Mar 19, 2024 | Governance, Marketing
Recently at a meeting of SME’s, I found myself in a conversation about accessing government grants, initiated by a guest speaker. She was a very impressive woman with significant experience delivering grants from the Department of Industry.
The notable omission was, in my opinion, a view that reflected the experience of someone contemplating investing the time and energy into an application should consider.
Full disclosure: I ran a small grant funding business called Agri Chain Solutions as a contractor for almost 3 years from 1999 to 2002. It was a company limited by Guarantee, with a commercial board, and ranks as the only time I am aware of that a task has been outsourced by the federal Bureaucracy in this manner. The department concerned, then called Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries Australia (AFFA) was implacably opposed to the exercise, and only complied after express instruction from John Howard, as the then new PM.
Following is a list of the irritations you can expect.
- Ambiguous guidelines, and sometimes they appear to be on roller-skates as you seek clarification.
- Unusable templates, seemingly designed to frustrate applicants.
- Bureaucratic time and commercial time do not match. The process will always take longer and consume more resources than you think would be possible as you initiate the process.
- The revolving door of ‘officials’ who will manage your application, through to the approval and then implementation. You will constantly be covering the same ground, again, and again, as departmental personnel rotate.
- Commercial in confidence: it does not exist.
- Rounds and the money has run out. For ease of management, most grant programs operate in ’rounds’, and when the money for that round has been allocated, bad luck. You could reapply in the next round. This system disregards overall merit, replacing it with merit in a particular round. The result is weak projects in less competitive rounds are sometimes approved, when in later more competitive rounds, highly meritorious projects miss out.
- The effect of influence of competitive rent seekers. Who you know is always important.
- The time taken to prepare without any indication of the probability of success usually challenges resources of SME’s. This leaves the field open to larger companies with the staff, who probably need the grants less.
- Having inexperienced young bureaucrats believing they’re important, and can dictate to you particularly in grant implementation.
- Recognise at the outset that an application will take a long time, consume significant resources, and you may not be successful. When you are not successful, the reasons for the failure may never be clear.
- Grants are taken into account as revenue, and therefore if you make a profit, you pay tax on it.
- Finally, what is important to you is usually absolutely irrelevant to those responsible for assessing and progressing your application for ‘their’ money. They are just people with their own baggage, ideas, perceptions, ambitions, and worries. Your application amongst all the others in the pile hardly rates on their radar.
Header credit: Cartoon by Tom Gauld from New Scientist magazine.
Mar 15, 2024 | Analytics, Marketing
Every market research proposal must answer a duo of critical questions before it proceeds, if it is to be of any value.
What is it for, and how will it be used?
Market research is done for all sorts of reasons. Many commissioned projects have little to do with the examination of the critical factors in driving success.
They just provide a convenient crutch.
Several projects commissioned and paid for from marketing budgets I controlled would come in under the ‘what the F&&k’ category. However, in my defence they were usually quant studies designed to generate the numbers necessary to pass the accountants various thresholds. This enabled me to progress projects that qualitatively and ‘in my guts’ were winners. That is the way they usually turned out!
In the absence of clearly understanding how the research results were to be used, how they would add strategic, operational, or technical value, why should you bother?
There is a further tier of understanding that is required: Are you looking to define an objective outcome, or are you seeking understanding and insight?
In the case of the outcome required being quantitative, simple yes/no, black/white answers to a question are sufficient.
When you are looking for insight, there may be a few numbers, way below a level of statistical significance, but they can be reassuring. However, the value lies in discovering the connections, implications, options, and potentially hard to anticipate consequences.
Research is a critical step in successful marketing programs. However, in the absence of a very clear and compelling answer to the ‘What is it for’ question, it should not proceed.
The header illustration is the only AI used in this post.
Mar 8, 2024 | AI, Management
Cash flow is often described as the lifeblood of a business.
While it is correct, it leaves a lot on the table.
If cash flow is the lifeblood, you also need a heart to pump it around the body. The leaner and more efficient the body in which the heart resides, the easier it is to pump, reducing the stress on the mechanism, reducing risk.
Similarly, to be effective blood requires oxygen to be attracted and distributed through the system.
Oxygen is what keeps everything working, it is the source of the power required to run the system, without which the system rapidly grinds to a halt.
In a business context, the oxygen is the input of information, the lungs and heart are the analysis and leveraging of that information, and the culture of the organisation is the body that holds it all together.
You go to the doctor to get a physical, where do you go to get a ‘commercial’?
An accountant will give you part of the picture, based on the books.
A ‘lean’ expert might offer many insights into the operational processes, particularly in a factory, and at the same time offer cultural insights.
A ‘6 sigma’ expert will deliver an arithmetic analysis of the efficiency of each part of a process.
A marketing expert (if you can find a bullshit-free one) will give you opinions based often on questionable and partial information, and usually biased towards their particular view of the role of marketing.
A sales expert will opine that everything else will be OK if you just get more leads for them to convert, and here is how!!
The point is that each will give you a picture of your business as they see it based on their experience, training, predisposition, domain knowledge, and their own assessment of WIFM.
