Category Archives: Brand Model

Building Brand Britain

Posted on Tuesday 16 August 2011 | 1 Comment

Over that last week or so, prompted by the UK riots, we Brits have listened to endless analyses and proclamations by local community members, civil servants and politicians centred on fixing our “broken society”.  As always with these situations, there has been plenty of scepticism heaped on the potential any new initiative has for success.  However, there is only one real obstacle to all the remedial plans announced by David Cameron and others and that’s motivation.

I believe that Dave is a good motivator and getting better, he talks sense, even though his opponent Ed Miliband, seems intent on trying to neutralise that with mindless and responsible political point-scoring.  (If I were him I’d shut up before people started to realise that it’s the left-wing, crap that his party has expounded for decades that has given certain sectors of society the idea that they have rights they haven’t earned and therefore created this disaffection).

The marketers among us will recognise the task facing us as brand-building and as anybody reading this blog over the last few years will know building Brand Britain is one of my pet subjects. The problem is that we have singularly failed to respond to the obvious need to develop Brand Britain and we still don’t have the right people in harness to tackle the job.  Forget the political masseurs, data-analysis’s and bean-counters, where are the marketers in the team?  Without them we won’t get past first base because the people who are currently in the driving seat simply don’t get it.

Over the past few years I have approached politicians, government departments, local councils and private enterprises with initiatives designed to help build Brand Britain.  In many cases, because I have always believed that unemployment and local business initiatives are both inextricably linked and critical to the cause, these initiatives have addressed local unemployment, been designed to strengthen communities and help the mid-sized local businesses who are the key to the future of our nation, shift up a gear and take on the world.

The responses I have received from the public sector jobs-worths in particular, though unsurprising have been nonetheless frustrating.  Unimaginative Job Centre Plus employees civil servants and local councillors have simply disregarded projects and initiatives as representing just another unwelcome task.  There’s no point and very little scope for public sector workers like these to adopt an initiative that’s not dictated letter by letter from Whitehall because their world isn’t a meritocracy.  Why should they take on something they aren’t compelled to?  There’s nothing in it for them.  Besides, these people aren’t employed for their creativity and they are entombed in a culture that actively discourages any kind of creative thinking, so expecting them to appreciate any concept is always an ask too far.

Life skills that should have been taught throughout a person’s school life, if not at the cradle, are belatedly outsourced by Job Centre Plus to HR and recruitment companies.  I’ve spoken to a few of these contractors.  They view these projects with the glee of a paedophile assigned to changing room duty at kids swimming gala and submit proposals that represent minimal input and maximum income for them with the balls-out cheek that comes from knowing the people assigning these projects don’t have the first idea what they are doing and are just relieved to have a tick in the “assigned” box.  When I have gone to these organisations to volunteer help and advice, the response has been eerily uniform and something to the effect that “…we‘ve managed to blag the approval of the JCP people for this half-baked programme, so there’s nothing in it for us if we actually do the job properly”.

These are the kinds of issues that will threaten any British brand development programme and unless someone wakes up pretty quickly and recognises that we ARE building a brand and therefore need to follow the appropriate process, we are destined to failure once again.  That means someone (Dave will do) having a clear picture of what Brand Britain looks like and starting with the mother of all internal marketing campaigns that will bring the public sector and government puppet masters into line behind the concept.  The public are motivated, the players are listening and we’re unlikely to find ourselves with a better promise of success for a brand building venture than now this side of World War Three.

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Posted in Big Society, brand, brand Britain, brand character, brand community, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand equity, brand loyalty, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, change, communications, Conservative, CRM, culture, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, England, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Government, Human resources, integrated marketing, internal marketing, Job Centre Plus, marketing, marketing experience, marketing skills, National Branding, phil darby, The Big Society, The Full Effect Company

Brand building – Murdoch makes the connection.

Posted on Friday 8 July 2011 | Leave a comment

Its been a weird week for brand associations.  In the UK the revelations over The News Of The World phone hacking, its peak intriguingly coinciding with the parent, Murdoch-owned News International’s bid for control of BSkyB, has led to Rupe closing down Britain’s oldest and biggest paper.

I wouldn’t suppose for a moment that this has anything to do with right and wrong.  He’s done this purely for reasons of value not values.  Its emerging that there were already plans afoot to launch a Sunday edition of TNOTW’s sister paper The Sun, so the empire isn’t going to lose its readers, just the overhead represented by the journos, administrators and printers who produced TNOTW.  My contacts tell me that a quick audit also unsurprisingly revealed that The News Of The World brand had been irreparably damaged by hack-gate and although I’m surprised if the paper’s average reading age was such that they possessed sufficient social conscience to boycott it, the overnight disappearance of its advertisers has to be a bit of a pisser.

