Category Archives: Australia

On yer’ bike

Posted on Thursday 9 July 2009 | Leave a comment

pod_uq_final500Britain must be the worst place in the world to be a biker. Not only do we have to contend with the arcane rules about rights of way, footpaths and bridleways (give me strength!), public transport restrictions and their inconsistency from one operator to another pretty-well kill off any attempt to take up biking as a passtime or a practical means of commuting.

If only we had government with the vision to liberalise cycling at least to the level of other European countries where you can hop on or off a train, or even a bus, with your bike at will and get out of town and hit those trails.

They have it even better it seems in Australia where the rail operators are looking at installing Bike Pods with showers and secure lock-ups, care of a great organisation called Penny Farthing, at railway stations.

We poor Brits can only look on in envy. Where is the green lobby when you need it?

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Posted in Australia, green lobby, Uncategorized

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Foreign trade and the new consumer

Posted on Thursday 15 January 2009 | 3 Comments

Barely was the metaphorical ink dry on my piece about businesses in Central Europe struggling to remain viable in the vital international marketplace, when I caught this pod-cast by Phil Dobbie a Brit exiled in Oz, who I don’t know and who is not related to me, but who I find, talks a lot of sense.

Although its a far more mature market, Australia shares one critical trait with some of the emerging new Central European markets – they don’t have a lot of people!  As Phil and his panel of experts agree in this broadcast, no business in any country can afford to focus exclusively on their domestic customers and when your population is fifteen million or less, if you do so you don’t have much scope.

They recognise that smaller economies have tended to exacerbate their problems by making it difficult for foreign experts to operate and by resisting their advice, something that I often see in the Central European markets, especially the Czech Republic.  I have noted lately that the organisations that seek advice from people like me are more often foreign-owned or managed businesses themselves, while Czech organisations stick with Czech advisers, which rarely gives them the perspective they need.

In my earlier piece I also introduce a new consumer with new priorities and suggest that the businesses that emerge from the current financial downturn a success will be those that recognise this critical change and adjust their strategy accordingly.  Every organisation, big and small,wherever they may be, is in the same boat, but there are valuable and very real opportunities for everyone and there’ll be no excuses afterwards for those who fail. 

This point was echoed this week by Lee Scott the outgoing Walmart CEO at the National Retail Federation in New York who told the audience that young customers in particular have adopted a new ethic.  They’ll buy what they need, think more carefully about purchases, avoid unessentials, pay cash and avoid credit.  Its going to be back to the drawing board for customer-facing organisations whose sales rely heavily on credit and I doubt the plethora of products that we have seen over the last few years, that are unessential, impractical or fail to deliver on any level, will survive.  Glad you bought that lava-lamp now aren’t you? 

The good news is that I believe that service will come back into fashion.  Not the service that so many retailers advertise these days, which amounts to no more than a spotty youth with a badge to confirm that he spent half a day on a product knowledge course that covered little more than how to switch the product on, but real service, from responsible people with a depth of knowledge and understanding of their product and a determination to serve their customer.

So, how is your organisation going to service the new consumer, at home or abroad?

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Posted in Australia, central europe, change, consulting, customer, customer service, customers, czech, export, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Lee Scott, management, marketing, opportunity, phil darby, Phil Dobbie, Prague, Retail, retailer, strategy, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Well it bloody well happened at Tourism Australia, didn’t it?

Posted on Tuesday 28 October 2008 | 1 Comment

I just knew it when I wrote about this in February!  I’ve been waiting in trepidation for the outcome and now we have it. Australia, the land that we hold in great affection for its rough-edges – Crocodile Dundee, Home and Away and Sir Les Patterson, has decided that its a luxury destination for poser aesthetes in search of their real self – Strewth!  Pour me a Bundy and lets get real here!

There’s no doubt about it Baz Luhrmann makes great cinema, but everything about this production leaves me asking “So what the bloody hell happened to Australia” and not, by any means, in a good way.  What we are witnessing here isn’t anything to do with attracting tourism to Australia, its about a new government attempting to remove every trace of their forebears, but having nothing to replace them with.  Yes, by all means when you gain office establish your brand quickly and decisively by doing something different, but for Christ’s sake do something sensible.

This isn’t Baz’s fault, and it may not even be the agency’s (they are just being opportunistic), but it most certainly is the fault of whoever wrote the brief and approved the strategy and that, I guess, was a politician or civil servant because any half-wit marketing person would know that if you are going to make claims you firstly want to know both that anybody cares and that you can back them up.  However popular retreats may be these days, I absolutely cannot belive that anything more than a handful of tripped-out tree-huggers are going to fork-out thousands of pounds on a re-awakening walk-about.  The Australian outback is about four-wheel-drive, Bush-Tucker Man and the Crocodile Trophy (the toughest mountain bike race in the world!) not competition for yoga-punting Maharishis with Bentleys in their back yards.  And just because some asshole in Canberra decides that his future lies in distancing himself from what his predecessors stood for, it doesn’t make it right, or even wise, to present Australia, that we all know, and understand just fine already, as something that it isn’t!

It might be argued that this is aimed at Americans, most of whom don’t know where Australia is, or have a passport that will get them there.  I have to admit, when it comes to selling something “different” to Americans the extreme adventure element of traditional Australian positioning is a bit too close to home and the historical Aboriginal card starts to offer hope.  However, if this were so its, at best, a case of bad timing because the high-flying banker-type who might, a few weeks ago, have been fooled into embarking on a voyage of self-discovery in the Aussie outback is struggling to afford the bus ride home from the soup kitchen these days!

This absolutely has to be a case of a no-substance politician wallpapering over reality.  If you want to change a nation (and Aus looks just fine as it is these days to me) stick to your strengths.  Politic your way to change, don’t just tell everyone that its come about and hope they don’t notice its all bullshit.  Oh, and butt out of marketing, its definitely not your forte.

I really, really hope that everyone gets this situation for what it is and doesn’t end up hating brand Australia for trying (because, believe me it won’t succeed) to jump on what it perceives as a gravy train.  Remember, while it takes ten times as much to attract new customers to your brand than it does to repeat sell to existing ones, the cost of attracting someone you’ve already pissed off by not delivering or trying to scam (or maybe in this case by selling out) could be a hundred times that.

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Posted in advertising, American, Australia, Australian Tourist Commission, bankers, Baz Luhrmann, brand, brand development, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, communications, customer, customers, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Government, honesty, maharishi, National Branding, phil darby, Politicing, public sector, Sir Les Patterson, The Full Effect Company, Tourism, tradition, Uncategorized

What the bloody hell’s happening at Tourism Australia?

Posted on Thursday 7 February 2008 | 2 Comments
hell.jpg

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.

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Posted in advertising, Australia, brand, brands, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, internal marketing, marketing, phil darby, promise, strategy, The Full Effect Company, Tourism, Uncategorized