The Full Blog

Last week witnessed a shift in the British political scene with the Tories gaining extra seats in local councils at the expense of Labour and the Tory candidate for London Mayor, (Bumbling) Boris Johnson scoring a resounding victory over the incumbent Labour (Communist actually!) (Red) Ken Livingstone. I’m not yet sure about Boris - it could be that London is buggered, but watching (blonde) Boris in action is sure as hell going to be more entertaining than the 2012 Olympics!

This Tory triumph represents two fingers for Labour and is a classic case of a) what happens when a brand (in this case Labour) fails to deliver its promise and b) how important the emotional side of brands is in any buying decision. David Cameron, the Conservative leader hasn’t come up with anything you could nail to your mast in the way of a policy yet, but the general opinion seems to be that he’s “our kind of guy”. Boris likewise won his contest really just by being a good bloke, in stark contrast to the slime-ball that Red Ken has always been. Welcome to the cut and thrust of political marketing!

The whole thing is a really great demonstration of how any kind of marketing works - the corporate and sub-brand relationship (Tory central office policies being represented at local level by brand Boris) and the harsh truth that a great brand is one that, when the Champagne bottles have been taken to the glass bank, delivers its promises. Yes, winning the election, just like making the first sale, only gets you as far as a seat at the crap table. Its what you do when you get there that really counts.

The terminology differs a bit between commercial and political marketing, but it all boils down to the same thing. You join the community by voting instead of buying and if you want to evangelise, you pay your fees and join your party, it all depends how close to the brand you feel. The parties are a sum of their membership and voters and the honeymoon period that they all talk about is the time immediately after election when the party has to put its plan into action. Up until that point the voting decision has been very much an emotional (right side of brain) thing now the rational left side of the electorate’s brain kicks in and takes increasing prominence (although it is never the whole story).

As with any organisation the people we see representing government are not those who will actually deliver the promises - that’s down to the minions - and the only way that the leaders can be certain that the delivery will match their promises is if they have their internal marketing really buttoned down. Every marketer in every sector faces the same issue. I was talking to someone the other day who said that they were going to vote BNP (British National Party - the remodelled National Front). His point was that their policies make sense. I felt obliged to point out that while I might agree, the real point was that while the senior party officials were spouting the (arguably) sensible stuff the grass roots representatives were interpreting this as race hate and ethnic cleansing. That’s what happens when your internal marketing fails and the front line do it their way! You could argue that its the same with Islam. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the Koran, but it leaves much to the interpretation of Imams, who, intentionally or otherwise sometimes use the vagueries of the text to justify their own ends.

I have had a little experience of working with political parties, so I appreciate that its more complex than a commercial brand, but that doesn’t mean that the same rules don’t apply. You have to have a programme and my Brand Discovery is as good as any, even in this context. The stages are clearly defined:

• Establish exactly what your brand is all about - That’s the process of creating the Brand Model within which is the brand promise that every brand has.
• Make sure that your stakeholders (party members and representatives) understand it, buy into it and commit to playing their part in its delivery.
• Go and tell he world about it, confident in the knowledge that wherever they encounter your brand the experience will be consistent.

When you are doing this every contact you have with customers or electorate will further enhance your relationship give you greater opportunity for sales and make life far simpler and your business more efficient. I didn’t say it was easy, in fact its where most organisations (and I mean all but a very few indeed) fail, but that’s all the more reason to be focused and tenacious because when you have been missing the target by the margin that most businesses are you’ll see results very quickly.

OK, I know I rattle on a lot about the various vested interests within organisations that prevent real cohesion or an integrated approach, but that’s because I keep bumping into ivory tower-builders and political dead-heads who undermine organisations’ success.

For instance, those of you who know me will know that I have always promoted the idea of HR as a marketing function.  After all, the definition of marketing is to leverage an organisation’s resources in order to deliver something that people want or need in the most efficient way and the biggest resource any organisation has are its people. So, as long as HR is about managing the employee resource it has to be a marketing function.

