Marketing is dead; Long live marketing

Marketing is dead; Long live marketing

Jul 15, 2019 | Branding, Marketing

 

In 1973 I graduated with a marketing degree, something few had heard of. My father was appalled, as I had set out to get an accounting degree, but had been waylaid by some  new age nonsense that would not get me a job.

Several years later, after quenching my wanderlust, I went looking for a job back in Australia. At that time, marketing was becoming important in a couple of areas, the food industry, and FMCG more generally, being the leader.

I was lucky and scored a job in an environment  which would give rise to one of the (formerly) great Australian brands; Meadow Lea.

Brands had become important through the 20th century in food, as they were a mark of quality, and reassurance that there were no nasties in there that would terminally stunt your growth.  Pretty important in food that you have not grown yourself,  and it is where the big brands emerged, creating the cycle of scale.

Large volumes enables capital expenditure,  and advertising, which exploded when TV emerged in the 50’s, creating massive consumer brands that dominated the landscape of our lives. The corollary is  that there were also many smaller brands, yapping around the edges, stealing a crust here and there, and generally keeping the big blokes honest.

Supermarkets built their scale for the same reasons, delivering price and convenience to consumers, then progressively they  set out to capture some of the proprietary margin of the big brands by leveraging their distribution muscle, by launching house brands in the 80’s. The very first one was a ‘No Frills’ margarine, launched by Franklins in Sydney, supplied by what became Meadow Lea Foods.

Then came the marketing ‘Big Bang’, the arrival of the internet.

I remember seeing the first fax around 1983, and thinking ‘this will change the world’ and it did, but not how I expected, and the fax was nothing compared to the disruption 20 years later.

Suddenly there were thousands of ways to communicate, TV remained, and still does remain an important vehicle, but like an aged boxing champion, is unable to deliver the impact of his youth against a horde of more agile, and stronger contenders who learn on the job every day.

The big brand owners, not wanting to miss out on this new wave of communication channels chucked money and their established ways of doing things at them, and wondered why they were being ignored. At the same time, supermarkets doubled down on housebrands, setting out to market their retail brands as someone you could trust to deliver quality and integrity, while consumers recognised that health regulations made putting nasties in food products a thing of the past.

Who needs brands anymore?

Well, the answer to that question is just about anyone who needs to offer a sense of security, certainty of performance, and a guarantee that they will stand behind their products performance,  to their customers and potential customers. That means anyone pushing the established boundaries of production, distribution, or technology.

Obviously Google, Facebook, Apple, et al fall into this category, and they have built huge global brands in less than 20 years, but those brands look nothing like those of my early years.

They have been built using new channels, as well as reimagining the old ones and executing at scale in ways unimaginable to incumbents. Apple is now the most successful bricks and mortar retailer in the world, when measured on the retailers own key KPI, margin per square foot of retail space, Amazon Go, and Whole Foods are rethinking FMCG retailing, and their bookstores are popping up in places where Dymocks,   Borders, et al closed down a decade ago.

The challenge is that the new marketers emerging now have no idea of how to really build a real brand. FMCG brands are largely irrelevant, so that training ground has gone, the new places to get marketing experience is in tech, and financial services. Tech is building brands despite themselves, simply because they are replacing the old ways with new ones, and financial services, well,  look how puny and irrelevant their brands are in the face of profit pressures, and simply nobody will believe them anymore.

Trust is zero.

Brands cost money to build, and take time building them is an investment in the future, and will not pay off until the future arrives. Unless you have the skills now, the future is looking bleak.

Fortunately there are a few old heads around who still remember, and recognise the ‘4 P’s’ still apply, and a few new heads, not seduced by the newest, shiny tech tool that skates across the surface of brand building

Brands are everywhere, without them, chaos will prevail, but to build one today, you need to be smarter than the next bloke, not just be lucky enough to have more resources and distribution scale. Genuine, creative and forward looking marketing is getting another lease of life.

 Call me when you need a dose of invaluable experience.

 

Header cartoon courtesy Tom Fishburn at www.marketoonsist.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

Genuflecting at the tomb of the unknown customer

Genuflecting at the tomb of the unknown customer

Jul 12, 2019 | Branding, Marketing

More money is thrown at the tomb of the unknown customer than any other source of marketing waste.

Unless you can define very well indeed who your customer is, you will be wasting most of any time, effort, and money you spend.

Defining who your ideal customer is involves choices, as you also  have to determine who is not, and therefore you will not spend resources trying to reach and influence them. This is really difficult for most, especially smaller businesses, to whom turning away a potential customer is an appalling thought.

