May 3, 2023 | Marketing, Strategy
Every person on the planet has a frame through which they view the world, built on their life experience, education, background and interests. Unconsciously we all bring these biases into the process of planning our businesses.
If you ask an accountant how to best address the climate crisis, they will give you a response that has an accounting and numeric base, ask the same question of an ecologist, economist, entomologist, or marketer, and you will get different answers, informed by their own unconscious biases.
So, how do we filter them out of our planning, which almost all of the time focusses on the opportunity, the impact of our innovation?
Business planning while having a place for risk assessment, always in my experience lends it far less weight than the opportunity.
In order to ‘de-bias the plan, ask yourself three questions, the first of which is strategist Roger Martin’s claimed most important question:
- What would have to be true? This forces you to consider the drivers of success in the situation being addressed in the plan.
- What future event could sink the plan?
- What would help us if the plan does sink: i.e., what is plan B that avoids commercial demolition?
Anticipating competitive action and planning to accommodate the impact is a necessary part of every plan. This is perhaps the most common failure amongst marketing plans I have seen, including my own.
A long time ago I was with Cerebos, one of the brands I managed was Cerola muesli, at that time a successful brand, and I was keen to expand the brand footprint. I saw a gap in the market between muesli and corn flakes. This was 40 years ago, and there was not the wide choice we have now. We developed a halfway product we called ‘Cerola Light and Crunchy.’ I wrote a marketing plan that had as its first step a test market in Adelaide.
In that plan, well thought out and detailed as it was, I failed to sufficiently consider any of the three questions.
At first, we did remarkably well. The logic we employed was well accepted, the retailer sell-in easily achieved targets, and consumer off-take was strong after the initial burst of advertising. Then in came Kellogg’s with a look-a-like product, ‘Just Right,’ and their resources just blew us away. Light &Crunchy never had a chance in the face of the weight of the competitive reaction by Kellogg’s, and we retreated, recognising the reality that we simply did not have what it took to poke a bear and expect to get away unscathed.
I never made that mistake again, and the only consolation I have is that ‘Just Right’ has survived and prospered, so at least my marketing logic was sound.
I do not agree with the conclusion in the header cartoon that you should roll over and play dead in the face of bear-like opposition. However, it is true that if you poke a bear, you had better do it in such a way that you have some sort of advantage that they cannot replicate.
Header cartoon credit: Tom Fishburne at marketoonist
May 1, 2023 | Change, Governance, Strategy
Strategy is all about choice: what we will not do is at least as important as what we will do.
When you dig a level deeper into the generic ‘will I or won’t I’, you come to the question of how do you make what are almost always difficult choices between options in the absence of full information.
At a top level, that choice is driven by two factors:
Cost structure.
There is always a cost to delivering product. Understanding the cost drivers associated with your product and business model is essential. You will then be able to make informed choices about how best to minimise those costs without compromising the value you deliver to customers.
Value creation.
Selling a product of any type depends on a buyer seeing the value created by their purchase as being greater than the cost of the purchase. ‘Value’ is a very personal term. The value of an expensive watch is not in the ability of that watch to tell the time, it resides in a range of psychological drivers that drive individual behaviour and choice.
Until recently, most of the costs involved were of a physical nature, now they are increasingly behavioural. Similarly with value creation, in the past it was the utility you got out of a physical purchase, but physical utility has been usurped by digital and emotional utility.
Understanding both is critical to success.
Apr 29, 2023 | Change, Innovation
30 years ago tomorrow, April 30, 1993, the public internet was born with the announcement by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research that they would publicly release the HTTP protocols that would change the world. These protocols had been created by Tim (now Sir Tim) Berners-Lee for use by academic and defence facilities and had been very tightly held. On April 30, 1993 they were posted on what would become the world’s first website and were to be freely available to all.
10 years ago, I posted a happy 20th message.
Leading up to that momentous release of the HTTP protocols, providing the initial foundation for today’s internet, the US department of defence had created the ARPANET (Advanced Research projects Agency Network) in 1969. The first email message being sent by Ray Tomlinson who first used the @ symbol to separate the recipient’s name from the network address to himself in 1971. By 1983 there was general agreement on the standards for communication on the internet, the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet protocol), and in 1985 the first domain, Symbolics.com was registered, which remains live today.
Once publicly released, the standardised protocols saw a mobilisation of innovative resources from around the world, resulting in rapid development of uses and tools.
Mosaic, the first popular web browser was launched in late 1993, and later was renamed Netscape navigator, and Yahoo launched in 1994. Microsoft launched their competitive search tool Explorer in 1995, later incorporating it free into Windows, leading to the move by the Clinton government to take action under the antitrust laws in 1998, resulting in an order to break up Microsoft. This order was later lost on appeal, significantly due to the evolving dominance of Google as the preferred search engine. Amazon launched in 1995, Google in 1998 and amongst the wave of tech IPO’s in 1999 was Napster, the first peer to peer file sharing service.
