Sep 8, 2011 | Customers, Management, Marketing, Operations, Small business
The mulitnational Heinz has been in the news a bit recently.
First, they announce a restructure, which means closing plants, and consolidating production, in this case to NZ, and to a remaining Australian plant that will get a bit of a kick-along. Wonder how long that will last?
Then the worldwide CFO Art Winkleblack took aim at the retail duopoly in Australia, citing it as a reason for the difficulties Heinz has had, and as a basis of the restructuring decisions. I bet the local sales management loved him for it, the next time they had to front Coles and Woolies!
In a short period, the challenges of the industry are laid bare, the $A making imports cheaper, the power exercised by the retail duopoly, and the necessity of manufacturing and marketing scale to counter it.
If Heinz, a global business turning over close to a billion dollars in Australia, and many more globally has these problems, put yourself in the position of the SME, with little marketing leverage, a plant that needs capital, banks that are so risk averse, and so stripped of people who understand small business they simply choose not to engage, how can the little guy hope to sustain his business?. Pure bloody mindedness and determination is about the only answer you will come up with, mixed in with a spirit of being prepared to really have a go, and screw the buggars!.
We wonder why we have more imports of packaged food products into this country than we produce, the position Heinz finds itself in demonstrates why.
Sep 7, 2011 | Collaboration, Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Chatting to a very successful distributor during the week at Sydney’s Fine Food trade show, he said he simply did not “get” facebook and Twitter as marketing tools. “I will wait till my 14 year old daughter gets interested in the business, and does it for me” he said, “but I guess I should be doing something, just too busy to think about it”
Pretty typical in my experience of SME’s and their relationships with social media, just something else to do, and no more time to do it in!
So here are a few thought starters, simple things to do with facebook to turn it from something else to do, to the most important tool ever put in your hands to engage with your customers.
- Change the “face” regularly, the picture on the landing page, the animation, put up some simple recipes of the day, week, or season, just make it interesting. Even Google changes their landing page almost daily, putting up some design that is topical for some reason .
- Have a page where visitors to your site can engage, you just become the facilitator. In the case of food marketers, a place to exchange recipes, cooking techniques, photos of finished dishes, and people enjoying them seems like a sensible idea.
- Make sure you have a spot where other platforms that may be of interest to visitors can be reached, allow them to add their own links to spots they like.
- Have good quality, relevant content, and make sure you keep it fresh.
- Have a range of incentives rolling through, these might be anything from samples and deals, to points type accumulation programs for a prize.
- Make giving easy. If we are talking food products here, and I am, create seasonal hampers and gift to a friend offers, a Xmas hamper delivered to a customers friend with seasons greetings will always go down well.
- Enable Q & A pages, and conversation streams. This may be on the page, or in a linked blog if the topics are a bit more serious. In the Australian food game, SME’s are struggling for survival in a retail oligopoly where housebrands are being pushed by retailers, and imports are growing on the back of the high $A. There is plenty to talk about, some of it commercial and perhaps not engaging for consumers, so keep it linked but separate and do not be afraid to tackle serious stuff, just be a bit careful.
- Be responsive to posts fans put up, engage in the conversations yourself, just don’t try to dominate it.
- Make sure you have a strong call to action, not too overtly commercial, but the point of it is ultimately to get a sale, so find creative ways of asking for the order.
- Ask for visitors ideas, views, and thoughts. Where better to test a new product idea, and do some focussed qualitative mrket research than with those already engaged.
- Watch and learn from what others are doing, the web is a great big learning experience. Social Media Examiner is one site that often puts up very useful information, here is a list of the top 10 SME sites from around the world they have just judged, some good pointers in there.
- And last of all, make it fun, and never let down someone who visits and engages!
This is all pretty easy stuff technically, it just takes time to plan, assemble the content, and make it happen. My distributor friend can probably get his 14 year old daughter to do it for fun, you don’t have to pay someone big bucks, you just need to engage in the conversation as you would over the back fence to your neighbour.
Aug 11, 2011 | Customers, Lean, Sales
Last week I spent over 2 hours on the phone to Optus trying to fix something they had stuffed up, the third try, after speaking to their techies and emailing the bloke who “signed” a form letter to, thanking me for taking on the service they stuffed up. Annoying? no, bloody irritating, being shuffled around their departments, nobody taking any responsibility for the stuff-up, but reciting how important my call was to them.
With the emphasis on speed nowadays, how quick is the connection, how rapidly fulfillment happens, how quickly the email is answered, we are used to “quick” and when it does not happen, we get angry very quickly indeed.
