Is the net killing marketing creativity?

Is the net killing marketing creativity?

Jul 1, 2016 | Branding, Marketing, Strategy

There is just so much stuff around on the net, everything and anything you ever wanted to know, or could think of to ask, is there somewhere.

The availability is removing the necessity to think, to capture the essence of a problem, and then develop creative  solutions and the means to communicate.

Too often the list driven, by the digital book solution, is the only strategy considered.

This blog is no different, when I do a list post with an attractive hook in the headline, views spike. It is a seductive outcome to write a post and double the average number of views.

Marketing has always been about people, with all the vagaries that apply when  you deal with people and their idiosyncrasies.

The people who did marketing well were those able to connect the dots in some way that added value to others. It is essentially a creative skill. Not in the sense of being able to create a drawing, but much broader than that, being able to see things that others cannot.

Then along came the web, and the ‘quick fix’ world we live in, a world of instant gratification, where lists rate very highly, because they meet the need.

But what about the thought process, the creativity??

What about strategy that connects people with unique solutions to their problems?

What about the stories that make things memorable and repeatable?

As I get older, it becomes increasingly obvious that the foundations of marketing, the delivery of value to someone who is prepared to pay for it more than it costs for you to deliver it, are unchanged.

I suspect they are unchanged since Babylon was being built.

How do we come back at this?

How do we ensure that marketing has the depth of thought necessary to truly make a difference?

These days I joke that to get a marketing degree you just need to have a pulse. This is proving to be unfortunately true the more I see the quality of those degree qualified automatons around now, inhabiting businesses and being supposedly in charge of a businesses greatest asset, its brand.

Why was Mad Men was a great TV series?

Not just because it was entertaining, and told stories, but because it was able, for some of us, to tweak a nerve so deep in our psyches that almost hurts. Don Drapers pitch to Kodak, the throwing out of a brief that spoke about the technology, and replacing it with one that spoke to peoples hearts is a classic.

Would that have been possible if Don was following a list?? Beware the siren song of marketing by lists, they can lead you onto the rocks.

How do you reduce customer churn?

How do you reduce customer churn?

Jun 29, 2016 | Customers, Marketing

Pretty simple answer really; you increase customer retention.

It costs way more to find a new costumer than it does to keep a current one, we all know that, but somehow do little about it. Almost every business I interact with fails to get an optimum balance between servicing existing customers and prospecting for new ones.

So, how do you do it.

Stand for something. I am a great advocate of Simon Sinek’s “Why How What‘ analysis. People buy products, not algorithms, and they buy at least partly with their hearts. Even aggressive  B2B buyers, and  multinationals who put in global sourcing by tender as a means to squeeze price, still buy with their hearts because there are people involved. They are more likely to buy from someone they see as standing for something they can relate to, even believe in, than someone who stands for nothing more than their own success.

Be human. Everyone likes to be treated as important, to know that someone cares. It is more than great customer service, it is genuinely caring about your customer. What a poor cliché it has become when much so called ‘customer service’ has been outsourced to low cost countries, where the so called service people have inadequate product knowledge, and no power to actually solve the problem, assuming they understand it in the first place. I received a parcel of stuff bought on line recently. The packaging was superb, and inside there was a note from the person who assembled the order, with her email address at the supplying company. It was such a unusual thing that I tested the email, saying thanks, and got a warm reply from the person. That is customer service!

Be a tribe. Seth Godin’s articulation of this phenomena is superb, people want to be a part of a group of people who are like them. Do you own a Rolls Royce because you want to pay 100 times more than you needed to get adequate and reliable transport from A to B? No. The ownership of a ‘Roller’ says something about you, and those you know and interact with, and attracts like minded people who want to be like you.

KISS. (Keep It Simple Stupid) Making it simple for customers to stay and interact with you is the key to keeping them. Why do Telcos have so much churn? Because they fail abysmally at customer service, and are so complicated and opaque in what they do that you feel encouraged to look elsewhere. It is only when you move that they come up with the better price, or service package, and make the moving of your account as hard as possible, hoping you will stay because it is easier. However, who wants to keep a customer who would rather be elsewhere? They will be restless and bad mouth you to all the time, rather than being an advocate for your product.

A management that encourages, particularly by means of financial incentive, investment in prospecting for new business, when their service to existing customers sucks is on the road to pain.

My preferred measure of churn and retention beyond the simple numbers is Share of Wallet. I recommend you use it.

7 things business leaders can learn from this election campaign

7 things business leaders can learn from this election campaign

Jun 27, 2016 | Governance, Leadership, Personal Rant

Over the weekend I was talking to my 32 year old son about the coming election.

I thought I was  the quintessential cynical old buggar, while being politically engaged, but I had nothing on my formerly optimistic son.

He is not just a cynical young buggar, he is so disengaged that in the long term, it can only be bad for our economic and social life if he is any way representative of his demographic cohort, and I fear he is.

As he said ‘Problem is that the gap between what the pollies say, and what they do is so wide, they have lost any sort of credibility and moral authority’.

Sadly I agree with his analysis, but the core of the problem seems to me that they claim control over things they cannot control, while ignoring, misrepresenting or pork-barrelling the things they can.

It is the same in business.

Those that promise the world do not have any credibility at all, while those that demonstrate the performance and value of what they can control earn our loyalty and respect.

