Jul 22, 2020 | Change, Leadership, Strategy
As we hesitantly, with stumbles, come out of this lockdown, we will see the landscape has changed. For some, it will be a land of opportunity, for others, a wasteland.
Rather than seeing it as a calamity, those who choose to see it as an opportunity, will be able to look and see that what has actually happened is that the lockdown has dramatically accelerated many trends that were already slowly impacting on our lives. They were all evident before to those who were looking, now they are in ample evidence to everyone who is not completely blind.
The more obvious ones, are:
‘Digitisation’.
So called digitisation has taken off, whatever digitisation means in your context. Suddenly ‘digital’ is the new normal. From remote control of factories to grannies interacting with their grandchildren via Zoom, nobody has been immune.
Remote work
Working from home, cafes, the car, has been developing for a decade. Suddenly, it has been accepted as an alternative to expensive office space in central locations. What will probably evolve is some combination of decentralised ‘meeting places’ and working from home, serviced offices, and cafes. The trend has been pushed along a decade in 5 months.
Retail delivery services.
Similarly have been pushed ahead a decade. Everything from the local restaurant to the supermarket, and department store now have to be geared up to deliver, or lose the sale. This will change the nature of retail from transactional to more ‘showrooming’, a trend harnessed by Apple a decade ago while everyone else was cutting retail prices and locations in order to save money. However, retail shop fronts will become more important than ever as a means to communicate with customers, rather than just being a point of sale.
The end of ‘purpose’ marketing.
The focus of marketing, at least by corporate marketers, will have pivoted from the banality of the ‘purpose driven’ marketing of the last few years. In the absence of a compelling idea, marketers deluded themselves that people really cared about their empty statements of ‘purpose’. Your potential and current customers will be demanding evidence that the statements carry weight in the behaviour of those seeking their money.
Politics.
Politicians have had a huge wakeup call. We voters really hate the division and spite of the practise of politics as usual pre corona. We long for some evidence that those elected to lead, actually do so, rather than just taking the trappings of office for their own benefits. The pressures on politicians and the political orthodoxy that has dominated to date will have to be revised. The basic assumptions about what services government provides, and from who and how, the necessary funds are raised to pay for them, have moved.
Not since 1939 have our politicians been confronted with the profoundly difficult choices that now face. I wonder if they are up to the challenge?
The economy.
The economy has suffered a major stroke, one for which substantial rehab over a long period will be required. It would be naive to believe it will recover to look much like the pre stroke version, but recover it will, over time. For those willing and able to push the boundaries, there will be opportunity everywhere, from the remaking of supply chains, to the potential of rebirth of sophisticated niche manufacturing, and new export markets. Digitisation of just about everything that has been accelerated massively, will demand investment and different business models and enterprise capabilities. These will offer great opportunity as well as what for many will be a terminal challenge. None of this will be easy, but it will happen.
As we ‘wake up’ from the corona coma, there will be an inclination to revert back to the known, and comfortable. Succumbing to that urge will be a mistake, as we have all been forced to move on, to push the edges of our comfort zones. The economic and social climate has changed dramatically, and those that seek the comfort of the Pre Corona status quo will find themselves isolated, and falling behind their competitors.
Picking your way through all this will take effort, experience and careful planning. When you need the injection of those skills, give me a call.
Jul 20, 2020 | Analytics, Marketing
Being a useful marketer has many foundations, most of them untouched in the course of a marketing degree.
One of the ‘must have’ but seemingly rare skills amongst most so called marketers I see, is a relationship with numbers.
In a seeming paradox, I do not like numbers, the piles of them I often see squeezed onto dense spreadsheets, with little thought or imagination beyond getting as much data as possible assembled in the one place. This drives me nuts.
On the other hand, I love numbers for what they can tell me. Once that data has been cleaned and organised in a way that enables smart, and curious questions to be asked, then answered. Data that moves towards knowledge, then to the source of insight is essential to success. It also clearly demonstrates the parameters of holes in the data, and your ability to address the challenges presented.
Analytical skill is a foundation of successful marketing.
Typically, marketing is seen as a creative exercise. I think this is why many marketers appear almost innumerate, and why the accountants and engineers who run many organisations have little time for those supposed to be running marketing. They love numbers, and assume anyone who does not is an idiot.
Well used, numbers tell a story, and marketing is all about stories. However, stories that do not have some sort of quantitative foundation are commonly called fairy tales. Children love fairy tales, but the accountant in the corner office making the resource allocation decisions, thinks they are for his grandchildren only.
