Clear a path to your goals

Get in touch

We're Avapond. We're like business detectives: we challenge your assumptions, figure out the real culprit standing in your way, and build whatever you need to get there.

We're Avapond. We're like business detectives. Challenge your assumptions. Figure out the culprit. And build whatever you need to get there.

Some of the people we have worked with

  • Cancer Research UK
  • Capital One
  • Telefónica
  • GameAnalytics
  • Runware
  • Geo
  • LinearB
  • Gameye
  • Odeeo
  • Coda
  • Coding Dojo
  • Porto Bristol
ViewingOur thinking
List view
Blog 6 min read

No one gives a $#!+ about your opinion

Sarah Impey Marketing Director and Consultant

Every review room has a Harry: the senior voice who says "I'm not sure about the purple" and calls it feedback. Here’s why that could cause you to keep making the same mistakes. Over and over and over. (And what you can say instead.)

Contents

Has your feedback ever looked similar to this?

In your eyes, you’re giving solid advice. But in reality, you’re sharing vague, non-descriptive feedback and comments that give almost nothing to the original creator. I’ve been in marketing about ten years — and I’ve sat in a hell of a lot of review meetings — but the ones that stick with me are the ones where weeks of work just unravelled in under a minute. Where the work goes up, and the most senior person leans back and says, "I don’t like purple."

This scenario is much more common than you might think. Even the biggest of businesses and agencies fall victim to this issue. Giving feedback is a skill in itself, and takes time to perfect.

But it’s easy to overcome.

The “vague feedback” bingo card

Be honest, have you ever said one of the following?

  1. "Can we make it pop?"

  2. "I showed it to my husband and he didn't really get it."

  3. "Can we see it in blue as well?"

  4. “I’m not really sure about this”

  5. "It just doesn't feel very us."

  6. "The name reminds me of my old boss's dog."

  7. "Can we make it punchier?”

  8. "It feels a bit generic.”

  9. "Something about the tone isn't landing.”

  10. "I'll know it when I see it.”

  11. “Just come up with some more ideas.”

  12. "This isn't quite hitting the mark for me.”

  13. “I don’t really like this colour.”

Subjective opinions aren’t helpful. We’ve all done it at some point in our careers and even our personal lives. I’d throw a book at my husband if I asked him for his opinion while redecorating and he replied with “Hmmm… I’ll know when I see it”.

So stop it.

When it comes from a person of authority, it becomes gospel

When you start inputting your personal opinion, your team stops asking whether it hits the brief and starts asking whether you'll go for it. I’ve even heard it in the last few months, a talented designer said: “I think this is what John wants” rather than “Does this work as an ad?”

That’s the power of your position. No one wants to be seen disagreeing with the boss. Especially when you make it personal.

In fact, Kluger and DeNisi's meta-analysis found that more than a third of feedback interventions made performance worse. Basically, feedback backfires when it points at the person instead of the task.

This bleeds anxiety into your team

Looking deeper into Kluger and DeNisi’s analysis, the type of feedback you give can even do more damage than good. When sharing an opinion, rather than constructive feedback, it’s easy for the creator to take it personally. It can threaten their self-esteem and ultimately their performance. Even praising them can cause bad results.

So you want to remove the person and focus completely on the piece of content itself. Now, you’re working together to fix a problem, rather than playing the blame game. Language also plays a very important role here (but more on that later).

Your opinion probably isn’t even right (no offence)

The new product name your brand team recommended could remind you of your kid's dog, or of a bloke you couldn't stand at your last job (talking about you, Jerry). That reaction is real. But nobody out there, in the real world, cares what it reminds you of.

Whether you like it was never the question. The actual questions you’re answering look like this:

  • Does it appeal to our target audience?
  • Does it sound like our brand?
  • Does it convey the message we’re trying to say?
  • Will people understand it?
  • Does it conflict with what our competitors are doing?

Remember, you are not your audience

Psychologists call this the false consensus effect: you assume your preferences are the same as your customers. Marketers are especially affected by it. Research in the Journal of Marketing Research ran six studies across 714 marketing executives and found that when they weren't sure what customers wanted, they substituted their own taste. In the first of those six studies, 86.6% of the 100 executives involved admitted they'd done exactly that, recently.

Eighty-six per cent. These are people whose entire job is telling the difference between their taste and their strategy. If they can't do it reliably, the rest of us have no chance without something to check ourselves against.

Being in the target market doesn't get you out of it either. You've seen the work a dozen times, signed off on the brief, and you know the strategy behind it. Your customer gets half a second on a phone while the kettle boils.

How to give feedback, like a boss

1. Start with the brief

Your brief is the true foundation. It answers the what, why, who, when and how. Once it's signed off, that's what you check the work against, not your mood that day. I always go back to it before giving feedback, just to remind myself what we actually agreed.

Projects can run for months. It's easy to forget the details, so it's worth doing the same before you comment. And if a piece of work needs a genuinely big change, that's rarely the designer's fault. More often, the brief has changed, and nobody's said so.

Our advice? Whenever I present something back, I open by reminding everyone what we agreed and why. It gets the room looking at the same thing, and if the brief has shifted, we find out before the meeting turns into an afternoon spent on something that doesn't matter anymore.

2. Restructure your feedback

Structure your feedback like this: "This [thing] works (or doesn't work) because [reason]." If you can't finish the sentence, you've caught yourself before a reaction became an instruction.

  • [thing]: forces you and the creator to analyse the work.
  • (works or doesn’t work): forces you to be critical.
  • [because]: forces you to give a reason. Something the creator can work with.

Instead of "I don’t like purple," try: "Purple doesn’t work because… it doesn’t align with our audience. We're going after a value-conscious customer, and purple says luxury, not affordable." The second one opens a constructive conversation. The first can only be obeyed.

3. Point to the problem, not the fix

Neil Gaiman put it well:

"When people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong."

Your gut is data. "The purple makes me flinch" is real information someone can use. You can offer a suggestion, just frame it as optional: "Blue could work better here, because [reason], but if you land on something better, run with that." Specific on the problem, specific on a possible fix, with enough room left for someone to find a better one.

Your designers and writers have spent years perfecting their craft. The likelihood is, they’ll land on a much better fix than something you put together in five minutes.

Your thoughts do matter

None of this means sitting there quietly while an agency or team does whatever they fancy. You know your business better than anyone in that room, and nine times out of ten there's a decent reason buried underneath "I'm not sure about the purple." Dig it out before you say it, so you hand your team something to build with.

P.S. If you hadn’t guessed it, I don’t really like the colour purple. Thankfully, it doesn’t work for our brand.

If this sounds like your business

We’ve seen this problem happen more times than we can count. The strategy's fine, the team's good, the budget's there, but somewhere in the review process the brief got swapped for somebody's personal taste. Nobody notices it happening, which is exactly why it keeps happening. A fresh pair of eyes could be all you need to spot this problem.