When a client likes or dislikes something in advertising

In the communication industry, it is very common to hear this "I like" or "I dislike" expression from everybody, specially when making reference to their appreciation of a material or advertising piece that's been created.

We understand that whenever a client gives us his "I like", it's because many things have been carried out: previous agreements, a well-defined strategy and a planned objective. There's an aesthetics you both agree on and a creative expectation that fulfills the communication that will generate a response in a potential client. At least that is what I try to obtain from a client before venturing into carrying out a proposal. The "I like" expression thus, wants to recognize all those partial successes carried out, without having to name them individually.

On the other hand, the "I dislike" means that the performance of the piece has been poor, that the creative expectations weren't met, that we lost sight of the objective and that the strategy and communication agreements worked-on during many sessions, during which the need to create this material was expressed, were not assumed correctly.

Simple as pie.

This is how things would work in an ideal world, one at where we all handle the same concepts and a common education in terms of communication, marketing, design, strategy, and business. But the truth is, reality isn't like that. Most customers want to force their personal taste - or lack of it - over the market needs, and project their needs or aspirations into a piece of which they aren't -obviously- the recipients.

Unfortunately, when a client says "I don't like it", he is really expressing his dissatisfaction with something that evokes disharmony on him, in a subjective way, beyond the objective of a piece. And this gets even more complicated when the opinion of other people who do not have a background in communication (brief) is asked for, and they give their opinions outside of the platform, based on their personal tastes, disinformation and with a poor aesthetic education. This only gets confusing and creates chaos at the moment of the approval/disapproval of a material. This usually ends up in creating, what we call "a camel", which is a horse that has gone through many revision and opinions.

In other words, many alterations are made to the original proposal or proposals and, most of the times, with terrible results that look like an "alebrije" with no feet or head. And once the pieces are judged by friends and colleagues, these people will blame it on the agency and the creative staff, for sure, even though it was them who deformed the pieces by pure whim.

A very useful lesson that I cherish, and which I learned during my first years working as a creative is: "if I don't like it, it works". I have come to understand that it's not about my personal taste, it's about a practical material that works for a specific group of individuals (a specific market) who, for obvious reasons, have tastes and expectations very different from mine.

Obvious, a company director who was trained at the Ibero (prestigious Mexican University), and who has a business master at Harvard, has a very different aesthetic education to the potato-chips consumer for whom a poster is being designed, so we must put ourselves in the shoes of that potential client (target group or person) and put aside all our class prejudices to objectively look at the work done.

I hope that when whenever we use these expressions (I like or dislike) when approving/disapproving a marketing piece, we go beyond the subjective point of view and rather think of the recipient to whom the piece is directed. It is only then that we can elaborate a practical/objective judgment (not whimsy) about a work developed, for the sake of the brand for which we work, and the delight of our consumers.