Like the advertisers, politicians of all hues are desperately scrambling, with varying degrees of sure-footedness, to disassociate themselves with Murdoch (Although today’s press conference suggests that Dave’s penny is still teetering), who some claim has been their puppet master for many years.  The end of an era, if not the Murdoch empire some say – I doubt it somehow.

This event however, does serve to underline the influence that the brands other brands are seen with, can have on their success.  I’ve long propounded the notion that product brand perceptions are heavily influenced by the retail brands they are sold through and the other products on the shelves alongside them.  The reverse is also true and similar associations exist between football teams (soccer to my US readers) and their players and even national brands.  It’s not uncommon to hear individuals being decried because of the company they keep and the same dynamic applies to every kind of brand.  Its why, despite their “fashion brands” claim you don’t find Hermes in TK Maxx.

Back in Prague this week Vaclav Havel, leader of the liberation of the former Czechoslovakia from Communist rule and undoubtedly the most respected man in the Czech Republic (admittedly not a difficult distinction to hold in a land of very shady political characters, but undoubtedly justified in his case) chose to endorse AAA Autos, one of the most deeply miss-trusted commercial organisations in the country.

I say chose to, but it seems he sort of slid slowly and inexorably into what I am sure he’ll come to regard as a mire, as a result of one of his charities accepting a hand-out from the company.  Tony Denny the enigmatic half-Aussie founder of what may be Europe’s biggest used car franchise has long-boasted of his political connections – I might say, far more enthusiastically than those connections have advertised their connections with him.  This week, it seems, he’s managed to leverage this connection in a stroke of genius that will undoubtedly bring him greater benefit than it will Havel.  It seems that AAA lent Havel’s wife’s foundation Vision ’97 an Audi (probably a cut-and-shut with a leaky sump) in exchange for her endorsement, but when Denny called the loan in Pani Havel was out of the country, so her husband stepped in as her understudy.  Was this Tony Denny watching the airport for Dagmar Havlova’s departure and quickly nipping round to Vaclav with a deadline he just had to meet?  Who knows, but I’m surprised Havel fell for this and disappointed to see the Havel brand devalued by its association with the Czech Arthur Daly.

Enter Vision ’97′s PR spokeswoman Sabina Tancevova to explain that there is nothing unusual in the nearest thing Czechs have to Nelson Mandela fronting a Dodgy Motors ad.  Who is she trying to kid.  But then, if I were in her shoes I’d be feeling a bit vulnerable given that it’s the role of PR to manage deals like this.  If she’s daft enought to buy into a cars-for-cred deal like this on behalf of the Havels who could blame AAA Autos for rubbing their corporate mits together in glee?

Such is Czech culture that I fear AAA, the most controversial of Czech Automotive brands, will have significantly raised its credibility, particularly among older Czechs, with this one association.  Maybe Rupert Murdoch, already one newspaper and possibly a TV franchise down this week, could get a few tips from Tony Denny?

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Posted in aaa autos, brand, brand character, brand community, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand equity, brand loyalty, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, BskyB, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, National Branding, News of the world, Newscorp, phil darby, Prague, Rupert Murdoch, The Full Effect Company, TK Max, Tony Denny, Uncategorized, Vaclav Havel

Customer Loyalty – Stop trying to buy it and start earning it!

Posted on Friday 17 June 2011 | 1 Comment

Yesterday I came across a great piece by Luca Paderni on iMedia Connection entitled “Why Your Brand Loyalty is Failing”.  Luca covers pretty well all the angles and raises many important issues, but there’s no escaping the underlying truth that kept surfacing among the other well-made points – customer loyalty is simply a product of customer satisfaction.

I run many workshops on this subject with businesses around the world and I’m used to receiving a torrent of ideas from delegates for programmes and initiatives designed to reward loyalty.  Sadly I get fewer ideas for ensuring that the brand promise that brought customers to the point of purchase in the first place is delivered. If my delegates are indicative of the people driving marketing these days, its hardly surprising that the focus of so many businesses appear to be trying to buy rather than earn customer love.  And they do this regardless of the fact that it’s a ludicrously expensive and extremely short-term way to run a business.

