Why the “Smartest” Person in the Room is Ruining Your Marketing

Should we trust the wisdom of focus groups, committees, and the other fine folks around the office?

Let’s be honest—if bold ideas were born in boardrooms, every brand would be unforgettable. But they’re not. Because most great ideas get murdered by a well-meaning committee before they ever see daylight.

We’re throwing elbows at the myth that focus groups, panels, and office Keurig clubs make marketing better. Mick, Chris, and Ryan rip into the comfort-zone thinking that turns sharp ideas into soft garbage—and they explain why the brands that win don’t ask for permission. They make the decision. Then they own it. Forget safe. Forget consensus. If you’re still trying to create marketing that “won’t get you fired,” you’ve already lost.

Episode Highlights:

  • Too many ideas get watered down by committees.
  • Too many brands choose safety over originality.
  • Too many people are afraid of offending someone, so they create nothing of consequence.

Skip the committee. Make the decision. Own it.

This episode’s for the marketers who are tired of playing it safe, and the business owners brave enough to color outside the lines. Tune in to hear how to skip the committee, make the call, and start building the kind of brand people remember.

Hit play. Then go create something worth fighting for.

 

Should we trust the wisdom of focus groups, committees and the other fine folks around the office, or should we consider a different path? Before you create a marketing campaign learn all you can about your customer and the customer experience and see if there’s something that you can tap into. You can’t expect brilliant marketing ideas from a room full of random people who have nothing better to do on a Thursday night than hang out with you and listen to marketing ideas for 3 hours and make 50 bucks. It is so abundantly clear that we did not run a focus group before launching this podcast. You actually have to try a thing that you don’t know if it’s going to work…

Ryan: Should we trust the wisdom of focus groups, committees, and the other fine folks around the office? Or should we consider a different path?

Chris: Before you create a marketing campaign, learn all you can about your customer and the customer experience and see if there’s something that you can tap into. You can’t expect brilliant marketing ideas from a room full of random people who have nothing better to do on a Thursday night than hang out with you and listen to marketing ideas for three hours and make 50 bucks.

Mick: It is so abundantly clear that we did not run a focus group before launching this podcast. You actually have to try a thing that you don’t know if it’s going to work.

Ryan: On today’s episode of Advertising in America, we ask a bunch of people leading questions to affirm what we believe to be true. Should we trust the wisdom of focus groups, committees, and the other fine folks around the office, or should we consider a different path?

Lonely? Dark? Vulnerable? Here comes Mick back from smoking a dart. Thanks for wearing your underpants today. It makes a palpable difference in the room. What you got for us, bud?

Mick: I’ve never used a focus group before, not because I’m too cool, but because I’ve never worked for an agency large enough to have the balls to charge a client for one.

My better-looking, more successful older brother has a lot of experience with focus groups, so ignore everything I have to say about them if he disagrees with me. But just because I have no experience with focus groups doesn’t mean I don’t have a strong opinion about them. Here’s my biggest. They are always, by definition, a committee.

And my feelings on committees are well documented. Maybe the kind Producers will include a link to my rant on committees somewhere, perhaps at the end, or maybe right. My committee speech is a favorite of Roy Williams and Ken Goodrich and many other outstandingly smart people. The committee itself has many problems inherent to their existence, but the one that I think applies most to focus groups is this one.

A committee cannot come up with a good idea. It can only shoot down ideas it thinks are bad. You don’t get a lot of, “Hey, great idea! This is going to be the best plan ever! Can’t miss!” What you’ll get is, “Well, here’s why that won’t work. Better not do that. Someone might be offended”.

Somebody might be offended. Well, I got some news for you. In this day and age, somebody might be freaking offended by anything. And if you make your plans based on ensuring no one is offended, then by definition you’re building nothing of consequence. People were offended by the Eiffel f****** tower, for crying out loud. Your marketing ideas don’t stand a chance. More than anything, the committee wants to look good to the rest of the committee.

