Aug 15, 2013 | Branding, Change, Marketing
I talk to a lot of farmers, and have done so for a long time. Not much has changed over that time, it is just that there are less farmers, bigger farms, and corporatised farming, with deep capital resources is taking over from the family farming enterprise.
The topics of conversation however remain the same:
The weather
The banks
Cost increases imposed by shiny-pants in office towers who never see a farm
The Aussie $
Regulatory and interest group interference
The value chain duopolies: grain handlers, logistics providers, processing works, and supermarkets.
How little they get from the value of the end product.
When you lay it all out, there are some things a farmer cannot control, but there are others that they could, should they choose to do so. However, to date, they have largely chosen not to, or paid a levy so some industry body can do it for them. Generally the results of this strategy have been pretty poor, the biggest beneficiaries being researchers, bureaucrats, those who control a choke point in the supply chain, and paper bag manufacturers.
Now however, the time has come for farmers to take control of the supply chains that they feed, and turn them into something different where they can extract the margins that accrue to those who make markets.
Not an easy task, not a short term task, and not one without cost and risk, but one that must be done if Australian farming beyond corporatised broad acre grain and perhaps beef, is to remain commercially sustainable. The tools and capabilities are now far more easily available, it just takes the vision, guts, determination and patience to make it happen.
Aug 6, 2013 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Social Media
Many SME’s do not engage with Social media, or do so at a very superficial level, having a facebook page, and wondering why people do not flock to them with their wallets open.
These are the most common I hear:
• Not enough time
• Just for the kids
• Do not know how to use it
• Waste of effort
• Why would I put my business in the same place as all those stupid cat photos
• I have been successful doing this for a long time, why change now
• I hate sitting in front of a computer, much more important stuff to do
• My neighbor went on it, and she got stalked, why would I want to risk that?
• Nobody I know uses it
• My customers all know about me anyway
• It is just a fad
• My employees will waste the time I am paying them to work for me talking on facebook
I am sure you can think of many more.
Now, here are a four things that will happen as a result of the above:
• Others will control what is said about your brand and business
• You will be failing to communicate with a substantial proportion of (most) products markets. Leaving aside incontinence pads for ageing baby boomers, every product is being discussed on social media, somewhere by your potential customers.
• You will be seen, when you are seen (refer below) as “behind the curve”
• Invisibility equals commercial death, and visibility these days is all about Social media
If that is what you want, easy, do nothing, but Social media is not going away. Many of the ways we communicated last century are, by contrast, going away, so if commercial survival is on your bucket list, you had better get with the program.
Jul 9, 2013 | Branding, Change, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
To talk to consumers, you used to stick an ad on TV, in one of the main mags, on maybe a few radio stations, a shotgun effort informed by some pretty rudimentary demographic data.
Then we migrated to the web, in the late 90’s, and advertisers transferred the techniques of mass marketing to this new medium. The cost of banner ads, in the early days calculated on a similar reach basis as mass advertising, has plummeted to perhaps 1% of that cost, and much better targeted, as we realised they simply did not work. Mass media consumption necessitated being interrupted by ads, we expected it as the price to be paid, but the web, we do not need to be interrupted, as we have the option to ignore. Increasingly, advertising became about direct response, as we can now count it.
Now the next shift is on, to mobile, where the “rules of engagement” have dramatically moved again, and we are figuring out how best to leverage the move. Customers need to be wooed, as shouting at them no longer works, you have access to mountains of data (using it is another whole challenge) that enable targeting at behavior rather than simple demographics, and you can count the effectiveness of tactics, one by one, person by person, directly.
Not only is the practice of marketing radically shifted to accommodate these moves by consumers and the tools to hand, but the organisation of the marketing function needs to have changed to reflect the immediacy of direct response, and the disconnect that has existed between the strategy held in the minds of the senior group, and those who by default spend the marketing dollars, often without any real authority beyond budget expenditure with little accountability for the outcomes.
It seems to me as I poke around that organisational inertia that is the greatest impediment to the potential productivity gains from this explosion of accountability of marketing investments that is now possible.
Jul 3, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Sales
Price is always a sticky subject.
In most cases, sales people have been trained to slide over answering the inevitable, and often first question about price, until the value of the sales proposition has been established with the potential buyer.
That is the way it was.
Now, we all seek information on specification, availability, options and list price using the net, all information that in an earlier time, the salesperson could dole out as the sales process evolved. Therefore the decision is often almost made before a salesman has the opportunity to become engaged in the process.
When your sales prospect types “Widget prices” into Google, because that is their last question, the top 10 results, which is all most of us look at, are the ones that have “widgets from $100” or “Worlds cheapest widgets” in the headline.
You have just lost control of the conversation if you are not there.
Web sites are different to face to face, the emotion, the human interaction and the potential that humanity brings to the process has been removed, and you need to replace it with something that creates the opportunity for a conversation.
If you are on the web to sell, and the product is such that potential customers will ask the price early in the game, don’t be afraid, be proud, and put your pricing up front, along with your value proposition, so at least you might get a chance to talk about it.
Jun 21, 2013 | Branding, Marketing, Small business
We pay a fortune for lobster, it is a delicacy, but it is not long ago that lobster was poor peoples food. If you had nothing else to eat in New England in the 18th or 19th centuries, you would go to the beach and scrounge some lobster, and rules were in place to limit the amount of lobster masters could feed their indentured servants.
I remember as a kid that chicken was a delicacy, an occasional festive meal, Mum fed the Roberts tribe rabbit in a variety of ways as a cheap staple, bought from a bloke who went door to door down the street selling the previous nights haul.
How things have changed. Chicken is a commodity, flogged in supermarket specials, and rabbit is on the menus of the top end of town restaurants, attracting very high prices.
Marketing is all about managing the context and expectations a customer has of the value that can be delivered by your product offering. Preparing and consuming rabbit at home is now uncommon, but change the context to a restaurant, and suddenly the expectation changes, and rabbit is a sexy, modern dish that has attracted the chefs attention and skill, so is something very different to the skinned offering at the backdoor of my childhood.
Setting out to change expectations, often by changing the context as well, is at the core of the marketing challenge. Changing nothing, and competing on the existing commercial battlefield is just flogging stuff, and becomes a contest of price, not value.
Update: March 2015. This article from Entrepreneur magazine tells a similar story about lobster, and the way context and time changes perception, plus a very useful infographic.
Jun 14, 2013 | Branding, Marketing, retail, Sales, Social Media
What will happen when facial recognition is good enough to recognise a person walking into a retail shop, and convey to a device that persons purchase history, returns, sizes, social media mentions and links, and all the rich data that can be collected. The opportunities to use this sort of marketing data integration are limited only by your imagination.
This is just a step away, probably closer even than that, the speed of development of software applications has been amazing.
Next time you walk into a shop, the assistant just may greet you with asking how the function you bought the blue dress for 2 months ago went, or inform you that they have just one left of a belt that would be a great match to the shoes you bought in February, and on it can go……
The real human challenge will be engaging your customers using all this information without being stilted or “creepy”, not a good outcome.
George Orwell is alive and well.
P.S. August 20, 2013.
Tom Fishburne, a favourite commentator on marketing who uses incisive cartoons to make his point posted this cartoon this morning, with the link to the Minority report clip that makes my point above way better than I did. Great stuff Tom.