These days loyalty is the dominant business driver.  With most customers already claimed/assigned to vendors (apart from in emerging markets there are few emerging customers) the return you’ll get on acquisition investment is always going to be limited and its hard work.  The future lies in selling more stuff to your existing customers and they’ll only buy if they love you.  The problem is there seems to be confusion among marketers over what drives these brandships.

Sure customers will appreciate add-ons and freebies, They’ll add to the customer experience, but they only have value if you have already given your customers what they came for and simply will never be an alternative to simply delivering your brand promise.  My advice to any business that asks me about customer loyalty is to start by measuring customer satisfaction.  There’s only one way to do this and that’s by measuring your performance against your brand promise and the pillars that support it. (see the tab for Brand Discovery above for definitions.

Yes, there is no escaping it.  It’s back to my old favourite, the Brand Model again, because that’s where everything in any successful organisation has to start and it’s why my Brand Discovery programme places so much up-front emphasis on this vital business tool.  If you have set about creating your Brand Model correctly and placed the appropriate emphasis on marketing it internally, if you have developed the right briefing processes and checks to back it up, everyone (and I do mean everyone) in your organisation will be focussed on delivering your Brand Promise and none of your customers will be disappointed.  THEN the rewards that everyone seems so keen to give away can make sense.

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Posted in brand, Brand Discovery, brand loyalty, Brand Model, branding, brands, brandships, business development, CRM, customer service, customers, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, integrated marketing, loyalty, marketing, phil darby, promise, reward programmes, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Maximising marketing efficency. It’s the old strategic v. tactical debate again!

Posted on Wednesday 18 May 2011 | Leave a comment

I  had an interesting discussion with an agency founder the other day that reminded me why I started The Full Effect Company and took to championing the “integrated” cause.

When I set up The Full Effect Company my proposition centred on marketing communications rather than marketing, but while my horizon has broadened the same principle holds true.  When you really get down to business, its efficiency, nothing more or less, that separates success from failure.

And that’s what integrated marketing is all about – getting every element of a business pointing in the same direction.  In the area of marketing communications the elements operate on two levels – strategic and tactical.  Strategic is about building your community, making your customers feel at home and comfortable so they stick around, spend more time (and money) with you and even help you add members (customers).  Tactical, on the other hand, is all about short-term, prompting actions, introductions, sales. (over-simplification I know, but I’m talking to people who know this anyway, so I don’t need to state the obvious)

The thing to remember in all this is that while the influence of strategic communications can only ever be long-term, tactical communications will always not only constitute a call to action, but have a strategic influence as well.  Its unavoidable.  It’s there in the style of execution, the language and the graphics you use. Ignore it at your peril because it will go on working anyway and if you don’t manage it, it could actually be undermining your message and neutralising the investment you have in it.  On the other hand, when the tactical messages support aspects of the bigger strategic idea the relationship become synergistic.  If you make the most of the strategic element within your tactical communications you’ll increase your efficiency significantly and get a whole lot bigger bang for your buck.  And that’s where I started my Full Effect Marketing mission to increase my clients’ efficiency.  I’ve moved on a bit since then, but it’s still the fundamental principle behind all that I do.

While I see increasing evidence that businesses are understanding and exploiting this principle, there’s still a long way to go and it’s certainly not just the small guys who need the lessons.  The friend I mentioned at the start of this piece and I both had first-hand experience of major international organisations with problems that were symptomatic of them forgetting this basic strategic/tactical rule.

A while back I was called into a series of meeting with a major telco who were complaining that they weren’t getting value from their marcoms investment.  They had a strategic message that was getting more woolly by the day and were investing heavily in creating numerous short-term campaigns from scratch each year.  Their problems were two-fold.  Firstly their tactical campaigns were always short and very expensive, so they never had the opportunity to really get up a head of steam and fully repay the investment made in them.  Secondly the tactical messages were so diverse and disconnected from their strategic message that they were not just missing the opportunity for synergy, but sending out confusing, if not contradictory messages that just muddied the water.  This in turn meant their relationships with their customers (Brandships) weren’t as strong as they could be. Yes, it was all very inefficient.

Sadly, while they didn’t disagree with me, the remedy I suggested had political implications that they just weren’t prepared to contemplate.  As is often the case, I was talking to the marketing department and my solution suggested both a change of process and structure and a reduction in head-count, a suggestion that echoed rather hollowly inside their ivory tower.  Oddly enough my friend had a very similar story from a different sector.  Needless to say, faced with an impasse like this my relationship with this telco was short, but by way of my vindication, they were reported in the press last month as having exactly the problem I defined for them, so the cracks are now plain for all to see.  You would think it would be back to basics for them then?  However, I’m not expecting the phone call any day soon!

