Sometimes you get so mired in your own thoughts and ideas, you fail to recognize what’s right in front of you. Last Halloween, we had a pumpkin carving contest at work. My department (Marketing) won against Sales, Customer Service and the Warehouse teams. We’re marketing creative and cool is what we do. Then, two months later we had a gingerbread house building party. Once again we were wildly creative but lost out to the Customer Service team. I figured we paid the Marketing Penalty that we couldn’t win everything, and like our annual awards, it’s pretty much participation and who would win “this time”. We’d built an awesome gingerbread house with a snowy lawn and a drunken snowball fight between snowmen and gingerbread men. I was disappointed we didn’t win, but whatever …
Marketing
We missed the pumpkin carving this year, but they resurrected the gingerbread house contest. One of my newer coworkers was appointed captain by our boss and she promptly picked a beach theme. The team worked on this all week. We planned, plotted, decorated, expanded and (we thought) knocked it out of the park. We brought our creation out of the lab and scoped out the competition. It wasn’t even close (in our minds) we had this with totally creative and out of the box thinking and design.
Marketing
Well, Customer Service won again.
We were stunned. Their entry was pretty, but ours was EPIC. I figured they were just playing nice with the Customer Service team that always takes shit and has a tough job. Marketing and Sales get all the accolades and awards, the travel and the perks, so let CS have this? That was all I could think. Our Captain decided to dig further, whereas the rest of us had simply shrugged our shoulders and given up. She decided to find out what the “scorecard” was. Once she had that information it became very clear why the CS team had one and we had lost. We had this “post-Christmas Santa getaway Beach house” theme, which wasn’t what the judges were looking for at all. They were judging on “how Christmasy it was” which ours really wasn’t and “how nice the piping was” we didn’t have any piping. That was the eye-opening moment for me. We didn’t know where the goal post was, how the hell were we ever going to make the shot? Instead of looking for what the judges wanted, we gave them what we wanted, and as a result, we lost. It was an epiphany moment because that would relate to our work as well. Instead of pushing what WE want on our customer, we need to really dig to find out what the customer WANTS that’s the only way to win.
So, next year, before we take a knife to pumpkin or icing to gingerbread, I’m going to find out what it’s going to be judged on, and do THAT.
