Mistakes Happen…But Are Avoidable

This meme is making its way around social media and drives home the point that having a knowledgable horse person on your team is essential when making marketing materials.

Picture this: Your event, watched from around the world, is making its first real comeback since COVID changed everything two years ago. You seize the opportunity to make a big splash by hiring a major agency to design your merchandise and visuals. They’re not horse people, but they’re creative powerhouses and can push your messaging and awareness to new levels. What can possibly go wrong?

I’m fully on board with hiring talent outside your immediate industry circle. It allows new perspectives and ideas to disrupt how your brand has been perceived in the past and can open new doors so that you become a thought leader in the horse industry. But…if they’re not horse people…get someone on your team who is.

Horse people are notoriously finicky, picky, and very observant. So much so, that one small misstep can destroy your credibility and cause us to completely abandon your brand or at least mock it online.

In my creative career, I’ve seen product images that could’ve sank the product—or even the brand—in one quick glance. A glove ad with hands holding the reins wrong. A cowboy hat on backward. Images flipped so the saddle’s gear is on the wrong side. The average non-horse observer likely won’t notice; but your core horse-loving audience definitely will.

All it takes is arming your team with a horse-educated creative. Go with the non-endemic agency with the big ideas, but include on your side of the team a consultant who can look at the images and see them as your audience will to help point out possibly problematic elements. We can tell you when a famous horse has had his coat color Photoshoppped beyond recognition (and explain why that’s an issue), when the cinch is on the wrong side of the saddle, when a poorly shaped cowboy hat is going to make folks laugh instead of receive your call to action, and when the iconic breed of your sport isn’t the hero in your merchandise, as with the Kentucky Derby merchandise pictured above. Folks, that’s a Standardbred, which races but with a cart and completely different tack than one of the Thoroughbreds that’ll be loaded into the Churchill Downs starting gate and be off to the races—and a chance to make history—on May 7, 2022.

Mistakes happen. But they can be avoided when you arm yourself with the right team members.