Apr 16, 2012 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Content is the new creativity.
In the “old days” a core part of developing advertising that had brand building as its purpose, was a need to be memorable, relevant, deliver a proposition, and cut through the clutter on TV (or magazines, or radio, our only choices) all in thirty seconds. Then you repeated the message, as the common wisdom said, until you were sick of it, because the punters were only just getting to recognise it.
All that is changed, now media choices are numbered in the thousands, and you need to engage punters, one by one.
The content of the communication therefore is the still the key, but you get only one shot at it in most cases, and you rely on, perhaps pray for, the recipient to pass it on to like minded people they know.
Makes it pretty hard.
How do you market a bookshop? Common wisdom would say get really deeply into a niche with a few enthusiasts, or get out while you can, as it is all going on-line.
However, every now and again, a piece of luck comes along, that when combined with creativity and truly great understanding of what your market, wherever they are, may be looking for, you get something like this short bit of brilliance from Barter Books.
Would you go anywhere else?
Apr 3, 2012 | Leadership, Management, Small business, Strategy
A small manufacturing business I work with, operating in a domain now dominated by a few huge retailers, and cheap imported products, is facing a dilemma.
Three key people are leaving at pretty much the same time, for different reasons, just with difficult co-incident timing. This is a small business, there is no “bench” of executives who have been mentored, trained, and nurtured so that they can step in at short notice, no such luxury in an SME to whom every dollar of cashflow is critical to survival .
The purpose for this business to exist is to showcase the great products coming from Australia’s food basket, the Riverina, this is what makes them different, and gives all stakeholders, customers, suppliers, employees, and those who fund the business, a reason to keep on supporting it through the current challenges.
It seems that the opportunity presented by this sudden and unwelcome personnel churn is to start again, almost from scratch, to rebuild the processes, and renew the sense of shared purpose amongst the employees. That task however, is a bit like getting to the top of a sand-hill in a desert, and seeing just another sand-hill rather than the expected oasis.
The key distinction between leaders and managers is that leaders find the grit to climb this extra sand-hill, ways to bridge the gaps between peoples differing experience, expertise, and expectations, so that there is a shared purpose that is larger than an individual. Leaders are not leaders because they are always right, but because they listen, learn, and enable others to do the same. That is the opportunity facing my small client, to be a leader, and to remain one of the very few Australian owned food manufacturing businesses left.
Mar 30, 2012 | Change, Innovation, Strategy
Evolution happens in most circumstances in the absence of strong ‘anti-evolution” measures, and often even then, generally there is stuff happening at the fringes.
However, rigid barriers hold back change, until like the boy in the dyke, you run out of fingers, and then all hell breaks loose.
Allowing, even encouraging evolution acts as a pressure relief valve.
For some years I worked in the regulated milk industry, it was pretty obvious that the regulations protected a small number of people to the detriment of many, were a barrier to growth, and had no rational economic or social base at all. The problem was politics, not economics, there were a small number of electorates that could swing on the votes of dairy farmers, and we all effectively paid a price to keep them in business.
It was pretty obvious it would end badly, as indeed it did. The costs to everyone were far greater than necessary when the regulations were removed, particularly to those who had survived only because of the barriers. Instead of having time to adjust, those farmers were “killed off” overnight, a tragedy for them, but an inevitable outcome of the sudden removal of significant protection.
In effect, the evolution that was happening on the fringes of the market, and in other regulatory jurisdictions, was disregarded, and it required a bloody revolution, with all the associated pain, to get change.
Just think how much less pain would have been felt in the Middle East had the various autocrats in the region allowed change to evolve, rather than supressing it for years. It is much easier in the long run to encourage evolution.
Mar 21, 2012 | Change, Leadership, Strategy
Marketing is all about defining the problem we want to solve, poor definition leads to poor analysis and solution implementation. In the climate “debate” to give it more credit that it deserves, we have absolutely failed to include the capital value of the natural assets we currently have, considering only of the value of the current products that are made.