Being analytical is way more than just having the numbers. It requires that they are turned from just the numbers into actionable insights, which generate further numbers to be understood and used to gain leverage for the investments being made. It does not matter if the investment is one on brand building, or buying a new machine, they are both investments, upon which a return should be expected.
We are not generally taught to have this sort of intimacy with numbers. We are not taught that they are key enablers of critical thinking, curiosity, and creativity.
A hypothesis without the means to test and validate it is at best, a nice idea.
I managed to pass (just) a reasonably high level of maths at the HSC, almost 50 years ago. I passed purely because I worked at remembering the formulas and circumstances where they worked. I never had the slightest idea of where this gobbledy-gook stuff might be useful, so by the time I had recovered from the post exam hangover I had forgotten everything. The absence of that key item, understanding, is why many of us shy away from numbers, we were never taught where and why they might be useful. We had formulas jammed down our young throats, and hated it, a dislike that coloured the rest of our lives.
Get over it, and allow numbers to speak to you, to help you understand the stories they are hiding.
- Look for, and identify the trends, and patterns in the data, and when there is an anomaly, be able to ask and find the answer to the simple question: Why?
- Find the gems of truth hidden amongst the averages we always seem to be fed.
- Understand what ‘normal’ looks like, so you can see the bits sticking out, and again find out the ‘why’
- Find the boundaries of an idea, circumstance, impact, and potential.
- Discover variances, and use the boundaries of those variances to improve performance over time. This is the core technique of continuous improvement in factories, engineers love it, and I have found it just as useful in many other circumstances.
- Numbers enable some sort of quantitative boundary to be thrown around uncertainty, particularly useful at the moment. By testing the numbers, then revising and retesting, you can progressively increase the level of certainty, reducing risk.
- Enable yourself to use perhaps the oldest and most useful tool in the marketers arsenal, the 80/20 rule, courtesy of Italian mathematician Vilfredo Pareto. In 45 years of commercial life, this simple technique has been used over, and over, and over again to uncover many ‘Why’s’
- Understanding the data enables you to be ‘numerically ambidextrous’. You can zoom out to see the whole picture, and then zoom in to see the details of anything that for one reason or another looks different, interesting, or just a hole in the data that might lead to an insight.
All these skills are just as useful to a marketer as they are to an accountant or engineer. When you have them, your credibility with those in the corner office will soar.
Jul 17, 2020 | Change, Strategy
‘Pivot’ has been the word of the year so far.
Cafes have ‘pivoted’ to takeaway, fitness centres ‘pivoted’ to on line classes, supermarkets ‘pivoted’ to home delivery, entertainers ‘pivoted’ to all sorts of variations of on line delivery, and so on.
Huge changes to the business models of many businesses amidst the chaos.
Now things are starting to go back to some sort of normal activity, although the signs of a re-emergence of the Bug are alarming.
The entrepreneurs amongst us are thinking about the bits of the emerged business models to keep, adjust, or throw away.
It seems that while there is a new normal emerging, for many the challenge is not to slip back into the old ways, but to see the coming months as the second start-up for their business.
It may have been forced on them, but there is silver in the cloud.
New business models, new relationships and types of relationship, a wider recognition that communication is the core of success, and that customers are looking for value from all sorts of new sources.
This coming period for most will be much more than just a re-opening, it will have many of the elements of a start-up. For others, it will be the sad walk to the under-taker. It is unlikely there will be too many businesses remaining unchanged.
Header photo credit: Peter Orr photography
Jul 15, 2020 | Change, Strategy
Crises always drive rapid change, and this Corona crisis will prove to be no different. Many enterprises will flounder and disappear, but others will emerge, not just to take the place of the dead, but to build value in different ways.
The law of diminishing returns that had held true for most of the 19th and 20th centuries turned around, beginning in the 1990’s with the flattening of productivity increases. Slowly, scale had become its own worst enemy, as it outgrew the ability of the corporate bureaucracies that evolved to operate productively.
Manufacturing became organisationally top heavy, and productivity improvement became very hard to extract in anything more than small steps.
Even harder to find is relative productivity improvement. When everyone is increasing productivity at around the same rate, along a predictable curve, there is no net competitive improvement.
