Apr 16, 2014 | Branding, Leadership
Personal branding seems to be a popular topic around the pub, even the brickie who lives a few streets away, and is not known for his new age sensitivities, has got a hold of it.
It is not new, Julius Caesar had a personal brand well before Bill Shakespeare wrote a play about him, and they killed him for it.
Tom Peters, who was really “hot” in the nineties wrote a prescient Fast Company article about personal branding, but missed the point, at least to my mind. This Roger Duncan e-book does it much better, listing 8 behaviors that build a personal brand, and if you followed the list, no doubt you would make a mark.
However, I think it can be summarised better, in a few words.
“Always deliver greater value than is expected”. Simple, but complicated at the same time.
A mate of mine was offered a bundle, just to meet with someone he knew vaguely for a coffee. If asked nicely, he probably would have made the 20 minutes, but being offered money????. He did not have the coffee, and it turned out that the supplicant did want something from him, and had my friend taken the money, it would have set up an obligation to deliver something he may rather not have.
There is never something for nothing in business, when it seems too good to be true, it usually is.
Doing something unexpected for others, over delivering in the parlance, builds a bank of goodwill that at some point will be repaid.
Perhaps not today, or tomorrow, but it will come back to you. That is the way you build a persona brand, based on honesty, transparency, and over-delivery.
Apr 14, 2014 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, retail, Sales
Walking into chain retailers these days you are inevitably confronted by displays of product, usually at a discount.
Most people seem to think that it is the retailer doing the promotion as a means to attract added sales, which is true, but the reality is that the promotion is funded by the suppliers, and it is a competition for the retail space that is generally won by those suppliers with the deepest pockets, and best information.
Retailers are in two businesses, selling stuff to consumers, and renting retail space to suppliers. Chain retailers business model relies on a formula that accommodates volume, revenue, and total margin over the space allocated. This can get very complicated, as the number of variables is enormous.
For a supplier to a chain retailer, the challenge is to balance the complex and competing demands of enterprise profitability and investment in the future against the need to meet retailer margin demands necessary to retain access to the consumer via the distribution controlled by the retailer.
Of real significance is the difference between sales that would have been made irrespective of promotional activity the “base sales rate” and sales made in a period as a result of promotional activity, “incremental sales”.
The need to fund retailer margin via promotional allowances is universal, but the sales that occur as a result of the activity may not be there when there is no activity, and are therefore” rented” sales. The effectiveness of the activity has many measures, but to the supplier two measures only are of any real use.
- The real cost of the promotional activity including all discounts on deal volumes and associated co-operative advertising.
- The number of consumers who convert over time from being a rented consumer to one who becomes a part of the base sales volume.
If you are not making these calculations, and adjusting the mix of your expenditure programs accordingly, and are prepared to make some very tough choices on the basis of the information gathered, chances are you are going broke being successful, a very common complaint in the Australian FMCG market.
Apr 3, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Management
Talking with a couple of mates over a beer recently, one of whom has a successful boutique recruitment agency, we found ourselves reflecting on the changes in word usage that had occurred over the last 20 years, and how we had contributed to the changes, most of which we did not feel were improvements.
A few examples.
“Gay”. A friend of mine at school was named Gaye, lovely girl, great fun, bet she has changed her name.
“Like”. It actually used to mean something, rather than acting as a tool of verbal punctuation.
“Green” used to be a really nice colour, not a political label.
The kicker for me was “passion”.
I have been guilty, there are several posts over the years talking about how important passion is, so I have made a contribution to turning this word into a management cliché
Do we have to be passionate about everything? Cooking. Suddenly we have to be passionate about cooking, when sometimes cooking is just to refuel, and jobs. A quick look at any jobs site will tell you that to be considered you must be passionate about your job, the mission of the enterprise, collaborating with others, and so on, Sometimes, a job is just a job, it pays the bills, keeps the kids occupied , and with luck delivers some intellectual and emotional support.
“Passion” has become a cliche, and has an unfortunate simile, Pretentious.
If you really want someone to be passionate, to make the emotional investment you are seeking, you had better give them a very good reason, because passion is a very private emotion, not given easily.
Apr 1, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Marketing
What do I do now?
The great paradox in selling is that to sell successfully, we often raise the expectations of those to whom we are selling, but to have satisfied customers, we need to under promise and over-deliver.
Complicating that dilemma of the potential mis-match of promise and delivery is that people hear what they want to hear, filtering out stuff that is inconsistent, unexpected, off their personal radar, or is just uncomfortable, while interpreting and exaggerating the stuff they want to hear. This particularly applies to sales outside the expertise of a customer.