The problem is that HR people so rarely see it this way. There’s something so separatist about the way that HR is set up in most organisations that I come across, you would think that their role had nothing at all to do with the business.

I came across a national retail organisation the other day that was having great difficulty recruiting good store managers. This same organisation however, had recruited a manager in waiting and put her “on ice” as a deputy manager at one of its stores . This manager made an real impact and was very highly thought of so when the incumbent manager went on extended leave she stepped into the manager’s role and immediately produced better figures and team spirit.

The regular manager walked back into her job after six months or so and the stand-in was stepped down again. Odd enough in itself, but for some months the organisation continued to pay her a manager’s salary, so she lived with it. Then came the whammy, because the organisation’s HR people discovered some months down the line that they had been paying her as a manager when she had been acting as a deputy and demanded the incremental salary back from her. They were at pains to point out to me that they were legally entitled to do so, but, of course, that’s hardly the point.  It takes a very special level of stupidity for any organisation to do this route let alone one that was having problems finding good people.

The HR position was that “rules are rules” and the woman wasn’t entitled to a manager’s salary if she wasn’t doing a manager’s job. It quite escaped them that it was their fault that she wasn’t doing the job and as for the small matter of pissing-off a valuable employee, they didn’t see it as their problem. Their job was to enforce the rules, it was the job of operations to field that one! Frankly, I hope they go broke (and it seems they might), but even then I’m sure they won’t get it.

A couple of weeks back I was chatting with the global HR Director of one of our most respected marketing services groups who was explaining to me why the marcoms sector had a really primitive approach to HR (Tell me about it!) However, I’m not sure they are as alone in this as he seems to think. There are so many things wrong with the HR set-up in most organisations that its hard to know where to start, but there are two critical issues:

A) Although they are dealing with people most HR departments appear to be hide-bound by bureaucracy - and we all know where that leads.

B) So few HR people understand how crucial their role is to the delivery of the brand promise and certainly don’t visualise themselves as marketers.

Brands are communities and that means they are the sum of the attitudes, standards and opinions of their members. I work with organisations to drive business growth by developing their brands, not, by means of the papering-over-the-cracks-and-making-empty-promises approach that appears to be the default position adopted by most organisations, but by actually delivering a promise that people respond to. Delivery has a lot to do with having the right employees, so recruitment (under general HR) plays a critical role. My agency friend waxed lyrical about the deficiencies of recruitment consultants and their numbers-driven approach and plans to solve this one by removing outsourced recruitment entirely and replacing it with an in-house department that serves the organisation’s global needs. More power to his elbow I say!

Success is also about getting all of your people behind the brand and pushing in the same direction, which is what internal marketing is all about.  This is also very much a job for HR under the general management of their marketing colleagues yet I frequently have to argue with clients for the inclusion of HR people in the brand discovery workshops I run, which to me is a key indicator of old-fashioned, unenlightened, inefficient, or just plain shoddy management.

Of course, HR people are often the authors of their own destiny in this respect.  While it all seems pretty logical to me, I often feel myself slipping into Columbus’s shoes as he received the reaction to his suggestion that the world wasn’t flat! Then again, identifying the chicken and the egg in this cycle is something of a challenge.  Maybe  HR people have just been trained into this viewpoint by generations of sadly-lacking general management.

In the final analysis though, the argument is redundant, because as soon as you start identifying the things that drive success, you inevitably home in on the brand and when you dig into this you can’t help but realise how critical the HR function is to your brand development.  It all comes back to the need for an organised approach like my Brand Discovery programme, which I know isn’t the only programme in this area, but you’ll excuse me if I stick to the view that its the best - unless you know different that is?

I’m back in the UK for a while at the moment and my inadvertent, but perfect timing landed me right in the middle of one of my favorite debates - national branding.

I wrote a post about this about a year ago and added it to this blog in January (”Brand Britain”). I’m fascinated by the issues of large-scale brand development projects and they don’t come much larger than national branding. I’m also fascinated by the workings of government, so this is an area where I get some seriously big kicks. Of course, the participants in this debate rarely recognise the subject as “branding”. I have heard it referred to by many names this week, but that’s what it is aright and all the private sector rules apply.

