Have you ever experienced a Lego Block? No, I am not talking about the children’s building toy. Lego Block is short for a Leadership Ego Block. It is when someone in leadership in your organization decides they have a better idea than everyone else around them and they refuse all other ideas but their own.

There is typically a very good reason to listen to business leaders. They did not get to where they are without good ideas – particularly those who have successfully launched and grown a business. However, there is a bit of hubris that can sneak into the thinking of many business leaders – they begin to believe their ideas are far superior to those of their customers. Thus, when the marketing feedback from their customers runs counter to their own thinking, the Lego Block occurs.

How do you guard against Lego Blocks if you are in charge of marketing for your company? It is not easy to buck the ideas of the boss, but logic would tell you that the boss is not the customer. Which leads to the first step. Make sure you have a good feel for who is and who is not a potential customer. Define your target market. It doesn’t matter what your nephew’s next-door neighbor thinks of your marketing if that neighbor is never going to buy anything from you. Second, listen very carefully to your target market. How do you do this? The very simple answer is to ask them their opinions. There are some marketing experts who will tell you we have moved past the effectiveness of customer satisfaction surveys because the only customers who fill them out are unhappy customers. I do not follow this logic, but there are other ways of hearing what your target market is saying. One way is to measure your analytics. How do analytics help you to "hear” what your customers are thinking? By measuring your web traffic, especially that which is driven to a specific part of your site by your marketing, you can get a good idea of what interests them and what does not by their habits – how long they stay on a page, what they click beyond the page they land on, how many times they come back to the site, etc. But there are also analytics that will tell you other sites they browse. What are their trending likes and dislikes based on what they view?

Back up the opinions of your customers with facts and then build your marketing upon them. If the boss steps in your way, you have the customer stats to back up your marketing directional choices. If the boss continues to give you the Lego Block, you may want to put some more facts on the table, namely, some big name egos that took their companies the wrong direction, such as:

Reed Hastings, CEO and founder of Netflix who, in 2011 announced that the DVD service would split from the streaming service and take on a new name: Qwikster. Sold as a quicker way to access DVDs, customers found that it had quite the opposite effect. Customers threw a fit and Qwikster was dropped one month after it was launched.

Ronald Johnson took over retailer J.C. Penney after leading Apple Retail. He made sweeping changes in the way the stores operated, including getting rid of sales and discounts that were a long-time staple of retail marketing. The company lost 25 percent of its year-to-year revenue in his first year and his tenure lasted less than two years before he was fired.

Robert Nakasone was the CEO of Toys ‘R’ Us in 1998. His tenure was only 18 months as he desperately tried to turn the bricks and mortar toy stores around by downsizing, reducing inventory and closing stores. What he failed to realize was that toy buying was going online. Startup online retailers were making it easy on consumers to skip the long lines and get toys shipped directly to their homes, especially during the Christmas season. Instead of consolidating to order and fulfillment centers, Nakasone paid Amazon to take over online orders for Toys ‘R’ Us. If he would have paid attention to trends among his customers, Toys ‘R’ Us would probably still be the leader in their industry. Instead, they filed for bankruptcy in 2018.

If you can help it, avoid the Lego Blocks. Some times business leaders get it right, but you can never outguess your customers.

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10 CEOs Who Made Huge Mistakes by Will Bridges, BPlan.com, https://articles.bplans.com/10-ceos-who-made-huge-mistakes/

Personally Disrupted: 14 CEOs Who Got Axed After Failing To Navigate Disruption, CB Insights, July 17, 2019