Long term planning is dead, long live long term thinking

Long term planning is dead, long live long term thinking

Jul 3, 2019 | Change, Governance, Strategy

 

Planning for the long term is a game for losers.

In a world where we have difficulty planning what will happen next month, locking yourself into a long term plan, which allocates resources, and makes binding decisions about the required capabilities, and how to build and deploy them, is crazy.
By contrast, long term thinking, retaining your perspective for the longer term, but being able to be agile in the shorter term, makes way more sense.

The makeup of the top 100 companies has changed dramatically in the past 10 years, and is unrecognisable from the top 100 of 1990. This should give us a clue.

Corporations of the 20th century grew by building scale, marketing, operational, geographic and financial. In the quest for scale they also built silos, bureaucracies, and cultures of  personal safety, risk aversity, and dependence on what worked in the past to  continue to work into the future.

Successful corporations now must be much more agile and responsive to change, even when they  are huge. The necessary process of devolving both authority and responsibility down the tree to where the interaction with operations really happens, makes them look more like a collection of smaller businesses than a corporate monolith.

The new model works. Perhaps the greatest example of this management about-face, while not of a commercial corporation, is the change in the US military retold  in Stanley McCrystal’s great book Team of Teams .

It is unstated, but the current political argument in Australia about the tax cuts legislation is an example of the failure of long term thinking. It substitutes a flimsy long term plan for intelligent long term thinking. Even worse, it is long term planning with an objective that is political, rather than economic or responsible. It is a wedge job on the opposition, and is a great example of why we do not trust politicians, and politics. We know such a long term plan, legislating for something as fundamentally important as a tax framework is nonsense. However, we accept the value of long term thinking, recognising the need to consider the manner in which tax rates make us competitive with other economies, at the same time as raising the revenue to deliver the community outcomes we all demand.

 

 

 

What price experience?

What price experience?

Jul 1, 2019 | Branding, Governance, Strategy

It seems to me that the development of robust, lasting, measureable and implementable strategy and marketing has gone to the dogs.

We are infested with short term rubbish that reflects the lack of experience of those doing the developing, and lack of understanding of those doing the commissioning, obsessed as they are with the short term.

Last week, Bloomberg revealed that the software in the Boeing 737 Max was outsourced to a bunch of recent graduates in India. Unfortunately, we all know the result of that exercise.

Not only were hundreds killed in the two crashes that followed, but the brand ‘Boeing’ took a dive with them.

How is that for the ROI on a few bob saved on experience!

You cannot put an old head on a young dog, all they do is yap.

The huge power of relative risk in sales.

The huge power of relative risk in sales.

Jun 28, 2019 | Communication, Sales

‘Risk’ is an emotive word, it immediately conjures up danger, and an instinctive reluctance to avoid it, if at all possible.

Relative risk is often used in a selling situation as a means to motivate the potential buyer to take that last step, and buy, immediately. The risk may be of missing out, of a price rise, or of an unpleasant event happening, and many other things that might incite a sense of urgency. Unless you apply some added, and not usually made available logic, you can be seduced by the size of the stated risk, and buy, when it may not be a logically consistent decision to do so.

When you see the word ‘Risk’ in a brochure, offering research numbers that demonstrate how much this new ‘whizzo’, newly developed after much research,  will reduce your risk, do not take them at face value.

For example, if I was selling a new medication aimed at older fathers, of which there is an increasing number, I might use something like the copy following.

‘For men of 50 fathering children, there is an 18% greater chance of those children suffering seizures, than children of a father of 30′. New ABC medication from XYZ company can more than halve this risk’

This first part of this copy would be alarming to any man in this group, but misleading. It is a relative risk, comparing one group to another. It does not tell you how likely it is that an individual child will have a seizure, which is an absolute risk. The second part, promises a huge reduction in this risk as an inducement to buy, but again, very misleading, because the reduction in risk is relative.

Had the copy been complete, it would also have told the reader:

The child of a father aged 30 has a risk of seizure of .024%, 24 out of 100,000 children.

The child of a father aged 50 has a risk of seizure of .028%, 28 out of 100,000 children.

(Data source new scientist November 2018)

An increase of 18% to the risk of children of fathers over 50 suffering seizures, compared to that of fathers of 30 sounds shocking, but when you consider it is 4 children in 100,000, it is less so. Equally, the reduction coming from new ABC medication is less impressive when viewed as an absolute reduction, from 4 to 2, and the (poor) statistician in me tells me it is within the boundaries of statistical error in any event.

Daniel Kahneman in his great book ‘Thinking Fast & Slow’ uses a number of examples similar to the one above, and in addition would apply the question: ‘How much would you pay to reduce the risk of your child having seizures from 4/100,000 to 2/100,000’? to get a better measure of the price difference between a purely rational decision, and an emotional one.