The subject seemed to come to the surface this week in reaction to a new report, commissioned by the government and prepared by Lord Goldsmith on “Citizenship”. In their usual helpful way the British press have leapt upon a small recommendation that Lord Goldsmith made within it - that British kids should swear allegiance to the Queen and/or the flag on a daily basis at school. Of course they have as usual and probably on purpose, completely miss-represented what he was saying. The interpretation that they have been pedalling being that if kids are made to swear allegiance to the flag regularly enough they’ll start to conform - of course this very much a reversal of the truth and I am sure nowhere near what Lord Goldsmith was saying.

By way of putting my cards on the table I have to say that I believe that many, if not all of the ills of our nation (and probably many other nations too) stem from a lack of national pride. National pride is a larger-scale equivalent of self-respect and very much the same kind of thing that drives the family communities that Conservative leader David Cameron is going on about. Its also that same emotional soup from which strong brands derive. Nations, and brands are both communities and communities are built on the reassurance, feeling of belonging and confidence that arise when beliefs, attitudes and values are shared.

I was having a conversation with a chap in Prague a few weeks ago who was convinced that the reason that Czechs have become so bickering, back-biting and self-absorbed since the fall of communism is that their hatred of their communist oppressors that was once a common bond wasn’t replaced with anything else. Sadly, being basically clueless, the politicians there haven’t even come close to being up for this key task. As a result the country now has no focus, no common objective, no shared belief and as a result a state of every man for himself has developed in the void. For the Czechs this fact represents a seriously missed opportunity - the country was a blank sheet of paper, everyone was looking for a lead. The invitation was out for someone to pull it all together and nobody stepped up to the plate. While the first second republic president Havel was great at galvanising a generally ambivalent nation towards revolution, he proved singularly incapable of filling the void he had created. Klaus on the other hand, as witnessed by his New York speech three weeks ago, appears to be representing the emerging grab-all-you-can philosophy that is dominant in the republic now.

In the UK the task of focusing or re-focusing a nation is rather more complex. In exactly the same way that the structures and practices that a large organisation develops to help it maintain a status quo become the biggest obstacle to change, the UK is finding that, even though it may have the will to change the structures and practices of government and all other interested parties, that have been built and reinforced over the centuries now prevent that change.

Its not unlike the story that is unfolding in the US right now too. Obama recognises the need for change and seems to have a reasonable theory for bringing it about, while Hilary claims that her experience and insights of the people and the system give her the understanding Barak lacks when it comes to pre-empting and overcoming resistance to change. She says he will fail because he’s not going to know where the ambushes are going to come from (Although I’m not sure that she agrees with the principles of change any more than the ambushers she is so familiar with!).

However, as Barak says, once you recognise the need for change you are duty-bound to start trying to bring it about and that’s where US politics are ahead of the UK - they have Barak Obama, we Brits don’t seem to have anybody focussed enough to make it all happen. This fact mirrors my experience in brand development too. I frequently come across organisations who have in the past brought in some of the heavy guns to help them address their brand issues only to find that while they are great on spotting the problem and coming up with solutions, they often fail miserably when it comes to implementing them. My answer to this is a logical step-by-step approach that tackles all the obstacles in order. I go through this methodically, which takes time, but ensures that ultimately the required changes are brought about.

The first step with any project like this is to establish common ground (That’s what my Brand Model is all about) and that’s where the problems lie in the UK. I’ve listened to the views on this subject of a good many spokespeople for different interested parties over the last week or so and while I can see that there is fundamental agreement between many of them few of them recognise it, many are arguing about semantics and a very large proportion of them are confusing cause and effect. None of the people who I have heard representing any of the organisations seem to have a clue how to get things moving and all are very narrowly and tactically focussed.

What we and every other nation need is a senior minister whose sole responsibility is as champion of our national brand. Only then will we begin to be able to introduce the understanding among stakeholders and the initiatives we need to drive brand development. Its what is happening in the private sector, many businesses have directors responsible for brand development.

