"I was once working on a large account where the client had been using the same strategies for a very long time. Their marketing team was all hard-to-convince, tenured employees who had success in the past. But as times were changing, they were losing traction. They didn't know what to do because it seemed their product remained the same, and as did their audience, but they were losing market share. They had been advertising on the same channels forever and somehow; they failed to notice their audience spending time on new platforms and adapting to new technologies. Rather than try to convince my clients with presentations, pie charts, and the traditional means, I gathered them together for interactive discussions. They all filled out forms about major purchases they'd made over the past five years, then shared them out loud. What we found from their stories was that in their personal lives, they had been receptive to new technology. For some reason, however, they believed their customers had not. Through this exercise, I connected them to the hard data I had to present and convinced them it was time to try new things."
