You Have a Marketing Thief? Make Lemonade!

Good artists create; great artists steal. — Picasso (supposedly)

When speaking to marketing students, I stress this quote. Not literally “steal” (that’s not what Picasso meant) but borrow and do better … make it your own. As a university marketer, it’s something I believe in. Big egos … those who trust their own creativity … will refute this. That’s fine, but I prefer the power of group thinking.

Admittedly, I’m also a hypocrite … I don’t want other universities borrowing our marketing ideas. It’s something that happened recently; a co-employee left, went to a competing university, and suddenly, their social media looked very familiar. For years, their social media has lagged behind ours;[1] since 2017, our Instagram audience has outgrown theirs by 18K, our YouTube audience by 16K, and today, our total audience exceeds theirs by 100K. To catch up, they started copying us.

How to Be a “Great” Artist

Being a hypocrite, it irked me that our ideas had been stolen. However, after reflection, I discovered value in it. The first value … a better understanding of what Picasso meant by “steal.” Admittedly, our competitor has seen growth in their social media, but they merely “borrowed” our ideas. They’ve neither enhanced these ideas nor do they understand the underlying motives.

What’s missing is the “great” part of Picasso’s quote. “Great” is something more than surface copying. Our competitor copies blindly, not understanding the deeper “why”. They struggle to be anything other than our mirror image, and as our mirror image, they’ll always lag behind.

To do it right, a Picasso-type “steal” demands unpacking. It’s simply not enough to copy and be done. If you’re gonna borrow a marketing idea, there’s a greater chance of success if you understand the foundation and expand it into something more.

The Teaching Thief

There’s an even more important lesson here: the art of transforming a loss into a win. When you see your ideas stolen, you can sulk, or you can turn the thief into a teacher. This was a lightbulb moment for me. Our work, shared under a different brand, provided opportunity for objectivity and critique. Or put another way, we’re more apt to judge our ideas when they’re used against us.

The benefits can’t be understated. Through this self-critique, our marketing department uncovered two things. First, we rethought our priority focus. Large-scale storytelling — while hugely successful — had blinded us to smaller, untapped campaigns. Second, we reaffirmed the “why” behind what we do. Consequently, we’ve doubled down on our overarching motive, leaving our competitor to merely regurgitate ideas.

[1] Our university enrollment has grown for 15 years in a row, and this fall, we welcomed the largest freshman class in history. Our messaging and marketing — including organic/paid social media — have played a significant role in this growth.