Who hasn’t heard this one: new marketing manager or director joins a firm, and the first thing this person does is a repositioning and developing a new campaign. Everything needs to go into the bin. Whatever was there, is past tense and for sure isn’t going to help us succeed in the future.

It goes beyond this observation, even within running marketing teams, they decide to kill off campaigns. Why? Because they claim that the campaign doesn’t resonate with the key target audience, that its creative juices have been squeezed to the max, etc etc. Real reason is in most cases that the marketer is just bored with doing the same. That or doesn’t seem to be able to find the energy to pivot around the campaign idea to find new insights. Maybe just bored with doing the same.

Which is a shame. Not only do you throw away amazing amounts of costly work, in most cases you throw away a highly invested relationship with your agency as well. All to have a new entertaining story at Friday drinks.

Cause there a numerous big brands who still are running the same campaign idea for years and have been doing so very effectively. And obviously it’s not the case that you should just be complacent and sit back and air the same thing over and over. As a brand you need to evolve, innovate, whether it is in products, ways of campaigning or targeting new audiences.

Before you bin a campaign and the agency, ask yourself if you really have looked at your business from all directions, checked whether consumers are actually fed up with your campaign. Cause in most cases, they aren’t. I found doing consumer research many times people claiming to have seen a particular TV ad, which in fact had not aired for 5 years. Reason is that normal people aren’t involved with brands on a day to day, 24/7 basis as marketers do. They only start caring about your brand when they need to spot it on a shelf and are looking for those distinctive brand cues. Maybe I’m going to hurt a lot of people, but in most cases, your product just is not a high involvement product. It’s not the stuff that keeps most people awake at night. It’s jobs, kids, work, family. Not a potato crisp brand of a rugged outdoor vest. So, knowing this, please don’t fire your agency because you claim the campaign has run its course. People don’t get fed up with campaigns that quickly. Marketers do.