A reflection on Anzac Day, 2019

A reflection on Anzac Day, 2019

Apr 25, 2019 | Communication, Personal Rant

It is Anzac day 2019, just a public holiday to some,  but a lot more to others.

It is also my beautiful daughters 34th birthday, so it is a good day.

As we take the day off, some will just be thankful that the self-serving, fact free, fabricated drama, and partisan nonsense of this election season has also taken a break. 

Anzac Day has re-emerged from a slumber in the late 60’s to mid-seventies,  when it seemed that it had faded in our collective memory. In 1976 I massaged the itinerary of  a European camping tour I was leading to take us down the Gallipoli peninsula to the Lone Pine memorial.  I was surprised that we were so close, and the visit was not included, but much more surprised that so few of the 45 twenty something passengers, knew much about what had happened there.

Perhaps the re-emergence of awareness and pride in the role Australians have played in wars has less to do with the facts of the sacrifices made by our forebears, than it has to do with our collective search for something to believe in, as they did. Something to bind us together, trust the word of a stranger because they looked in our eyes and said it was so.

The tools of modern communication are extraordinary, but we are more alone, more fragmented,  more focussed on ourselves, and more pessimistic than ever, while  we live in a world of plenty. 

It should be the opposite way around. We are highly social animals, the tools should have made ‘community’ easier, not harder, not more elusive. 

I look at all this through the eyes of a cynical, but well informed, educated, and thoughtful 67 year old baby boomer. I am a recipient of the largess brought on by the post war boom, and general prosperity since. While there have been some set-backs, on balance it has been a good life. That good life is in good measure thanks to those who went before, and made it possible.

Lest we forget.

Happy birthday Jennifer, now let your cranky old dad go and tend the BBQ, as an excuse to soothe his parched throat.

 

 

 

‘Brief’ does not just mean quick!

‘Brief’ does not just mean quick!

Apr 23, 2019 | Communication, Marketing

Providing a project brief is a core skill of great marketers.

Too often I see so called marketers sounding off about service providers of all stripes for failing to deliver, when the brief against which they are being judged is a load of ambiguous, fluffy clichés.

It takes courage for a service provider to tell a principal their brief sucks, but if they are to deliver, the brief has to be good. It is usually best where there is genuine collaboration on the brief development, engaging all the available expertise in defining the problems to be addressed, and sorting the  best way to go about it.

This requires not just the courage to speak up, but the intellectual freedom to do so, and follow differing lines of thought

Often time is a hard barrier, but in most cases that is because the marketer has failed in their duty to deeply consider the particular project  in the context of the strategic framework, which is also often missing.

As a young marketer, we were always seeking the ‘big idea,’ the one thing that would make a difference, the Meadow Lea line ‘you ought to be congratulated’ for instance. This appears to have been replaced by  the need to create an never ending flow of ideas for execution on all the new media platforms. However, a gaggle of mediocre creative does nothing except consume resources.

The day of the big idea is not gone, but we seem to grossly underestimate the time and intellectual energy necessary to come up with them.

Believe what they do, not what they say.

Believe what they do, not what they say.

Apr 8, 2019 | Governance, Leadership

Last week I was reminded, again, to take what people told you with a grain  of salt, and to watch closely what they did, rather than believing what they said.

I watched as the CEO of a significant business took a decision that was in direct conflict with the values he regularly espouses to staff and customers, in the interests of a short term cost mitigation.

He did not seem to accept the inconsistency when it was pointed out.

In the early 70’s as a student, I did a couple of holiday stints as a door to door market researcher. In one project, we were banging on doors and asking which brand of cigarette was smoked (in those days, smoking was widespread). When the answer was one of a couple of premium brands, we had to persuade the respondent to show us the packets in the house, and half the time, it was one of the cheaper brands.

Had we accepted what they said, rather than confirming with what they did, the research results would have been even more rubbish than they were.