The whole debate about the need for change in the economy in response to climate change is about the costs that will be imposed as a result of those measures.
The classic narrow minded management mistake of believing the future will be an extrapolation of the past has driven the debate.
The “carbon tax” label has ensured that there is little else considered in the pubs, and around the BBQ’s that determine the public mood, and is a really poor piece of marketing by all concerned, except perhaps the opposition who are just there “to oppose” with no responsibility to be responsible.
In the past I have expressed the view that putting a price on carbon is the most easily managed form of insurance against adverse impacts of climate change should it be a reality. That still seems to be the case to me, even though the bumbling in Canberra ensures compromises that emasculate the cost/benefit, and the public mind is now firmly in opposition to imposition of a carbon price.
However, there is another dimension.
Just ask yourself what is the current value of discoveries that will emerge from natural compounds in the future , all of which come from the forests, swamps, sea, and estuaries around us. What is the value of retaining the natural capital that produces oxygen and water?
Because we have not really considered these things, and because we just assume they will continue to be essentially free as they have been to date, it would be a mistake to believe the past will just continue when we are busily changing everything else.
As a part of the debate, we should spend time considering the value of the natural capital we have, assigning monetary value to the olive tree plantations, as well as the olives they produce, simply because they have values beyond the olives, they produce wood, oxygen, habitat, and even a place to have a picnic. This can get pretty complicated, but the data sets are emerging that enable accurate mapping and assignment of values.
ARies or “Artificial intelligence for Ecosystem Services” is an organisation setting out to develop the methodology of assigning values to natural capital, we would do well to try and redefine the debate from the equivalent of a schoolyard brawl to one that uses our innate capacity to be creative and extraordinarily adaptable when we dismiss the power of current vested interest.
Mar 20, 2012 | Change, Innovation, Strategy
On March 14, IPART, the NSW Utility regulator made public a decision that put a price of 6-8 cents for energy exported to the grid, compared to the current cost of 30-44 cents for any power consumed from the grid.
The argument is in two parts, if I can put a complex report into a few dot points:
- The distribution infrastructure, poles & wires make up over 50% of the costs of electricity, and
- The times of peak demand do not coincide with times of strong sunlight, and therefore the power imported to the grid is of less value.
It seems to me that vested interests have got hold of the argument.
If it was truly that we were seeking to reduce our reliance on coal fired power stations, the ones the pollies tell us are better in private hands so the capital requirements are not a drain on the public purse, would it not be sensible to do two simple things:
- Use tariffs to shift the time of peak usage, (This assumes that households are the drivers of peak demand, which seems questionable to me, industry is a much larger user of power than households) this simply means people put their dishwashers on before they go to bed, not as they finish the meal, and ditto for dryers.
- Encourage the “crowdsourcing” of power, which takes the pressure off the network systems. The march of technology seems to imply that in a very short time we will have cheap batteries that will be able to recharge during daylight, storing power for use later. Put simply, put the generation points next to the consumption points.
We mostly accept that crowdsourcing of all sorts of things is the most efficient way of getting them, from ideas, to finance to goods. So why don’t we do it with power?
Why do we insist on insulating a legacy system that we are moaning is from the last century from the winds of change, when the alternative is obvious, and policy decisions elsewhere seem to indicate that the contrary outcome is in our long term interests. This is not necessarily an argument for subsidy, that is an emotive word, but it is an argument for reducing the responsibility for power generation from the public sector to those using the power, taking advantage of C21 technology.
Mar 16, 2012 | Strategy
I am a strategist, with a marketing background, so sometimes the expectation is that there will be a lot of talk.
Often, and too often with many of those I see, that is the case. Talk, talk, talk, and talk.
However, a strategy discussion without concrete action plans, and performance measures against those plans is not strategy, it is wishful thinking, perhaps delusion.
If you want just to feel good for a while, keep talking, but if you want to really achieve something, the hard work of implementation needs to be undertaken, so get out there!
