Jul 31, 2013 | Communication, Social Media
“We just clicked”
It’s an old expression to describe the situation where you meet someone, and find a lot to talk about, mutual interests, and an immediate comfort in each others company for some reason.
In the digital world, it means something entirely different, implying a “friending” of someone on a social site, or a “click-through” on an e-vertisement or link on a site.
The key difference is the presence or otherwise of a real person, not an avatar, not a site, or a blog, a real person, whose hand you can shake, eyes you can smile into.
The value of a real relationship, one with a person, should never be confused with the number of “friends” on a social media site.
Humans are social animals, and while we might call this thing taking over our lives “Social media” it perhaps could be better called “Anti-Social media”
Jul 25, 2013 | Marketing
Most of the best marketers I have worked with had a common strand of DNA. They were professionally trained, and came to marketing via their science, engineering, or maths training, for a variety of reasons.
Took me a long time to figure it out, but the light dawned (this is now 25 years ago) when interviewing two seemingly very good people for a key role, and having trouble with the final selection despite several meetings with both. Each seemed to have the right experience, were a good cultural fit, had the drive and collaborative mind set I was looking for, and on a personal level, I liked and admired both of them.
What clinched it for the one I selected was a natural “hypothesis/test/analyse/rehypothesise/retest” approach, that seemed to offer the potential of a combination of his comfort with data and his marketing experience to provide useful insights. By comparison, the other seemed to move quickly to a conclusion based on what appeared to be valid experience and instinct.
It is pretty easy with hindsight. My lucky (for me) hire moved towards a conclusion based on data, and where there was no data, he created some by experiment, rather than leap ahead to a comfortable conclusion. This is now a standard marketing operating procedure, as we have so much data at our door, but then, it was unusual.
Feeling a bit bad about passing over what I thought was a very good candidate, I recommended her to a colleague at another large company. She proved over time to be reasonably effective, but too inclined to favor the cliché over data, which limited the breadth of insight she was able to bring, as every decision was based on what had been, rather than what may be.
Today, with our analytic capabilities and the mountains of available data, marketing is all about the maths, and we should be accountable for results.
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!
Jul 17, 2013 | Governance, Management, Marketing, Small business
Small business owners work harder, and often take home less than their employed peers. I see this all the time, again and again, in all sorts of contexts.
Ever wondered why?
In my experience, most go into business because they have great skill, contacts, and experience in the domain of their choice, which makes them great engineers, plumbers, food scientists, but does not necessarily suit them to be CEO.
The flip side is, do you need specific domain knowledge to be the CEO of an enterprise in that domain?, the answer clearly is no.
Most get confused about the purpose of their activity. Competent chefs try to run restaurants, simply because as a chef they can pay themselves only chef rates and remain solvent, but being a restaurant owner, perhaps a string of them, is where the money is.
Get your priorities right.
Want to be a rich chef, but love to be “cheffing” ? Probably can’t do both.
So many exchange the cooking for shuffling paper, suppliers, lease contracts, worrying about staffing, and doing the marketing, then wonder why the restaurant fails.
Fire yourself as the CEO, and hire a professional manager, while you do the cooking. After all, you would not even consider hiring an apprentice to replace you in the kitchen as you try to run the business, would you?
You can still own the business, and eap the benefits, you just do not have to run it day to day.
Jul 15, 2013 | Innovation, Management, Marketing
Public programs are great, they redistribute the largess of success to the less successful or fortunate via taxes. Every civilised society has some, of varying value, but necessary none the less.
Public entrepreneurial programs are a bit different, despite the best efforts of well meaning public servants everywhere, they just never work.
Entrepreneurs simply do not show up at public show and tells, they keep their ideas to themselves and those who are able to add some skin to the game, and feel the loss if this skin gets scraped off.
That is part of the reason we Aussie tax-payers pump millions into innovation via the various well meaning agencies, but get stuff all back. The vast majority of this well meaning but misdirected assistance ends up in the pockets of consultants (thank you) snake oil salesmen, and those with institutional ties, not with the people doing the real work of innovation.
In saying this you must consider R&D and innovation to be different, one is the development of the science, the other is using it. Public funding of the infrastructure of science is essential, although subject to political whim and manipulation, the leveraging of the science should not be the domain of the public sector beyond harvesting royalties to fund the continuing effort.
The only way to engage with entrepreneurs is one on one, with the absolute trust that what gets discussed, stays with those in the discussion, and is not spread around for some ephemeral notion of equity and greater good.
Real entrepreneurs find new spaces to inhabit, places others have not seen, all others then follow them in.
