The dirty little secret of digital marketing.

The dirty little secret of digital marketing.

Feb 8, 2016 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business

Achieving simplicity is really hard, we all know that in our guts.

There is however a huge difference between simple and superficial, and again, we all know that but tend to be persuaded to take the easy way out.

The development of a specific ‘Persona’ to which you target your marketing efforts is one of those seemingly simple  things we can now do with digital help, but in fact it is really hard.

Therefore, many make a token effort, and go away satisfied, but have in fact settled for a superficial result.

And then they wonder why the subsequent marketing efforts fail to deliver on the hype.

It is impossible to target a generic message to a 35-year-old middle-class working mother of two, and have it received in the manner you would wish. It’s much easier to target a message to Jennifer, who has two children under four, works broken hours as a lawyer, and is always looking for quick but healthy dinners and ways to spend more time with her husband and  kids, and less time on housework.

As a young marketing bloke we always developed a ‘target audience’ for everything we did.

In those  days they were generally demographic categories, which were pretty broad. If we were lucky and had big budgets, we had a Usage & Attitude study that gave us some insights into consumers behaviour, but were pretty superficial. The research relied on peoples memory, and willingness to actually recognise and admit to the behaviours that drove marketing decisions.

It was relatively rough and ready stuff.

Then  we used mass media to try and reach those demographic groups, hoping to find a few by chance who wanted to hear and act on what we were saying, or even were just prepared to listen.

Progressively we have been able to develop detailed pictures of customers and potential customers, those of our competitors, and those who might be interested in what we have to offer. We now can build a detailed understanding of their preferences and behaviour from a range of data sources,  can direct messages very specifically at very small groups of  individuals, and with many forms of media, specific individuals.

This power is unprecedented , and mostly it is ignored by small and medium sized businesses.

It enables the development of a four sided picture of those we want to reach.

Who they are

Where you can find them

Develop your target persona

Develop your target persona

What are their behaviours that are relevant to your value proposition

Why they should  buy from you

The flip side of the persona, the challenge  most marketers fail to understand sufficiency is that individuals now can avoid you should they choose. That array of digital targeting tools can be turned against the marketer, their messages in one way or another moved to the ‘Junk file’ never to be seen or acknowledged.

Why they should  buy from you, what makes your persona something relevant to a potential buyer?

Because you can solve a problem,  they like/trust you, and/or they engage and relate to you.

Successful selling is not about the transaction, it is the value you can deliver that is more  than the cost of the transaction, and it is about the empathy you can deliver.

In order to create a story potential customers can relate to, you need to develop some sort of story for the character.  Who they are, how they got here, what they have experienced, the obstacles overcome, their character flaws, all the things that make them human. You weave your own characters into the sales itch, and lead people to the conclusion you want them to reach, because you relate to them, they relate to you, your story is theirs.

This means you may need a few variations that accommodate differing ideal customer personas, but not too many or it becomes false and fabricated.

Let me know if I can help.

 

 

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The power of “Why” in a sales pitch

The power of “Why” in a sales pitch

Feb 4, 2016 | Customers, Marketing, Social Media

One of the standard problem definition techniques I use is the classic “5 why” process pioneered by Toyota. Just keep on asking “why” to peel back the layers pf the onion to get to the real problem, rather than just being satisfied that addressing the associated and superficial symptoms is enough.

You rarely get past 5 before the guts are on the table, I certainly never have.
It can be a tough and extended process, but it works.

It also works when you are on the receiving end of a sales pitch.

Late last year I sat with a client through a series of pitches by advertising agencies, all heavy on rhetoric and marketing cliché, but mostly a bit light on strategic and creative grunt.

‘Why do you think this idea will deliver the strategy’?

‘Why is it a great idea as you claim’?

‘Why do you recommend this media mix’?

‘Why do you believe these metrics are useful’?

All pretty valid questions I thought.

As one group of hopefuls left, one asked another not realising I had followed them out to offer a final handshake  “Why was he bloody there?”

Had they been able to answer any of the questions satisfactorily, they may have got the gig, but as it stands I suspect they have no idea why they missed out.

I rest my case.  .

What makes some leaders, and others just managers?

What makes some leaders, and others just managers?

