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.

 

 

 

What does marketing to Supermarkets and Pharmaceutical research have in common?

What does marketing to Supermarkets and Pharmaceutical research have in common?

Mar 13, 2019 | Branding, Governance, Marketing, retail

Quantifying the ROI of marketing investments remains the single most challenging task of marketers. While marketing costs  remain being seen as a variable expense, stuck in the monthly P&L , it will remain hostage to the whims of expediency, corporate politics, and short term thinking. The real KPI of marketing investment should be the sustainable margin delivered over a considerable time, as you would with an investment in machinery.

The obvious problem is that you can measure the output and productivity improvements associated with a piece of machinery, the numbers become available with use, although, they are all in the past. Marketing investment is all about influencing the future, and measurement, even with the benefit of hindsight is very hard, and useful only as a learning tool.

Is there something we marketers can learn from elsewhere?

The  Kaplan Meier curve is a basic concept used all the time by medical and pharmaceutical researchers. For example, if they are testing a new drug for say, patients with diagnosed terminal prostate cancer, you plot on a daily curve the lifespan of those on the test drug, and those on the placebo.

Assuming there are 100 patients in the trial, at day 1, all 100 are alive, then  you plot the numbers who remain alive daily with, and without the drug. If the plot line of those with the drug goes above the line of those without, you can imply the outcome of longer life, and you have some numbers to support the conclusion. If the line of those on the drug dips below the placebo line, you are killing patients. Lines that stay together indicate the drug has no impact.

Simple idea, widely used in medical research.

For years I have watched suppliers to supermarkets being screwed by those supermarkets, and increasingly allocating advertising funds aimed at brand building , which delivers margins over time to the brand owners, and indirectly despite the protestations to the contrary, to the retailers. This reallocation of advertising to working capital and margin via in store promotional activities, and supermarket profitability, at the expense of advertising, has been a huge mistake.

It has seen the demise of some great brands. To be fair however, consumers have benefitted by cheaper prices, at the expense of choice.

A few weeks ago,  the recently merged businesses of Kraft and Heinz, announced a disastrous profit result. This came about as progressively brand advertising that gave consumers confidence in the  brands has been redirected to price promotion that is the primary competitive tool of supermarkets. Meanwhile, those  same retailers have introduced house brands that look very similar, and that trade off the value proposition developed by Heinz and Kraft over many years.

The same thing has happened in Australia, perhaps more so given the concentration of supermarket retailing.

I was around as a junior product manager in the early  days of Meadow Lea brand building, at what was then Vegetable Oils Pty Ltd, a long gone business, swallowed up by corporate stupidity.

 ‘You ought to be congratulated’ is one of the great propositions of Australian brand building. In a hugely crowded margarine market, Meadow Lea held at its height, a 23% percent market share at premium prices, four times that of its closest rival. This was a direct outcome of a good product, great advertising, and a brand that delivered.

I had a look in a supermarket yesterday, and had trouble finding anything labelled Meadow Lea.

What happened?

Retailer power happened, combined with the lack of  understanding of the power of great brand building consumer propositions by retailers. Meadow Lea was squeezed by retailers for more and more promotional dollars that ended up  being funded by reductions in the brand advertising and building activity, with the end result that the brand in effect no longer exists.

It has become nothing more than a label!

I wonder where the  next market building initiative will come from?

Certainly not from the manufacturers, as they know that immediately they create a market the retailers will undermine it with cheap versions, so there is no value in the risks involved in the innovation necessary, and no reward.

Back to where I started, and I do not have the data for this, but I bet that applying a Kaplan Meier analysis to  the delivered margin from Meadow Lea over time, both to the now owners of the brand, and the retailers, would show that the allocation of brand activity to the low prices demanded by retailers had hurt everybody concerned, including consumers.

Image credit: Wikipedia

 

 

‘Brand Conversations’ are usually just a marketers wet dream.

‘Brand Conversations’ are usually just a marketers wet dream.

Feb 20, 2019 | Branding, Customers, Marketing

 

Brand loyalty and frequency of purchase,  are not the same thing, although we seem to act most often as if they were.

Sometimes we marketers believe our own bullshit, not recognising we are usually delusional, or at least subject to a severe case of confirmation bias.

When was the last time you actually came across a customer who was so loyal, they wanted to ‘have a conversation’ with your brand?

Perhaps they were just shopping around and wanted a ‘conversation’?

Never, right?

Yet the term is used often as we indulge ourselves in developing marketing collateral.

Frequency of purchase, read loyalty, can be the result of many things, awareness, market share, delivering better distribution, price, shelf position in a supermarket, big advertising budgets, and so on.

Only when you significantly increase the price, and some customers stick like glue, or  go from retailer A to retailer B for the single reason of being able to buy your product, do you have real loyalty. Even then, it is likely that rare, wonderful customer could not be bothered having a conversation with your brand, at the risk of the men in white coats carrying them off.

Even the exceptional brands, Apple is one, IBM used to be another, a deli in Flemington, Sydney, is another, known to a relative few who simply would  not go anywhere else, do not have conversations. 

Nobody in their right mind tries to have conversations with these brands.

They do have conversations with employees of the companies that own them, as they seek information, pricing, availability of spares, after sales service, and all the rest of the things we need, but nobody has a conversation with the brand.

Except in the mind of marketing dreamers.

They have conversations with people, your employees, their friends, and friends of their friends, people they meet in supermarkets and service facilities, the list goes on.

The real key is to ensure that when your brand is spoken about, in whatever context, people are telling others of the value delivered, the problems solved, and that it ‘delivers’.

Forget the frills, jargon, and self delusion, it is a tough world out there, and your product needs to perform as promised, then people will talk about you.

Header cartoon credit: Tom Gauld New Scientist.