Putting yourself in the shoes of a research respondent is really hard. It requires empathy, close observation, robust but sensitive questioning, and savvy choices in who you talk to if the results are to be reliable. It also offers the opportunity to gather insights into behavior that enables better product and service design, uncovering unstated or unrecognised problems being faced.

I hesitate to mention, we are about to go into an election campaign, the reality is we are already there, with the welter of blather, tired clichés and bullshit about to overwhelm us, again. As a community, we should really point out to all who want our votes the truth of the post headline.

Illustration credit: Tom Gauld from Instagram.

What is the one skill no SME can do without?

What is the one skill no SME can do without?

Mar 28, 2019 | Marketing, Strategy

Simple answer, rarely given at first: Writing quality copy!

Quality copy, in whatever form it is delivered,  gets inside someone’s head, it joins in and contributes to the conversation already happening, and influences the outcomes that evolve.

Everything we do in an enterprise is in one way or another directed towards the objective of getting someone to do something. It therefore follows that we need to be able to communicate with them clearly, in their words, saying things they either want to hear, or are receptive to hearing which may lead to an action.

This does not happen by accident, it only happens when time is invested in the writing process, and importantly, the preparation that happens before the pen is lifted. From writing a simple email, to communicating the most complex message by any number of media, the rules are pretty much the same, only the time invested will vary.

It is also true that we humans relate to, understand, and remember stories, so tell one! Do not just deliver a bunch of words, data and illustrations, create a memorable narrative.

There are 4.5 million copy templates out there, available via Dr. Google. Scrape away the jargon, fancy words, and promises of millions of dollars if you will just do this one thing, and there is a very common thread running through most of them that offer any real value. That thread comes down to  a few simple to say, but very hard to implement rules.

  • Audience. Know who you are talking to
  • Objective. Know exactly what it is you want to say, and why.
  • Action. Communicate what Action you want them to take as a result of reading (or listening)
  • Impression. What is the lasting impression you are seeking to place in the mind of the reader.

A simple acronym: A.O.A. I. That makes it 4.5 million and one!

An email will differ from website copy, and both will be different to a sales letter,  and to a major verbal presentation, but all will follow those simple rules, with the obvious variations in the manner in which they are executed.

Common to all are a few further observations I will make.

  • Every successful communication starts with a draft, that can always be improved. The more complex the communication, the greater the potential for improvement. Usually this is achieved by cutting words and selecting them more carefully to better communicate the meaning, motivate the desired action, and leave the lasting impression. For example, despite the following two sentences being quantitatively the same, almost everyone will feel substantially more favourable towards  the first:

‘This milk is 95% fat free‘ . Versus, ‘This milk contains 5% fat‘.

The pursuit of clarity, brevity, and maximum impact  are voracious consumers of the writers time, but always offer a return on the investment. Variously credited, but I believe correctly to Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) is a note to his wife while visiting Australia in 1895. ‘Darling, I wrote you a long letter because I did not have the time to write you a short one’

  • In written communications, spelling and grammar are essential skills. Not because of some preoccupation with the past, but because the rules of spelling and grammar evolved to assist in delivering clarity. Spellcheck is a good first start, but it misses a lot, particularly grammar, and the construction of sentences to deliver clarity. When writing anything, from a simple email to a book, in the absence of a person playing the role of editor, read it out aloud to yourself, saying every word as it is written.  There is a tool in Word, called ‘Speak’ which I have on my quick access toolbar, which reads back your copy in ‘computer voice’. While it is far from perfect, no matter how careful I have been, listening back to  ‘Speak’ always highlights something that can be improved.
  • Verbal communication, from a simple elevator pitch, to a major speech, should always evolve from a written draft. ‘Winging it’ is almost always a very bad idea! Once you have an elevator pitch, it can be memorised, repeated, and ‘tweeked’. Writing any communication the first time is always hard, as you have to decide what to leave out. Doing a brain dump of everything you know  about a topic will just lead to a bored, and disengaged audience.
  • Verbal communication in front of an audience also imposes another set of choices that need to be made in addition to the choice of words. That is how those words are to be delivered. Speaking naturally, including all the intonation and body language as you would to a single person, is always best, but with caution. Colloquial and ‘expressive’ language that may be acceptable one to one, may not be in front of an audience. This is a judgement to be made each time, usually somewhat dependent on the audience. Practise helps, as does the recognition that it is natural to be nervous, and importantly, working on the written drafts until you know  the content intimately, removes a lot of the self imposed pressure.

