Jun 6, 2014 | Communication, Small business
Marketing is about telling stories, engaging people with them, which builds awareness, affinity, preference, and with luck, persistence, and good management, can lead to a transaction, or two.
Metaphors, when well used can make a complicated point in a memorable and understandable way.
Couple of weeks ago in a talk to a small group of SME owners about the rugged terrain of modern marketing, I used an old metaphor, a throwaway, in the midst of the conversation. I was surprised firstly that nobody had heard it before, and secondly at the sudden clarity it delivered to a complex message.
“When you go to the hardware to buy a 10mm drill” I said, “you do not really want a 10mm drill, what you want is a 10mm hole”.
An oldie but a goodie.
This morning on the copyblogger site I saw another one I really like. It goes something like: “To make a restaurant successful, you don’t really need the best location, best service, lowest prices, fascinating menus, and all the rest, you just need a starving crowd”.
Obviously, all the good features you will see touted around as people flog bum-spots in restaurants in a crowded market all helps. They are part of the means to the end, the way you deliver the service, but to be outrageously successful, what you really need is a starving crowd.
A good metaphor, like a good picture, clarifies, simplifies, amplifies, and makes memorable, the outcome of a complex conversation.
Jun 5, 2014 | Governance, Management
JSF F-35 Lightening
I am not a car nut, but as a young bloke, I used to fix my own cars. There was not much you could not do without a reasonable set of Sidchromes, a block and tackle, mechanical manual, and a jack.
No longer.
My kids would no more set out to fix their own cars as fly, it is simply too complex. On the other hand, they have mastered the art of managing complexity by just knowing how to use stuff, and call for expert help when things go wrong.
Life is becoming incredibly complex, almost everything we do has dimensions that we cannot hope to understand and interact with, so we outsource. We ask the experts, take advice, seek guidance from those with the domain expertise we do not have. This is a healthy process, except when having asked the experts, we disregard their advice because it is inconsistent with some pre determined position, or expressed opinion.
Ego getting in the way.
We see it all the time in politics, expert advice disregarded by those who sought it to inform their decision making.
Last week Liberal backbencher Dennis Jensen, with a Phd in materials science, and a background in applied research, and so with some credibility on matters scientific had the balls to criticise Government. In a very worthwhile speech made to an almost empty Parliament he reflected on the apparent lack of uderstanding of how science works and the management of R&D priorities using the JSF project as a case in point as he had intimate knowledge of the decision making processes applied.
Economies are complex, and the competing demands on a finite pool of funds challenging to manage, but is that not why we employ experts? Why then disregard their advice in such a wholesale fashion as appeared to happen here?
Better stop thinking and get back to where the real action is, whichever crappy reality show is currently topping the ratings.
Jun 4, 2014 | Branding, Collaboration, Leadership, Marketing
Debate and argument fills a vital role in all parts of our lives, it is what makes us human, this capacity to be able to think and communicate, rather than just react.
For an extended period with two different employers, I reported as marketing manager to a bloke with whom over time I developed a rapport that enabled us to achieve some great things, creative and commercial. We won awards, opened some new markets and redefined others, and importantly, delivered market share, brand credibility and profits to the employers.
Reflecting on the experience, now a long time ago, it seemed to me that there were 7 factors at work:
- Play devils advocate. We seemed to just fall into this habit of taking the opposite view of the one expressed, to debate the point by seeking the holes in the data, logic, and assumptions, irrespective of our own starting point. We usually ended up somewhere other than either of our respective starting points.
- Never allow authority to override or diminish the views of others. At no time during a debate was my view overridden by his organisational authority. From time to time after the debate was over, with some level of disagreement still present, he had to make a decision contrary to my expressed position. However, when those occasions arose, I was happy to go along, and execute he decision, as the process we had gone through was thorough, and my views had been listed to, and taken into account prior to the decision. Some form of “due process” had occurred.
- Recognise when you are wrong, and be very open about it. What more needs to be said? Very few things build respect quicker than someone being able to concede that they were wrong, and respect is vital for an open, non personal debate.
- Encourage absolutely open communication. This requires lots of trust, and goes with the point above, as respect is a vial element in trust. It is behaviour that engenders trust, not words. People watch the behaviour of others, and over time make a judgement about the level of trust they are prepared to offer. Trust is hard won, but easily lost.
- Openly question the foundations and logic of your own position. Being prepared to not just have others question your position, but being prepared to shoot your own scared cows, and we all have them, enables others to do the same thing with confidence that the commentary is never personal, and is welcome.
