Are your hyper-stretched targets a little too high?

It must be at least 30 years old by now. For the few who have not yet been exposed to this ugliest of acronyms, the BHAG stands for Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal.

BHAGs first came to my attention through my colleagues working on P&G in the 90s. They had been presented with a marketing BHAG and were kind of daunted and excited by it at the same time. I guess that was the idea.

But, importantly, a BHAG was new. It was unusual. It wasn’t just a stretch target, it was an audacious target, designed to get the client and the agency team thinking about what they might do differently to more significantly “move the needle”.

Nothing wrong with that.

However, now BHAGs no longer seem exceptional, but rather almost commonplace. And marketing BHAGs have forgotten about the laws of investment.

Introducing the FART

Over the years I’ve had multiple clients with ambitious marketing targets, again – nothing wrong with that per se – until you investigate how the goals were reached. In contrast to the 90s, nowadays there’s enough data science, research and econometric modelling to confidently predict, within a reasonable degree of accuracy and acceptability, what sort of return a marketer can expect from their investments. From that you can derive a stretch target and – if you must – an attainable BHAG. Many of my clients do routinely do this, as do most other brands. But more and more I have come across something else for which I’m coining my own acronym - the FART.

A FART is a Fanciful, Arbitrarily, Remote Target. One that is so far beyond stretch as to become abstract.  A FART pretends to be a BHAG, but for the arbitrary way it has been constructed.

Although FARTs are relatively easy to identify, they are treated as BHAGs and taken just as seriously.

FARTs’ most conspicuous features are: a large, round number (e.g. £10million, £1billion, 1 million customers), followed by a memorable neat date (by 2025, by 2030) etc. These numbers are not always together, but the first one is always the most prominent and it usually has a deadline.

The problem with FARTs

The most problematic part of a FART is the “A” for “arbitrarily”. “A” means a number has been summoned up by somebody – who almost always sits above those whose heads will be on the block if they fail – by plucking it from who knows where(?). Some refer to this as a process of rectal hypothesis – which I suppose is appropriate for a FART. Once this target number has been openly named and shared, it becomes the real goal, not a BHAG or the forecast expectation – everybody concentrates on the FART. The fact that it was reached arbitrarily is overlooked and/or forgotten. But, most importantly, the crazy means by which a FART could be achieved don’t necessarily change with the serious ambition to achieve a FART.

Anybody already familiar with my model, The Meikle Matrix, will recognise immediately that those with the RESPONSIBILITY for achieving the FART don’t have the CONTROL over the means by which to do so and are therefore plunged immediately into a state of STRESS.

For marketing-based  FARTS, it is simple enough to identify the problems with these arbitrary targets:

Let’s first theorise the FART is achievable. Let’s assume that – whatever it is – there is a way of deploying the marketing investment we have available to achieve the FART. Rules of investment dictate that if we want to increase our return from the same investment then we must increase our risk. The higher the return the greater the risk we must take. But inherent in that risk is failure. Increasing risk is increasing chances of failure.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a marketing brief that said, “whatever it takes, no matter the risk or how slim the chance of success”. But that’s not because of a failing memory on my part, it’s because it’s virtually unheard of for a company that reaches a “shit or bust” last throw of the dice to issue such a brief.

OK, so let’s say we don’t have to increase risk, instead we can increase our budget. Unlikely, I know, but let’s explore the scenario because the argument here is useful too.

There are brands these days that have more money than God or who have owners who are richer than Croesus, so it’s not impossible that big budgets could be assigned to achieve a FART. But brands don’t have unlimited market penetration. Brands plateau. There are people who don’t have iPhones, there are people who don’t use Amazon, and brand saturation exists on a smaller scale, too. Marketing investment is limited by a diminishing return on investment. But FARTs are set without that in mind because they were set arbitrarily.

That’s why we have to look out for them.

Brilliant brains can fry trying to fix unsolvable problems or reach impossible targets with the full burden of responsibility without control.

Such brains can be far more effectively deployed with better defined goals.

David Meikle

Author, Tuning Up, Perform better, Stress less

Founder at HTBAG