There is a lot those in businesses can control, and should strive to improve.

You can control the way you spend your time. Every job, even those on a manufacturing line has some level of flexibility in the way the time is spent. In management roles of any type, the discretion is significant. You can choose to do what may be apparently urgent, but is unimportant, or those things that may  not be urgent, but are important. It is those who elect the latter route that will prosper in the long run.

You control the way you  behave. Those who say one thing and do another, or worse, demand behaviour of others  they are unwilling to demand of themselves will be judged failed leaders.

You control your attitude. An optimistic person has an effect on those around them, infecting them with your optimism and enthusiasm

You control your leadership style. Dictatorial, aggressively demanding results without consideration of the personal toll that may take, or you can be a coach and mentor, seeking to improve the results by improving those around you.

You control the way you see opportunities. Often opportunities are in the problems being faced, but if all you see are the problems, the opportunities will pass on by.

You can choose where credit/recriminations are levelled. The best leaders I have seen have a common characteristic: they give credit to others, even when the credit is largely due to themselves, and they take absolute responsibility for the performance within their span of control, never seeking to allocate blame elsewhere.

You can choose to have a clear and unambiguous moral compass, or purpose in your life. Having a purpose, and living to that purpose is empowering for individuals and the groups they interact with. Even when others disagree with you the simple presence of a foundation of beliefs that drive your behaviour will get you considerable credit, loyalty and an ability to get things done.

When you think about it, politicians have exactly the same choices we in business have.

Perhaps it is their collective failure to adhere to the basic tenets of leadership that has us so disillusioned with them all.

I predict that come next Sunday, there will be a narrow Coalition win, but the outstanding feature will be the percentage of the first preference votes that go to other than the two major parties, particularly amongst those under 30 whose expectations have been shaped by different factors to those that shaped their parents. This group will also exercise their compulsory obligation to vote by deliberately voting informal. This will not be a ‘donkey’ vote, it will be a vote against what these youngsters see as the irrelevance, hubris and self interest of the political class. It will be fascinating to watch the spin  the major parties put on this disaffection, assuming that both, somebody does the analysis and I am right.

5 things to avoid to do better consumer research

5 things to avoid to do better consumer research

Jun 24, 2016 | Customers, Marketing, Strategy

I sat through a qualitative research (focus) group a few weeks ago, recruited over the phone against a specific demographic list.

On the odd occasion I receive these calls, my stated occupation is never associated in any way with marketing, as that always disqualifies you, the excuse being you might learn something, which in my experience is pretty unusual.

Anyway, are we not consumers?

The moderator was a nice woman, probably had a psychology degree or something similarly disassociated from the tough task of creating value for money, and proceeded to make every research mistake in the book.

Taking ideas as gospel. Instead of digging around to understand why we said the things being tested would work, she just took the blanket statements as fact. The reality is that nobody knows for sure if something will work or not, so gathering opinions without the supporting attitudes and reasons why is dumb.

 Asking questions we could not answer. This often happens, I have seen it and fired researchers for doing it. Why waste time asking a question, then debating the silly answers when there is no way the group could know  the answer, as it requires some specific knowledge which was not in the filtering questionnaire.

Is it better? Collecting quasi quantitative data with questions like this can lead to gross misjudgements. Just ask Coke if they had the research assuring them that ‘New Coke” was better than ‘old Coke’.

Crystal balling. Asking a group to rub their crystal balls and tell you the future is dumb, dumb unless corralled by a statement such as “if A and B were to happen, what do you think would happen next?”

Defining behaviour by Demographics.  This is a general mistake in recruiting groups. Defining your target markers, which is what this is, by demographics alone went out with the turn of the century when we recognised and were able to track the impacts of the drivers of behaviour beyond simple demographics. Just because you might live in Blacktown and do not have a degree does not mean you cannot own a BMW, purchase expensive wine and go on holidays. Our cultural and social life is far more fragmented and eclectic than in past decades that demographics are now only a small part of the picture of who we are, what we want, and how we behave.

When you spend the money on consumer research, it pays to really consider the problems to be solved and how the answers might be used. If the answer to those is: ‘what problem’ and ‘To convince the boss’   or ‘because I do not what else to do’ it is better to save the research money and do something useful with it.

Do we still need books?

Jun 22, 2016 | Marketing, Personal Rant, Strategy

In a world of abundance, we are desperately in need of depth.

Skating across the surface of the ice is fine for a while, but at some point you need to be able to recognise the weak spots, and figure out how to avoid them before you drop through and drown, just after you freeze.

A book does that for me in a way that an e-book does not, neither does a blog post, or a tweet, they are not physical, they have no intellectual or physical weight somehow. A ‘real’ book still does it.

The other thing is that when you find a book that ‘speaks’ to you, it is easy to walk into someone’s home or office, and plonk it on the desk, and say, ‘read this, it will change your life’ or even be just interesting.

A mate of mine who makes his living researching and writing complicated tenders for large projects, also writes a blog on words, their use and misuse, origins, and various meanings. One day he will assemble it all into a book, as he has done with an collection of illustrated verse he wrote for his kids, personal stuff that he has shared with them, now in a tattered book they have all loved.

It is hard to love an e-book in the same way.

I love books, perhaps scarcity is just making me realise how much.