- Be prepared to enable, more than just allow, projects and ideas you disagree with to proceed. From time to time, when a project is allowed to proceed that may fail, and the “boss” thinks failure is likely, but gets behind it the impact on the creative energy is enormous. I recall one project that would completely disrupt the category the launch was aimed at, was allowed to proceed on the basis of my instinct. We had done lots of research, tested to the wahzoo, but this was a genuine innovation, something consumers had not seen, so asking them what they thought was encouraging but inconclusive, as they had no actual context against which the idea could be judged. There was considerable capital investment involved, and the “boss” went in aggressively to bat for the project, whist quietly being less than convinced. For an organisational subordinate to have that level of support is enormously empowering. Luckily, the launch was an enormous strategic and financial success.
- Be prepared for failure, but be determined to learn from it. We learn more from than we do from or success, so being prepared to experiment, adjust assumptions and try again is fundamental to learning. As part of the preparation for the launch referred to above, I had a range of plans prepared that would ensure that in the event of failure, the financial losses would be outweighed by the organisational learning that occurred. This was just good prudential management practise, and fortunately those plans were not necessary.
An unusually long post this morning, glad you go this far. It was triggered by a post I read earlier in which Ed Catmull, CEO of Pixar reflected on the reasons for his creative success. Many were reminiscent of mine, and his notion of a “brainstrust” is extremely attractive.
Such is the source of blog post ideas, a spark, combined with personal experience. This answers one of the questions I am often asked as I continue to find stuff sufficiently interesting to me, and hopefully to a few others, to post.
Jun 3, 2014 | Change, Governance, Innovation
Solar tower. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_thermal_power_stations
It seems to me that the most important emerging driver of success in the economy that must drive innovation and value delivery, is the intersection of technical capability and power generation.
Oil has driven the geo politics of the C 19 & C20. The US became a manufacturing giant by finding oil, and was a net exporter until the 70’s, then became an importer. Now thanks to the technology commonly called “Fracking” enabling (for better or worse) the extraction of gas reserves the US is again an exporter, and cheaper energy is in the early stages of revitalising US manufacturing.
Early C20 imperialism was driven by energy, the French and British in The Middle East, British and Dutch in SE Asia, The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour because of the oil embargo, Hitler went after the Caucuses for the oil, it is a long story.
Now we have another revolution on our hands.
We are no longer looking to conserve energy, which has been the mantra since the 70’s oil shock, now we are seeking to harness it from other sources.
The tops of our buildings with rooftop PV, which has dropped 80% in cost over a real short time, wind, tide. Solar however is the most obvious, and potentially sensational advances are being made that will transform economies.
In this state (NSW, Australia) we are arguing about the sale of the “poles and wires” of the power distribution companies to fund public works, schools, and so on. Vital projects, but at the same time we are cutting the R&D that will deliver us the world of tomorrow.
Any idiot who has thought about this stuff (even I could figure it out in a number of posts over the years) would come to the conclusion that just like computing, power generation will become distributed, so, rather than argue about the disposition of yesterdays assets, we should be considering how we build a leverage those of today, let alone tomorrow. Moore’s Law in reverse, combined with the explosion of adjacent technologies.
Companies like IBM with their Deep Thunder and Smarter cities initiatives are driving the research agenda, Germany outdoes the US in spreading the impact of innovation from the lab to the manufacturing operations, and in Australia with the abundant easily accessible sunlight in a politically stable country we are ignoring all this in favour of short term political tit-bits, trivia, and populist bullshit, mixed in with the occasional poorly sold but sensible objective.
Will we ever wake up????
Jun 2, 2014 | Branding, Marketing
brand destruction centre
On Friday I got another of those calls from an offshore call centre flogging a product I did not need or want. Some poor person obligingly named “Kevin” whose first language was not English, scrolling through a prepared screed that bore no relationship to the situation he found himself in talking to me.
What a waste of everyone’s time, and money.
Meanwhile, there are thousands of blogs, learned papers, and stories demonstrating clearly the power of social media, all being ignored by the enterprise stumping up the cash to make the useless, brand destroying phone call.
Why is it that the outsourced marketing unit called a “call centre” still uses C20 technology to waste my time when there are plenty of opportunities to pick up information about me on the various social C21 platforms I inhabit?
Why is it unreasonable to expect that the investment made in these centres would be better spent on some activity that did not piss off 99% of those unfortunate enough to answer the phone?
The available technology easily supports the scraping of social media to build a profile of individuals that can then be targeted with a message that at least has a better chance of being welcome than an annoying phone call from a “Kevin from Mumbai” who is simply reading a script that bears no relation to the circumstances of the callee.
Turn your Call centre into a Social centre, and I bet the results will improve.
