Jul 16, 2013 | Governance, Leadership, Strategy
For a long time now I have advocated the notion that to get something back, you first need to put something in. Time, effort, knowledge, care, whatever. What you put in is less important that that simple act of being generous, and contributing.
It has always seemed to work for me, although the effort to get momentum going has often led to a few moments when I wonder if there is really a return on the effort.
What I have realised is that the crucial element of success is how, and to whom you make the offer.
Assisting those who want your assistance is not as effective as offering it to those who deserve it.
Wanting has become an expectation that something will just arrive, no cost, no obligation, whereas “deserve” inherently acknowledges a moral debt, and that your generosity will at some point be repaid.
Jul 9, 2013 | Branding, Change, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
To talk to consumers, you used to stick an ad on TV, in one of the main mags, on maybe a few radio stations, a shotgun effort informed by some pretty rudimentary demographic data.
Then we migrated to the web, in the late 90’s, and advertisers transferred the techniques of mass marketing to this new medium. The cost of banner ads, in the early days calculated on a similar reach basis as mass advertising, has plummeted to perhaps 1% of that cost, and much better targeted, as we realised they simply did not work. Mass media consumption necessitated being interrupted by ads, we expected it as the price to be paid, but the web, we do not need to be interrupted, as we have the option to ignore. Increasingly, advertising became about direct response, as we can now count it.
Now the next shift is on, to mobile, where the “rules of engagement” have dramatically moved again, and we are figuring out how best to leverage the move. Customers need to be wooed, as shouting at them no longer works, you have access to mountains of data (using it is another whole challenge) that enable targeting at behavior rather than simple demographics, and you can count the effectiveness of tactics, one by one, person by person, directly.
Not only is the practice of marketing radically shifted to accommodate these moves by consumers and the tools to hand, but the organisation of the marketing function needs to have changed to reflect the immediacy of direct response, and the disconnect that has existed between the strategy held in the minds of the senior group, and those who by default spend the marketing dollars, often without any real authority beyond budget expenditure with little accountability for the outcomes.
It seems to me as I poke around that organisational inertia that is the greatest impediment to the potential productivity gains from this explosion of accountability of marketing investments that is now possible.
Jun 19, 2013 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Strategy
Marketers have a whole range of new tools to use to tap the opportunities emerging from the digital age, but most appear to approach the challenge in an ad hoc manner.
It seems to me that there are 4 trends that are driving marketing behavior:
- The shift from offline marketing to digital. Whilst this is generally seems as a “catch all trend” it is really just a part of the marketing strategy mix that needs to be considered on its own merits. In this situation, how should I use TV Vs YouTube or facebook, what is the best mix of media to achieve a outcome?.
- The shift from paid to earned media. This can easily be seen as a subset of the first point, and from a marketing resource perspective it is, but from a consumer perspective, it is entirely different. The sudden availability of a digital version of word of mouth endorsement has changed the dynamics, consumers put far more faith in earned than purchased messages. It is also a bit more complex than that, as consumers no longer consume advertising, in any medium, they watch what interests them. If an ad is interesting, irrespective of the medium, it will get watched, and you have only a moment to gain the interest before you get deleted.
- The increasing importance of data in marketing. In the “old days” the best that you could do was measure theoretical impacts on an audience, about as inexact as throwing a stone at a bird flying past. That has changed, we can now measure with great accuracy a host of data that reveals preferences and behavior that have nothing to do with the generalities of the past.
- Fragmentation of just about everything, and because there is just so much data, it tends to be siloed, or ignored. Therein lies the huge marketing opportunity of the future, those who can cut across the silos, and extract the actionable insights will own the markets. Automation is taking over (perhaps has taken over) with the integration of CRM with social media and automated marketing programming that is occurring online.
It is in the fourth trend that lies the secret sauce. Finding ways to increase the productivity of the marketing investment you make, not just in the expenditure to reach the marketplace, and achieve an outcome, but in the overhead costs of running an effective marketing function.
Jun 13, 2013 | Collaboration, Governance, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
One of the most famous photos ever taken, above, is of the 29 Participants in the 1927 Solvay Physics conference. The astonishing thing is that of the 29, 17 were Nobel prize winners, lauded busy people, so how did they get them all together at the same time?
Relatively easy, as at the time the photo was taken, only 3 had already won the Nobel prize, the other 14 won in the years after the conference, so were mostly unknown outside their research domain. (One of those who had already won was Marie Curie, who is also the only person in the photo to have won the prize twice, in different disciplines)
The point is that assembling this group, the organisers were not looking backwards, they were looking forward, to those who would make, rather than had already made a huge contribution to the topic.
Next time you are considering the personnel to go onto a project team, seeking to define your role into the future, or just operating a day to day activity, exercise the same forethought, and open the opportunity for great things.
Jun 5, 2013 | Innovation, Leadership, Management, Strategy
I was struck by a line in a terrific blog post by Ian Leslie I read that said ” Google can answer almost anything you ask it, but it cannot tell you what to ask”
It is totally counter-intuitive to consider that the power of the web is now narrowing our horizons, and that by succumbing to the lure of the algorithm, we are dismissing the beauty of serendipity, that unexpected discovery, the thing we would never have seen were it not for “right time, right place”. It does not seem to matter if it is a scientific discovery, Fleming recognising that the growth on his slide was killing all the bacteria around it, or just finding a book in a bookstore that is “right” somehow, these thing s cannot happen on Amazon, or in isolation.
The question then becomes how do you create serendipity?
You need to be messy, cross- functional, collaborative, iterative, and work with an open mind, as well as applying discipline to the scientific method of process improvement, practicing what I call Loose-tight , or ambidextrous management.
This ambidexterity is not easy. It takes leadership, an enabling culture, and a deft hand, but the results speak for themselves. Combining the ability to mine the accumulated knowledge of all of us, with the creativity inherent in human nature when it is open-minded and free to make non linear connections will eventually lead you to ask the right questions, and reveal what you do not know.
Once you see the question, serendipity has a chance.
May 8, 2013 | Change, Management, Strategy
Success is the result of hard work, smarts, good teams, focus, with a hit of “right place, right time” thrown in, etc, etc, right? Right.
At least that is what I always believed, knocked into me by my Dad who believed, and lived by the credo that “the harder I work, the luckier I get”
Increasingly however, I am seeing success being a relative thing, significantly dependent on a whole host of factors outside our control, many that have perhaps only come into play since the net made our world so bloody complicated, immediate and transparent.
Bill Gates did well, right time and place with an idea that was new, but when he pitched it to IBM, the defining moment of his career, he was not to know that internally IBM had reached some strategic conclusions about how they would approach the emerging world of personal computing.
Contingency.
Ron Jones got fired three weeks ago from JC Penny, where he lasted 17 months after being hired to “Appelise” the aging department store retailer. The retail guru who saved Target, created the retail megastar that is Apple stores, failed to do anything but annoy JC Penny’s existing management who rebelled, and customers who went elsewhere.
Wrong strategy perhaps, but it had certainly worked before, demonstrating again the sensitivity of context, and that success is a fragile, elusive thing, dependent on all sorts of contingencies, making continuous experimentation a “must”.