Feb 2, 2016 | Leadership

In my 40 years of commercial life I have seen a few true leaders, and many, many more managers.

Unfortunately.

The leaders are not always those at the top of organisations, more often that not, those are just the successful managers. The leaders can be scattered through an organisation, from the top to the bottom, they are the ones to whom others turn when a decision has to be made, a difficult choice articulated, and when someone is required to step forward and be the one to take a risk.

When you  meet one, you usually just “know it”.

Just because you are the boss, does not make you a leader.

Sometimes in fact, I think that being the boss is a counter leadership factor, simply because being the boss means others will do your bidding, the institutional power invested in the position dictates that you have the call.

On many, this conferred power has the effect that they confuse the notions of leadership and management. Their egos are boosted, they feel good so the self confidence that feeling good brings impacts those around them, and they receive the deference of the group, and feed on it.

They listen to their own voice and fail to recognise that it is their voice, and not necessarily the voice of the group.

Leaders by contrast make those around them feel good, they inspire  action by demonstration, they acknowledge that they are a part of a group, not  the embodiment of that group, they give before the receive, of their time, energy, experience, and expertise.

Leaders would never sacrifice those around them for  the numbers, but they would be prepared to sacrifice the numbers for  the people, and others recognise that, and respond by acknowledging their leadership.

The leaders among us are often unsung outside their immediate circles, sometimes we find ourselves participating willingly in something without knowing who started it.

Most of us are aware of “Movember” probably know somebody who has grown a  moustache for charity, but do we know who started it? Probably not, but he was a leader.

He is an unsung hero, unknown apart from his immediate circle, nevertheless, a leader.

A mate of mine, Julian Day  is one such unsung hero. I know he is a leader because he always gives before he receives, that makes him a leader, and I am proud to call him a mate.

This time however, there are some accolades coming from outside his immediate circle. This is based partly on his success as a provider of professional services to the IT industry, and creation of the highly regarded Consensus  awards acknowledging the success of others in that industry.  However, his mission in life is to do something bigger than just have commercial success, so he has created the Waterline Challenge.

I have watched over the past few years as Julian has wrestled with the complex challenges of creating a national charity event, one that will direct the money raised to the need, and not to the charity administration. The commitment of his time and energy has been enormous, but more importantly, he has been able to assemble a stellar group around him ,also prepared to commit their time and energy to the event. He has led the charge, put himself out there with nothing to gain personally.

The catalyst for this post is the publication of a book, “50 unsung business heroes”  in which Julian is  worthy inclusion.

Well done old mate!

 

 

The (almost) impossible task of brand building momentum. A personal story.

The (almost) impossible task of brand building momentum. A personal story.

Jan 29, 2016 | Branding, Customers, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing

What is  a brand?

When you think about it, a brand is a just a promise embodied in a product.

A promise of performance, and delivery of value.

It survives and grows, retains and builds relevance and attraction only when the promise is delivered.

Finding the promise that can be delivered in a way that is sufficiently different to make an impact is really difficult.  Making a promise that is the same as everyone else’s promise, and the brand becomes indistinguishable, just another label on the shelf.

30 years ago I was heading a marketing group that amongst other successes, relaunched ‘Ski’ yoghurt in Australia. The relaunch was a huge success, and over the following 3 years, our national market share went from single figures to well over 35% in a market growing at double digit rates.

There is a lot of patronising bullshit around about the way to build a brand, advice that sounds nice but is usually just a template that promises an outcome, a bit like the paint by numbers paintings an old aunt had adorning her walls. Not very good, and certainly not original.

So, I thought that the hindsight afforded by the almost 25 years since that  Ski relaunch might be valuable as you consider your own brand building exercise.

Following are the lessons I took away, often with the enlightenment that comes with hindsight, as the appearance of organisation and planning is a bit of a fiction, the real situation was considerably more chaotic as we juggled competing priorities, competitive and financial pressure, and all the jostling and risk mitigation that goes on inside big businesses.

 

Be different.

At the time conventional wisdom was that the fruit in yoghurt had to be mashed, the product homogeneous, that lumps of fruit were not good. All the research told us that consumers wanted their fruit yoghurt to be consistent with the fruit mashed and evenly distributed, and the launch of Yoplait a few years earlier had kick started a genuinely competitive race and significant market growth.

