Jul 21, 2011 | Change, Collaboration, Leadership, Personal Rant
We all understand the “God Complex” the situation where someone proclaims their universal truth about a complex problem. My solution is the right one, no argument!.
Problem is that complex problems are really, well, complex, hard to understand, and there is rarely a single right answer, and even rarer that an individual stumbles across the solution first time, without trying many potential solutions and partial solutions, revising the bits that worked, dismissing those bits that proved to be useless. Sound familiar, its trial and error, continuous improvement, or to the Lean adherents amongst us, PDCA, or the scientific method, perhaps AAR, all variations to a theme about which I have written a bit.
In the case of the carbon tax in Australia, it may be a contributor to a solution to global warming, it may make enough difference to worth the pain, it may not, problem is we will not know until after the data is in, but by then the dice will be rolled, and we cannot unroll it.
Currently we have two political leaders proclaiming the rightness of their solution to a hugely complex problem. Neither knows the answer, that will be the outcome of a hugely complex set of assumptions and outcomes containing multiples of permutations of what may happen depending on decisions and actions over which neither pollie has any control at all.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have both of these silly wallies admit they do not know the right answer, that there certainly is not one “right” answer, but agree that the problem is real, as they have done in a tacit way by each “committing” to the 5% reduction. In a bi partisan manner, map out a program of experimental measures across a range of activities, with a view to refining over time the range of measures to be put in place to reduce our emissions, and encourage the “clean” economy through technology and changed practices. This stuff is important enough to our collective future that it requires genuine wide ranging collaboration to come up with an evolutionary and decade straddling program for there to be any hope of success.
Somebody, please tell me I’m dreamin’.
Jul 19, 2011 | Leadership, Management, Personal Rant
I was struck last month by the blizzard of numbers and alternative views presented as a part of the release of the national accounts.
The economy was down, but the floods in QLD and Vic had largely caused the problem and was it short term only, consumer spending was up, but we are saving more than ever, and so on, and on, and on. However, the overall picture is so rosy that the Reserve Bank appeared likely to put up interest rates again pretty soon.
Little of it struck true at a “gut” level, a two speed economy is probably more like a 6 speed economy, with a couple of gears going backwards, and the picture if you take away mining, just a horrible mess of varying degrees.
Thank heavens over the last fortnight the Westpac chief economist has come out and said that interest rates were in fact too high, and all but the mining industry was struggling. On Monday the Reserve Bank minutes released indicated they were taking note of the problems, and rates were likely to be steady for a while.
In my patch, in and around the food industry, one of the largest drivers in the economy, the landscape is littered with landmines. It has not been worse in my 35 years of engagement. No numbers here, just tacit knowledge based on observation, discussion, and experience, all of which run counter to the heroic stuff mouthed explicitly by the treasurer, most economists, and the shiny pants set in Canberra who just rely on the macro numbers.
Jul 19, 2011 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Social Media
Procter & Gamble is a huge branded consumer business, but seems to be able to maintain the agility and innovation capability of an SME. Supermarket retailers have to be nervous when they display a determination to build a direct business model for their brands, and when they start talking about “qualified retailers” it is music to my ears, having struggled in an unforgiving Australian FMCG duopoly for years. It is the other side of the coin from retailers developing their own brands beyond Housebrand status, noted previously.
P&G tried with Amazon, and the effort had its challenges, so they are quietly widening the approach with this facebook collaboration, creating a new descriptor in the process, “f-commerce” and recruiting Wal-mart as a “qualified retailer” (not bad for a start)
This also ticks facebooks boxes, as it is a strategy to monetarise their huge base of connections to consumers, and sets them against Amazon in the e-fulfilment business.
Poor old Microsoft, increasingly it seems to have missed the boat. Just a decade ago the US government had them in court trying to break them up to give others a chance.
What’s the old saying about roosters and feather dusters?
Jul 18, 2011 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Strategy
There is a new boy on the block to match Colgate, P&G, and other international brand owners, but one who does not play fair, one who controls access to consumers, removing their options of choice. Tesco. A retailer with the clout of Tesco that comes from its scale, with its ability to determine which products consumers will see on shelf, is aiming to develop international housebrands in competition with its suppliers.
Some will see this as just commercial common sense, Tesco leveraging their hard won position with consumers, whilst others will see it as the death-nell of brands, something to be opposed by any means.
I suggest it is neither, but neither is it something in the middle, there are other dimensions to the decision that will determine the outcome:
- Will a retailer be able to develop the deep consumer understanding that feeds a sustainable marketing, brand and product development effort necessary to build a real brand as distinct from labels on shelf?
- When a consumer has a problem with a Tesco branded product, and Tesco fails to manage that problem in a satisfactory manner, will the consumer just move to an alternative product, or move to an alternative retailer?
- Will the presence of Tesco branded products on shelf in a category further remove the incentive for proprietary brands to invest in category growth, and will the further removal of that support damage category profitability for Tesco? This profitability squeeze appears to be happening currently in many categories being demolished by retailer housebrands, will it just get worse?
This development is a logical evolution of the path retailers have been travelling for some time, the only real question is weather evolution accepts the change in the model, or will the model, having evolved past the point of sustainability, now wither and die in the face of more effective competitive models.
Jul 14, 2011 | Branding, Marketing
Brands are not uniform things, they are an amalgam of all sorts of contributing factors, patterns of attraction, that together make up an experience.
People recognise and relate to brands in a very personal way, and in the age of net communication, the opportunity to build and leverage from the notion of brands as patterns of behaviour and preference is building daily. People have friends who are all different, but looking behind the people, there will usually be a few common denominators, education, interests, a particular point of view, something that binds them together that may not be immediately obvious.
The brands people choose to engage with are no different to the people they choose to engage with, they contain a pattern of characteristics that is attractive.