Compelling kids to salute the flag is definitely not the way to go, but a sure sign of the success of any national branding initiative would be if kids really wanted to raise their baseball hats when they passed a national flag. Actually, its not completely beyond hope either. As a part-time resident of Prague I see more Brit tourists wearing the George flag or Union Jack as they wander the attractions (or more commonly fall over in a bar!) and we are all familiar with the crowds at international football matches and other sporting events. So there’s is something to build on. So where is that national brand builder going to come from?

I have this art project thing that has been rattling around in the back of my head for years and I guess, when I have some spare time (Yeah, like, what’s that?) I might get around to looking at it again. It adopts a utilitarian icon that years ago everybody in the UK had, and highlights how these things mirror the development of our individual characters. The reason I have brought this up here is that this is not just about human character development, but the character of all living things, which, to me, and I hope to you, includes brands.

When I was a kid in the UK everyone had a pressed steel dustbin (trash-can, garbage can - insert as appropriate) that they kept outside their house and one of the distinctive sounds of my childhood was that of steel dustbins banging on the edge of the bin-men’s trailer when each week they came to empty the bins and haul the rubbish (trash, garbage) away. These days its all plastic wheelie-bins and automated heists and the music is less interesting.

We’re all very hot on strategy these days.  It seems everyone is suddenly a strategist.  There’s also a lot of talk about data collection.  However, a problem I find on my travels around organisations is that too few organisations put the two concepts together. 

Every business needs a data strategy, if you don’t have one you’ll be wasting time and money.  The spectrum of data abusing businesses that I come across ranges from those that are drowning under a deluge of data that they can’t organise or analyse (trying to drink from the fire hose) or those which have big holes in their insights where they forgot to ask some of the key questions. 

The sobering thought is, if you are in the drowning category you will have paid for data that you can’t use.  If you have holes you’ll have paid for half the picture when the full picture would usually have cost you the same - either way, its inefficient and as we all know, these days you are either efficient or on the slippery slope to the trash bin.  Yet many organisation still just collect data piecemeal, as and when they feel they can, with no particular rhyme or reason.

There’s a third category of data abusers too, which is probably the biggest in terms their data use and that’s businesses that have data and have managed to turn it into insights, but are unable to act upon them.  Mostly this is because organisations that are heavily into data, like financial services groups, are using it for direct marketing and a lot of that is systematised and/or automated to such a degree that their structures and even their culture is bound up in the system.  Once you have a system like this its hard to change.  The bottom line there is that your scope for improvemrent is confined to, as a well-known data marketer friend of mine is renown for repeating, “polishing turds”.

Next time you get a presentation from a data management consultancy or analyst, stop them at the slide that lists the savings that they claim they helped their clients achieve.  There is always a slide like this and the wording if they are honest at all is a dead give-away.  Usually its something like “we showed so-and-so how they could save £20million on their DM investment”.  The weasels there are “showed” and “could” because the bane of most data consultancies lives is the fact that very little of the potential savings that they identify are ever achieved.

I spent a good part of last year working with one of our biggest data management consultancies to develop an end-to-end process for collecting analysing and acting on data and I can assure you that data takes on almost magical properties if its managed like this.  Rather than “polish turds”, or to put it more elegantly “refine tactical activity”, we created a model that applied carefully gathered and analysed data at both strategic and tactical level.  The end result was a data driven approach to marketing where marketing was where it should be, firmly in the driving seat of the business and the entire business was built around a brand community with a heart that beat in time to that of its customers.  The data drove the brand development, which in turn drove the internal marketing and therefore the “promise” delivery (including product and offer development), right through to the tactical communications and promotional initiatives.  And this is the way it works, from the top not as the in the case of the tactical application model, with the tail wagging the dog!