We relaunched Ski on the proposition  of taste. The best tasting yogurt, the only one with pieces of fruit. It completely distinguished us from the then market leader, Yoplait, and all other brands, and gave consumers who liked or did not mind whole fruit in their yogurt a real reason to buy Ski. Of course, some rejected it, but many did realise after trying that they did prefer it, and whilst there was a lot of supporting activity and pack changes, the market share of Ski zoomed. A few of the small producers copied us, but the market leader could not, as their whole manufacturing process was designed to deliver a homogeneous product.

The value of true differentiation backed by a brand promise that was carried out and of value to at least some consumers was clear.

Across the range Ski was so different that  it created new segments within  the yoghurt category, segments we owned because we created and named them, and which made competition hard and expensive for our opposition.

 

Get onto a roll.

When you have a line-up of innovations that do add value, you can roll them out progressively and the competitive impact is cumulative, you leave the competition struggling to catch up with your first one, and spending valuable marketing resources to stay in the game while you roll out the second, and third iteration. I would not claim that Steve Jobs knew anything about Ski, but that is the exact strategy that Apple used from the launch of the original iPod on.

In our case, we relaunched Ski with the different product as noted, but we also changed the naming conventions that had prevailed. For example, the low fat version changed from Ski Low Fat to Ski DeLite. Worked a treat, and went some way to redefining the low fat category. The next ‘roll’ of the dice was to relaunch the 1kg size into the now common rectangular packs. To that time all 1kg Packs had been round, as they were operationally easier and the packs were much cheaper. However, we noted that most female buyers, and they made up 90+%  of purchasers, could not easily handle the product in one hand, they did not fit on most refrigerator door racks, and were less than optimal on the retail shelves.

When we changed all this, sales of 1kg exploded, and gave us new retail distribution. We then followed up with Ski Double-Up, a product that had a range of ‘toppings’ in a separate compartment  of the pack, and a completely different yoghurt that emerged from the combination of new strains of culture and operational process innovation,  that revolutionised the market again, creating an entirely new category.

Your customers may not be who you think they are.

Innovation is a powerful way to attract fringe, lapsed or just reluctant buyers into a market. When we launched Ski Double-up the typical consumer was young, educated, and female.  Consumption by men of yoghurt was only about 20% of female. Ski Double-Up changed all that. Not only did it attract more men, they were significantly older in profile, those who would not touch ‘yoghurt’ as it has been with a barge-pole. They tried Double-Up, liked it, tried other versions, and became regular and loyal consumers, adding significantly to the scope and scale of the Ski brand.

 

Start with ‘Why’.

Defining the ‘Why’ of your brand is a foundation of all branding activity. The best articulation of “Why’ is the now famous TED talk by Simon Sinek.  A brand without a clear and distinctive ‘Why’ is just a label. Sinek uses Apple as an example several times, because as he says, ‘everyone gets it’ and they do. Apple is a branding icon, but not the only one. Recently I stumbled across a new brand from a start-up, one that is breaking new ground on a number of fronts, competing against some of the biggest and best marketers in the world, but will (I suspect) succeed on the strength of their “Why’. It is whogivesacrap toilet paper, purchased by consumers  direct rather than via retailers, with a very clear ‘Why’. Many, almost certainly most will not buy into the why, but enough will to make the brand and business a success, and they will do some good in the process.

The corporate benefit of ‘Why’ is that everyone in the business can buy into it, and the resulting culture can become a very powerful motivator and driver of performance. In our case, the ‘why’ was that we were producing a natural, healthy product, our workforce has all been taken into our confidence, and they were our market research as we ran taste group after taste group in the factory during the development process to get the variables right. When the products became very successful, those people  saw what their contribution had resulted in, and took great pride in it, making a huge contribution to improving the production efficiencies .

 

Sweat the small stuff.

Details matter, a lot. Steve Job’s obsession with the experience of opening a shipper containing an Apple product contributed  a core part to the brand identity of Apple. With Ski we pioneered amongst other things a  process that used a new and expensive printing process that both accommodated the square shape of the 1kg tub, and delivered crystal clear graphics. It was expensive and difficult, but  the attention to the detail that could have been dismissed for cheaper more utilitarian solutions paid huge dividends in volume, and profitability albeit at skinnier margins.