We had the early stages of the digital revolution in the mid 1990’s, culminating in the enormous profits of the so called ‘unicorns’ that emerged in the early 2000’s. These defied the rules of diminishing returns, and grew on the back of network effects and negligible marginal costs. In the process, they made their owners multi billionaires and rock stars.
Perhaps we have reached a tipping point, where the dollars flowing from the digitisation of our lives is starting to reach its limits?
Despite the enormous wealth and power delivered by the digital platforms, they still supply only a small part of what we need, and do not supply any of the basics, food, shelter, or clothing. They just make these things easier to get, and sometimes cheaper.
However, the application of digital capability to the manufacturing processes that deliver the things we need to live, may be in the nascent stages of reversing some of those limitations of scale.
Over the last decade, most of the unicorn wannabee’s have floundered, with a few notable exceptions. Their market valuation tanked, and in the recent case of WeWork, blowing up in spectacular fashion. Meanwhile, the market value of manufacturing businesses, those that produce the things we need to live, have not been as affected. However, when compared to the valuations of the digital platforms, their performance looks tepid at best. This comparison has sucked the life out of manufacturing investment, as investors seek quick wins.
Productivity increases, soaring in the latter quarter of the 20th century have flattened out, despite the ubiquity of software.
It was not supposed to happen like this.
Partly this flattening is because the barriers to entry have been radically reduced, and in many cases, removed. Meanwhile the benefits have moved very slowly from the owners of the software to those that use it.
Our productivity will rise again, as digital tools are developed and deployed into the production of the physical things we need and want to live comfortable lives.
The future is digital, but the emphasis will be in different places.
The evidence is all around if we look.
Tesla is just a car, re-imagined with a digital heart, Apple became the most valuable company in the world by adding a physical retail arm to their digital portfolio, and Amazon purchased the physical supply chain of Whole foods for US$16.5 billion, and got their money back overnight with the increase in their stock value.
Locally, the response to the Corona bug in manufacturing forums has been all about the deploying of digital capability to the production of physical things. This is together with the recognition of the importance of a sovereign manufacturing capability.
We are, maybe, approaching a huge inflection point.
A few weeks ago, I watched the Prime Minister speak at the National Press Club. If even a modest part of the rhetoric converts into action, we will be better off. When talking about the technical education system, he used the same phrase several times: ‘Why pour more money into a dud system?’ This is an overt acknowledgement that the current system is absolutely broken, and needs to be fixed if manufacturing jobs, with the social stability they generate, are to re-emerge.
What do you think?
Jul 13, 2020 | Communication, Customers, Strategy
Writing an email sequence is not as easy, or effective, as the videoed on-line courses (special deal $695, ends at midnight) would have you believe.
The templates and advice is all pretty vanilla although useful, but does not get to the heart of why people buy from you, and how, amidst the tsunami of stuff coming at them, they pick out yours.
Many seem to think digital is different from the old fashioned advertising I grew up with, and it is, tactically, but strategically, it is the same.
A potential customer goes through some sort of journey that differs in every case, but generally follows a process:
- recognition that there is something of interest out there for them
- Awareness that the stuff out there has relevance to them as a solution to some sort of a problem they have, or have recognised as a result of the discovery process.
- The problem now seen becomes something that has a value in its solution
- There is activity seeking that solution
- Choosing a supplier, and installation of the solution
- The after sales process, where they can be persuaded, assuming you did a good job, to be an advocate for the problem you solved for them, and more specifically for you as the solution provider.
The process by which this all happens is not a nice logical ‘Sales funnel’ where progress is made in an orderly manner. In reality is looks more like a huge ball of tangled fishing line, a real mess. Seeking to put order to the mess makes sense so long as you do not lose sight of the simple fact that the whole thing will resist the orderly, sequential nature of software, and revert to the mess at any and every opportunity.
The targets of your ‘content’ at each stage also has wrinkles.
You have current customers, the easiest to reach, potential customers, those you really want to reach who may have the problem unrecognised, some who may have recognised their problem, and you have advocates, those who might amplify your content.
The further audience is the wider community, out of whom all the other three groups emerge in one way or another.
Therefore, you need to mix and match between the mediums and the message to maximise the outcomes of the investment in content. You do this by the combination of focus on specific market personas. This includes personalised messaging of current and past customers, as well as more general communication of the problem/value proposition equation to gain reach into the varying audiences, to generate marketing leverage.
How deeply have your considered your mix of content and medium to reach your preferred audience?
Header credit: Maksym Kopylov via Flikr
