"You Failed"

That's something no one wants to hear. We dread failure and more so talking about it. In public we prefer sweeping our failures under the rug, while no one is watching. But this will not help the culture of innovation for an organisation or individual.

An old saying goes "Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan". What if we flipped that idea and start not just admitting our wrong steps but celebrating them and sharing what we learned from them? That's the idea behind the suggestion of quarterly failure report, a useful tool for marketing leaders and digital enthusiasts who are trying to in stil a culture of growth and innovation. The quarterly failure report has two goals.

•The first is to share what has been learned. Failure is a fact of life for innovators, and every flop represents a fact uncovered. Sharing those defeats in a routine way promotes institutional memory, ensuring history will be less likely to repeat itself. The losses don't have to be huge; they can be tests of buttons, imagery, or call-to-actions as well as more ambitious tests of user flow at checkout or new features.

•The second goal is to reinforce the culture of failing and learning fast. Whether sharing successful experiments or highlighting the duds and lessons learned, strive

for simplicity. The more digestible the information, the more likely people will learn from it.

As digital marketer one has to
1.continuously try new things
2.keep pace with the world
3.experiment with the smallest of the attributes
4.arrive at conclusions which are beneficial for the brand .

Each of these experiments will result in various levels of failures. Getting disciplined on the capturing of the learning from each of these failures is all the more important for this breed of professionals.

An experiment gone wrong doesn't have to mean someone goofed. In a culture of growth, it should mean that you tried something new, measured the results, and learned that the change didn't help the bottom line. If your tests are always successful, you're probably not testing often enough or aggressively enough. Like it is said "The hand that makes fewer mistakes is the hand that does not work".

Still, it's important that failures, like testing itself, be directed and carefully measured. Before you start issuing a quarterly failure report, make sure you've trained everyone on best practices for driving growth through testing and experimentation. You should have clear, repeatable frameworks and methodologies for testing that everyone can (and does) follow.

No one knows anything until they test. That's one of the basic truths of the digital world, and it's a compelling reason for testing everything. When you take that mantra a step further and begin celebrating failures, there are no orphans and, ultimately, everybody wins.

Getting disciplined on the capturing of the learning from each of the failures is all the more important for this breed of professionals

Creating a culture of growth should rank at the top of a digital marketers' 2017 plans, but the best way to go about, is by instituting a "Quarterly Failure Report" in 2017— a progressive way to shift from how marketer's worked and grew before.