This kind of thing is only possible when you start with a clear vision of what you need to know, how data will contribute to that knowledge and how you are going to get that data - in other words a data strategy.  You’ll need the right tools for the job too of course.  I still see quite large firms who keep their data on an Excel spread sheet - it doesn’t work, get real!  You’ll also need to get used to the idea that you should collect data at every touch-point, which is perfectly feasible if you apply a little ingenuity.  Once you get your head around that things get a bit easier.  Then all you have to do is convince your marketing services partners that their initiatives need to contribute to data collection and that the data they collect will in turn influence their future initiatives (or as one agency bright-spark put it “anything it says may be used against them!”).  Too bloody right and about time I say!

I talk a lot about “the big idea” to clients and the delegates to my seminars, in fact anybody who will listen. The fashion in marketing these days seems to be to focus on the delivery of the message rather more than the message itself and while I think its right that we should all be striving to make delivery more efficient, the danger is that some of us are ignoring an equally important issue. You might have the best delivery system in the business, but if you don’t have anything worth saying you may as well not bother!

Maybe it harks back to my creative roots, but I am passionate about “the big idea”. Its a principle that applies equally to all areas of business not just marketing communications, but I can’t help having that “Yes!” reaction when I see some of the great creative solutions that have come from marketing services firms like Lowe and Droga5 (some of their recent stuff blows me away).

I was talking to the VP Marketing of a global telco a couple of weeks ago and he was expressing his frustration at not being able to find a marketing services firm that genuinely embraced the “big idea”. The point he was making was that if he briefed an advertising agency they would come back with a response that worked on TV and maybe some other media, but didn’t really have legs in the context of the far greater communications arena that we acknowledge today. The same applied if he briefed a promotions company or an experiential agency. He felt that nobody was capable of separating the “idea” from the media - nothing changes then!

There’s another aspect to this that was brought home to me recently in a dialogue I was having on another blog. The subject there was “trade shows” and most contributors were commenting that as new methods of measurement were becoming available and practical they were revealing that trade shows weren’t viable. My angle on this was that, as with any other communications route, the bar has been raised considerably and like TV, and press there was no point investing in a trade show unless you had a “big dea” that would cut through and get you noticed. One contributor responded with the statement that he had found that even with a “big idea” he was struggling and he posted photos of a recent trade show exhibit. Once I saw these I realise that it isn’t about acceptance of the need for a big idea, but having the discernment to recognise how big a “big idea” had to be. His example was positively pants! Definitely grounds for firing his agency.

There’s a parallel here with the delegates to my Brand Discovery workshops, who when it comes to the point where they have to nominate their “point of difference” always come up with stuff that is mundane and very ordinary. Of course, that’s why we marketing folks are here, but I think that even in our world genuine creativity is rare. I see far too many so-so agencies who think they have cracked it - its self delusional.

Going back to Droga5, In response to a brief to tackle in-school use of mobile phones that was disrupting lessons, they did a deal with Motorola and gave away a million mobile phones to students in New York schools as the focal point of their “Million” project (take a look at their case study here). These phones were on a discrete network that delivered only educational content during school hours, but reverted to a normal phone network outside of those hours. Students earned credits to spend on phone calls and other stuff by accessing the educational content. The cost of the exercise was covered in full by advertising, which means that anybody could have done this … if they had the imagination. Now that’s a big idea!

Strong personalities appeal to me and I don’t think I’m alone in that. In fact I was reading research last week that suggested that most of us find people with strong characters more attractive than people who were just “nice”. Of course, it’s great, if you can be both - “nice” and “interesting” - but if its an either/or give me “interesting” every time. It adds up to some difficult relationships, but hey! … it makes life colourful and most importantly for us marketers - its engaging!.

This factor influences us in more ways than we might at first appreciate. For instance, it influences the brands that we buy. Think about it. Its how Apple (full of character) scored over Big Blue (full of … boringness?) or how Mark Ecko, the T-shirt guy made his rhinoceros the thing to have on your chest or back pocket (who saw that Air Force One stunt? - Wild!). Talking of aircraft, I don’t know anybody who would consider Ryan Air’s Michael O’Leary to be Mr Nice Guy, but he has become one of those people you love to hate and his airline is a runaway success. Conversely, you don’t see any cool people wearing T-shirts with “Boots the chemist” printed on them because Boots are boring!

