly/aTlWvu
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
[...] post about yes, failure, but it’s also about what can be learned from it. This week’s quote comes from Sarah Ragsdale over at the Walking the Path blog: “Failure [...]