The key to this kind of efficiency lies in what I call the Brand Model. In the case of my Brand Discovery programme, this is a definition of a brand using eleven parameters, including a promise and a considered set of facts that make that promise credible. If once you have a Brand Model in place you assess every planned initiative in the context of its contribution to or reflection of the promise and these support facts, you’ll not go far wrong.  In the context of your marketing communications this should result in campaign elements with tactical messages that hard-underline one of the support facts and place it in the context of your strategic message.  People who are really good at this are Tesco in the UK with their tactically led messages that culminate with their strap-line “Every little helps”. Philips Electronics’ “Sense and Simplicity” which not only translates back to their product design briefs but results in advertising where the “sense” and “simplicity” are always demonstrated (and these words quoted religiously in headlines and body copy) and to a lesser extent Specsavers’ “I should have gone to …” message.

Until more businesses focus on squeezing the maximum strategic benefit from their tactical initiatives and messages and thereby achieve full efficiency, it’s hard to justify, in these cash-strapped times any purely strategic initiatives.

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Posted in advertising, brand, brand character, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, communications, consistency, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, integrated marketing, integration, marketing, marketing skills, optimisation, optimization, phil darby, promise, Tesco, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

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When customer service is more about internal marketing than training

Posted on Monday 2 May 2011 | Leave a comment

Because, unlike most other countries, when a bank holiday coincides with a weekend, we Brits nominate the nearest weekday a public holiday, today (Monday 2nd May) was Mayday bank holiday in the UK.  As a consequence, I caught “Don’t Get Done Get Dom” on daytime TV where, cheeky chappie Dominic Little champions the consumer cause.  The object of his ire this week were the retailers Currys and PC World and Dom had a mailbag full of customer service complaints that he set out to resolve with the retailers’ parent Dixons Stores Group.

Over the last few years the consumer group Which have consistently highlighted DSG’s customer service deficiencies, its surveys revealing a customer satisfaction rating of something in the region of 30%, so the state of affairs can’t be news to DSGI management.  It’s bemusing therefore that, if they have done anything at all it’s had little or no impact on the end product, which frankly appears as bad as ever.

How can it be that a big organisation like DSGI can firstly deliver such poor customer service and secondly fail to address the fact when its pointed out to them in such irrefutable fashion?  Well, it could be that it’s a strategic choice.  I’ve heard of organisations before that had made the conscious decision to set their customer service rating target low because they had calculated that the cost of raising it above that point would not be recouped.  Putting aside the many and obvious flaws in that argument, I can’t imagine that a 30% rating would be acceptable to anybody, so I have to assume that this state of affairs is rather more an accident than a plan.

The feedback Dom received from DSG management was confusing.  Their comments suggested that they view inconsistencies in customer handling skills as an inevitable consequence of their rapid pace of recruitment and accepted that limitations in training capacity would result in new employees arriving on the shop floor with limited or no training.

I don’t buy any of this.  Firstly training may be an issue, but the fundamental problem here is clearly internal marketing.  The reported problems had far more to do with the willingness of customer-facing staff to disappoint or even upset customers than it did with processes, which it seems were largely not at fault anyway because all the customer issues were resolved once Dom had escalated them.

It seems obvious to me that the focus of DSGI employees is miss-aligned.  They seem to act on the assumption that customer satisfaction was secondary to adherence to processes (which they misunderstood anyway).  Yes, training would help them get to grips with the processes, but internal marketing is the tool to set customer satisfaction as the priority.  Once that’s established, when an employee can see that they are in danger of disappointing a customer they’ll realise that the process, as they understood it, is leading them down the wrong path and put the brakes on.

I don’t accept that employees find themselves on the shop floor without first receiving training either.  Training like this doesn’t have to be process-based.  In fact, the priority should be a culture-based induction that can be undertaken by the local manager, on-line or in a classroom, depending on time and cost pressures and there are many ways in which this process can be policed.

Over the years I have devised and run numerous training and internal marketing programmes, for retailers, who have witnessed improvements despite high volume recruitment.  In fact internal marketing, linked to a clear brand model reduces employee turnover, so volume demands are usually reduced too.  The evidence of Dominic Little leads me to suspect that DSGI are making a fundamental error in thinking that training holds the solution to their problems.  My belief is that they need to take a step further back.  Their customer service issues and a number of their other problems are, I am sure, all down to the lack of a clearly defined brand model and the internal marketing programme that makes it live and the sooner they recognise that and address it the sooner they will stop finding themselves the focus of programmes like Don’t Get Done Get Dom.