Finding someone who ties all that together, and offers a complete, unbiased, and expert picture is a challenge.
Mar 4, 2024 | AI, Change
Covid was a Darwinian catalyst, at least in my view.
A decade of slow change was supercharged into 6 months as businesses, institutions, and individuals, struggled with the need to change rapidly, and radically. It also unleashed an unprecedented innovation cycle in medical science that will have long term impacts on drug discovery.
In November 2022, another Darwinian catalyst struck. Open AI launched ChatGPT into the wild, setting off a chain reaction that surpassed the impact of Covid, which has since become endemic, and we have largely stopped worrying.
We have yet to understand the longer-term impacts of AI on social dislocation, personal security, and the ways in which the largess can be fairly spread across the community.
The trends in both cases were all there for those who looked closely enough with an open mind to see.
Pre-Covid it was clear that there were too many cafes, and we were generally over-shopped. Home delivery was increasing, as was remote work. The installation of ‘smart’ devices in factories and homes was normal, and product differentiation based on digital features was everywhere. Yet, it was slow going.
We had a binary mindset, the cake was a given size, and any change to the way it was sliced up meant there were winners and losers. Nobody wanted to be the latter.
Suddenly, in two whacks behind the ear, the cake has changed size and shape radically. The pre-Covid/AI status quo that included many points of friction and often unseen waste, previously sacrosanct, have been swept away.
All this costs money, so the cake has changed ingredients as well as shape and size. The suppliers of those ingredients have morphed into a few monster corporations that will continue to change the shape of our cake with little or no public oversight. Governance has become whatever it takes to make more money, as the power of regulators is substantially diminished.
This level of uncertainty has made us very jumpy, unwilling to trust, and wary of the future impact on our finances, security and familial connections. It has also made possible development of products and services inconceivable previously.
If you are a glass half full type, the opportunities are endless. If you are the other sort, find a comfortable place to hide, if there are any left.
How would Darwin see human evolution post covid & AI?
Header: Is a photo of Ghandi leading the ‘Salt march’ in 1930 which was the catalyst to the recognition that British rule over India needed to end.
Feb 29, 2024 | Change, Leadership, Marketing
If you asked a room full of marketers if marketing had changed in the last decade, you would get most of them telling you it had changed radically.
On the surface it has, the digital revolution has taken marketing by the neck and given it a great big shake.
There has been an explosion of sales, media, connection, and payment channels, customers are more wary, and do their own research before a marketer knows they are in the market. So called ‘content’ has almost infinite reach, but the frequency is rubbish, as there is so much digital noise, and so much competition for attention, that most of it is the digital equivalent of yesterday’s fish wrapper from the newspaper obituary section. The investment in marketing technology to manage all this has also exploded.
There is a welter of research and opinion that confirms the notion marketing has changed, some by very credible organisations.
I asked myself the question again, after stumbling across this report by Adobe, one of those credible organisations that supports the ‘yes’ vote, and came to a partly different conclusion.
Marketing has changed, absolutely, at the tactical level. The means by which marketers create and deliver a value proposition, then turn it into a transaction is unrecognisable from just 5 years ago. However, tactical implementation is just a small part of the pie.
Organisationally, marketing has changed a bit. Generally, it is still a function in a group of functional silos that reports to a CEO. A range of new titles have emerged, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Engagement Officer, and so on, but that does not change the essential reporting and accountability of those in senior marketing roles. The marketing organisation in large enterprises has also siloed, now there is digital, customer service, technology, and a range of other functional roles within marketing not present 5 years ago.
Strategically, marketing has changed little if at all. The role of marketing is to tell the future and adjust the value proposition to customers ahead of the changing preferences and behaviour. That has always been the case, and remains so.
The only strategic change I can see is one of leadership.
In the past, marketing has generally been a passive corporate player, relegated to the role of managing one of the largest expenses in the P&L. Now the value of enterprises is so much more in the hands of intangibles, that marketing is increasingly demanding a seat at the big table. This requires that marketers are able to lead their peers and boss. Unless they can achieve this position of leadership, they will remain the simple gatekeepers to one line in the P&L, rather than being responsible for the future health of the enterprise.
Look at it from the top down.
Marketing has changed little strategically, but strategy is by far the most important component.
It has changed organisationally, and while it is important, in most areas, it is not a game changer.
Tactically, marketing is unrecognisable, but who really cares. Tactics are short term, able to be changed in real time as the situation evolves. Marketers need the organisational capability to be able to change in real time, but the impact of failing to do so is limited.
The marketing groups that will be successful into the future are the ones that are successful leaders of their organisation. To achieve this role of leadership, they must be able to identify the priority areas for investment and activity, as well as being able to remove the organisational constraints that operate in every enterprise, that are not directly accountable to marketing.
Well, they are not accountable until marketers are in the corner office, which should be happening more and more as they are the future tellers. Those who currently occupy that office are usually the engineers, lawyers, and accountants who are good at reading the past in the data, and hoping the future looks similar.
Who is next in your corner office?
