Oct 9, 2013 | Customers, Management, Marketing, Personal Rant
Definitions of marketing abound. A bit like a scratch in the morning, everybody has one!
The lament of President Roosevelt that if you had 7 economists in a room, you had 8 opinions, is equally true for marketers, except that to date, most have used smoke and mirrors and snake-oil rather than data to support an opinion. Most usually, you get the “5 P’s” regurgitated as a definition of marketing, easy to remember, but unfortunately irrelevant since the time of Don Draper.
Asked a few weeks ago what my definition was, I said “Marketing is the identification, development, protection, and leveraging of competitive advantage” To me, this covers all the elements of marketing process, collaboration, customer value, management discipline, and innovation that go to make up modern marketing.
Whilst the context of every marketing challenge differs, and the potential solutions numerous, the discipline necessary to tease out the core issues are pretty consistent.
As it happens, a day or so later, I came across an alternative definition, expressed as a formula that I also like very much:
Marketing = the creation of unique value.
That seems to say it all, and very simply.
What is yours??
Sep 6, 2013 | Governance, Management
How often have you been in a position of trying to get something done in the face of an illogical or bureaucratic impediment ?
It is enormously frustrating, Authority being exercised.
On the other hand when faced with complexity, ambiguity, or technology beyond our knowledge and understanding, sensible people seek advice from an authority, someone who knows more than us, and can clarify and explain.
This person often has no authority, but is an authority.
So often these two things get tangled up. Someone “in authority” exercises that authority as would “an authority”, and the outcome is usually rubbish.
As management of our institutions has become flatter, more collaborative and individually accountable, this distinction has become more important as those with the authority are less and less likely to also be an authority on any given topic.
Failure to recognise the distinction is a huge burden on productivity.
Sep 2, 2013 | Communication, Management, Small business, Social Media
Digital technology has offered all of us an astounding range of opportunities to challenge and interact with our social environment, creating as we go. Gary Hamel has summarised them into a “5 C” list,:
Contribution
Connection
Creation
Choice
Challenge.
You read them, you just know the truth of it, but the next step, the really hard one, is how to harness the potential energy unleashed by these revolutions.
As a consultant to small businesses, I find no lack of energy, determination, and intelligent, informed risk taking, but I do find that the digital revolution has marched past the capabilities of many of the established businesses, and as time passes, the gap just becomes wider.
Recognising the presence of the capability gap, and finding a way to bridge it is rapidly becoming the most significant challenge faced by SME’s. Until that bridging has happened, digital is a millstone rather than a freedom, and freedom feels great!.
Go for it.
Aug 29, 2013 | Collaboration, Governance, Leadership, Management, Strategy
Everyone knows herding cats is impossible, right?
Quite often this is a metaphor used to apply to NGO’s and voluntary organisations, bureaucracies, particularly local government, farmers, and children. Getting them to one place, at one time, in an organised and disciplined manner seems impossible.
I have used it plenty of times, not always kindly.
However, a recent experience has led me to a different conclusion, cats are actually pretty easy to herd, it just requires a bit of good management.
- Make sure they are hungry
- Show them a feed.
Done, herded.
It is the same with any of the metaphorical cats. Make sure they are hungry for what you have, can deliver, or represent, then demonstrate how to get to the prize.
Mostly people are motivated by things other than money and rules that dictate their behavior, offering responsibility and accountability for their actions, and a reason why things need to happen in a particular way goes a long way towards herding them. However, it is not really herding, as you need to be out in front persuading the “cats” by one means or another, to follow.
It is simply called “leadership”, and leaders are not always the ones at the top of the now almost redundant, formal, old fashioned management pyramid. Now they are those that care, put themselves out beyond their comfort zone, confront scared cows and take a photo of the elephant in the rooom and throw darts at it.
Jul 24, 2013 | Change, Governance, Management, Marketing
In this time of marketing abundance, huge opportunity to connect with consumers, understand their behavior and its drivers, both physical and psychological, not just the demographics of big groups who fall within arbitrarily nominated boundaries, why is the general standard of marketing so crap????
It seems to me that the defining skills of great marketing, the insights, creativity, compelling articulation of a proposition, empathy with a problem and its solution, and indeed asking question not asked before, have all been drowned in a deluge of marketing mediocrity coming from the abundance.
The Australian Marketing Institute recently published a paper wondering why the marketing profession is underrepresented in Australia’s boardrooms, and came up with a bunch or pretty treasonable reasons. However, to my mind, they missed the seminal one: most marketers, and hence their output are crap.