From the launch of Wikipedia in 2001, we again had a wave of launches, most of which failed, but a few became the unicorns that changed our lives, Facebook 2004, YouTube 2005, iPhone 2007, Instagram 2010, and so it continues.
The most recent inflection is obviously the explosion of AI tools since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022.
If you extrapolated from this birthday out to the next milestone, the 40th, the only thing we can say for sure is that you would be wildly, massively wrong. That happens every time such an inflection point is reached. Extrapolation is useless, instead we need to experiment and innovate, a continuous process that will take us in completely unpredictable directions.
I hope I am around to see it.
Apr 24, 2023 | Communication, Marketing
So called ‘Content Marketing” or alternatively, ‘inbound marketing’, has become the poster boy of marketing. It has attracted marketing budgets like a magnet in an iron filings factory.
Often, we see content that has been produced for contents sake, without any analytical consideration or real value. It has become so easy to produce superficial generalities that pass uninformed scrutiny using AI tools, that ‘thinking’ is becoming rare.
Creating content that will deliver a return is an investment, and like every investment, marketers should be looking for a return, seeking to improve the performance of the resources they deploy.
Just making assumptions, no matter how obvious, can end up badly.
As a young marketer, I made the huge mistake of assuming that consumers could see the pack of a product I managed through my eyes, and were as desperate as I was to rectify the damage it was clearly doing to a good brand.
That assumption was a huge mistake that nearly ended my budding marketing career before it really took off.
The point is that we are now just all creating content, assuming our current and potential customers can read our minds and see the value in it, be overwhelmed, and just buy.
Never happens, you must build a framework within which your content makes no assumptions. Following are a few seemingly simple steps:
Have goals for your content.
It does not matter how beautifully written and illustrated your content may be, if the reader does not know what you want them to do with it. When you want them to try a product, tell them. When you want them to sign up for a webinar, or free e-book, tell them.
Write for the persona.
Content with a commercial intent is different from being a journalist telling a wide story. You need to engage a very specific group of people and convert them to a transaction. This is best done by a skilled salesperson looking them in the eye, but the second best is great content that they see as written for them. To achieve this, you need to be very certain and specific of the desired audience. First step is creating those personas, and when you have them, write to them as you would a friend.
Write to a calendar.
This comes from knowing your audience and the markets they are in. If you are selling real estate, it makes more sense to write about the great outdoor entertaining area in spring, than the huge log fireplace which will keep the house warm. Keep that one for the autumn. It is also the case that your committed audience come to expect some sort of rhythm to your writing. Once a month, once a week, every day, whatever it is, establish and keep to the rhythm so that it becomes part of their lives. I consume a wide range of the content of others, the only common factor is that they all have a predictable rhythm.
Have your own voice.
Ensure you have a tone of voice that is consistent across all the platforms you use. I always recommend that my clients write their own content. They may have it researched, drafted, and a first draft edit by others, but they do the writing. In that way it is them speaking as close to one to one as they can get to the individuals in their audience.
Have your own ‘Home base’.
Content lasts forever once it is posted, it can continue to deliver for you, but it needs a home. The platforms out there make their money by collecting information attractive to advertisers, then restricting access unless you pay them for it. Facebook started with total access to the newsfeeds of those to whom you were connected, it is now down by most counts to less than 2%. LinkedIn has made huge changes since being bought by Microsoft as they progressively monetised the platform. All platforms are there to make a return, not to act as a public service. You must have your own home base, digital real estate that you own, that you can do with what you wish. The challenge of course is that you must figure out how to drive the traffic you want to your home.
Repurpose and resurrect your content.
Content once created and posted lasts forever, and can be used and reused many times, and in many forms, on the many different platforms. While the ‘half-life’ of content on a public platform like Facebook or twitter can be measured in a few minutes, content on your website is always there, can be found with a search, and can continue to deliver value for a long time. A number of my older posts deliver readers every day, many of whom stay, subscribe, and engage with the newer content as it is posted.
Leverage your analytics.
The free Google analytics package gives you a pile of information that can be used to improve what you are doing, and ensure it is finding the right audiences. Not using it is silly.
This is all simple to say, but very hard to do.
Like all things that are hard, it takes a considerable commitment to be able to stand out, be different, and deliver value that generates a return on your investment in content. You should recognise that digital marketing, if it is to be effective, is not ‘free’. Not only are you giving the platforms access to your eyeballs for further remarketing for their benefit, but you are also making the investment of your most valuable resources, time and energy.
You should always consider the return you receive from investments you make.
Header image credit: Dall-E robotic image generator