This is not some kind of new radical thinking of course. Adam Morgan explained how it works in his book Eating The Big Fish(still one of my favourites) way back in 1998. Its “lighthouse branding” and its the basis of challenger brand marketing. If you are a market leader you might think you can afford to be boring (that’s why so many market leaders are) and of course, once you are there, in the top slot its easy to fall into the trap of believing you don’t have to put yourself out too much thinking of new stuff to make yourself interesting, but while you are kicking back, give a thought to some of the big organisations who had their business snuck away from them while they were resting on their laurels. I can think of a few who are heading that way now.

I’m no advocate of superficial branding, but it’s certainly true that if you want to be successful you have to be the best at what you do and if you can’t be the best being different will certainly buy you the first rung on the ladder. One of the nine elements (the nine P’s) in the brand models we create in my Brand Discovery workshops defines the brand’s “Point of difference”. It still surprises me how few of the delegates to my workshops really appreciate what “different” really means. Rarely is anybody extreme enough at the first pass around the table and its clear that most organisations delude themselves by believing that their very ordinary traits make them distinctive. I usually find that the best way to identify a potential point of difference is to ask customers. For instance, some years ago I worked on this with a mobile phone company whose subscribers told us that they were sick of the complicated tariffs that mobile operators offered. They felt that they were making them confusing on purpose to disguise high costs. We replied with a real point of difference - one tariff for all, wrapped up in a “champions of the people” brand character, and it worked.

Most places that you see a real success story you will find a distinctive brand character - Starbucks, Harley Davidson, Virgin - and they’ll almost always be a response to a consumer need. Modern media makes it simple to gather consumer feedback at pretty much every point of contact so there’s no excuse for not knowing what your customers want, think or believe is interesting and as I always say - every communication in any communication strategy should be two-way. I find there are people who don’t think that’s possible, but you can usually get feedback if you really want it with a little applied ingenuity.

Of course, you still have to deliver your promise and in part that’s about maintaining your point of difference, but that’s the another chapter in my Full Effect Marketing story.

I’m on a customer service kick again having just wasted the best part of a day battling with O2’s customer support.

In the Czech Republic Telefonica O2 recently acquired the once state-owned Czech Telecom and their mobile counterpart Eurotel and with them what was probably the worst customer service in the developed world.  Somehow the arrogance of public ownership had combined with a Communist appreciation of what customer service is all about, absolutely no consumer insights and zero training to create a customer service resource that had infinite flexibility to be able NOT to deliver whatever you needed.  Yes, I am sure they actually went out of their way to make life impossible!

Luckily the boys at Telefonica have risen to the challenge and in a reasonably short period have begun to respond to  current needs, anticipate future ones and even create processes for resolving them.

My problem was that as a self-confessed media junkie (integration was invented just for me) I travel the world with my lap-top set up to deliver English language TV, movies, news etc. wherever I may be.  I’m not usually at my Prague base for long periods of time but this month I appear to have outstayed my welcome (at least with Telefonica/O2) by downloading more than they think I should have (Maybe something to do with watching the entire first series of Lost!?).  The result being that I received a hefty slap on the wrist in the form of a download speed restriction that reduced my bandwidth from 4mb to 88kbps - very friendly!

Now, I could launch into one of my pet subjects here with a piece entitled “When is unlimited download not unlimited?” and turn this whole thing around into a case for revealing the “fair user policy” that some ISPs adopt for the miss-sell that it represents - to my mind if you buy unlimited download you should get unlimited download and anything short of that should be considered breach of contract.  However, I’m determined to keep to the point here, which is … why having gone to all the trouble of training and devising programmes for the resolution of customer issues anybody - and Telefonica are not alone here - should hand it over to web site developers to completely bugger up.

Why, when everyone seems to be talking about and nodding to the suggestion that you should never be more than a couple of clicks away from satisfaction on any web site, do so many organisations that I believe genuinely understand customers and want to solve their problems, have web sites with customer support that you need GPS and a native guide to find your way around? (My old English teacher would love that sentence/paragraph!)

