Dec 25, 2013 | Branding, Marketing, Personal Rant
It is Christmas day, my adult children are off doing stuff, my wife is working for the man, so I am left with my thoughts, the prospect of a late, and very big lunch, accompanied by perhaps a few too many sherbets, and this blog.
It seems to me that the basic purpose of Christmas is to provide an opportunity to reaffirm the importance of family and the relationships that exist in our lives. However, we have been hi-jacked by commerce, self interest and marketing at its most venal.
Christmas has become a commercial day, even my Jewish friends get caught up in the frenzy, and I am almost ashamed to admit, I have no Muslim friends with whom I have felt sufficiently comfortable to have a philosophical discussion about Christmas, and the personification, indeed branding of it as” Santa Day”.
So, hug your kids, embrace your friends, smile, and remember that it is us that has allowed Santa to become a brand, so it can also be us that steps above the commerce and get back to the real meaning.
Merry Christmas, and thanks for engaging with my variable musings throughout the 5 years of this blog, I hope to have scratched your brain from time to time.
Dec 16, 2013 | Branding, Governance, Management, Strategy
For perhaps the 1,000th time last week I heard the “strategy” question asked. It comes in many forms:
What is your customer strategy?
What is your google strategy?
What is your social media strategy? and so on.
All are valid questions, but the implication is that there is a different strategy for every bloody thing that is faced by a business, which to my mind is a degradation, perhaps commoditisation of the meaning of the word as it should (in my view) be practised. This type of usage is about the implementation of strategy, the manner in which you go about achieving the strategic outcomes desired, not about the formulation of the drivers of performance over the long term.
Equally, having an annual “strategic workshop” that sets strategy for the year is a nonsense, well, at best a budgeting session by another name.
“Strategy” is at once simpler, and more complicated than that, and comes down to five really challenging questions that must be lived, every day, by all in the enterprise. They are not the subject of some crappy off-site gab-fest in the slow sales period of the year if you are serious.
- What is the business we are in? (the old are we selling drills, or 20mm holes question, probably the most undervalued, and original marketing question)
- What does the enterprise do to add value?
- What are the behavioural drivers of the primary customers we are seeking to service
- What is our value proposition to these customers and potential customers?
- What capabilities are crucial, now and into the future, and how do we develop them to be differentiated?
When was the last time you seriously asked yourself any of these?
Dec 11, 2013 | Branding, Change, Collaboration, Leadership, Marketing
In some circumstances, “collective clarity” may be a synonym for alignment, but in others it is an entirely different beast.
Currently I am involved in a project that aims to bring together a small group of specialist growers and retailers into a collaborative framework that delivers fresh Sydney basin produce to consumers, and contributes to the building of a brand. “Sydney Harvest“, if successful in pilot, offers the opportunity for commercial sustainability to both Sydney basin farmers and specialist retailers. In the process of developing this project, which seeks to re-engineer the supply chain in response to the economy wide trends that are placing huge pressure on the viability of agriculture in urban proximity, the differences have become stark.
Alignment is typically sought inside a commercial entity, all employees, and stakeholders having a clear understanding of the enterprises direction, priorities, and resources availabilities so each can see the bigger picture, beyond just their area of operation, and act accordingly.
Collective clarity, by contrast, is a term I have started to use to describe the necessity of having a common view of the end point of a collaborative project amongst all collaborators, as well as of the key project collaborative points along the way. This is external to any of the individual enterprises.
By its nature, a collaboration is not subject to the same management thinking that prevails in commercial enterprises, as collaborators are all independent, and sometimes competitive businesses. It therefore requires that they all recognize that their individual best interests are best served by serving the best interests of the collaboration, a big ask.
This Collective clarity is required amongst collaborators for a successful collaboration, alignment as commonly articulated as being internal, is not.
Each individual business will still be managed independently, in their own way. The processes that impact on the collective operations will usually be only a small part of the overall, and so will often require a different perspective, and explicit management, and leadership to be effective.
I would welcome feedback on this idea, as I have not seen it articulated before.
Dec 10, 2013 | Branding, Marketing, Sales
Recognising better is really hard when all offerings in the market appear similar. It follows then that you also must be different.
This brings in another challenge, being different is not enough, you also have to deliver. Being different just offers the opportunity to be seen, and perhaps to deliver, that you would not have had otherwise.
Take Seth Godins Purple Cow example. If you had rushed out and bought a purple cow thinking purple milk would be cool, then all you got was the same white milk that you could get from any old cow, then you would be disappointed. The “purple” did not deliver on the promise of the purple cow to be different, It got noticed, chosen once, but did not deliver.
Classic case, Red Bull is a beverage, a crappy tasting, caffeinated, cocktail of chemicals, and Co2, selling at a premium. Yet look at their website, they do not sell the product, there is almost nothing about the product on it, the site is all about the brand ,the excitement, the story, updated in close to real time, and tailored to your location. It is a storytelling masterpiece, one that almost all marketers would be well advised to understand.
Storytelling is more than a core skill of marketing, it is the critical ingredient, without which, your marketing will be hollow. To be sustainably successful, however, you need to live the story, do it, not just tell it. Steve Goldners post on the best facebook page ever eloquently makes the case.
Dec 9, 2013 | Branding, Marketing, Social Media
Mass marketing used to be about blasting messages to an ill defined supposed user base, “women 18-30” because that is about the best we could do.
With the advent of social media, we have been led to understand that the analytics behind the scene enable extremely accurate targeting of messages, just be wary, as the recipient now has the ability to trash your message, and turn it back on you.
Why is it then that brands, some big, sophisticated ones, are using social media, specifically Twitter, as a mass medium, sending huge numbers of messages.
I was browsing marketing charts when up popped this research noting that some top brands are tweeting 30 times a week.
Do the wallies driving this really think the consumers who find themselves on a brand twitter-list want to hear from them that much? Are they considering the negative reaction that much crap can bring? At the very least, it is a good reason to dump your brand of choice for one that does not annoy you as much on social media.
When was the last time you had areal conversation with a brand??
Why would you want to receive tweets from them beyond the occasional piece of genuine news, or value offer??
How much is too much?.
Dec 4, 2013 | Branding, Change, Marketing, retail, Sales, Small business
The produce branding model used by the agricultural so called marketing programs run by industry bodies all fail the basic test of being consumer centric. Generally they are retailer centric, using grower levies to fund discounts, and sometimes display space, never brand building. ”
“Australian tomatoes” is not a brand, it is simply a description.
Besides, the major retailers are exercising their control of the supply chain by not allowing proprietary brand building marketing anywhere near their stores.
The major retailers hold varying shares of produce categories. I suggest that hard vegetables like potatoes and carrots are in line with their overall share of around 75%, but their share of sensitive, seasonal fruit is probably more like 40%, with everything else falling somewhere in between. Where they fall depends on the “commodity” status of the produce, and consumers view of the trade-off between convenience and freshness, taste, and the more subjective things like customer service and product provenance.
Sydney Harvest is determinedly consumer centric. It is an evolving business model that creates a collaboration between the best growers in the Sydney Basin ands specialist produce retailers in Sydney to deliver field fresh, best quality, provenance assured produce to discriminating consumers, turning the usual supply chain into a demand chain.
Currently in pilot, the initiative is setting out to determine if there is a market in the niche, as there is certainly a niche in the market for such a collaboration.