Problem with your plan, your campaign, or your marketing in general. Every member of your committee, sorry, focus group is going to be clamouring to be the one to spot it. The one who can arrogantly prove that you’re an idiot and don’t even know your own business. He’ll be the first one to speak up. I’m smarter than you. I’m the smartest one in the room. How do I know? Because I’m the one who found your mistake. That’s what every member of your focus group is thinking. There’s something wrong with this thing, and it’s my job to find it. After all, if you just agree that it’s great, well, why bother having you here in the first place?

It’d be a waste of your time and our client’s money. So, you want to believe he’s going to find something about your idea that sucks and make it clear that you f***** up. And you actually expect these people to help you find a solution? Don’t bother. Running your idea by a focus group will only scare people away from doing something innovative, something unusual, something remarkable, something risky.

Those are the things that disrupt markets and make people rich. The committee will protect you from all that. You’ve been warned.

Ryan: Mick Torbay everyone. Smart by proximity. I think it’s safe to say that you were definitely not raised by a committee because you offend everyone. That’s why I love you, buddy. Chris, can you tell us why you’re so much better than your brother?

Night and day, really. I think I know who the evil twin is now. Well, what do you have to say about all these people up in your business?

Chris: People love to crap on focus groups. Me especially. But they do have specific things that they’re good at. Consumer insights, for example. before you create a marketing campaign, learn all you can about your customer and the customer experience, and see if there’s something that you can tap into.

Ask a focus group. And while you can’t ask them whether they think a new ad idea is good, you can do a disaster check. We all get too close to our own work every now and then, and you can check it against real people. If Chevrolet had focus-grouped the Nova before they launched it in Brazil, they would have learned that “Nova” means “doesn’t go” in Portuguese.

A simple focus group in China would have revealed that “Coke adds life” had been mistranslated into “Coke brings your ancestors back from the dead.” Disaster check.

The problems arise when people try to use them for the things that they are not good at. And the biggest thing people fail to appreciate about focus groups is that they cannot create. Think about it. It’s 1950, and you ask a focus group if you should put baking soda in your freezer. They’ll look at you like you’re an idiot. “Baking soda is for making cakes. It makes all those light, fluffy bubbles. Why would I put it in my freezer?” The focus group would crush that idea. They can only answer based on everything they’ve heard before.

What you need to do is advertise, “baking soda absorbs freezer odours. Oh, really? Okay, I didn’t know that. Maybe I’ll buy some and give it a go.”

You can’t ask them if it’s a good idea. You have to tell them it’s a good idea. And you especially can’t go into a focus group hoping for some sort of marketing flashbulb moment.

Sure, there are apocryphal stories of respondents who said something in a focus group and it was awesome. Some copywriter wrote it down and a new campaign was born, what luck! But the three times in history where that may or may not have happened, doesn’t mean you can expect it from your focus group. You need to bring the ideas, or you need your advertising people to bring the ideas.

You can’t ask consumers if a bunch of people shouting, “What’s up!” is a good way to sell beer. They’ll say, no, you should talk about how yummy the beer is. You can’t ask consumers if a little CGI gecko with a British accent is a good way to sell insurance. They’ll say, “no, you should talk about the features and benefits of your insurance.”

You can’t ask a focus group if it’s a good idea to remove the keyboard from your BlackBerry and make your cell phone one giant screen, you have to show them the iPhone. And even then it’ll take them a couple of years before they realize that that’s what they actually need. Focus groups can only answer based on the obvious things that they’ve already been told. You can’t expect brilliant marketing ideas from a room full of random people who have nothing better to do on a Thursday night than hang out with you, and listen to marketing ideas for three hours and make 50 bucks.

Ryan: It is so abundantly clear that we did not run a focus group before launching this podcast. Definitely not disaster checked. Definitely not. Stay focused. How do committees water things down?

Mick: Committees just, they pull you from the side of interesting or unusual and they pull you towards what they are comfortable with. And what they are comfortable with, it’s like what Chris is saying, it’s what they’ve already seen.