All I wanted to do was buy a quid’s worth of extra bandwidth to see me through the week and it took four phone calls and more time on the O2 web site that I would care to recall (or add-up the cost of).  The reasons for this were firstly that this service is not available via the telephone customer service, only on line.  Secondly, web site navigation was unending, but my biggest issue is that, for some reason that I can’t fathom, Telefonica O2 insist on giving things cute names that you are supposed to instinctively relate.

Pardon me for being simple, but if I want to buy extra bandwidth I’m looking for a menu item that says something like “buy extra bandwidth”.  Unfortunately T/O2 don’t see it that way.  They think that its far more appropriate to list “Data Klik” among a never ending menu of similarly cute names at the end of a navigation challenge that goes like this.

Home>Private>Customer Care>On-line Services and applications>Log-in (this is great because you are supposed to have at your fingertips a sixteen character login and password that you won’t have used since the day you set up your modem)>My services>Data Klik (if you knew it was call this)>order>send.  Sorted!

Maybe I’m slow, but it took me conversations with four different customer service representatives to fathom that route.  Yes, I couldn’t buy the service on the phone but I had to use the phone service to find out how to use the on-line service - does that make sense? - No, of course not!  Only the last guy gave me the impression that he had ever seen the web site himself or knew that what I was looking for was “data klik”.  One thought I could buy it from a colleague over the phone, but having transferred me the colleague was as confused as I was, another cut me off and didn’t call back (I assume they have number recognition at the telephone company?) the third gave me completely the wrong instructions - Oh, and I got through to a recorded message that told me that there were no operators available, but if I left a message they would call me back, which I did.  That was two days ago now and I’m still waiting!

So, I guess at least some of the morals of this story are:

• Never trust a web developer to create a customer service web site
• Keep marketing speak out of it - call a spade a spade and everyone will understand.
• If your mechanism doesn’t deliver your customer service, you have no customer service.

Actually, this experience actually had a negative influence on my opinion of Telefonica/O2 and it is a really good example of where the inefficiencies lie in organisations like this.  They could significant and directly reduce their need for investment by fixing this problem, but it will be a drop in the ocean compared to the savings they would make if they just stopped pissing customers off by putting them through this mill. 

As the market leader by a long way they may be less driven than their competitors on issues like this and rather less concerned than they should be about achieving efficiencies and increasing ROI, but as one of their competitors has pledged to take their leadership position within two years I hardly think they can afford to hang around. 

Of course this is my old subject Integrated Marketing again and how it applies to the delivery of the brand promise - in this case the promise is “customer service”!

I just received my daily digest from B&T, the advertising trade organ of Australia and I see that the Aussie Tourist Board business is up for grabs again.  Initially I thought it was just a case of a government department, bureaucracy and a fixed-term contract up for renewal, but reading down the text its clear that all is not well.

I have to say, I have no data on this client or the campaign.  The last time that I worked on Aussie Tourism business was too long ago for my insights to be relevant, but I liked this campaign when it broke.  In fact, I was beginning to think that the Aussie Tourism Johnnies (or Waynes) had a real winner on their hands.  However, the figures show that while tourism to Australia is up slightly overall, from the UK and Japan it is actually down.  Nevertheless, this is a very simplistic measurement and too many questions remain unanswered for it to be conclusive evidence that the campaign failed.

The reason that I liked the campaign is that it was consistent with my perceptions of the brand - irreverent, laid back.  The fact that the commercials were briefly banned in the UK and Australia (for using the phrase “bloody hell”) only served to endorse that.  I actually suspected that the ban was a set-up anyway.  So the campaign was controversial, which to my mind is good especially when the objections were seen to be raised by a bunch of sad puritans objecting to the language - more of it I say!  The Australian government of the time endorsed it too, but I guess they had to as they were indirectly responsible. 