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Posted in Brand Model, branding, brands, Currys, customer service, customer support, customers, employees, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, internal marketing, PC World, phil darby, Retail, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Is your customer support a bit of a let-down?

Posted on Wednesday 30 March 2011 | 1 Comment

Most businesses these days understand that they are driven by Brandships.  Many appreciate that Brandships are built on trust and few would fail to recognise that if their words and deeds are in any way inconsistent, either with each other or with their Brand Promise, they stand little chance of establishing the level of trust that success is built on.  So where is it going wrong?

Having acquired this wisdom, organisations around the world now devote a great deal of time and invest heavily in initiatives designed to represent their brand values consistently at every touch-point.  Getting every communication to say the same thing is the essence of integrated communications.

Because customer acquisition for all the reasons I’ve explored here in the past, is getting horribly expensive, Brandships are more valuable than ever, which is why businesses are increasingly seeking to improve their customer support,  a factor that is accentuated by the growth in e-tailing where the incidence of customer complaint is, as I mentioned last month, a bit of an issue.

I’m encouraged by the increase in the number of businesses who, instead of trying to make customers with a complaint feel like Oliver Twist asking for “more gruel”, have adopted a no-quibble replacement or compensation policy.  It seems that,  at last, the penny has dropped on this one (Although you’ll note from my earlier post on this subject that Halfords still don’t get it!).  However, you can have the best complaint resolution policy in the business, but it ‘aint worth a hill of beans if your customers have to navigate a maze of on-line and telephone obstacles to get to it!  There’s no more telling evidence of a genuine commitment to Brandships than an organisation’s on-line or call-centre process and it’s certainly taken by customers as a pretty good guide to brand values.  So why do so many businesses get it wrong?

My guess is that they simply don’t recognse what’s happening.  I’ve been advising senior execs lately to call up their own customer support line from time to time, rather than rely on the KPIs they get every month.  Whether your process is automated or not, the way you handle after sales contact with customers can be pivotal to the success in Brandships.  This isn’t just about damage limitation (because nearly all the calls you receive are going to be potentially damaging), many businesses have demonstrated that you can actually reverse the momentum, turning a potentially damaging situation into one that strengthens Brandships, if you handle them correctly.  For most this is nothing more than aligning the process to the brand model, which, sadly, few businesses do well.

In recent weeks I’ve experienced both the best and the worst in customer call handling.  The worst being the episode with Halfords that I reported on here last week and a more recent still, an encounter with HP’s customer dis-service process that starts with their un-navigable web site, designed to send you round in circles until you screw yourself!  Yes HP seem intent not to engage with you unless they absolutely have to, which is a pity, because if you can get around the system and actually manage to speak to the person you need, the response (in my case anyway) was exemplary.

I was also disappointed when re-visiting a brand that I have been happy to deal with for years.  I have never before had cause to complain about Polar UK, The local distributor for Polar, who manufacture heart-rate monitors for athletes, but I’ve called and spoken directly to their service people in the UK a number of times.  Such an old-fashioned process may have been a little at odds with their global positioning, but it was very reassuring and, overall, it worked.  Sadly, they have succumbed to pressure to automate their calls handling, but in their case the band-waggon has a wheel missing.  In fact, its possibly the most bumbling and poorly conceived process I have come across for a good while and the antithesis of everything that I have come to expect of the Polar brand.  This takes me right back to the principles of Full Effect Marketing – individual marketing elements, which because they are neglected, neutralise some of the brand building benefits of higher-profile elements that the business is investing in.  In other words … waste!

The up-side of my engaging with customer service processes has been a discovery I made of a business that specialises in designing models that actually contribute to brand development.  Brand Audio in Edgware, North London, will study your brand (even work with you to help you profile it if you haven’t already) and then bring it to life in navigation, messages and music.  Just what every business needs in fact.  This isn’t about hardware or programming (although I’m told they can provide that too), its pure brand development and while I am sure they are not alone in this space, it made me feel good to know that there is someone my clients can turn to for this kind of specialist help.  Brand Audio work with a host of leading brands who recognise the need to prioritise their customer handling processes.  At least, one route to great Brandships (and therefore a healthy business) is in the way you interact with customers on-line and on-phone and I recommend to every business to address this area of their marketing before its too late.

