Marketing’s lean future

Marketing’s lean future

Mar 23, 2016 | Governance, Leadership, Lean, Marketing

The best marketers I employed in days past as a honcho in a corporate environment were pretty much always from a professional background of some type. Those with engineering, science, architecture training, and with a bit of sales thrown in were almost always better marketers than those with marketing degrees.

Having just a 40 year old (had anybody heard of marketing 40 years ago) marketing degree, this both intrigued and disturbed me, and it took a while to understand “why” it was so. It became clear that those trained in the professions had an instinctive approach to problem solving, commonly called the ‘scientific method’. By contrast, those with just marketing degrees tended to jump from problem definition straight to a final solution, missing all the nuances and understanding to be gained from the interim steps, and often getting it horribly wrong as a result.

“Lean thinking” 35 years ago was just a babe, an approach to operational improvement that has transformed the way manufacturing operations around the world are run, and delivered huge benefits to our way of life. It is absolutely based on the scientific method.

More recently however, it has been realised that lean thinking has applications far wider than just operations, and office work flows are rapidly transforming as a result. The next obvious cab off the rank is marketing, traditionally a qualitative, smoke and mirrors part of a business, and marketers have been their own worst enemy.

It often seems marketers sit around, drink coffee, and go to lunch a lot, and as a result of allowing that perception to survive, (and it has been true in an unfortunate number of cases) , we get what we deserve.

If people do not understand the role of marketing, particularly those who allocate resources and measure performance, no wonder there are problems, but there are some pretty simple solutions taken from lean thinking.

Have an objective

Map the processes

Form hypothesis

Test and measure

Rinse and repeat.

From the perspective of managing this process, it is essential that two criteria be met:

  1. There is great transparency of the whole process across functions, everyone these days is “in marketing”. Leveraging the resources available by the collaboration enabled by technology will evolve as standard practice, for which transparency is essential.
  2. It is OK to be wrong, you can learn more for your mistakes than from what works well, but to learn  there must be understanding of the flaws in the tested hypothesis coming from the failure. In addition, there needs to be a robust process of due diligence both before and after the experiments are done. Saying it is OK to be wrong is not a license to be sloppy, as I have seen from time to time.

Marketing has been very late to the technology table, and as a result the size of the gap between the ‘leading edge’ and what most small and medium businesses are doing is huge, and getting progressively ‘huger’. There is a real danger of just leaving it in the too hard basket, but that would be a mistake.

Marketing technology offers the opportunity to leverage resources and widen the impact, the core principals of marketing remain unchanged, indeed become more important as we increase the leverage that can be applied. For small and medium businesses these technologies are the competitive tool-box they have been seeking.

It is my prediction that inside a decade technology decisions will be driven by marketing. If you cannot locate, understand, engage, and deliver value to your customers in a digital world, you will not survive. This post from the ‘Martech’ guru Scott Brinker detailing the 2016 marketing technology landscape says it all.

Lets see how that goes as the technology landscape continues to evolve.

Design for context.

Design for context.

Mar 21, 2016 | Customers, Management

Good design is considering up front what could possibly go wrong, and designing it out.

A while ago I did some work with a business that had suffered for years with excessive  invoice errors. To their credit, they had done a lot to eliminate the variations in their processes, and systemise them, which had made a difference, but not enough.

It was pointed out (by a forkie) that their very attractive shipper design, done by a design agency at considerable expense to be consistent with their brand, was really difficult for the forkies to read in the warehouse, three rows up.

They got rid of  the pretty graphics, replacing them with a clear, big product descriptor  and bingo, errors almost eliminated.

Lesson is  that design has many functions, and good design takes into consideration the circumstances that the product finds itself in, out there in the real world, not always the same world as that shown on the screen of a design software package.

On a more personal note, over the 40 years wandering around business, I have found that there is as strong well of common sense and actionable improvements available to us in places that those in the air-conditioning and suits often do not consider.

Go talk to those people.

What can marketers learn from comics?

What can marketers learn from comics?

