A pox on their houses!

A pox on their houses!

Aug 14, 2019 | Marketing, rant, Strategy

 

It seems that ‘Influencers’ are chasing me everywhere.

I have been receiving messages from one who needs me to be rescued by using the product she flogs. Perhaps it will make me look younger, but I doubt it, and I certainly would not pony up the absurd amount of money to buy it from her special friend, at the special once off price, only available to her followers.

I am not a follower, nor am I a 24 year old female millennial, and I have been around way too long for the nonsense about scarcity to have any effect at all on me.

All I would like to know is who the hell sold her my mobile phone number, and why does she think I am interested?

There is nothing wrong with using a celebrity, someone with real influence, to provide a spokesperson for your product. It has been a valuable element in the marketing armoury since the advent of advertising.

However, it is dumb to use a celebrity in the absence of a creative idea, born of a strategy.  A way of communicating the value your product can deliver to those who may buy and use it.

I am perhaps old and cranky, but the hugely increasing use of so called ‘influencers’ self styled gurus of nothing important, gives me the Tom Tits. 

If you want to demonstrate the paucity of your strategic marketing chops, go pay some silly Instagram influencer a pile of money to post your rubbish on their site, so the bots can like it and they can charge you piles of money that could be put to better use.

It is lazy, lazy, and no substitute for doing the hard work of diagnosis of the problem or opportunity, followed by the development of an appropriate strategy. This necessitates hard work,  making difficult choices, accepting risks, and implementing, learning, and going again.

Too often I see silly marketing people convincing themselves that an influencer campaign, whatever the hell that may be, is the solution to, well,  whatever, which is normally all about being seen to be doing something.

Do the work instead.

 

Cartoon credit: Courtesy Tom Fishburne at marketoonist.com

 

 

 

Trust: A rare priviledge that is hard to earn, never just given.

Trust: A rare priviledge that is hard to earn, never just given.

Aug 9, 2019 | Branding, Marketing

 

Trust is a word bandied around liberally, like a ticket to be attached to a piece of luggage. A label, adornment, meaning little.

In a world where the bonds of community have been broken down by the pressures of the 21st century, real trust is a rare and earned  privilege.

A brand is a badge of trust.

We tend to trust a brand where there has been a lot of media, after all, if the enterprise that owned it did not believe in the product, why would they invest? To some degree, this is the only advantage old media has over digital, most consumers see it as really expensive, while digital is seen (wrongly) as cheap.

Trust is never just given, it has to be earned.

Consider ‘The Knowledge’ as an example of trust.

This is the test you need to pass in order to get a licence to drive a black cab in London.  To pass this most demanding of tests, an applicant must know every street, major building, place of interest, cross road, and transport stop, within 6.5 miles of Charing cross station. This adds up to 25,000 streets, many of them with the same name, and 20,000 landmarks. This is in addition to all the major routes in other parts of London. In a day of the GPS, Uber, and an alternative licence for a ‘mini-cab that is not much more than an over the counter transaction, why would you bother? So why is it that there are still people lining up to do spend the time and money to do the training to qualify?

The answer may sound weird, but ask yourself, who would you rather trust with your daughter on her big night out? Someone who had invested years and a lot of money into passing The Knowledge, and who would lose it after any sort of malfeasance, or someone who just turned up with a car and a GPS? 

The driver of a black cab has earned your trust, not because you know them,  but because of the investment they have made, which they would be dumb to risk, and dumb people cannot pass ‘The Knowledge’.

Consider that the next time you could benefit from dispassionate advice based on deep experience. 

Photo credit: photo_forest.

 

 

How your brain collaborates with itself

How your brain collaborates with itself

Aug 7, 2019 | Collaboration, Marketing

 

Your left brain manages the quantitative, anything that can be reduced to a spreadsheet will be a left brain activity. It can be quantified, optimised, but always lacks the spark of originality, and creativity. 

Creativity, instinct, understanding, are all functions of the right brain.

We homo sapiens respond instinctively to the cues around us in our environment, a  function of our evolutionary drive to survive in a hostile environment. However, we do it using our ‘fast’ brain, which is not a specific location or hemisphere of the brain, but an instinctive response built into us by evolution, residing deep in our amygdala. It enables instant response, which may not always be right, but is a safer bet. For example, when our ancestors were walking across the savannah, they responded to that rustle in the grass as if it was a threat. If it turns out to be just the wind, nothing is lost, but if it turns out to have been a tiger, it would have been a grave mistake to ignore it.