While the basic rules will remain consistent, the formats used will differ markedly. A sales letter will  look different to the copy on a website, which will be different to the presentation you do to an audience. However, the basic AOAI framework will help in the writing of the copy that is the foundation of delivering the message.

In addition to my simplistic A.O.A.I. template, there are many others of value from successful writers, as noted, roughly similar. The following two I commend, which come from books I have read and re-read on several occasions.

R.O.A.M. Readers, Objective, Action, iMpression. Josh Bernoff, ‘Writing without Bullshit’.

P.A.S.T.O.R. Person Problem Pain; Amplify; Story, Solution System; Transformation, Testimony; Offer; Response. Ray Edwards. ‘How to write copy that sells’.

When you need help developing and articulating your strategy, and figuring out how to implement, call me.  0410 627 318

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Where is the similarity between strategy development  and ‘Two-Up’

Where is the similarity between strategy development  and ‘Two-Up’

Mar 21, 2019 | Strategy

Strategy is all about making choices, which market, which customer type, which channel, and so on. Many marketers do this sort of analysis almost on autopilot, when it is in fact the core of a robust strategy, and should be the subject of rigorous consideration.

Sitting behind the choices made, mostly without much fanfare, is the basis on which the choices have been made:

Expected value!.

What is the expected value of choice A

What is the expected value of choice B.

Expected value = Anticipated outcome – Risk

Once you have articulated the value, the choice becomes clearer.

It just gets complicated when you also need to consider the expected value of the following choices that need to be made. A strategy is a series of choices, all separate, but the final outcome is a result of the interdependencies of the choices made.

A part of the process of putting a number on the expected value is the expected risk. Again, this is a cumulative process.

Think about the essential Australian game of two-up. You are betting on the outcome of the flip of two coins, there is only three potential outcomes, a pair of heads, a pair of tails, or a head and tail, which is a foul throw, and is repeated.  It is possible to get a run of heads or tails, and in a modest number of throws, a marked bias towards one or the other. However, over a larger number of throws, the maths takes over and it ends up 50:50.  In this case, the range of outcomes is known, the probability of one or the other after the re-throw of ‘odds’  is exactly 50%.

I watched a mate at University (scary, 45 years ago) win next semesters fees in a run of ‘heads;’ in a two up game in Dubbo. 9 in a row, the odds are .5 X.5 X .5 X and so on, 1 in approx 19,500. Every time he spun the coins everyone was betting that the next fair throw would be tails, but the odds of each throw are exactly the same, 50:50, it is the probability of there being 9 heads throws in a row that is the really long odds, as you would need to make the bet on 9 consecutive heads before the first throw, to get the return from that outcome. In my mates case, he just kept on betting the ring each time that there would be another heads, 50:50 each time, until he had enough.

Building a strategy is similar, there are some knowns that can be calculated, there are some things that can be added in with some level of probability, and there are the random, incalculable events that can throw an unexpected result.

Trick is to know which is which, and calculate the expected value of any set of circumstances as best you can, always being prepared to accommodate the unexpected, that seems to always happen at the worst possible time.

I am tempted to also make the comparison to the state election to be held on Saturday. A choice of two, with the real possibility of a dud throw, which unfortunately cannot be re-thrown for another 4 years, but that may be inappropriate.

Photo credit: Two up at the Ypres front, 23 December 1917, Australian  war memorial.