Mar 18, 2016 | Communication, Marketing

For no particular reason I was watching some comedy on YouTube recently, top comedians plying their trade.

Great fun, but it struck me that there was a lot that we marketers can learn from the techniques that permeated all the routines I watched.

Comedians may be funny, but at heart they are storytellers.

We have all seen really funny jokes hit the floor in the hands of a poor storyteller. It is not  the fault of the story, it is the teller.

There was a clear pattern to the stories told by these comedians, irrespective it appears of the type of story they were telling. Jimmy Carr’s potty mouth stories had a similar  structure to  Jerry Seinfelds mother in law appropriate ones.

Some time ago I attended a corporate event that featured comedienne Fiona O’Loughlin as the after dinner speaker. She told her own story, her personal battles with alcohol,  an upbringing in Alice Springs,  early marrriage and a pile of kids. There was some pretty black stuff, but she had the room in stiches, and left a powerful message about personal responsibility.

Back to the structure of a successful story.

First,  every story has to grab your attention, so there is an opener of some sort, 5-45 seconds, that poses a question, makes a contestable statement, or paints some picture in the mind of the listener. An exemplar if you need another one is that almost every TED talk starts this way, with a device of some sort that grabs and holds attention.

Second, the story opens up, the comedian  weaves a narrative using all the tools of their voice and body, the dimensions of the stage. They create then relieve tension, ‘draw’ a series of pictures in the minds of the audience, only to pull them down to  show how ridiculous they are, almost mini- punchlines, and they are almost always personal, human, showing the foibles and idiosyncrasies of people. They reveal themselves and their emotions  to the audience, seeking to engage by having the audience relate to the story they are telling, winning the hearts of the audience with the struggles they are describing, reeling you in the with authenticity and ‘this could have been you’ narrative.

Finally there is the punch line, always something unexpected, providing contrast that evolves out of the story, but is not something that is obvious, it is this contrast that delivers the humour.

In telling the story, the comedian has allowed the audience to get to know them in an intimate way, you know how they think and feel, they have won your liking and respect with the authenticity of the story, and you trust them, because they have trusted you.

Marketing is no different, we have to tell stories about the products, how they fit into our lives to make them better, and they ways the audience can benefit.

Do that and your communication will work, fail to tell a good story, and it will hit the floor like a dirty wet  mop, and probably splash you in the process.

 

 

The secret sauce of marketing.

The secret sauce of marketing.

Mar 16, 2016 | Branding, Communication, Customers

 

The currency of marketing success starts these days with a simple word:

Attention.

How to get it, keep it and leverage it.

In the crowded world we are in, it is the secret sauce of marketing.

Every day we are assaulted by messages, millions of them, yet we actually ‘see’ just a tiny fraction.

In a world where our brains give us comprehensive and automatic filters, where even those that get through have a split second to make an impression and gain some of our attention, it pays to understand the means by which this process happens.

Automatic sensory cues.

When was the last time you completely ignored a gorgeous bird (if you are a bloke) wearing a short skirt and blazing red shirt?

Never happens right? That is because our brain is on automatic, it sifts the information coming at it in an unconscious manner. However, when something triggers one of the basic responses in our ‘reptile’ brain, the deepest most ancient part of the grey matter that controls just a few things, we notice. This automatic response was vital to the survival of a weak mammal being hunted by sabre tooth tigers, and thankfully survives to ensure we see the red shirt.

Reputation.

We often almost automatically trust things and people based on reputation. Tom Clancy brings out a new novel, and fans of the genre will buy it based on the experience and reputation of his previous books. In the past we also tended to trust authority, police and doctors for example, but the transparency of the last 25 years has almost seen that gone, we now make judgements on a wider base. Taking that one step further, we now put some weight on crowd sourced reviews as Amazon does with their rating and referral systems.

Recognition.

When we recognise something or someone, it grabs our attention. Walking through Sydney’s CBD a few weeks ago, paying no particular attention to anything, I unexpectedly recognised someone I had not seen for many years, walking the opposite way on the opposite side of Pitt Street. The sudden and unexpected recognition riveted my attention, I had to race across the road and accost him. (luckily my recognition was accurate or it would have been embarrassing). This also works inside businesses, the recognition of the familiar, weather it be people, processes or existing patterns of behaviour are powerful motivators of future behaviour.