Over 35 years ago I took over as Marketing Manager of the newly formed General Products Division of Dairy Farmers.

The brand of yoghurt we had was Ski, market leader in a small, and slowly growing market. When I joined, Yoplait had just launched, and the market had exploded.  Ski’s volumes were about the same, but share had dropped to single figures as Yoplait had, rightly,  taken all the growth for itself.

During a qualitative research project aimed at understanding who was buying yoghurt, which brands they preferred and why, the researcher asked the respondents to describe each of the major brands in human terms.

Yoplait was an educated, hip, self reliant, confident young woman who had her life in order the way she wanted it.

Ski was a reliable 50 year old farmer in wellies.

The advertising plan that was in place when I arrived was just more of the same old stuff, trying to convince ‘Miss Yoplait’ that the wellie wearing farmer was a good choice for her.

Might not have worked very well, so it was changed, and Ski started on a 5 year roll of product innovation that led to market leadership.

25 years later, Chobani came along and has done the same thing, again, as the so called marketers who followed, lost sight of the consumer, leaving the field open for a better targeted offer from a newcomer.

Need some help thinking this challenging stuff through? Give me a call.

What price experience?

What price experience?

Jul 1, 2019 | Branding, Governance, Strategy

It seems to me that the development of robust, lasting, measureable and implementable strategy and marketing has gone to the dogs.

We are infested with short term rubbish that reflects the lack of experience of those doing the developing, and lack of understanding of those doing the commissioning, obsessed as they are with the short term.

Last week, Bloomberg revealed that the software in the Boeing 737 Max was outsourced to a bunch of recent graduates in India. Unfortunately, we all know the result of that exercise.

Not only were hundreds killed in the two crashes that followed, but the brand ‘Boeing’ took a dive with them.

How is that for the ROI on a few bob saved on experience!

You cannot put an old head on a young dog, all they do is yap.

Where does the ‘essential essence’ of marketing hide?

Where does the ‘essential essence’ of marketing hide?

Jun 21, 2019 | Branding, Marketing, Strategy

 

Great marketing is never entirely rational.

If it was we would call it economics, and be bored to death by its recitation.

‘Rational’ relies on precision, mathematics, and repeatability, not characteristics often seen in the behaviour of human beings.  We are driven by automatic things buried deep in our brains that have evolved to enable our relatively physically weak species, to become the dominant species on earth.

Individually our ancestors could not beat off a sabre toothed tiger, but together we saw them disappear while we prospered. We are disproportionally attuned to detect danger before we detect happiness, a foe before a friend, and are initially suspicious of anyone from outside the ‘tribe,’ and anything we do not understand.

Great marketing is the opposite to rational. It demands attention because it is different, it creates curiosity, because it is unexpected,  and interest because it is of value.

Creativity is the core of great marketing, as without creativity, every marketing strategy would be the same.  All marketers have access to the same data, can apply the same logic to a challenge, use the same models,  have the same distribution, so if logic reined, all would be the same for the same sort of product.

Instead, we have a cornucopia of strategies and tactical implementations, driven by some level of creativity. These days, sadly, most of the creativity has been squeezed out by the algorithms and demands of the rationalists running enterprises,  which is why there is so much poor marketing and advertising around.

If you want to be seen, be different, cause a stir in the bushes, build curiosity, be creative!

It will not always work as you expect, as creativity is about being first, which is usually bold and risky, it will not always win hearts and minds in the corner office, but as a marketer, it is your duty!

 

Header cartoon from the great Hugh McLeod at www.gapingvoid.com

 

 

How much is a seat at the creative table?

How much is a seat at the creative table?

Jun 3, 2019 | Branding, Marketing

The nature of the 24 hour marketing turnaround has led to piles of rubbish advertising. The ‘big idea’ of my youth, the search for that magic something that will engage and motivate  has been replaced by piles of small expressions that get left on the table.

Creativity requires time, curiosity, an awareness of what is around you, a tolerance for risk, and an irreverence for the status quo. These are no longer common in an environment of the 24 hour turnaround, but when you see an example, you notice it, remember it, and just perhaps it influences behaviour.

However, from time to time, someone  also takes advantage of the quick cycle and comes up with something creative, irreverent, and different, and it works.

As a young marketer, one of the key metrics was awareness. How much did we have to spend to generate a specific level of awareness?