Sadly the new Premier has seen fit to add his pearls of wisdom on the matter.  It seems that he objects to the negativity of the strap-line “So where the bloody hell are you?” which makes me feel that somehow he has missed the point.  His suggestion was “Thanks for visiting, see you next time” - yes, clearly an differentiator there!

If the campaign was approved and run then I guess it must have been considered to have answered the brief, which immediately places the brief (or whoever wrote it) in the hot seat.  I often discover that problems like this arise from poor briefing and usually that is a symptom of the commissioning organisation not having a brand model.  However, as I have said, the campaign seemed pretty well on the button as far as my perceptions of Brand Australia is concerned.  I may not be typical of the Aussie target market though and the thing is, if the campaign was representative of the brand and it didn’t appeal to the kind of people who are most likely to travel to Aus then the problem is much deeper that the advertising.

S0, is there a robust enough Brand Model in place?  Is there a clear and efficient process for transferring that model to the brief?  Is the Aussie “promise” accurately represented by the campaign?

If the answer to the last of these questions is “yes” then its clearly a case of having to change the reality of the brand, which will take a long time and a lot of internal marketing.  Before the baby and bathwater scenario comes into play though, it may be that the strategic elements of the campaign were right, but either the tactical messages were off target or that the media was wrong.

I’d be fascinated if somebody could fill in a few of the blanks for me, so if you know anybody who is involved in this debacle, feel free to pass on a link to this blog and hopefully they’ll post a comment.  Meanwhile, the biggest fear that I have is that someone is going to try to make Aussie Tourism’s external communications convey a promise that the brand isn’t able to deliver - and we all know where that ends up  - or that a lack of commitment to being “remarkable” ends up with the brand being undersold by communications that could be about anywhere.  Looking a little deeper into the current result and making tactical rather than strategic changes might be all that it needs.  Although, I have a feeling there’s more politics to this than might be healthy.

Anyway, I’m hooked and looking forward to the next installment.

I’ve never been one for activities that involved so much sitting still, but there’s no doubt there are people around who believe that transcendental meditation is where its at.  However, with the death of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who I guess has been its greatest promoter, we are back to the old debate of whether he was a money-grabbing fraud or the genuine article.

There is definitely a rich vein of “hard line realists” whose scepticism is fueled by their secret resentment of anybody who could build such a viable business, and apparently achieve total fulfillment, simply by sitting and talking (over simplification, but you get my idea), while they are killing themselves for the same result.  So, I’m immediately dismissive of these sceptics.

I’ve also yet to come across anybody who has met the Maharishi or participated in any of his ashrams and now falls into the sceptic camp.  Given the circles that I tend to find myself in (mainly hard-line realists) the fact that I have come across more people who are enthusiastic about the man than who are critical I guess points to a strong vote in his favour.

I have no axe to grind on the spiritual aspects of this debate - whatever floats your boat and  I think if someone can make a bucketful of money with a flawed proposition, then its fine by me, although in my experience its a business approach that isn’t sustainable.  What I like about this whole transcendental meditation thing though, is that it represents a really neat brand model. 

The way I see it is that the brand community that the Mahareshi created ticked all the boxes.  It was/is remarkable in the true sense of the word and completely fulfilled all the requisites of a lighthouse brand, which indeed it was, compared to its competitive brands/communities/beliefs in the sixties. 

His target market has always been vividly defined and the brand promise has evolved, but has remained uncompromising throughout.  As a result he achieved either complete buy-in or outright rejection, which, in a world where wishy-washiness just doesn’t cut it any more is exactly how every brand should be.  Because of this his community was extremely evangelistic and he is unlikely to have had hostages, as many brands do.  The evidence suggests that while on first glance you might view the dialogue within this community as rather one-way, in fact, given that the product was teaching, the community members (disciples) were extremely influential in its development and evolution.

The truly great thing about the promise though is that it was relevant, realistic and achievable and as far as I can see from the customer feedback he’s getting in the obituaries and threads today he delivered.  So, while I may not have been at the front of the queue to get into an ashram he would definitely get my vote for the “Brand Guru Hall of Fame”.