The only thing they know for sure is what has worked in the past, so they will say. “Well, the leader does this, you know, the successful brands do that. So maybe that’s what you should do.” And they mean well, it’s important to note. And you get this from my committee rant is that the committee is not evil. The committee is not trying to wreck your ideas or wreck your business. They are in fact, trying to try to help you. But that doesn’t change the fact that what they’re going to do is they’re going to bring you to the center and people in the center do not stand out.

Your job as a marketer, or your job as a business person, is to make it easy for the consumer to separate you from your competitors. What we want is in their brain to say, well, there’s, there’s my brand and then there’s all the other ones over here. So stand out. Well, standing out scares committees because by definition, standing out is risky and you don’t know if it’s gonna work. So they’re gonna say, “well, this might not work.” Again, meaning well, trying to help you, but they’re gonna f*** it up, even though they’re trying to.

Chris: And the interesting thing, and you touched on this, the difference between focus groups and committees is that actually there may be some people in the focus group who are evil or whose interests are separate from helping you.

And that is the people who are there to look like they’re the smartest guy in the room. It’s interesting in the focus group world, and this happened on a number of occasions at focus groups, there is a mechanism for how you get those people out of the room. Because it happens quite frequently.

You see, you get one disruptor, you get one guy who’s like Mr. Opinion, no one’s ever asked his opinion on anything else. And here he is, and he’s going to unload you know a decade’s worth of irritants on you guys. And he’s going to hijack the whole thing. And anytime somebody says, “Yeah, see, that’s another stupid one”. And what it does is the shy people then shut down, and nobody wants to say the opposite because this guy’s going to go off on a tear. So even though there’s a person in the corner who goes, “Well, I actually kind of thought it was pretty funny”, you know, if this guy’s crapping on everything, and so there’s a mechanism where we can communicate with the moderator and, you know, they’ll go in and they’ll tell him he’s got a phone call or something like that. And they’ll usher him out of the room and he magically won’t come back. But it happens in focus groups so often that that’s in fact, built into the thing because of that Smart Aleck disrupter thing is very common. And that’s someone who’s not got your best interest in heart. He’s got his own soapbox at heart

Mick: Well, and there’s no reason to believe that the noisiest person in the room is necessary.

Chris: Exactly. And a good moderator will, you know, shut those people off. “Thanks, Dave. We’ve heard from you a few times. I don’t know. Does anybody think the opposite? Does anybody think, you know, something else” you know. But, again, then you’re starting to get into this, is that a leading question then if you try and, if you try and make it sound like Dave’s, you know, so this is where the science is out the window. You know, it’s really just a bunch of people talking.

Ryan: But it’s, you know, I’ve tweeted about creativity. It doesn’t begin at the things you already do know. It begins at the things that you don’t. And for us to be truly creative, we have to be able to go past what we already are comfortable with. And outside of that comfort zone, there is not going to be creativity in a comfort zone.

Mick: Well, “I don’t know,” should be the basis of every major decision when you’re doing something new. I mean, whoever invented Uber must have said, do you really think we could build a business where just random people can just pick you up and take you to work because they’re kind of going that way anyway? And the answer is I don’t know. There was no path to connect those dots.

It’s the people who, acknowledge the “I don’t know” and say and I’m going to give it a shot anyway, because I got a hunch, although I have no data to back it up, let’s do it. Those are the people who are tremendously successful, and tremendously wealthy. You actually have to try a thing that you don’t know if it’s going to work. If all you ever do is what’s been done, especially by the leader, if all you ever do is that, then you can’t beat him, right?

Chris: You can be identical to the leader.

Mick: Yeah. Except that the leader’s got a headstart, so you probably can’t even match that person. So your best case is to be number two. Well, that’s not why you went into business. You went into business to be the guy. Well, you have to do something new.

Ryan: This really ends up being fundamentally one of the big issues with collaborating with private equity groups when you have a business where you are the brave soul, decision maker and now shift to a committee group of thinking. We start to lose courage and we start to lose the creativity that made you the company you were in the first place.

Mick: Well, and if there’s one thing that a committee that’s involved in the money is going to try to avoid is risk, they’re more afraid of risk than there are hopeful that you’re going to come up with something different. I mean, especially if you’re dealing with a private equity group that has more than one brand in the same category, then they kind of are going to look at the whole, their whole portfolio of companies within a category and say, okay, well, we’re all doing this. And if we’re all doing this, it ain’t that interesting. It’s not that interesting.