 

Be brave & committed.

Nothing really useful will evolve from just doing the same thing as others, but just a bit better. Being different means taking risks, being brave, pushing the envelope, all those clichés that mean someone has to be brave enough to open the door to the unchartered. That takes guts, rare in todays corporate world,  but around aplenty in small and medium sized businesses.

When we changed Ski 1kg to the rectangular tub, there was no way back. Over a week long factory shutdown, the old machinery for  filling the round tubs was removed, and the new rectangular filling machines installed. Had the change failed, there was no way back.

The steps we took with Ski were all brave at the time. We changed the dynamics and shape of the market, a seemingly obvious step,  but at the time it was sweaty palms all around.

 

You have to be smart.

The marketing group had some very smart people, but more than that, it was a collectively smart group. There was great collaboration and support, and the longevity of the group was substantial, which had offered the opportunity to make a few mistakes and learn from them. At a time when the average tenure of marketing personnel was about 18 months, we averaged 6 years, giving us a significant depth of market understanding and intelligence. Just as important, or perhaps more so, we had the support of the CEO of the division who was prepared to support and encourage the things we did, and I am sure his palms were sweatier than any others, although at the time it never showed. His confidence in us, and support in keeping the corporate drones at bay never wavered. Innovation is impossible without that sort of support from the top.

 

It is really hard to continue to succeed.

This is a warning.

If you succeed, when the applause is over and the credit appropriated, the corporate gnomes come out to play, those who do not understand the dynamics of a brand. If you go into a supermarket today, Ski is an also ran, it looks like it is back to single figure market share, a shadow of its former self we had built. The brand we developed was raped by the accountants and sycophants who killed the golden goose by greed, short ‘termism’ and stupidity, rather than continuing to nurture and invest. The temptation to do so will be strong, and it takes a CEO with brass ones to resist the siren call of the throngs and maintain the investment required.

That rot had started a year or so before I was toddled off. By that time the corporate structure had changed a couple of times, and I was unable to keep the support that had enabled the success in the first place in the face of the changed structure and personnel. Unable to stay quiet in the face of the short term lure of the margins instead of continuing the investment for the long haul, I insisted on being the resident ‘Cassandra’  and ended up paying the price.

As I wrote this post I had to shake myself that it was 25 years ago.

Seems like yesterday.

A lot has changed in the marketing landscape, but the essentials remain the same.

Australia day report card 2016

Australia day report card 2016

Jan 26, 2016 | Strategy

Today is January 26, 2016, Australia Day.

As in past years , I have reflected in a post on this day what it means to be an Aussie.

The post on January 26 2012, called for a mature debate on the challenges we face as a nation, the real, long term issues, rather than the diet of puffery and bullshit we normally are asked to digest. Quaint idea that, asking for a national debate on real issues.

In 2013, I asked what it was we wanted the place to look like in another generation, and I guess some degree of pessimism came through the words.

In 2014, I focussed on what I thought would be the defining trend that would drive our decision making, individually and for the nation: Data, and the essential truths that data can convey. The observations of what might be coming turned out to be absolutely wrong, about as wrong as anyone can be, and is again a salient lesson to those with a crystal ball hidden somewhere. Last year I think I just had my head in my hands in despair at  the nonsense passing as responsible government, and whilst I am again tempted to head for the bar to sink a few Coopers (the only significant Australian beer left after the foreign invasion) I am going to try and be a bit more responsible and make some serious comment on the state of the nation.

It has to be noted also that as I am now of an age at which those icons of my youth, the Beatles wrote songs, (‘When I’m 64’)it is fair to suspect that my view of the country, and the various carryings on that are happening is tempered by all those years.

