Welcome to Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the world’s leading irreverent podcast for senior marketers who are tired of the polished corporate b*llshit.
Join Chris Norton and Will Ockenden, founders of the award-winning Prohibition PR, as they sit down with industry leaders to dissect the career-ending f*ck-ups they’d rather forget. The show moves past any pretty vanity metrics to uncover the brutal, honest truths behind marketing disasters, from £30,000 SEO black holes and completely failed companies, to social media crises that went globally viral for all the wrong reasons.
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He Asked for Honest Feedback. Then Never Spoke to Me
•Prohibition PR
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If you have ever watched a brilliant marketing strategy die in a sign‑off meeting, this episode is for you. We unpack the real reasons ideas fail in the boardroom and what senior marketers can do to read the room, create emotional buy in and keep stakeholders focused on what matters.
Faris Aranki, founder of Shear Ghetto Consulting and former top‑tier strategy advisor, explains his IQ x EQ x FQ model for success back in episode 96. IQ is the quality of your idea, EQ is your emotional intelligence and stakeholder awareness, and FQ is your focus quotient, the ability to prioritise and resist shiny‑object distractions. Miss any one pillar and your strategy stays on the hard drive.
So this show is all about mistakes. Yeah. What mistakes have you made then, Faris? You must have made a few in over the last 20 years in in strategy development. What have you properly screwed up? That'd be interesting to hear.
Faris Aranki
Oh, loads of things. Loads of things, Chris. Uh and I still screw up uh regularly. Um, you know, a lot of them come from
that in the early days of the EQ pillar. You know, so um I remember um early on in my career where I wasn't great at reading a room. Um and it I remember it was the first time I was uh given the sort of um responsibility to present to the senior client. You know, I was quite junior, and I my boss said, Okay, well, you've done all the hard work, you get up there, you present it. And my natural style back then was very jokey, very over-familiar. And I stood up in front of the C-suite room and started to tell, you know, apply that style. And the CEO looked up, and the first thing he said was, Who is this guy? He's not my friend. I didn't pay for him to be my friend. And my boss hooked me at that point. Okay, and I was gutted, and I was like, I've spent, you know, I rehearsed this, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, in the afterwards, he pulled me aside and he said, You did not have the emotional maturity to realise that you had just lost the crowd with your first opening statement. And and I just thought it was going to get worse for us. I know you were trying to be friendly, but this is not the audience to be friendly with. Right. So um it was a really important lesson about how you know you assume your style will work everywhere. Who who wouldn't like a friendly approach? Well, it turns out people who've paid a lot who are very direct and to the point do not want that in the room.
Will Ockenden
Did your boss salvage the um the presentation?
Faris Aranki
He did salvage the presentation, and the knock-on for me is I had to play a sort of more sort of backroom role uh for the for the you know, kind of as a penance because the the CEO did not like me at that point.
Will Ockenden
Is that the idea of um you you talked in the in the kind of pre-show briefing about the importance of not pissing off powerful people?
Faris Aranki
Is that an example of that's an example, but when I wrote that one, it was actually um do you know uh you know when people say, Hey, please give me any feedback, my door is always open. I made the night of mistake um a few years back where um I said to the the owner of the company that I worked at, the big big boss, he said, I just want some honest feedback about this this thing. And we were sat in a in a group atmosphere and everyone had gone around kissing his ass. And so I said, Hey, do you want honest feedback or do you want me to just be like these other people? Right, and say what you want to say. Already, I was like, and he said, honest feedback. So I then gave him honest feedback about this thing. And I was very happy with myself. I was like, Look at me, I'm the only one who did the honest feedback. Um, it turned out he didn't want honest feedback. Uh the next day, my boss came and said to me, Were you pissed? Let's call him Steve. Uh, you pissed Steve off. He's now um thinks you're not a team player. And I didn't realize at the point, but for the rest of my time in that company, that guy never spoke to me. Ever again. Um, and so I tell people, particularly who have come with different cultures and aren't aware of the British culture, I'll say, Don't trust somebody when they say, you know, hey,
my door is always open, uh, unless you have a level of trust. Or they say, Of course I want feedback, or they say, Yeah, sure, we'll go for a coffee. I like these are phrases that people use that they don't genuinely necessarily mean. You have to, it's that point about going back and double checking before you step into that. That'd be quite a good game to play. Um phrases that people use in business that they don't actually meet. Because there's that one where there's the this this uh there's the bingo, isn't there? What's that buzzword bingo where it's like let's touch base? Yeah, yeah. Let's touch base, yeah. Uh yeah.
Will Ockenden
Yeah, we'll we'll go for lunch.
Speaker
That's we'll go for lunch. Oh, that's interesting.
Faris Aranki
Interesting at all.
Chris Norton
I hope this email finds you well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is how that email finds me.
Faris Aranki
Ah I find this are particularly certain cultures very British in many ways. So, you know, I'm um I'm Arabic, um, and a lot of my Arab friends who haven't spent time in Britain find it very confusing. Uh and and and not just not just the Arabs, but many other uh things. So you know, particularly if you come from a very direct nation.
Will Ockenden
It's so it's so subtle though, isn't it? You know, that level of um that level of nuance is is so subtle. And can I just check? Did you deliver the honest feedback in front of the entire team as well?
Chris Norton
I did, yeah. Oh that's the that's that's there's the there's the problem, Faris. Isn't it they say praise to a team, praise to a group, criticize to an individual.
Faris Aranki
Yeah, that's that's a key. They did, they do. And and they also hand in hand that I've learned subsequently is if you have uh negative feedback, deliver it in uh uh verbally in person. Yeah. If you have positive feedback, even if you deliver it in person, follow it up in writing. Because human beings like to show off positive things to their friends and family. Right? Yeah, whereas
negative if you write negative things, A, they don't want to show it, but also it can be lost to that interpretation of you know what voice they read it.
Chris Norton
If everyone listening to this podcast now could just pull out their phone and write a positive review of how amazing this guest and we are, that would be great. If you don't if you don't like it, sorry. Don't don't write if you don't like it, ring us, don't write a review.