Chris: And if that is doing mediocre for them then, if you want to be the one in that group who tries something else, it’s like well, there’s a risk of it could not work as mediocre as that, or it could work better. They’ll settle for the mediocre. They are so risk-averse and so you’re never going to get better than the mediocre because you’re never going to give a shot to the one who says, “Well, I got it. Why don’t we try this?”

Mick: Yeah, I mean, that’s, why we have chain restaurants, right? I mean, no one will ever say that the freaking Olive Garden has the best Italian food in town. But we know it won’t be that bad — it won’t be that good — but at least they’re going to give us the breadsticks and the salad and the macaroni is going to be, there’s gonna be a lot of it. So yeah, I think we’re probably more motivated by fear than by hope, sadly. Especially when we’re making business decisions. And so that’s why that idea arises, but also understand that if you’re aiming for the middle, like those people, you will never be the top dog.

Chris: You know what, to jump in on fear too, cause it just occurred to me that’s where the damage gets done by focus groups when it comes to selling good work to the client. And again, when you’re behind the glass with the client, you’ve got some stuff that your focus grouping. It’s that moment of client fear when somebody in the focus group says something and they go, “Oh, geez, really” right? And I’ve, we’ve talked about this one before. I worked on Budweiser. I worked on a lot of different beer brands and sometimes you focus group something, maybe a casting choices, or something like that. And all you need is one guy to say, I don’t know, does that guy look gay to you? And boom, you know, the question could be, no, what are you talking about?!

Mick: No, this is in the 90’s, keep in mind we’re talking about the 90’s.

Chris: But like that fear is like, “Oh, geez, we don’t want to do that.” And suddenly, even if the answer is no, because some person, one person asks it, that fear, you know, takes over the client and suddenly we’re not talking about the right ideas anymore.

We’re not, we’re not even answering the question. Yes or no. It’s just as soon as there’s that reaction. And it’s interesting. This is why often what happens in focus groups is you bring in five commercial ideas to focus group. Why? Because you know, people are going to lob hand grenades at three of them and you got to have two left over. You wouldn’t go in with one idea and say, let’s focus group this idea because if somebody says something that just makes the client, you know, get squirrely. Now what do you do? And so that’s why there are five different ideas, because you know, a couple of them are just going to get a bullet in them.

Mick: Well, and of course, most people don’t have the budget.

Chris: Yeah, exactly. If you’re a big beer brand, do it, they can afford to. They’ve got an entire agency full of people throwing their ideas against the wall to see if something sticks.

Mick: Multiple storyboarding building like five different ideas and which one sticks.

Ryan: As I went down the holes of committees and focus groups, group think really came up as the predominant underlying burden.

Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon where the desire for harmony and conformity within the group leads to irrational or dysfunctional decision-making.

And when you start looking through the pros and the cons of groupthink, you’ve got quick decision-making, team cohesion, and less conflict, you get a clear direction fairly quickly. But you, and you also as Chris mentioned, have that potential for crisis aversion, but the drawbacks end up being this poor decision quality, like dramatically poor decision quality.

The suppression of actual creativity, iteration and innovation. Overconfidence in risky behavior becomes statistically quite significant here, where people are both protective, but also a little bit sociopathic in the way that they think things because they disconnect from the moral and ethical guidelines that guide us in the path that we should choose that is virtuous rather than the thing that is most profitable.

We see this all the time as larger companies become larger. There’s also this astounding failure to adapt. So when we start to look at all of these significant things that are affecting whether or not we should rely on the committee or not, the data in groupthink clearly articulates that groupthink is far more harmful than it is beneficial. And while we think we’re decisions by collaboration, we’re usually coming up with decisions that end up being incredibly harmful for the actual overall solution, be it too watered down, boring, and benign and safe, you know, ads that are written not to offend rather than to persuade. For example, product ideas that sound good on paper, like New Coke, but then don’t get executed properly in the overarching process.

