Oct 5, 2010 | Change, Communication, Leadership, Sales
Trying to get stakeholder buy-in for an idea that breaks the mould is very hard in most organisations as it challenges the dominating logic of the organisation, what has succeeded in the past, and made it what it is today.
This process can be helped by breaking the internal selling process into two parts:
- Gain understanding of the idea from a “technical” perspective, the what and why, to ensure the facts are clear, understood, and acknowledged.
- Then, seek to address the cognitive issues, the “do you agree with it” things, but having gained an agreement of the technical aspects, the “do you understand it” issues, it is much harder for someone to disagree when all is left is the emotive stuff.
Sep 28, 2010 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Social Media
Social media, as I keep saying, has changed the rules completely.
In the pre-digital days of mass marketing, the consumer simply ignored most of the stuff thrown at them, and there was no genuinely effective mechanism to measure the waste.
Now, using the tools of the web the task has changed, as we can measure many dimensions of a messages effectiveness very quickly, and effectively, so the waste is measurable, and the degree of engagement, or “opt-in” becomes a key performance measure of marketing.
This is a whole lot harder than going to lunch with the ad agency, and then just throwing money at the TV or popular magazine in the hope that some of it would stick, as we can now measure not just awareness, but the degree of consumer “opt-in” any communication generates.
Sep 27, 2010 | Customers, Marketing, Social Media
If you ever needed evidence of the power of social tools on the net to influence your brands, look at what is happening currently to the Wyeth S26 baby formula.
Greenpeace did a couple of tests that indicated there may be genetically modified ingredients in S26, a news program picked up on the tests, and overnight, the “twittersphere” is overrun with negative comments, and I am sure health Minister Nicola Roxons in-box is full.
Wyeth is yet to respond, at least as far as I have seen. Only 24 hours, and the damage to S26, a brand that has taken 25 years to build, has been trashed. If you have not got contingency plans in place to counter this when it happens to you, I think you are mad!
Sep 22, 2010 | Change, Communication, Innovation, Leadership, Social Media, Strategy
A Wall Street Journal op-ed by Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google argues that the demise of printed media, particularly newspapers and magazines is as much a result of their own hubris as it is the advent of new media, and that the opportunities for journalism have flourished rather than diminished.
Fairfax have just announced that the outcomes of a strategic review conducted by McKinsey will result in significant changes to their commercial profile over time, with greater emphasis on electronic media. About time they woke up, having lost huge slabs of classified advertising, their “Rivers of Gold” revenue streams, to specialist web sites like “Car Sales”, “Seek” and others. The tenor of the public announcements still smells of them seeing electronic publishing as a competitive force, rather than a very different but complementary one that will not go away.
Print has lost its immediacy over a long time, first to radio, then TV, more latterly the web, but the process has not been one that should have taken them by surprise, the challenge is to harness the fundamental two differences the web has enabled:
- Anyone can be a publisher now, in a variety of formats from print to photographic and video.
- The whole communication process is now 2 way, hugely networked and fragmented, no longer a one way broadcast, the source of Fairfax’s success last century.
My instinct is that it is too late for incremental change to their business model, even at a rapid rate, the game has moved on too far for them to recapture the fortunes of the past. Glad I am not a shareholder, although Fairfax chairman Roger Corbett has a track record in instituting rapid improvement that generates great returns.
Sep 19, 2010 | Customers, Marketing, Sales
Watching The Gruen Transfer a couple of weeks ago, one of the panelists quoted one of the oldest adages in marketing, ‘Sell the problem” as if it was a revelation. Fact is, addressing the problem is often forgotten as marketers become so entranced by the features of their products they forget to define the reason somebody would buy it.
People do not buy solutions to problems until they see the solution as costing less than managing the ongoing costs and inconvenience the problem generates, it therefore follows that the best way to sell is to develop the understanding of the relative size of the problem to which you have the solution.
This is the basis of “SPIN” selling, (Situation, Problem, Implication, Need pay-off) which is still the best sales book ever written, outlining a selling process that focuses on what a sale delivers to the buyer, and the best way to get there.
Sep 16, 2010 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Communication
Social networks have boomed, tools to enable the networks abound, MySpace, twitter, face book et al being the most well known, but many more fail than succeed, and they do so based on the degree of mutuality that exists.
Bear with me here.
Imagine 2 people who have $10 to distribute between them, one has the power to divide the money any way he likes, the other has just one thing, the right to accept or veto the deal for them both.
Rational economics would suggest that the holder of the veto would accept any deal that has him better off beyond the inconvenience of saying yes or no, say 2 cents, as both parties will be better off with a yes. However, experiments consistently demonstrate that the second person will veto any offer he sees as unfair, resulting in both parties losing, and this “fairness” point kicks in around a 70/30 split.
This implies there is a deep willingness to punish unfairness, even at personal cost, and that there is a strong emotional dimension to decision making, something very hard for economists to take account of in their models.
This emotional dimension underpinning behavior has profound implications for the way we should be thinking about the development of networks, irrespective of weather they are social, commercial or political ones.
Social networking works because there is an unspoken deal in place, which promises mutuality, Wikipedia being a shining example, there appears to be no control and there isn’t, control is exercised by the “wiki community” by virtue of their ability to remove any incorrect, irrelevant, or corruptive content, the access to the edit key which is easier to exercise than the effort required to post something, keeps things on track. Wikipedia in its earliest incarnation was a failure, as it left control with a small group of expert editors and contributors, with nothing left for the community which then failed to show up, as the “mutuality deal” was not in place.
Much of my work is with farmer groups, and the greatest challenge in the formative stages of getting a group “over the line” is the notion of mutuality, and how the group coalesces around a source of that mutuality, then finds ways to self regulate, if it is to be successful.
