Purple cows rarely come from compromise

Compromises are a part of work, a part of life.  We make them every day.  Whether with our coworkers, family members, partners, suppliers, children, or employers; we make compromises everywhere.  In fact, often the ability to do your job effectively means making compromise after compromise to meet the limitations and requirements of other stakeholders tied to a particular project.  But it is often times the people who don’t make compromises, who are difficult and dedicated to an idea (a vision really) that they want to see brought into being untarnished and uncompromised.  It is usually those ideas that are the real wow ideas.  So why do so many compromises get made?

Because they’re easy, of course.

I was recently working on a new marketing initiative for my company. It’s a complex, multi-tiered marketing effort spanning across a bunch of channels and executions.  To pull something like this off you need everything from executive sponsorship to product support to public relations to agency and vendors to help realize the vision.  And a project like this is a breeding ground for compromises.  Things that are hard and expensive get put on the chopping block or reduced in scope and function.  Things that are seen as a risk as dialed back to a test.  Creative that needs to really grab you in left at good enough for budget reasons.  And the list goes on.

The job of a good marketer, a leader, a visionary is to understand which compromises are worth making and which ones aren’t. It is your responsibility to understand what makes a difference and where to draw the line.  What compromises are being done for budget reasons?  If you spend that extra money will you get a much greater return?  What compromises are being done for convenience? Does an idea not fit a template or product? How much better would the campaign be if you spent the time and money to change it?  Which compromises are being done for time?  Can you do a phased launch to ship something that works with a commitment to improving it quickly? And finally, which compromises are you absolutely not willing to make?  And how do you deal with proposed compromises to your inviolate core?

Compromises are a part of life. They are easy to make and we make them everyday.  Evaluating which compromises are the right ones to make is the job of any successful marketer.  Because while compromises are easy to make they’re often very hard to live with.

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