Have your clients handed you lemons?

It happens all the time. You expect your client to green-light you on Project A, and they suddenly describe Project Pi. Huh? You’re all ready to start on an initiative they’ve already approved, when they cancel it. Change it. Or tell you to do something that flies in the face of everything you know to be right. 
 
What do you do? 
 
You might as well be armed for these situations in advance, because they crop up continually. In this article, we’ll explore some variations on this theme; we’ll trace the issue to its roots; and we’ll give you some pointers for turning those lemons into crisp, refreshing lemonade. 
 
What could possibly go wrong?
 
We recently wrote a big brochure for a client and turned in the copy. That’s when they informed us that they’d changed their mind. They didn’t want a brochure anymore. They wanted something else. They’d already decided on it. But—ooops—they’d neglected to tell us. 
 
We know a client who made millions by promoting discounts for a certain offering. Then one day, the higher-up’s at this client enterprise said “No more discounts.” The one thing that worked was being yanked away. Our client was devastated. 
 
We must admit: Some of these changes are unfathomable. (Why did Apple, for example, after inventing and patenting an ingenious and unbreakable magnetic power-cord connector for its laptops, suddenly abandon it?) But as with most stories, there are two sides. 
 
How to react—or not
 
What makes these situations all the more painful is the inevitable feeling of surprise that accompanies them. How often have you felt blind-sided by a decision or policy change that’s beyond your grasp? It’s not uncommon. 
 
Thing is, these changes, more often than not, are based on a rationale. Now, what that rationale is, may not be immediately apparent. Hence the “blind-side.” 
 
But this gets to two crucial points about your tactical challenge: 
 
1. Don’t overreact. Whatever you do, don’t complain, push back, or argue. Manage your emotions. Take a deep breath. And do your best to listen: You need to hear the most at the exact time you’re likely to be tuning things out. 
 
If you’re really good, play it the other way. Act intrigued (“intrigued,” after all, isn’t too much of a stretch from “surprised”). Probe. Ask questions. Learn as much as you can. 
 
2. Find out the other side. This is the detail-digging you must do. Go on the assumption—even if it feels insane—that there is a reason for this surprise bombshell. Hey, every secret weapon is a surprise to its recipient, but you can rest assured that it was years in development beforehand. So try and learn more about the planning and thinking that went into this decision. Who was involved? What was the perceived problem they were trying to solve? Did they experience internal pushback when they first proposed it? Were other possibilities offered up? If so, what were they, and why were they passed over?
 
If you can “climb into the heads” of the people in the meeting that you’d missed, you can gain some real insights. Better yet, you can often build upon their ideas, making them better—for them and for you—since you understand their intentions, and can bring your own perspective and creativity to bear upon the same solution. 
 
Lemonade
 
What ever happened to that client who got their discounts discarded? They were unable to advertise any reductions in the pricing. At all.
 
But this led to an interesting question: What had happened to the original pricing? It doesn’t take a genius to realize that it had been somewhat inflated from the get-go; that’s the only way this company could offer such deep discounts and still make a profit. 
 
As if customers can’t figure that out anyway. (Would you ever pay full price, say, for a mattress, when you know they get discounted by about 50 percent nearly every single week?)
 
Back to the question—and its answer. 
 
Sure enough, senior leadership had decided to eliminate the inflated prices. And—get this—they replaced them with pricing that was, overall, lower. No sale needed! Crisis = opportunity. Now we were able to promote “New Everyday Low Pricing!” As it turned out, this company’s customers had grown conditioned to getting sales discounts—to the point where they wouldn’t buy anything until there was a sale. Now, they didn’t have to wait. They could buy whenever they liked, without having to wait, check for sales, or fear that today’s “10 percent off” wasn’t as good as next week’s “20 percent off.” 
 
And what about that big brochure that we wrote? Well, it was a tricky assignment, because this client offers two main services, but they needed to be given equal exposure across three panels of a trifold. 
 
The client changed the “trifold” concept to essentially a “bifold”: a big presentation jacket with inserts. Our copy was able to flow nicely into the new design, with only minimal tweaks. If we’d simply complained when we learned that there was a change, we sure would’ve looked foolish when we found out just how good that change turned out to be. 
 
Brighten up!
 
There’s always a silver lining to what seem like bad-news stories. The challenge is to not over-react, be patient, ask the right questions, and actively seek out the opportunities that the new scenario invariably holds. 
 
Need help with that next marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. 

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