Flicking through the TV channels last night, a bit slower than usual, I saw (another) ad for some sort of home training device that promises to deliver me the body of an Adonis in 10 minutes a day with little effort. A classic case of over promising if ever I saw one, but I guess someone is sucked in every minute, or they would not be aired.
Wonder if the poorer suckers ever get their money back? Guess not, but they do get to keep the flab.
The only antidote is to build a brand that customers trust. To do that you need to deliver on the value proposition consistently, over a considerable period, and act with honestly, humility and transparency. Big call for the “fat-be-gone” industry.
Mar 10, 2014 | Branding, Customers
We all seek value, we set out to buy when we find it, but all too often, we settle on price as the measure, when price is only one component of the mix of factors that makes up “value”. The challenging thing is that even each individuals perception of value can change radically depending on context.
I tried to catch a taxi last week in the CBD, mid afternoon, and it was raining very lightly, I was late for an appointment,………
No hope, none at all. AAARRRRHHHH!!!!
There was also one of those sensational exposes on TV last week about the taxi industry in Sydney, how bloody awful it is, poor cars, badly serviced, flagrant profiteering by those who own the licences, and so on, typical populist “news comment”. However, those who own the licences, and those who issue them were declaring righteously how good it really was, and we better all wise up and understand that they had high standards, and the fares were managed to ensure we could all get a cab when we needed one, at a fair price.
What crap. Clearly, the model is broken.
The growth of Uber has been explosive after a shaky start in San Francisco in 2008, it went from an idea to a valuation of 304 million in 4 years.
They do not own a fleet of cars
They do not employ many people
They deliver a service people are prepared to pay for.
The service has always been there, it is called a Taxi, but taxi regulation obsesses about low fares, and regulation, making sure everyone is the same, Uber obsesses about Value. Same service, getting from point A to point B, Uber just does it differently and arguably more reliably than our regulated taxi service. However, you pay for it.
Their model enables cars to be called up in peak demand, but at peak demand, you also get peak prices, the surge pricing model kicks in. You can get a ride at 3.00 in a rainy CBD, but you pay for it.
Back to my taxi dilemma, when I have time, and it is not raining, there are many transport options, of which a taxi is one, but when there is no time, and it is raining the value of having a taxi there when I need it is enormous.
Value is extremely context sensitive and variable.
Does your marketing reflect this reality?
Feb 25, 2014 | Branding, Change, Collaboration, Demand chains, Marketing, retail
A pilot program I have been recently involved with, setting out to assist the evolution of a” Sydney Harvest” brand of local produce has not delivered the results hoped for.
After years of agitation by produce growers in the Sydney basin, beset as they are by aggressive competition from the chain stores, lack of scale and high operating costs as a result of being in semi urban areas, governed by urban concerns, the pilot was created. It was a collaboration between a small number of Sydney basin growers, and specialist retailers aimed at delivering the freshest and best possible produce to those discerning and demanding customers who choose to shop at the specialist produce outlets.
The value proposition was simple : “You know it is fresh, because it come from down the road, you know the retailer, and here is the grower, guaranteeing product provenance and farming practice sustainability”.
In considering the reporting of the exercise, part of the shortcoming of the pilot was that there was little commitment beyond the verbal from the participants, even though the verbal commitment was strong. This is very common in the early stages of collaborative exercises, everyone says “yes” and waits for others to do the lifting. The emergence or otherwise of a “champion” someone who takes on the challenges at a visceral level, can be the main bellwether of success.
Watching a presentation by Seth Godin last night, he articulated just the situation we had.
There was no “connection” between the participants beyond the superficial, the human connection was not there.
Godin calls Connection “The asset of the future” and in a connected world, it would be hard to argue against this proposition. He further identified 4 pre-conditions of connection occurring.
- Co-Ordination. There was co-ordination in this pilot, but it was managed from the outside, by me, there was little skin in the co-ordination part of the game by participants.
- Trust. Trust evolves over time as a result of behaviour, it is never given, it has to be earned. In this case, we underestimated hugely the role to be played by trust, and the preconditions necessary for its evolution.
- Permission. Seth is talking about permission being given by the subject of a marketing effort, so this pilot is a different set of circumstances, nevertheless, whilst” permission” was given in the sense that all signed up to the pilot knowing exactly what was going to happen, and the role they were expected to play, when it went away, nobody missed it. The “permission” whilst given was nothing more than a superficial “OK”
- Exchange of ideas. In this case, whilst there was superficial buy in, the subsequent behaviour did not include interaction amongst the participants. They were too busy and pre-occupied with the normal business to put the time aside to exchange ideas, and get to know on a human level the other participants ,exchange ideas and experiences, and learn from each other.
This stuff is really, really, hard, and the only way we learn is by jumping in and having a go.