Emotion sells way, way better than rationality, so the usual way to present data will almost  inevitably be relative. Watch out for it, and ask the appropriate questions before you jump to a purchase decision. 

 

Header cartoon courtesy of Scott Adams and ‘Dilbert’ https://dilbert.com/

Where to easily find the real value in Facebook

Where to easily find the real value in Facebook

Jun 26, 2019 | Marketing, Social Media

 

Facebook has made organic reach virtually (pun intended) impossible in the quest to empty marketers pockets of advertising funds, at which they have been astonishingly successful. This is despite their appalling management of privacy and enabling some pretty dodgy, some would call it reprehensible, activity.

The only option left, and it is a good one, is to take advantage of the groups that Facebook has encouraged to flourish.

Marketers should be taking advantage of groups, but to do so requires a greater level of discipline and investment than many seem to be able to muster. 

Following are the three main considerations.

Common interest.

Groups are by definition places where there is a common interest that draws members. However, common interest is not enough to generate the engagement that marketers need, there needs to be collaboration amongst the members, that creates its own two sided discussion. If the levels of two way discussion fall, so will the interest levels of participants, who will then wander off, digitally speaking. For marketers prepared to put in some leg work, selectively adding value to the groups specifically around your value proposition can be very useful.

Group control.

Anyone can create a group, for any reason, and manage the settings to your own agenda. I am a member of a local SME networking group that has three Facebook groups that serve different purposes. The first is a ‘public‘ group, where anyone can see and interact with posts, the second is a private group where only members of the network can  post and view the activity of others in the group. The third is a ‘secret’ group that has the current committee as its only members, and only those few can see anything posted, and respond. The first is a group that can  attract potential members and contributors to the activities of the group, the second is a collaboration of members where we can help each other in a myriad of ways, and the third is a very convenient communication channel for the committee to consider the manner in which the group is managed. The combination works well, and is very simple to set up. 

For a purpose.

Given it is easy to set up a group, when there is a specific purpose, you can set it up and leverage the potential reach amongst those who have an interest in your purpose. This can be anything from a product launch, technical forum to a personal interest, and everything in between. The challenge of course is to market the group to those who may buy into the purpose, and have something to contribute. Without a flow of quality content, such groups will have a very short life, but they have the potential to deliver considerable value to the group owner and members.

 

Groups are not the answer to most marketing challenges, at best they are a partial answer to some common questions, and can be a valuable part of a wider strategy. At least they can deliver a pathway to your own digital asset, your website that should remain a cornerstone of every  marketing activity. It is inevitable that Facebook will change the rules again, squeezing the algorithms that make groups useful, in order to keep the revenue flowing. However,  you  may as well use it while you can.

Almost exactly the same set of observations can be made about the group functions in other platforms. While the details differ, and none are anywhere near as sophisticated or provide the same sort of potential reach, they are all on the same path, monetising their access to your eyeballs in order to sell your details to advertisers.

 

 

 

Chemotherapy has no place in marketing.

Chemotherapy has no place in marketing.

Jun 24, 2019 | Marketing

Imagine you walk into your doctors office, and after the usual greetings, he just glances at you, and said ‘Chemotherapy’

After recovering, you would walk out.

The thought of undergoing chemotherapy without detailed examination of the malignancy to which it was to be applied, is absurd.

While this may be an unlikely scenario in medicine, it is one I see approximated  every day in the office of inexperienced and unthinking marketing people.

They jump to a solution before defining the problem. These days, the immediate ‘go to’ solution is more often than not, some shiny new digital toy that is claimed to fix all your problems while costing little, and walking on water.

The proper sequence to follow is to diagnose the problem being faced. This involves a detailed look at the causes, symptoms and consequences of a problem. It is not an easy task in most cases, which is why it gets jumped.

Qualitative research is often maligned, but done well will deliver insights that can later be tested, and uncover the questions that need to be answered. Unless you identify the right questions to ask, which is the power of qualitative research, your subsequent quantitative research will be nonsense, delivering answers to irrelevant or just plain wrong questions.

Secondly, once the dimensions of the problem are clearly understood,  you can develop strategies to address them. If the strategy is more of the same, it is a clear sign that you either do not understand the problem, or you need a better strategist.

Only after the strategies have been developed and articulated, can you move to the tactical part of addressing the problem, the means by which you fix it. Usually it is at this point where the biggest money is spent, often in a short time. It can be easily wasted if the appropriate levels of time, attention, and skill are not applied to the foregoing problem definition, and building a strategic framework that drives the tactical decisions.  

Header cartoon courtesy Tom Gauld at www.tomgauld.com