Chris: An interesting one, right? Like, don’t kid yourself. New Coke was focus-grouped. I’m sure there were tests. I’m sure there was all kinds of stuff. I’m sure that’s how they came up with the new formula, right? The whole reason there was New Coke is that the Pepsi challenge was happening for years and years and years. And, winning.

Mick: And they kept losing every time.

Chris: Because it was ever so slightly, sweeter, and so in a back-to-back, people would go for that one. So Coke said, well, why don’t we make ours ever so slightly sweeter, and we’ll change the recipe. Well, you know they, they focus group the recipe a bunch of times. I mean, nobody releases a consumer food or beverage, without taste-testing it with focus groups. So you know there’s a bunch of people in focus groups who said, “Yeah, actually, yeah, no, that’s nicer. I think I’d go with the new one. Yeah, that’s nicer.”

But the focus group didn’t have the foresight either to say “You are shattering one of America’s greatest and longest-standing icons. How dare you?” And so there’s a disaster check that you would have expected a focus group to catch and they don’t catch it.

Mick: Yeah, I think in that case, the focus group actually caused the problem because I’m absolutely certain that they would have kept testing different recipes until they could consistently do the Pepsi challenge with this new thing and people would actually prefer the new Coke.

What they didn’t count on is that there’s a slightly irrational thing the thing that they like actually chooses a thing they don’t like the best for other brand reasons.

Which is why if I say to you, name a hamburger restaurant, you’ll come up with one answer. And if I ask you who makes the best hamburger in town, you’ll give me another answer. So one of those businesses is more successful than the other and it’s not the one with the best-tasting hamburger.

But another thing that sort of bothers me about focus groups is that I’m convinced that all the people in the focus group are still suffering from the same thing that scares us all, the fear of being wrong. Nobody wants to be wrong. When you’re in a focus group, you’re in a room with a bunch of strangers, okay? There’s a lot at stake here and what you don’t want to be is wrong. So now your whole thing is based on fear. You don’t wanna look stupid, you don’t want to say the wrong thing, and you don’t wanna lead these people down the wrong path.

Everything about it is not hopeful, not optimistic. All the people on the other side of the glass are like, “Ooh, I hope they love my idea. I hope they love my idea”. And the client’s like, “I hope this is really gonna work. I really hope this is really gonna work”. And meanwhile, every single person in the thing is like, “I hope I don’t miss the thing.”

Chris: That I’m supposed to catch.

Mick “And I’m the one who thought it who said it was okay, and it turns out it ends everything.” You know, that’s a natural human characteristic, but that switches it from a hopeful attitude to a fearful attitude and that screws everything out.

Ryan: Well, you do shift you a thriving mindset to a surviving mindset in that regard, where you do batten down the hatches. You take cover and you get out of the way.

This does go back to the 9-10 core elements of motivation. We’re demotivated by fear, shame, and guilt. We’re anti-motivated when it’s internalized by ourselves, but we’re all trying to drive towards that identity within the group that we’re subjected to. In this case, an unknown group. But how do I think about myself? How do I think about myself from a ranking class within this group? Whether or not I’m smart or stupid in this group, how do I position myself within the tribe? Where do I rank? And everything comes back to identity.

These core motivators that drive us to do the things that we do, be it externally influenced through the praise of other people or the payback, you know, paying attention, paying with money, paying with time. And the power that one perceives, both of themselves and the group within the group and outside of the group, how they did after they leave the group and then tell their immediate family, their family, their workmates, all of these people who are looking at them going, “Oh, you were smart in that. You’re good. Oh, you made something, you did something of relevance and rank, rank, rank.” This is all about identity. And we can’t lose sight of the identity, the committee that sits in our head.

I recently read a book called No Bad Parts, and No Bad Parts is basically about all the different voices that are in your head saying, Hey, do it this do that way. I believe in this. I believe in that. And there’s the managers, the firefighters, there’s the inner child, there’s all of these different voices telling us and dictating to us, whether or not we’re performing or not we’re performing to their satisfaction.

Mick: Do you have a lot of voices inside your head?