Many of the youngsters I see coming through who have a marketing degree chose marketing because it was the lowest UAI entry requirement. Whilst this may not be a good indicator in every individual case, on average, is it any wonder the level of real marketing skill is disturbingly low.
It seems also that anyone over 40, who has accumulated some life and management experience, and has the experience to have developed some instincts and insight, is seen as too old, too set in their ways, and unable to accommodate the fragmentation caused by digitisation, not “hip” enough.
What a waste this is!
People who run large businesses are smart, smart enough to see through the clichés and jargon of superficial so-called marketers, and the nonsense they hear erodes their confidence in the contribution real professionals can bring to bear.
I was just listening to a commentary on the productivity challenges facing Australian manufacturing on the radio, and the focus was on the old battleground of wages and benefits. If that is to be the central arena of the productivity improvement debate, we cannot expect any improvement at all, indeed, we will continue to slip down the greasy international productivity pole.
An improvement in our marketing and strategic productivity, although hard to measure in the quarterly reports required by our institutional masters , would make a huge difference.
Jul 18, 2013 | Management, Marketing, Small business
As I talk to small businesses, there is a very common set of things they should all be doing, remarkably common.
So here they are:
- Doing what they currently do 10% better. Even if what they are doing is sub-optimal, doing it cheaper, faster, better, must be of benefit, and is usually very low hanging fruit indeed.
- Get your digital house in order. Websites, blogs, social media, all consume resources, but worse, most SME’s treat them as one-off activities, items to be ticked off a list and left till next year, or left to the pimply faced intern to do in their spare time. Wrong. You need a strategy, allocated resources, and the capability to do all this stuff, it is after all the window to the world, and is not an optional expense, it is an investment in commercial longevity.
- Sort out who your current high performance customers are, and build relationship s with them. They will not necessarily be the biggest, they may be the least cost, highest gross margin %, have most potential, be the ones who are prepared to engage with you on more than a transactional level, whatever it is, engage, as it is far easier to extract another dollar of revenue from an existing customer that find and extract from a new one.
- Understand the market segments you work in, and which deliver you the best returns, and work the segment harder. This may be similar to the best customer list, but it may not. It is really all about understanding the characteristics of the type of customer to whom you can add the best value with your product and service offerings.
- Actively seek and work for referrals. The cheapest form of marketing is to have an existing customer refer someone to you, so be creative about seeking referrals, and reward the referrers. Oh, and ask for them, most do not ask, but if your customers are happy with you, 9 times in 10, they are happy to give you referrals, they just do not think of it on their own, and you have to make it worth their time.
- Create and leverage alliances. If you are running a shoe shop, it makes sense to be working with the dress shop around the corner to cross-refer, co-promote, and collaborate to build a customer base loyal to you both. Halves the marketing costs, and leverages the dollars you do spend.
- Create and leverage data bases. Capture every transaction, and do something with it, follow up, see if the buyer is happy with the purchase, send a “thank you for your business” card, ensure the product met expectations, provide an offer for the upcoming birthday, etc, etc, etc. It is now so cheap to build and leverage databases that it is insane for small businesses not to be doing it.
- Keep your eyes open for opportunities. Most small business operators are so engrossed in the day to day bun-fight that they do not take the time, or make the effort to look around, see what their competitors are doing, look at the trends in your market, and those adjacent to you, look at the evolving technologies that may impact, or be of use, see who is going well, and who is going broke, and understand why, etc, etc. Opportunities usually come from unexpected places, and you have to be ready for them when they do.
- Measure, measure, measure. Understand your costs, not just of your products, and the stuff clearly articulated by an invoice, but the often subtle or hidden ones, customer acquisition costs, wasted time in the office, using untrained staff, breakdowns in the factory, etc, etc. Some measures will be more enlightening that others, and you need to be cognizant of the costs of collecting and analyzing the data to give you the measures, but rather than not measuring, do it for a while and determine if there is a value to the continued measurement and leverage the data gives you, then continue, or leave it if the return is not worth the effort, or the opportunity cost is too high.
- Work on why you do stuff, rather than just what you do, and how you do it. I considered making this number one on the list, but it is a bit esoteric, so it is here, with a link to Simon Sinek’s presentation that in my view should be compulsory viewing for small business people. Watch it, think about it, and act on it.
- Do something different, now. Pick from the list, and do something about it. I could go on about planning, assembling resources and capabilities, and all the other consultant stuff, but for small businesses people, the primary task is to act, watch how it works, and be prepared to change direction quickly if necessary, and move ahead again.
Oh, and a last one, so important that it is on its own, WATCH THE CASH!
