Sep 4, 2012 | Marketing, Sales, Small business
A modest sized marketing services agency I do occasional work for has an awards wall, where industry peer bestowed awards appear, a feature of most service agencies I have seen. However, theirs has two wrinkles
- Beneath each award is a further rating, done in collaboration with the relevant client that records the effectiveness of the ad/campaign, whatever it was, in the only awards arena that really matters, the marketplace.
- Campaigns that fail to win industry awards, which is most of them, are also subjected to their internal assessment of effectiveness, and they give it an internal award, and a spot on the wall.
As part of the effectiveness assessment underneath each award is a record of the assumptions, that drove the communication strategy, and their own internal award, the rating of which goes from “ratshit” to “not again” to “OK” to “dreamtime”. It also records what they collectively did right and wrong to deliver the result, and what they learnt that can be applied next time.
The wall provides a talking point, is a reminder each day of the reason they are in business, and how they are performing. Making performance transparent in this manner can be confronting, but time and time again, as I review best management practice, I see such transparency as a key success factor.
Oh, and another small wrinkle that sets them apart. They apply a pre-agreed sliding fee scale based on the agreed performance against objectives they set with their clients, so they always have skin in the game.
Clients love it!
Aug 28, 2012 | Customers, Management, Marketing, Sales
Most of the best ideas are simple, as is the Net promoter Score (NPS) the brainchild of Bain & Co executive Fred Reichheld.
As it gained currency, its simplicity became blurred by unnecessarily imposed complexity, often added it seems, just to make a consulting job seem more complicated.
NPS is really just one simple question:
“How likely are you, on a 1-10 scale to recommend this product/service to a friend or colleague”?
What Reichheld termed “detractors” answer 0-6, “Passives” answer 7 or 8, and “promoters” answer 9 & 10.
A company’s NPS is the percentage of Promoters minus the percentage of detractors. Simple.
The complexity comes often from the sample to whom you direct the question, and it is pretty easy to see how it can be “gamed” by those selections, which happens most often when some senior person reads about NPS, decides it makes sense, and just decrees to the sales force to go ask your customers, and that is exactly what they do, selectively. After all, their bonuses may depend on it.
Aug 25, 2012 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Social media is a jungle, full of vegetation that limits the view, poisionous flowers that look beautiful at first glance, small areas of bright sunlight that somehow finds its way through the foliage, nasty surprises of many types, and gems that can change your life.
Those who know the jungle can pick the nasties from the goodies with little more than a glance, when the reluctant wanderer can barely see any difference, and they seem to be able to find their way effortlessly through the undergrowth whilst we flounder.
That is the nature of our environment, get used to it.
There are many blogs out there that offer information, insight, and advice, use them. Jay Baer’s convince and convert, Mike Stelzner’s Social Media Examiner, and Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation, Jeff Bullas, being four of the best. All offer advice, insight and opinion via a range of means, and will throw a bit of light into the dark corners.
A client asked me recently why he should bother spending the time and money (it is not cheap, it just costs differently to the stuff on the P&L) on social media, and my answer was simple: “that is where your customers are!”
Aug 22, 2012 | Branding, Change, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
People are always looking for answers in their lives, whilst mostly not being in a position to frame the question sufficiently to enable a search as specific as one on Google. It is a factor in our lives that contributes to the context in which we live where we go, who we interact with, what we buy and where, what we think of our jobs, partners, and future for our kids.
It is not too much of a stretch to think that a picture of these things can be built over time by a personalised version of the search and browse capabilities now available to us. It has been called the semantic web, web 3.0, and a bunch of other things, but it is really a bank of information about us, evolved by emerging AI that reflects out lives.
Imagine you were walking down a street, near a car dealership with a new French model, your semantic web planted in your device knows you like French wine, your current car is due to be changed, you favor sweeping lines in design, your kids have left home, so there is some money in the bank, you always hankered for sporty, a bit “left field” experiences, and you have a bit of time before the appointment that brings you to this location. Bingo, a personalised invitation for a cup of coffee, and a chat about the new model comes to you from someone in the dealership vaguely linked to you via a social network.
It is only a small jump away from where we are now, but changes the way the marketing process will work.
Aug 16, 2012 | Branding, Innovation, Management, Marketing
The decades of growth up till a couple of years ago, and the recognition of the key nature of a robust marketing input to corporate success has left many organisations, particularly brand heavy consumer organisations with a marketing overhead problem as times change.
They have a structure that is often 5 layers from the CMO to the assistant brand manager, organised along brand lines, and recently supplemented with category analysts, social media experts, and other service roles. All this at a time when consumer brands are under huge threat from retailer owned brands, global marketing, fragile demand, the erosion of the ability to differentiate by the ubiquity of information, and agile low cost competitors.
Just getting rid of every third head makes little sense, all you do is lose corporate memory, so you need to reorganise to deliver productivity from the investment in marketing overhead, although inevitably there will be personnel losses. Three questions to consider:
- Is marketing activity aligned to corporate priorities?. Many times I have seen lower levels in marketing departments beavering away at projects that bear little resemblance to the strategic priorities held in the corner office.
- Are project portfolios run alongside brand initiatives to ensure that the silos that evolve when brand groups are relatively autonomous are removed?.
- Have you made the hard choices about what projects will proceed, and which will be relegated to the car-park?. This is sometimes very hard, but is a crucial circuit breaker for innovation, with the caveat that those projects left are appropriately resourced.
This is not easy stuff, and most fail the test, which results in sub-optimal resource allocation decisions.
Aug 8, 2012 | Management, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Whilst I hesitate to add to the plethora of words dedicated to the saga of Fairfax, from the stupidity of “Young Warwick” onwards, it seems to me that there are a couple of points that nobody has made.
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- Consumers of media have not changed. They still want to see the news, sports, political analysis, and the latest fashions and foibles of the rich and stupid, and they still want it delivered, and are prepared to pay for it, but they now have options about the delivery not available 15 years ago. Your $60 a month broadband costs are just a different means of delivery of content, the stuff newspapers used to deliver exclusively, for about the same price.
- Newspapers revenue comes from advertising, the literal “Rivers of Gold” that flowed from the classifieds, not from consumers. The price paid at the newsagent (another anachronism of an older world) would not cover the costs of printing and delivering the paper, then disposing of the excess. Newspapers disengaged from the primary source of their revenue and profits, advertisers, whilst their consumers still want, and obtain their news fix, it is just that they can get it elsewhere.
The disruption in the newspaper industry is from the new competition for advertising dollars coming from new channels of content distribution, not from consumers of content turning away.
In all the fluff written about the Fairfax share price, the stalking by Gina, the so called “code of journalistic conduct” and the failure of the Chairman to come to terms with the competing views around the board table, I have seen nothing that points out the basic failure to recognise who is your customer, and who pays the bills and why, outlined above.
The real reason Fairfax is stuffed is that it deserves to be.
P.S. (after 5 years)
It is now April 2017, and Fairfax is saving another 30 million by chopping costs, which means journalists. There is still no recognition of the simple fact that the distribution channels may have changed, but the consumers ares still out there, still consuming media, the challenge is articulating a value proposition that makes it worth their while to part with some money.