Ryan: A lot of them. A number of voices in my head. Yes, yeah. I really do try to, ignore the chairman of the board, my ego, who is, is basically the voice of everyone saying, this is what we’re gonna do.

As egos often do and that in itself is something to recognize when we start thinking about committees and how we’re fitting into the external world,  because that external world is something that we’re trying to gain traction and rank in, but we’re equally as much to do that in ourselves.

We’re trying to reconcile our worth within ourselves, to propel us forward, whatever that looks like for different people. And there’s voices in there saying, Hey, sometimes they’re saying you’re not worth it. And sometimes they’re saying that person is trying to steal your thing. And some people are saying, “Ooh, that guy thinks, you know, that this is a bad thing. you should, you know, fall in line so that you don’t worry about it.”

Mick: But if you’re in that room and there’s eight people in the room and seven of them are saying this sucks, even if you love it, you’re not going to say anything. Because you don’t want seven people looking at you going, sucker. He fell for this shit. The rest of us all know that this is no good. Whereas that person might be the most insightful.

Ryan: We’ve seen the science experiment very often where a group, a person, is put into a group of actors within the actual group, and the actors will all do things that are quite clearly the wrong thing to do. By the third action, that person typically will fall in line and start following the same actions.

Mick: Like if they get into an elevator and people are facing the wrong way.

Chris: They’ll turn around.

Mick: Yea, that’s a really good one because we all face this way, but if all the people are facing the other way, they will eventually turn around. They can’t handle it.

Ryan: Exactly. We are influenced by that committee and that group. And, I see the brave souls, the people who are really, really, the ones who break out, Malcolm Gladwell calls it the Outliers, these are the people who tend to really shine because they are zigging when everyone else is zagging.

Mick: Wrapping up the whole idea, if you think of anything great that you’ve ever written, anything great that’s really moved the needle, you can pretty much guarantee that a focus group would not have gone for it.

Yeah. Right. You and I’ve talked about that. Well, we’ll write a campaign or an ad and we’ll go, Oh my God, you know, this is such a great ad. Focus groups will throw it out just like that. Because why? Because there are so many reasons to throw it out. Like there are so many obvious flaws with this particular message, or this particular campaign. Where it would be so easy, like you did a campaign where for three months, you didn’t mention the name of the client. I mean, do you think someone on the focus group would have said, “I’m sorry. Who’s this for again?”

“Well, we’re not telling you, that’s the whole point.” We’re going to entertain people and make them remember the guy, but not remember the name of the client. And only then are we going to reveal it.

Well, the focus group would tear that to shreds. And it was a ridiculously successful campaign. And the fact that you didn’t mention the client was only one thing wrong with it.

Chris: And other things were wrong about it too – on purpose.

Mick: But it was all strategic. It was all done with full knowledge that this is breaking the rules of advertising. 

If you break the rules of advertising, and you break it well, and you break it on purpose for a reason, you can do incredible things. And you can become a leader. You can, you can beat the crap out of a leader, who’s simply a leader because no one else has dared challenge him.

Ryan: Before we go, let’s talk about three ways to replace the committee with healthier solutions.

Another fascinating conversation, gentlemen today. Skip the committee, trust in yourself, most a few close trusted advisors. Gather all the data together and make the assessment together. Embrace the complaints. They’re a sure sign that you’re doing things right. You need to get attention to persuade people and complaints are a sure sign that you’re actually getting the attention that you’re looking for because no one says positive things. They’re always going to gravitate to negative things to bring those up.

Fire the ego as the chairman of the board of the committee that’s inside your head and open up a direct, kind and patient dialogue with your inner child.

To avoid groupthink, groups should actively seek diverse viewpoints. Appoint a devil’s advocate and encourage open dialogue to ensure that the decisions are robust and informed. It’s not about ignoring advice from your company of people. It’s far more about sharing information, gathering feedback from a diverse group, and making a courageous decision independent of the watering-down process. Once decided, don’t dilute it.

This has been another episode of Advertising in America. Thanks for putting us on as background while you do something more important.  Until next time.

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