Marketing Bias - The Change for the sake of Change
How to spot and avoid make-work projects
It’s possible to be too close to your own business. You look at it everyday. Whether it’s your website, your store, your team or your solution; it’s easy to lose your customer’s point of view. You might find yourself bored with the look, the sound, or something about your brand and want to tinker. You gain a bias for change.
‘We should change the homepage’ was a fairly simple request that came to me one day. A simple statement with a lot of baggage and little reason.
Why? It looks old? To whom? Are your customers tired of the homepage or are you? How often are your customers actually coming to the site? Changing things for the sake of change causes disruption to priorities, fatigue with the team, and can sometimes mean you sacrificed an optimal experience for a poorer one.
“Why is this a problem Sean? Isn’t change good?”
Certainly it can be, but change is also expensive. Let’s take our homepage for example. We built the current one after several rounds of design, debate, copy and then a series of tests and improvements.
Here’s a shortlist of what’s in store for us:
Several rounds of discussion about what we want to change
Content strategy and UX
Wireframing and rough notes
Design mockups with numerous revisions
Copy production with edits
Development and deployment
All that just because we felt it was old. Think of the hours of labour invested in this that could have gone into other areas of higher leverage. Plus, any optimizations we did will have to be started again. Now, the homepage may truly have needed a redesign, but the decision should be justified.
There is another difficult to measure impact of change, which is the impact to the brand. Sometimes a new logo, colours or jingle feels like a way to bring energy to a brand, but it can kill years of established familiarity just to make someone in leadership feel good.
How to avoid this:
As a leader, be sure your decision is grounded in data and validation, not just a gut feeling. The data may show you there are weaknesses to improve. Customer insights may tell you there is a problem. Let this guide the discussion and use it to get buy-in from your team as to why they’re doing the work.
As a worker, if you’re not convinced this is a valid use of time, appeal to the data. Not just of the point of impact, but of the other pain points to address. Make-work projects are great opportunities to show leadership and propose more valuable things to improve. Use information to present a more valuable return for the investment. This way you’re not trying to kill someone’s idea, you’re just pushing it rationally further down the priority list.
From any point of view, ask for a second opinion from an expert. You might not have the data or expertise to provide the right insights, so leverage someone who does. Even if it’s external, it can often be far more affordable than a pile of work in the wrong direction.
Change for the sake of change happens a lot, and its consequence is impacting true priorities. I can’t tell you how many low-value ideas came across my desk, and I accept them all, investigate them and prioritize them to leadership. You may not always win these battles, but showing leadership grounded in effectiveness will be a win for your career.