Day 7

Tuesday April 12th 2011

If It Isn’t Going To Produce Millions, It Tends Not To Be Worth Getting Out Of Bed For

The BIG client arrived today to view the 6 platforms we as the design team at Cadbury had been working on. As expected with clients whose time is money, he arrived 30minutes before the scheduled meeting and took us all by surprise.

In true professional form we had our design themes / concepts completed well before the deadline and so remained calm upon his arrival. As mention this was a serious client for Cadbury and so only the head design team bosses went into the office with the actual client to view the work we had produced and worked on since Friday.

An hour or so later, the team leaders and clients emerged from the office, everything we had been working on rested on the feedback we would soon receive from Martin in the debrief.

One step forward, two steps back

It turned out the client liked our OdDs pitch and ideas but not so much the Choices – it’s fair to say I was pretty gutted with that  news as although we work as a team I felt the most inspired when working on the Choices idea. However, one out of two is pretty good going for a TEAM who have actually only been together 7 days.

It was fair to say I wasn’t the only one who felt a little knocked back. Martin (boss for the brief) debriefed us and explained these things happen and he too would spend the next few hours reflecting and redesigning based on the clients words - DOESN’T FIT MILKA.

Life Lesson Number 1 at Cadbury

500 ideas will probably pass through the design studio on this one brief; 5 will make it through if your lucky.

The design wall is effectively a funnel, we can throw hundreds at it, only a small amount can make it through the tiny hole and even then they must survive the market.

Life Lesson Number 2 at Cadbury

It’s all a game of Snakes and Ladders.

We rolled at 6 with our ideas but met a Snakes Head with the client and fell straight back to square one.

Quote courtesy of C. Thornton: Friend, Competition and seemingly Man Of Wisdom.

My way of looking at today, yes, we are now effectively back at square one but there is only one direction from here and that’s FORWARD!