Clearly Optus are cutting costs, employing people in their call centres who have no authority to fix a problem, or even suggest a solution, and anything not on the printed frequent question/appropriate response list gets shuffled elsewhere. They wasted a lot of time, across several departments, and I wasted a couple of hours, and need a new head gasket. No wonder these Telco’s have a lot of customer churn, how easy it would have been for the first person to whom I spoke to be allowed just a little bit of initiative and it would all have gone away in 5 minutes.
It may cost a little bit of money to enable staff to deal effectively with customers, but how much would be saved in time, customer churn reduction, and reducing the advertising and deals necessary to attract the annoyed customers of other Telco’s to come to them to replace those leaving?
This is a challenge for every organisation, as the speed of things increases, the expectation is the effectiveness of the response will increase at the same rate, and it doesn’t, so we get pissed, and everybody wastes time, effort, resources, energy and perhaps most importantly, hard won brand loyalty.
What a waste.
Aug 8, 2011 | Customers, Demand chains, Marketing, Small business
On Friday I made a very modest contribution to the proceedings of the Organic and Green trade show in Sydney. A bunch of committed, passionate people, working their collective butts off to build businesses that deliver on the organic promise to consumers.
The numbers however are daunting.
The Australian grocery trade is north of $106 Billion, the organic market, counting everything, (perhaps twice) with the most optimistic assumptions is $500 mill, including all the cosmetics, soaps, candles, recyclable bags, et al, many not included in the grocery figures, and probably constitutes 50% of the total. In other words, perhaps 1 in every 5,000 dollars spent in Australia on food is spent on organic food. How do you win in that arena?
Answer, one person at a time building a tribe, connecting them, giving them a reason to connect with others, supporting the ways they can connect, and working 20 years to be an overnight success.
Organic products are at what I believe to be a unique point in time, the confluence of two great social impacts.
The first is the tools to connect being given to us by the web 2.0.
The second is the sudden realisation that food matters more than as just fuel, that there is a powerful social and familial force present when you prepare and share good food, on top of the obvious benefits of the impact of healthy food on the individuals health.
Had you told me 3 years ago that a TV reality show would contribute to a major change in behavior, I would have told you to stop smoking illegal stuff, but perhaps the change was lurking, and Masterchef just provided the catalyst.
Jul 19, 2011 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Social Media
Procter & Gamble is a huge branded consumer business, but seems to be able to maintain the agility and innovation capability of an SME. Supermarket retailers have to be nervous when they display a determination to build a direct business model for their brands, and when they start talking about “qualified retailers” it is music to my ears, having struggled in an unforgiving Australian FMCG duopoly for years. It is the other side of the coin from retailers developing their own brands beyond Housebrand status, noted previously.
P&G tried with Amazon, and the effort had its challenges, so they are quietly widening the approach with this facebook collaboration, creating a new descriptor in the process, “f-commerce” and recruiting Wal-mart as a “qualified retailer” (not bad for a start)
This also ticks facebooks boxes, as it is a strategy to monetarise their huge base of connections to consumers, and sets them against Amazon in the e-fulfilment business.
Poor old Microsoft, increasingly it seems to have missed the boat. Just a decade ago the US government had them in court trying to break them up to give others a chance.
What’s the old saying about roosters and feather dusters?
Jul 18, 2011 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Strategy
There is a new boy on the block to match Colgate, P&G, and other international brand owners, but one who does not play fair, one who controls access to consumers, removing their options of choice. Tesco. A retailer with the clout of Tesco that comes from its scale, with its ability to determine which products consumers will see on shelf, is aiming to develop international housebrands in competition with its suppliers.
Some will see this as just commercial common sense, Tesco leveraging their hard won position with consumers, whilst others will see it as the death-nell of brands, something to be opposed by any means.
I suggest it is neither, but neither is it something in the middle, there are other dimensions to the decision that will determine the outcome:
- Will a retailer be able to develop the deep consumer understanding that feeds a sustainable marketing, brand and product development effort necessary to build a real brand as distinct from labels on shelf?
- When a consumer has a problem with a Tesco branded product, and Tesco fails to manage that problem in a satisfactory manner, will the consumer just move to an alternative product, or move to an alternative retailer?
- Will the presence of Tesco branded products on shelf in a category further remove the incentive for proprietary brands to invest in category growth, and will the further removal of that support damage category profitability for Tesco? This profitability squeeze appears to be happening currently in many categories being demolished by retailer housebrands, will it just get worse?
This development is a logical evolution of the path retailers have been travelling for some time, the only real question is weather evolution accepts the change in the model, or will the model, having evolved past the point of sustainability, now wither and die in the face of more effective competitive models.