Footnote: Brandships, as it suggests, is the name I use to describe the relationships we have with brands.  Enter the world of Brandships at www.thefullblog.com or follow me on Twitter @thefulltweet.

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Posted in brand, Brand Audio, brand character, brand community, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand equity, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, communications, community, customer, customer service, customer support, customers, e-tailing, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Halfords, HP, integrated marketing, marketing, phil darby, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

In the retail – e-tail war detail could be the decider.

Posted on Tuesday 1 March 2011 | Leave a comment

So, HMV is in a state of meltdown yet again and with today’s profit warning following a Christmas trading period that turned out to be more of a turkey than a gift, it all looks pretty glum for this once retail icon.

In fact HMV is one of two high street retailers that I feel deserve a kick up the arse right now.  Both are frustratingly short of a few tricks that would counteract the biggest threat to their future.  The other is no-brand WH Smith, whose stores are dismal, amateur, badly lit, over stocked, over-priced and poorly staffed.  There’s an irony somewhere in the fact that HMV’s sister business Waterstone’s is the one showing WH Smith how its done.  Smiths may be in growth mode right now, but it looks like the short-term market-trader kind of success that begs questions like “So what do we do for our next trick?”.

Compare the two – On the brightest day a visit to WH Smith can make you feel like ending it all.  A bit like a church hall jumble sale, the mess of books, school equipment, magazines and sweets(?) and lord knows what else, trying hard to be all things to all people and succeed in being nothing much to anybody.    Waterstones, on the other hand, with their founder back at the helm, have single-mindedly established their authority in a sector where authority is everything.  These days Waterstones are ticking all the boxes, with knowledgable and intelligent staff and meaningfully stocked shelves (no pick n’ mix sweets in grubby pots here).  They have even mastered the trick of using their High Street presence to establish the authority they need to succeed on-line and with a million plus e-book downloads under their belt I have no doubt that both clicks and mortar numbers will follow.

Like Waterstones, WH Smith and HMV have both encountered the Internet challenge, but while WH Smith firstly buried its head in the sand, hoped it would go away, then muffed the response, HMV, like Waterstones, are focussing on doing things in-store that only in-store can do and using on-line as a sort-of take-away format – well almost.  And that’s the rub.  They aren’t getting down to the detail quite as I would have hoped.

For one thing, despite the live music elements they have added, they haven’t really mastered the brand community thing and they are missing some of the small practical things could make doing business with them easier and more fun.  Take for instance the art of the demo.  A focus of all record stores in the past and certainly a useful community building tool today.  Remember the Saturdays (That’s the day of the week not the band!) spent in the listening booth at your local record store listening to Friday’s releases and deciding what to spend this week’s pocket-money on?

When vinyl went out of the door, so it seems did the listening booth – replaced, admittedly by HMVs listening posts, which were fine, but then … silence!  Sure, they’ll play a CD in the store if you can get close enough to the check-out for your request to be heard, but it’s not the same as sharing a set of headphones with your mates in a sweaty booth.

Maybe they think they have that one covered with their in-store radio (Is it live? – I’m not sure), but they kinda’ come out of that looking like the guy who invented 6-Up - just a natz short of success – not enough interaction, which they could have built-in even with an AsLive solution.  They also miss the same trick on-line because, except for a few albums like Jessie J’s latest which features her brilliant Price Tag video, you can’t listen to even samples of selected tracks before you buy.  In the store they make great play (excuse the pun) of introducing new acts with short, on-shelf biogs, but if you can’t listen to the music, you have to risk £10 to buy the album blind (or is it deaf?) which, when we are all being austere, is a non-starter really.

To WH Smith I say, before turn yourself into a Moroccan bazaar, I suggest you don’t copy Woolies, because we all know where that gets you, pop across to Wilkinson instead and see how multi-category retailing is done cheerfully and tastefully (and with staff that you’d consider striking up a conversation with).  Oh and switch the lights on.  Reading in bad light is bad for anybody’s eyes.   HMV on the other hand need to write a thousand times “retail is detail”.  Put yourself in your customer’s shoes, get the little things right, tackle these and I’m sure you’ll find your days will be brighter.

