Aug 7, 2012 | Management, Marketing
I was recently the recipient of one of the slickest presentations I have seen for some time, as the Marketing Manager of a business on whose board I sit employed the full range of his presentation skills on us. It was a truly impressive performance, at least at a superficial level.
The business is successful, and its marketing programs are seen as a key component of that success, but the reality is that we really do not know in quantitative terms the value delivered by the marketing investment.
Marketers, and the boards to which they report need to be recognise that the days of hype are over, and what is needed now is a solid, quantitative foundation linked to the outcomes so that intelligent, informed assessments of the marketing investments can be made.
Boards are used to numbers, and generally have to date tolerated the marketing hype delivered to us because:
- They do not understand the marketing jargon
- They had no idea how to measure it, so as it appeared to work, why change.
Those gravy-days of marketing are now ended, and no marketing function or person should be able to avoid the scrutiny and opportunity for productivity gains in marketing investments that have been delivered by intelligent metrics available in the digital world.
Aug 6, 2012 | Management, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
The term exponential is routinely used in engineering, maths, and the sciences, meaning, in lay terms, that the rate of increase in the derivative of a factor increases faster than the increase in the factor itself. “Gobbldy Gook” to most marketers.
Moore’s law is perhaps the most widely known use of this equation, but is only one of many.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil cited many others in a fascinating TED talk a few years ago, in which he points out that exponential growth is a common feature of technological growth, we just have to recognise it when we see it.
Mitch Joels great blog got me thinking.
The growth of complexity in the practice of marketing; new channels, social media, blogs enabling anyone to be a published writer, 100 TV channels at the end of a remote, new industries, the emerging models of collaboration, and all the rest are not linear growth, they are growing by leveraging the principals of exponential maths. The first one is hard, and takes years, the next is much easier and doesn’t take much time, then there is an explosion.
The way we generally think about marketing, and certainly the way the senior management of most large corporations think about it, is still in the linear mode, when the explosion in the opportunities presented by marketing to communicate and connect is an exponential change.
Competitive advantage will accrue to those enterprises that are capable of recognising that marketing into the future will operate in a different dimension if you like, to the C20 notion of accountability dominated by financial measures. Measuring performance by a P&L and Balance sheet mentality that counts what has happened, rather than assessing what will happen, and recognising the opportunities presented by exponential marketing will be leaving huge opportunities on the table.
Aug 2, 2012 | Change, Personal Rant
The much waited review of the” Work Choices” legislation will be released today, after the Minister has had it for a month considering the implications.
It will be absorbing to watch and listen to the “argy bargy” and strident demands of the various union dependent officials and politicians speaking out against the measures increasingly being taken by management that have as their objective recapturing their right to manage, and to reflect the current reality in those decisions. The recent Qantas lock-out and the current noise about labor visas for mining workers spring to mind.
Overall union membership in the economy is around 18%, only 13% if you take out the unionized public sector, against figures of mid 30’s in the 1990’s, and immediately post war, 65%.
Are these noises the last gasp of the doomed?
It is hard to think otherwise than that the power of the 18% is entirely because of the formal ties with the labor party, and the compulsory voting system in this country forcing donkeys to vote. I wonder what the voter turnout would be in a voluntary voting system, and what that may do to the existing two party structure.
As an advisor to a number of small businesses, I see every day the depredations emanating from the absurdly biased regulations surrounding employment. Were they to be removed, employment would immediately increase.
There are structural changes in employment going on, specifically there are far more self employed than even just a few years ago, many would not go back to the dark side, and self employment is a disincentive to the employment of others.
At the recent ACTU congress in Sydney, while trying to absorb the reality that less than 18% of the workforce is unionised, and this number is dropping, propelled by the structural changes in the economy, dumb regulations, and the odious nature of the implications of the Craig Thompson revelations, the union officialdom stood on the podium ,collectively looking like King Canute.
It is in the county’s interest to have many self employed people they are more entrepreneurial, risk takers, they produce value, not consume it, and yet the policies being pursued seem to mitigate against contractors and the self employed.
Aug 1, 2012 | Collaboration, Strategy
Ever thought “how do we get anything done with all these meetings”?
It is a paradox, as the evolving recognition that meetings are essential to successful collaborative activity, and the growth of collaboration as a strategy grows rapidly, so does the propensity for meetings.
However, many meetings are just an excuse for idle people to fill up the time available, and make it seem worthwhile and useful.
Meetings are not a substitute for thinking, they are one of two things:
- A forum to communicate face to face when the issue is sufficiently complicated, or important that other forms of communication are insufficient in their depth of engagement to be as effective, so the meeting its worth the cost, or,
- A forum to throw away the shackles of hierarchy, functional silos, and culture, and address a problem/opportunity as a 5 year old would, with delight, and no inhibitions.
All other reasons for a meeting are just an excuse, and beware of the evils of “groupthink”.
Which of these two did your last meeting fall into?
How is your organisation managing the paradox?
Jul 30, 2012 | Innovation
Bet that got your attention………
Successful Innovation is almost always the end result of many experiments, resources expended that deliver no result, lots of huffing, puffing, moments of excitement, and from time to time great let-downs.
Just like sex.
And just like getting pregnant uses millions of sperm, with only one getting the prize, so does innovation require the expenditure of lots of resources to just get one “home”, and that one makes all the rest seem irrelevant.
