Jan 2, 2013 | Branding, Change, Marketing, retail, Small business
This is the first post of the new year, so it seemed appropriate to hop on a hobby-horse, the indiscriminate use of the word “iconic”, in all sorts of situations.
My beef today is specific to the food industry.
The call to receivers to sort out “Rosella” has created a lot of noise, of the “another “Iconic” Australian food business goes to the wall” type.
Whilst it is true that the Rosella brand has been around for a long time, it has not been owned by an Australian company in my memory in the food industry, which is disturbingly long. Rosella was owned by the British/Dutch multinational Unilever for many years, who sold it to the Dutch trader Stuart Alexander probably 15 years ago. They failed to give it the breath of life, and on-sold it to the South African group that ultimately owned Gourmet Food Holdings, as their vehicle to assemble food brands. They also owned Aristocrat, which in my memory was owned by an Australian family who actually cared about their products. Problem was they had a factory in Chatswood in Sydney, now prime real estate, and insufficient marketing grunt to maintain retail real estate,
So, what makes an “Iconic Australian business”?
I might be persuaded that “Rosella” was an Australian brand, as you could not buy it anywhere else, but certainly not that it was an iconic Australian brand, or Australian business, which is the other epithet often used.
To me “iconic” has a number of dimensions:
Longevity.
Market share, but more importantly than share, the potential to shift markets due to consumer trust and loyalty.
Consistent delivery of value to customers/consumers.
Over time, it has managed to evolve so that it accurately reflects the core proposition of the brand in a manner relevant to the customers/consumers of each of those times.
On all but the first of these parameters, Rosella fails the test. Ask yourself “who will miss Rosella?” and the real answer is very few.
So why the hand-wringing?
Simple. The demise of Rosella in another example of the decimation of the Australian food manufacturing industry, particularly the small manufacturers. Here we are, in a geographically enviable location close to the burgeoning Asian markets, with advanced R&D, skilled workforce, high and transparent standards, able to produce commodities at world competitive costs, but we are failing to feed our own people from our own resources, huge amounts of manufactured food is now imported, (more than $10 billion last year) and the trend is accelerating.
We have White papers dealing with the Asian century and our place in it delivering cliches, and task forces examining the woes of the food manufacturing industry, and making grand recommendations, but not much activity that is useful, so I guess we have to kid ourselves to feel better.
Happy new year, I hope it is “iconic” for you.
Dec 20, 2012 | Marketing, Personal Rant, Small business
Yesterday in the midst of a sizeable gathering, one person was moaning about the rip-off represented by Christmas hampers, specifically one she had received the previous day. “Full of stuff I could have bought and probably cost half as much, what a wank”
Unfortunately for the moaner, the business that had given her said hamper was a client of mine, so I was aware of the thought, time, degree of personalisation, and genuine care that went into the construction of the hampers as a means of acknowledging the value they placed in the relationship. They did not have to give hampers, they wanted to. Whilst the costs incurred were important, the real importance to my client was elsewhere, a point entirely missed by the moaner.
It seems my client wasted the money they spent on that particular hamper, misjudging the total lack of grace of the receiver, but hopefully she was one of a very few who failed to recognise the intent.
I can say for sure that the mistake will not be made again with that particular person.
Merry Christmas to all my readers, I cannot send you all a hamper, but I can send you my genuine thanks for coming, commenting, and generally participating in making the writing of this blog a joy rather than a labour.
Merry Christmas.
Allen
Dec 18, 2012 | Change, Governance, Management, Social Media, Strategy
Like most newspaper groups, Fairfax has failed to evolve to accommodate the depredations of the digital revolution. Their business model is broken, and the way forward is unclear.
The one spot of light in a gloomy future was the NZ auction site “Trade Me” which Fairfax bought for $700 million in 2006, then floated 34% onto the ASX, and a further 15% last year, raising $422 million, leaving them with a 51%, share which they are now selling for $616 million. The proceeds of the sale, are being used to pay down the debt accumulated to keep a redundant business model alive, offering an opportunity for it to change before being terminal.
Trade me was delivering profitability, superior return on funds, and an important toe in the digital water, but is being sacrificed to keep the legacy business afloat while it tries to adjust. In addition, Trade Me, along with Fairfax’s other less prominent digital assets offer the opportunity to experiment, test, to learn how to survive and compete in the digital environment.
The lesson in all this is that if you do not cannibalise yourself, somebody else will accommodate, and the pain of chewing your fingers will pale into insignificance against the pain of being chomped around the waist by a white pointer. The irony however is that the only digitally sustainable asset in the house has to be sold to buy some time, but leaves the business without any significant cash generator in the digital space. At least Fairfax shares rose yesterday, so directors are probably happy this morning.
Dec 17, 2012 | Communication, Marketing, Sales
Everybody, well almost everybody, uses Powerpoint. Some use it well, many use it poorly, and some are just appalling.
We have all sat through that presentation by somebody we thought had something to say, and they said it all on packed, almost illegible slides, which they then read to us!
Sigh!
So here are three simple, practical steps to take to make a boring presentation engaging, assuming of course that what is to be said has merit in the first place. No way to make a silk purse…………
- Use big fonts, the bigger the better. You therefore cannot get much on a slide, so need to distill the information down to the idea you are trying to convey. If you cannot distill the verbiage down to a few words that is the core of the message, work on your message, not the presentation.
- Use photos, drawings and graphics that convey a message, one per slide. As above, plus it gives you a visual hook onto which to hang a story. There are millions of images on the net, there will be many that convey the core message in a memorable way, you just have to find it.
- Do things in threes. For some reason my psychological friends can probably recite, our brains work in threes, we can remember three, and sequences of three, using this innate ability helps to organise your thoughts and presentation, and creates a flow for the audience.
If Powerpoint no longer does it for you at all, eventually the world does move on, then something like Prezi evolves, and simply makes the old stuff look, well, old.
Dec 13, 2012 | Lean, Operations, Small business
How often do we get sidetracked by several possible causes of an adverse or unexpected outcome?
In the course of doing a fair bit of process improvement work over the years, one of the really successful strategies I have used is to get people to distinguish between the real cause of an unwanted outcome, and something that has no impact. Put like that it seems pretty simple, but it is almost always more complicated, and serves as a core of the “5 Why” lean tool, always requiring hands on knowledge of the way things work, and usually some data. Ask yourself “Why” successively, up to 5 times, as in this lovely story of the Lincoln memorial and pigeons.
Is the intermittent crushing of boxes by the box erector in the factory caused by a marginal variation in the dimensions of the carton flat (prior to erection) or by the wearing of the bearings in the box erector itself, leading to sloppy operation in one of the clamps? Pretty easy to mistake which of these is the real cause of the stoppages, and waste time trying to fix something that perhaps does not need fixing, while the boxes continue to be crushed.
This is of course different from the confusion about which is cause, and which is effect. I was in the Sydney CBD last week, and saw several blind people with Labrador dogs. Does having a Labrador cause blindness?