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Posted in brand community, Brand Model, branding, brands, brandships, e-tailing, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, HMV, ideas, in-store music, Jessie J, on-line, phil darby, Retail, Retail format, Retail marketing, retailer, Store design, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized, Waterstones, WH Smith, Wilkinson, woolies, Woolworth

Music – The High Street retailer’s secret weapon in the battle with e-tail brands

Posted on Friday 21 January 2011 | Leave a comment

Is the shine wearing off the on-line retail gem?  Customer service has always been the Achilles heel of on-line retailers and it seems as though it’s a problem that’s not going away.

In November, Nick Robertson of ASOS and Mark Newton-jones from Shop Direct told delegates to the Skillsmart Retail Parliamentary reception hosted by the Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons, Nigel Evans MP, that on-line retailers need to learn customer service from traditional retailers.  On-line customer complaints are high and margins are stretched when the e-tailers try to up their anti.  However, this week Mary Portas has been taking the High Street to task for what she says is “crap” customer service.  So, like most things, it seems its not that simple.

What this boils down to is the age-old marketing fundamental of playing to your strengths.  Internet retailers are never going to have the same opportunities to foster “Brandships” that a high street retailer has, so if the traditional players fail to leverage that now, I for one, won’t be sympathetic to their future cries of “unfair” when their business is left in the dust of the smart young things of e-commerce.

The Internet is a cold and impersonal place.  You have to work much harder than you might on the High Street to achieve anything close to that warm cuddly feeling you get in your favourite store.  To a customer, feeling “at home” with a retail brand is everything (actually, feeling at home with any kind of brand is the key to business success) but achieving this requires the ticking of a lot of boxes.  Some of these boxes are purely practical, like availability, delivery, ease of use, customer service, which is where the Internet brands can compete.  Sure they are failing on customer service right now, partly because the business model that remains viable when the levels of returns and complaints that this channel is prone to has yet to be found, but they’ll get there.  Meanwhile, the “trads” need to wise-up and start polishing up the soft elements of Brand Promise that are tougher for the e-shops to influence.

I’m thinking environment.  Sure you can make an on-line environment comfortable and inviting to customers and it’s not beyond our capability to even modify the on-line environment of a single e-retailer to fit different customer types, but the trads definitely have more scope.  My readers will know that I’ve been focusing on in-store music recently and that’s because its one of those great untapped opportunities of retail brand building.

Shoppers love in-store music when its right.  Give them what they want and they’ll visit you more often, stay longer, spend more and tell all their friends, or so the gurus at MusicWorksForYou.com  tell us.  Retailers know they can influence behaviour of shoppers and staff with the right music and store staff say the right music makes them feel more energised, so you’ll take care of some of Mary’s customer service issues too.  Put all this together and you can’t fail.  But, the onus is on the words “the right music” and that’s where the work needs to be done.

It seems we all know music works, but the secret of quite how it does so are held by only a very few.  People like Bruno Brookes and the rest of the folks at Immedia Broadcast who have been creating bespoke live radio for some of the High Street’s biggest brands for the past ten years.  However, you don’t have to own a multi-million dollar radio station to add something extra to your brand or even drive sales, because with the right play-list a simple music stream will do both and that’s what Immedia are doing right now with their new Dreamstream offer.  Retail marketers need to disabuse themselves of the belief that they know what music works with their audience and hand the job over to the experts who know what “tailoring” really means, then perhaps we’ll be able to wave goodbye to the ubiquitous local radio station (that actually can do more harm to trade than good) or repetitive CD’s of nearly-bands playing covers and start hearing more in-store music that reinforces the brand and fosters real “Brandships”.  Then the High Street will really be able to show the e-tailers a thing or two about brand-building.

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Posted in brand, brand character, brand development, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, Bruno Brookes, customer service, customers, Dreamstream, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Immedia, integrated marketing, Mark Newton-Jones, Mary Portas, Nick Robertson, phil darby, Retail, Retail marketing, retailer, Store design, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

In successful companies employees dance on tables

Posted on Sunday 16 January 2011 | Leave a comment

You don’t need me to tell you, its tough out there.  Many businesses that I come across are struggling to adjust to the new rules of business and a few are still realising that many of the old ways of running a business simply don’t work anymore, but, old habits die hard.

I’m seeing a disappointing return to purely tactical focus and its hard to persuade the companies heading in this direction and whose priority is to pay this month’s wage bill, that  it’s a dead-end street.  A still more worrying trend I am witnessing though is towards whip-cracking.  Much as I sympathise with the desperation of managers who simply don’t understand why the approaches they have used successfully for years to build or run a business don’t work in the era of new model marketing, flogging your staff is the desperate last twitch of management that has already failed.  High-pressure tactics like this are doomed to failure in both the long and the short-term.