  • The cost of housing in Sydney and Melbourne, is it a bubble or not, can I get in for my capital gain before the bust? It is a very common Australian dinner topic. What concerns me is what appears to be a process of parking money in housing, an essentially unproductive asset, and in Australia a moderately tax effective strategy. Those with the money, and it is not just Australians, it seems to be a global phenomenon, protect their money by property investment, to the point where there are more empty residences being built every day that those who need housing cannot afford. Youngsters are either moving to the fringes of cities, or resigning themselves to long term rental. Logic would suggest there should be a move to the country centres with the facilities, but is seems not to be the case. Recently I was in Armidale, a town with many huge  advantages, schools, a university, long term agricultural production and research, proximity to stunning wild Australia, but seemingly devoid of much of the energy that builds long term communities by successful commercial activity.  By contrast, Uralla, 20k’s down the road and only 1/10th the size is buzzing.  Go figure.
  • The internet has changed everything, and there is a generation that was born after the net become widely available  that do not understand what it is  not to have it.  I can remember the first Fax I saw, and recognising that it would change the world, but have not used a fax in 20 years. While the net has completely altered the way we work and live, it has removed the face to face communication human beings have relied on through our evolution, replacing it with digital ‘connectivity’ which is just code for substituting depth of a few relationships for the siren promise of breadth of relationship with many. I am no anthropologist, so cannot speculate on the longer term impacts of this substitution, but the speed with which it has happened, way faster than our evolutionary cycle time, cannot be good for our collective mental health.
  • There is no longer longevity in art. The world of art, in all its forms, is the way we express ourselves and how we relate to our communities. The loss of longevity might be just the next iteration, but I suspect it is more than that, it is a profound change taking us into new territory. Not necessarily a bad thing, change is what art is about, but nevertheless, a source of uncertainty and ambiguity. If Leonardo da Vinci was around today would he spend  4 years painting the roof of the Sistine chapel? No, it would be done with a paint gun in a day and a half, and then we would be wondering why it took so long.     Control of your art is essential, even more than before. In the old days  the record companies got wealthy on the back of bands they promoted managed and screwed, now talent has the opportunity to come through without the friction, but     how do you retain control in a world of streaming and sharing? The exception to this longevity and lack of control seems to be the fixation with tattoos. Showing my age perhaps, but I dislike them and their defacing of young Australians intensely. What will they look like when their carriers are my age? Tattoo removal is about to become a huge boom industry when a viable method is found
  • Our society has a new rat in the foundations, drugs. Not the tobacco of my day, with perhaps a bit of weed and booze added in, but all sorts of stuff that is as available as alcohol, but uncontrolled, very dangerous, and ubiquitous. Even smart kids are killing themselves with shit at concerts, and we have no idea why, or how to change it. They are smart and educated, why would they do it to themselves?.
  • Demographically we are a country in change, rapid and substantial change, but we seem to be able to absorb the change better than elsewhere in the world, but perhaps we are a the limit of absorption, at least in some locations. A long term fiend moved from the home he and his wife built after they were married, as they were now aliens in the suburb they had made home and brought up their kids. Is this a bad thing? I do not know, but it is certainly something that is driving change. It is perhaps ironic that John Howard lost the Liberal party leadership in 1989 largely for comments made about the rate of Asian immigration being too high, thus offending the then widely held view that the more the better, then 12 years later successfully used the Tampa affair to shore up his government. The change in the community over those 12 years represents a complete turnaround in our view of ourselves.  I am unsure of what the next iteration of those changes will be, but perhaps the focus has moved on from Asian migrants to those from the Middle East.
  • We have becomes cynical and disconnected from  the processes that govern us. Membership and activism in political life seems to me to be at an all time low, and the net result is it is being left to those who see it as a road to their own success rather than a service to the rest of the place. Obviously there are exceptions, but there seems little doubt that the politics of the last 10 years have been nothing short of toxic and do our country no good at all. I am just glad that we do not have the full blown circus determining who will be the head clown as they have in the US, ours is just a suburban circus by comparison, so far.
  • On a lighter note, I not only love the Operation Boomerang lamb ads, I also love the fact that the complaints from the usual suspects,  vegans, animal rights, anti-violence advocates (don’t they know it is an ad, a bit of entertainment with a message?) and assorted other anti-funsters got thrown out of court on its tush.

That is enough, for now. The place is changing, quickly, too quickly for many, but along with death and taxes, change is the only constant in life, so we better get used to it.

Happy Australia day.