Think like a customer.

It often surprises how little marketers actually look at their output from the perspective of those they are trying to influence. Stepping across and putting yourself into the shoes of the receiver in a way that enables you to see the material you are producing through their eyes, recognise and respond to the emotional hooks, feel urge to ‘connect’ that you are trying to build, recognise the  relevance and power of the offer or call to action. To some this capacity to jump into your customers persona comes as naturally as breathing, to others it remains a bridge too far no matter how hard they try, how much research they read. Finding someone in your team who has this capacity can mean a quantum step in the effectiveness of your efforts.   Thinking like a customer makes gathering attention much easier as you can see the cues your customer will respond to, and deliver them in a manner that creates and drives the attention.

This task, the drive to gather and leverage attention is one of the foundations of marketing success, understanding the triggers is essential.

How to Design a winner by staying out of the way.

How to Design a winner by staying out of the way.

Mar 9, 2016 | Branding, Marketing, Small business

 

Few of us are designers, although most would like to think the contrary

Few things get stuffed up more than design, and it is normally because a good designer was nowhere near the project.

You did it yourself, or had the intern do it, the boss’s wife, or you went on line and got 55 alternatives for $99.97 and picked one with a pin.

Does not work, does it!

While running large marketing departments long ago  in my corporate dark ages, there were two simple rules:

  1. There was a rigorous process of the product managers doing what they were supposed to be good at, building a design brief based on the strategies, product value proposition, and profile of the target audience, and it was followed.
  2. Nothing went out without me seeing it, and if there were several options, the one I favoured least was normally the one that was chosen.

I am a very good and widely experienced marketer, but a crap designer. Fortunately for the many successful projects over the years I know my own limitations.

So, to the design brief, the heart of any design project.  Here is a short list of do’s and don’ts

Do:

  • Offer the designer a range of emotional words you would like the designer to communicate. If the product is a healthy food product, words such as “nutritious,” “fresh,” and “natural” are likely words, but if the product is a body building supplement, they are more likely to be “Bold” “aggressive” and   “masculine”
  • Ensure the designer knows as much as it is possible to know how the customer will select, interact with, use and dispose of the product when it is finished. The more the designer can put themselves in the mind of the primary customer the better.
  • Make sure you take a mock up or two into the typical outlet to see how it fares in its competitive habitat if it is a product that must compete for retail display space.
  • Leave the graphical elements to the designer, that is their skill, so don’t box them in by specifying fonts, colours, layout ideas, or any of your  preconceptions. However, if there are elements that are mandatory, such as a brand colour guide, or that will cause the rejection of a design such as using your photograph, it would be wise to ensure they were aware of the boundaries.
  • Test where possible. Digital products can be subjected to all sorts of A/B tests and they often throw up amazing results, but in any event, be prepared to experiment, and improve with the benefit of the insights gained.
  •  First impressions matter, particularly when the impression is by someone with some empathy for the category. When running those large marketing departments of FMCG manufacturers, I used to ensure that all the women in the place were exposed to the designs, as they were more representative of the typical buyer than the men in the department.
  • Finally, and most importantly, the design has to tell a story to the buyer, it must communicate what the product does in a split second, and why they should buy it.

Do Not:

  • ‘Crowdsource’ the preferences of friends, co-workers, and particularly your partner beyond the “which do you like” question. Going one more and seeking advice on how to fix the shortcoming they see is asking for trouble.
  • Stick with a design that once in the market is clearly not working. We all make mistakes, the skill is in recognising them early, acknowledging, fixing, and moving on.

 

As a final word, do not do the design yourself, it will most times be rubbish. Design is a fundamentally important and often abused part of the process of delivering value to a customer. Short cuts almost never pay off, they end up costing heaps in rework and lost opportunity, and keep the list of Do’s handy.