I overheard a conversation last week where a middle manager was bemoaning the loss of the “good old days”.  “I remember …” he said “… the days when, if I was out of the office for a day, I’d return to find my stuff all pushed to one end of my desk because someone had been dancing on it!”.  Extreme perhaps, but there are offices throughout England where the atmosphere is so dour and depressing that its hard to imagine that this kind of thing once happened in successful businesses.

My mind goes back to a quote by Tom Peters in one of his early presentation where he begged business leaders to ask themselves if there was a spring in their employees’ step as they walked across the parking lot from their car to the office each morning, saying “If there isn’t, it’s your fault!”.  His overarching point being that unless employees are happy and enthusiastic about their work, your business will fail.

How many organisations, who today are battling to put together a business strategy that works under the new rules, are paying attention to the absolutely vital element of employee engagement?  Without the backing and buy-in of employees, no business will stand a chance of delivering its brand promise, and when you fail at that you’ve just failed!

For those tempted to respond with “… but we never did any of this stuff before”, I’ll underline what I have said earlier and many times before – If you got away with this omission in the past, it was only because the competition (despite what you may have thought then) wasn’t that tough.  Now its “game on” and there’s no room for slack.  No business can afford this level of inefficiency and, believe me, trying to deliver a promise without having first secured the committment of your employees is inefficient in the extreme.

If you think its par for the course for managers to be hated by employees, forget it!  If you confuse respect for you as a manager with distant or non-existing relationships with your staff you need to take a reality check.  Successful businesses have always had figureheads who employees are happy to stand behind – Richard Branson, Bill Muirhead, Maurice and Charles Saatchi, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, Steve Jobs … I could make a long list, but you get the idea.  Developing and leveraging relationships like these are all part of the internal marketing task.  Don’t side-step the issue.  These internal “brandships” are the key to the “brandships” you have with customers and that’s what drives your business.  When you need all the help you can get to keep afloat, the last thing you should do is abandon your internal relationship-building, so double-check your marketing strategy to ensure you are doing all you can to get your employees dancing on the tables!

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Posted in Bill Muirhead, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, business strategy, Charles Saatchi, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, industrial relations, internal marketing, marketing, Maurice Saatchi, phil darby, Saatchi & Saatchi, Saatchi's, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, Steve jobs, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

When clever headlines are not so clever

Posted on Thursday 4 November 2010 | Leave a comment

Earlier this week I was eves-dropping at a seminar in Newbury where the speaker Steve Mills was dishing out marketing advice to hungry small businesses managers.  One woman, asked “What is the secret of a good headline?”.

The lady in question explained how she was organising an event and needed a headline for her advertising.  So far she had been checking newspaper headlines and trying to think up something “catchy” and “clever”, a play on words or something similar.

When I was developing my Full Effect Marketing programme I created a formula for an advertisement that I stand by to this day.  Creatives don’t always agree, but it works and it goes like this.

  • There are four elements in an ad. – Headline, body copy, call-to-action, sign-off.
  • The sign-off, or strap-line, is your “brand promise”.
  • Your brand promise is always supported by pillars that substantiate it.  We create these in my Brand Discovery programme.
  • The headline is the first thing a reader will see.  It’s job is to stop the viewer and it has about half a nanosecond to do so, so it has to hit the mark.
  • To do this it has to be relevant and direct.
  • A good headline makes a proposition that your target will relate to.  It doesn’t have to resonate with people who you don’t want to reach, so it can talk to your target in his or her parlance and it will be all the more effective for that.
  • If you have made a good job of your Brand Model your headline proposition will reflect one of your brand pillars.
  • The body copy substantiates the proposition and links it to the brand promise.
  • The call-to-action tells them what to do next.

When you link up the components of an ad. it should tell a cohesive story.  Some organisations like Tesco, M&S and Philips do this very well, but most press ads are pretty average and surprisingly few headlines hit the mark.

In this case the lady wanted to promote self-improvement classes, so I guess her headlines should be something along the lines of “Learn the secrets of your future success”.  (So give me a break! I’m not a copywriter. I’m just marking out the ground here.)  The point is, clever headlines are only clever when they get to the point and if they are a mental obstacle course they are not clever at all.  The priority is to get your message across, if you can, express your brand personality in the language you use, which should be the same language as your target. Be clever by all means, but never make being smart your primary concern.

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Posted in advertising, brand character, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, Brand promise, communications, creativity, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, ideas, phil darby, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized