Michael Kaminsky discusses why companies fail at testing. The answer: you need a digitally-savvy C-level executive who can speak the language of both data and decision-makers, plus a CEO willing to trust them. Without that leadership alignment, fear kills experimentation and competitors who test faster will leave you behind.
Chapters
When I talk to people working at other brands, other companies, sometimes they have this desire to implement a system like what you're describing, but they run into roadblocks. People are very risk-averse, right? They would feel embarrassed if their experiment didn't yield positive results. Or the company is risk-averse in another way where they say like, okay, we have something that's working. We can't use some of our marketing spin for this experiment because it might be inefficient. How do you deal with that internally? Have those ever been questions? How did you get the whole organization to adapt this idea of embracing the risk that is inherent in experimentation?
I guess it's also something to do with our organizational structure or the way we are structured as a business. We have a guy placed at our C-level table who knows a lot about digital marketing and digital e-commerce. So he knows a lot about how you approach a digital business. And we really tapped into that. We are able to tell him what works from our standpoint, and he can actually take that to the decision table. And make sure that all the relevant people hear what he has to say. And also our CEO is really invested in having people around the table that is better than him to make the right decisions within the specific fields. So if my boss, Rasmus, goes to him and says, this is the right thing to do, he really truly believes that this is the right thing to do. And luckily Rasmus and I often agree, or do agree a lot, that if we don't test, we never become better. And then we will lose at some point because other companies are our competitors that do do testing, they will outrun us at some point because they'll figure out things faster than we will and be able to move faster at some point. So for us, it's very important that we never believe that we have the best setup or the best way to do things. It's only best practice until it's not. And if you don't test, you'll never find out when there is a better setup for you as a company.
