Oct 29, 2009 | Branding, Marketing, Strategy
Politicians on both sides of Australian politics are calling for a “narrative” to describe the values that the electorate should hold dear, particularly advocating a set of values that happen to be consistent with theirs, and their particular brand of politics.
What they appear to mean is that their political “brand” has run out of petrol, and they need something to give it some substance, now!.
Unfortunately, they do not understand that a brand is an expression of values, behaviors, and performance over a long period, and however hard they might try, putting lipstick on a bulldog does not give you a poodle, just a bulldog with lipstick, unlikely to be a pretty sight.
Much better to define what they stand for, take the knocks that will come from those who disagree, but consistently articulate a set of values through which they see the world and its vagaries. Only by that means, over a reasonable time, will they stand for something that the voting punters feel they can rely on. That then becomes their “narrative”, no different to building a commercial brand, and just as hard, except that they are not using their own money to do it, which perhaps is the reason they are so poor at it.
Oct 26, 2009 | Leadership, Management, Marketing, Strategy
Remember your history teachers, one who just had you remembering the dates of events, hard work remembering, and why bother anyway, but what about the one who told you about the people, and engaged you with the stories around the dates and events? It became easy to remember the details because you had the human stuff that went with it.
Building brands is the same thing, don’t just give out the facts, provide the stories that go with the facts, the human dimension.
Businesses have the same challenge when they set out to build a culture, it does not happen overnight, but when the stories that reinforce the culture are told, and celebrated, the behavior becomes embedded over time.
Building a brand, or a corporate culture takes persistence and consistency, and is a task that is never completed, just a work in progress.
Oct 11, 2009 | Innovation, Management, Marketing, Small business
It is easy to see opportunities outside the “home base” often easier than seeing them close to home. However, success comes with exploiting potential in existing markets before you “export” resources to chasing new ones. Chase market penetration, cost reduction, value and innovation in your home and adjacent markets before you bet the farm on a new one.
These closer to home opportunities are rarely as sexy as building a business in a new area, but often they come with less risk, and investment, and usually a greater payoff.
Innovation is front and centre in this process of leveraging the existing base, but it is the grunt work of implementation, continuous innovation in small ways, and focus that will win.
My definition of marketing, not found in any textbook I have read is:
“Marketing is the identification, development, protection and leveraging of competitive advantage”
I have found if you apply this definition to all the activities of an enterprise, looking at each for its contribution to at least one of these parameters, your marketing focus will be crystal clear, and the process of sorting out strategy, and the supporting allocation of resources will be considerably eased.
Sep 24, 2009 | Innovation, Management, Marketing
Seth Godin is once again ahead of the wave with the launch of Brands In Public.
The logic is simple, today, you cannot control the conversations that occur about your brand or business, they happen across the myriad of access points to the web, so the next best thing is to assemble the conversations at a common point, and give yourself the opportunity to participate.
Brands in public gathers the conversations, and offers a point of intersection between these conversations and the brand owner. At least, you then have a place at the table to counter the nonsense, put forward the facts, and perhaps add a bit of steerage to the process.
Wonderful idea, so obvious with hindsight, executed with simplicity.
Sep 23, 2009 | Marketing
Green marketing, Eco marketing, carbon aware marketing, food miles marketing, Cause marketing, all are segments of “marketing” that have potential appeal to an “aware” group of consumers that just a few years ago would have been lumped together, and considered to be “tree huggers” or “loonies.”
Reaching these small but committed groups of consumers, and engaging with them is not possible in any cost effective way with mass media, it requires the communication tools of the 21st century to engage with, and be relevant to the emerging consumers of the 21st century.
It has always been the case that individuals were all different, it is just that branding evolved as a means to communicate to similar “masses” in the absence of being able to communicate with individuals about what made them an individual, a market of one.
Nothing has changed except the tools.
Sep 20, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Strategy
Modeling scenarios has become a pretty big business, but notice that you often get only the numbers out of the end of the model, rarely the assumptions that drive the outcomes, and rarely a range of options.
This has been brought home again as I read the “strategic plan” completed at great expense on behalf of an industry body that covers a wide range of individual sub industries, each with their own characteristics and issues, albeit with some common drivers such as water availability, labour availability and capital generation.
Consultants at great expense produced a model that churned out numbers supposed to show the way forward, but which common sense says has a lot of dodgy assumptions going in, because what is coming out is unusable by any of the individual enterprises in the industries, or the industry bodies supposed to assist them.
Most commercial models I see set out to prove a point of view, and that point of view usually aligns with some preconceived notion of what the outcome should be. In this above case, the outcome was driven by the consultants need to tell the industry body what they wanted, not necessarily what they needed to know.
Scientific method by contrast works in the opposite way, it sets out to disprove a hypothesis, and by that means, advance our knowledge a bit, as you reconsider the hypotheses on the basis on one more thing you know does not work.
Bit more time consuming, but outcomes that are untainted by an existing perspective.
Numbers are only as good as the assumptions that drive them, so next time you are given an argument backed by numbers, don’t look at the numbers, have someone explain and debate the assumptions that have driven them.
