Contrary to conventional wisdom, failure is the best teacher, while success is misleading. One of my favorite quotes is by Bill Gates: “Success is a lousy teacher; it seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” To elaborate, let’s consider this: Suppose you are a reputable CEO in a global company and your marketing officer committed a mistake in branding your major product that costs the company millions of dollars. How would you react?
In the early 1980s, Pepsi-Cola was gaining ground from Coca-Cola both locally and globally. To regain market leadership, Sergio Zyman was appointed in 1984 as the Head of Marketing at Coca-Cola Company. He started launching Diet Coke that made a huge success in terms of branding and sales. That success encourages him to come up with a new formula for Coke. Thus he introduced the new formula under a new brand name – New Coke. Misled by the success of Diet Coke, Zyman believed that the New Coke will sell like hell, made him stop producing the old and well-positioned version of Classic Coke.
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The result of this New Coke campaign was a disaster. The loss was a $100 million that costs Coca-Cola a huge loss in terms of market share besides Costing Zyman his job. He left the company in 1987. It took the company and Zyman seven years to investigate what went wrong and what needs to be done. In 1993, the company summoned Zyman once again as a chief marketing officer of the company. The result was a historic outburst in sales under Zyman’s leadership. Coca-Cola Classic became a huge hit with a dominating market share worldwide. Zyman’s bounce back, in five years, has helped Coca Cola to increase sales by fifty percent; selling fifteen billion cases a year instead of ten billion.
Failure and success are not polar opposites, but rather a transformative process. By identifying the root causes of failure and resisting the temptation of blaming others and being in charge, make learning accessible. Only then a new version of YOU is capable of attracting success.