The ad in the header was as far as I am aware, just on a few Ikea stores in Queensland. The cost would have been almost nothing,  the impact significant. Most poster ads go unnoticed, this one was noticed, and the new age tools spread it, which is how it came to me.

A terrific idea.

My favourite marketing guru, Albert Einstein quipped, amongst his many, ‘Creativity is intelligence having fun’

Somebody in Ikea was having a lot of fun!

 

PS. June 4.

It turns out the ad in the header was a ‘fake ad’ put out by a creative consultancy, Adrian Elton, in an effort to get the attention of Ikea management. 

I am sure it worked, as Ikea is not stupid. This is an example of a big idea, so lacking in todays churn of mediocre ideas passed off as content creation.

11 things you have to get right to successfully rebrand.

11 things you have to get right to successfully rebrand.

May 13, 2019 | Branding, Marketing

Rebranding an enterprise is fraught with risk.

You risk losing the brand identity you have, along with current customers, distribution channels, recognition, and so on, banking on building a larger brand in the future.

It will not happen without significant risk and cost.

Let’s get the definition of ‘rebrand’ right.

We are  not talking about a simple pack change here, but a ‘clean sheet of paper’ rebrand.

A seemingly simple pack change is hard enough, but pales into insignificance against a total rebrand, which goes to the core of the value delivered by the brand to its customers.

Years ago I was tasked to rebrand a well known albeit small FMCG brand, ‘Tandaco’. It had in its portfolio several ingredient products used by serious and traditional cooks,  suet,  yeast,  stuffing mix and breadcrumbs. The task was to rebrand into a new brand ‘Supercook,’ which had a wider range of products that were intended to be licenced from the UK.

Having previously been badly bitten by what appeared to be a simple repackaging exercise on Tandaco Stuffing Mix, told in this post,  I was very wary of the larger exercise. While I opposed the whole exercise, as I failed to see any additional value for consumers, and considerable risk, I was convinced I had done everything humanly possible to make it work.

I set out to do this ‘by the numbers,’ to ensure as far as possible that mistakes previously made were not repeated. It was the early eighties, so market research was ‘clunky’ at best, and by comparison to today, positively prehistoric. Nevertheless, there was a lot of research done aimed at addressing what I saw as the stumbling blocks;

  • How did we translate the positive feelings of that small group of current buyers of Tandaco to the new brand Supercook?
  • How did we ensure that the new brand was not left on the shelf due to non recognition, repeating the mistake made previously with the redesign of the stuffing mix, noted above.
  • What brand takeaway did we want to attach to the new Supercook brand?
  • Which additional products could be fitted under the umbrella, that would add to the total volumes of that particular sub category in supermarkets? There were some expectations here based on the British experience, but it seemed to me that potential range extensions were going to have to take share from an existing product, as category expansion seemed unlikely.
  • What was the profile of the key group of purchasers who made up the bulk of the volume currently, and would they ‘stick’ when the new brand was introduced? Indeed, would they buy some of the range  extensions in preference to the existing competition, and why?
  • How would the brand change impact on consumers, how did it add any value to them. My view, expressed probably too loudly for the relatively junior person I was at the time, was that the whole exercise was driven by someone in an office who had a good idea one morning, and no engagement in the marketplace.

There were also marketing management challenges that had to be addressed.

  • Designers and advertising creative personnel needed to be thoroughly briefed and on board with the strategies, reasons for the change, and what we sought to achieve
  • Internal management record keeping from the accounting, through the production management and procurement processes needed to be keyed into the changeover timetables, and accommodating of record changes and allowances made for the inevitable one off changeover costs that would emerge.
  • Sales personnel and importantly customer , supermarket buyers needed similar timetables.
  • Most importantly, consumers had to be informed and engaged in the new brand as it was rolled out.
  • Was there enough budget to do all of the above?

While I believed at the time I had crossed every ‘t’ and dotted every ‘I,’ the change turned out to be a silly idea, and was reversed a couple of years later, after my departure.

At the time of the change, Cerebos was owned by British Multinational RHM, which had slowly bought up the Australian owned businesses over a period of years, and had global aspirations. It has since been passed around like a parcel at a 5 year olds birthday party. The current owner being Kraft Heinz, who acquired it at the beginning of 2018 from Japanese brewer Suntory.  Given the recent disastrous performance by Kraft Heinz, Cerebos is most likely back on the market as Kraft Heinz scrambles to improve their  balance sheet.

A final word of caution. I have seen a ‘rebrand’ become the excuse for all sorts of other changes, not associated with adding value to customers. These are to be avoided at any cost.