Curing Our Case of Cobbler’s Children Syndrome

For several years now, Kinetic has been suffering from, what some may consider, a fairly severe case of Cobbler’s Children Syndrome. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this diagnosis, it’s derived from the phrase “the cobbler’s children have no shoes,” which comes from an ironic tale about a cobbler who is so busy making shoes for his customers that he has no time to make shoes for his own children. Spoiler alert: the story doesn’t end well. The children go live with their mom, who does provide them with shoes, and the cobbler realizes he should have made time for his children and provided for them.

From a business standpoint, Cobbler’s Children Syndrome might look like a tech company operating with outdated technology, a content developer with only a few blog posts on their own page, or a signage store with a barely visible sign out front. In our case, we are a marketing agency who has failed to prioritize our own marketing needs. Just as you’d expect the cobbler’s children to have shoes—and not just any shoes, but really awesome shoes, like the best of the best—it would only make sense for a marketing agency to have some pretty amazing marketing pieces, an up-to-date website, a consistent brand, and an active social media presence—at the very least. After all, aren’t these things we specialize in and advise our clients to do?
But that’s just the thing: we’ve been so busy happily serving our clients and prioritizing their needs that we lost sight of our own.

So how did we cure it?

First, we identified the problem and admitted to habitually neglecting our own needs. Even on rare occasions when internal needs did make our to-do lists, they were at the bottom—and never seemed to make it to the top—and typically eventually fell off our radar completely.
Next, we recognized the need to solve the problem. After all, we didn’t want to suffer the same fate as the cobbler in the tale.

Then, we did something about it: we started treating ourselves like the client by following our own best practices. We began by identifying the goals and objectives we wanted to achieve. From there, we defined the scope of the project, including setting a budget. We developed a schedule and committed to meeting all of our deadlines—just as we do for our own clients. After planning and preparing, we began conducting research, then strategized, wrote content, designed, photographed, and finally—launched this campaign—a campaign that is just the first step on our journey to cure our case of Cobbler’s Children Syndrome.

Stay tuned to find out where exactly these new shoes will take us…