We interpret everything around us through this ‘fast lens’, then are able to sit back and think about it adding a layer of more thoughtful response.

The creative stuff in our brain, residing largely in the  right hemisphere is the slower part, from where we draw on our experience, learning, and context of information and environment, to come to a conclusion. It takes time and cognitive energy to assemble the factors that apply, and consider them, rather than just jumping to a conclusion.

It is this ability that distinguishes us from other mammals, and indeed, all animals.

However, the right brain needs input from the left, it requires the raw material with which to work, and when the magic happens, it needs a way for the left brain to figure out if the outcome made logical sense, then refeed the data back to the right brain for reprocessing.

I would speculate that the advent of the digital tools of instant gratification have compromised our propensity to apply the cognitive energy required to leverage the creative capability of our right brain.  Our creative output appears to me to have suffered in direct proportion to the evolution of the fast twitch tools of  the internet, which demand an instant response, not a considered one.  This does not  enable  the right brain to do what it does best, seek out interesting and non obvious solutions to a problem or situation.

For anyone more than  superficially interested in this stuff, the must read book is ‘Thinking Fast & Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman.

When you want to understand how it all applies to the generation of revenue, give me a call.

How do you crete a documented ‘Flow’ in your processes?

How do you crete a documented ‘Flow’ in your processes?

Aug 5, 2019 | Management, Operations

 

‘Flow’ evolves as a completed task is handed over to the next stage, or person, automatically, with no error, in an entirely predictable manner.

When seeking to build flow into a system, there needs to  be a lot of detailed and logical thought put into the individual actions that need to take place in order to complete the activity, stage, and whole job.

There needs to be a list of the individual actions that are required, that are checked off.

Nothing too adventurous here.

If you boarded a plane and saw that the pilot was running through his preflight checks from memory, rather than a clipboard held by the copilot, you would be justified to feel nervous. In the case of a light plane, the pilot will use a clipboard himself, and physically check items off the list.  This post will have been edited several times, but it is only the use of the ‘speak’ tool that will root out the small inevitable errors of grammar, syntax, and spelling that I make. Even then, some sneak through.

We all miss things, our mind sees what it wants to see because it makes assumptions about what should be there, and just ‘sees’ it.

The easiest way to write out a sequence of actions in sufficient detail for it to be a contributor to the creation of ‘Flow’,  is to assume you are writing them for  your grandmother who has advancing Alzheimer’s, and for whom  every action has to be articulated in detail and in sequence. This should deliver a simple, logical flow, that is easily communicated and used.

A caution: Never assume because a process has been articulated in this way, and seems to work well, that there is no room for further revision and improvement.

Improvement can only occur in a stable environment, and documenting the flow is a key step in the ongoing challenge of improvement. 

Processes are not goals, but goals are daydreams without processes.

Processes are not goals, but goals are daydreams without processes.

Aug 2, 2019 | Change, Strategy

 

Life is so very complicated.

We are always being told that to be successful requires that we set goals, and stick to them, work for them, focus, focus.

However, in my observation, a goal without a process to achieve that goal is useless, nothing more than a fantasy.

On the other hand, all the work I do with those who run  factories are about continuous improvement. Finding often tiny ways to deliver incremental productivity by removing the items, actions, and complications that hinder the ‘flow’ through a system delivers sustainable improvement.

Over time, the compounding impact is huge.

This has nothing to do with goals, but everything to do with mindset.

Can you achieve a goal without a systemic way of delivery that requires change?

Yes, but that goal will not be sustaining.

I observe those around me in this obese community setting out regularly to lose weight. Often they do, by a combination of exercise and ‘starving’ themselves, but immediately the goal weight has been reached, they relax, and the weight goes back on. They achieved the goal, but failed to have a process in place that made the weight loss sustainable.

If those same people just did some regular exercise, cut out sugar and fast foods, and ate less more often, then, over time, they would lose weight. In effect, they have adopted a process without necessarily having a goal.

My kids were all elite athletes, and they had goals, the big long term ones, but way more important, the ‘micro goals,’ the things they were working on every day to improve an element just a fraction, and a fraction a day, over time makes a huge difference. They were given an improvement process by their coaches, and while the long term goal was always there, it was never the focus, the day by day process was the focus.

Do the work, stick to the process, and the results will come.

Header cartoon is more visual advice from Dilbert via Scott Adms.