Category Archives: business strategy

Nominate your Pants-on-Fire advertiser.

Posted on Thursday 18 February 2010 | 4 Comments

If it wasn’t obvious already, one of the plethora of BBC radio stations ran an on-line phone-in this week that demonstrated beyond doubt how short Auntie is of material these days.  OK, so at least they were trying and I am sure there was more than a hint of irony in the choice of subject, but to ask viewers to phone in and nominate TV commercials that they were indifferent to was taking things a bit too far.  However, completely missing the point that if you are indifferent to a commercial, by definition, you won’t remember it, people actually called in!

The truth of the matter is that while nobody could have been “indifferent” to the commercials they nominated, there were many examples that were clearly getting up folks’ noses, often because they lacked a clear message or were frankly just awful, and that’s just the kind of waste of client investment that pushes all my buttons!  The worst offenders are commercials that are clearly all about creative ego.  As an ex-creative director myself and mentor to creatives and creative departments in agencies in a number of countries, I’m the first to recognise and understand the importance of great creativity, but, as I find myself saying far too often, great creative work reinforces the commercial message.  It doesn’t disguise or, worse still, contradict it and it certainly doesn’t just clutter thirty-seconds of airtime with wasteful irrelevance.

The reason that there are so many commercials out there that break these basic rules stems from errors or omissions at the very start of the strategy development process.  It amazes me that so many of the organisations I go into still don’t have a clearly defined brand. I’m often told by organisations that they have a strategy, even a brand strategy, only to find that what they have is built on sand.  You simply can’t develop a strategy without first establishing what your brand actually is.  This isn’t as easy as it sounds and involves a level of honesty and self-acceptance that few marketing people seem able to live with, but if you don’t crack this first step, absolutely everything you do from there forward will be compromised and wasteful.

You can’t hope to accurately communicate who you are (your brand character) if you can’t recognise yourself and its essential to the success of your business that you are accurate.  The process of accurately defining brand character is what my Brand Discovery programme is all about.  It also embraces all the processes and tools that ensure you always tell it like it is.  However, there are still a lot of businesses around that are either dishonest, confused about their own identity or just plain crap at communicating it and you can see the results in their advertising every day so my challenge to you is to find the world’s most dishonest advertiser.

You know who I mean.  The advertiser whose commercials or ads leave you saying “Yes, right” with the same commitment that you had when Kraft Foods said they wouldn’t cut the staff count at Cadbury (and then announced the closure of a Cadbury factory within a week of completing the deal).

Wherever in the world you may be, nominate your Pants-on-Fire advertiser by commenting on this post, adding a link to the “evidence” and explain why the piece in question lacks credibility.

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Posted in advertising, brand, brand character, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, briefing, business strategy, creativity, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, honesty, marketing, phil darby, the big idea, The Full Effect Company, transparency, Uncategorized

Britain’s unemployed managers – the solution to SMEs’ problems

Posted on Wednesday 17 February 2010 | Leave a comment

I’m back in the UK for a while and, inspired by the tales of the many struggling businesses in my local area, I’m trying to do my thing for SMEs .  I say “trying”, because, as my Granny used to say “You can’t help folks who won’t be helped”.

Most “small businesses” are small because they haven’t got what it takes to be big.  The deficiencies come in many forms and span all areas of business from lack of key skills like financial, operational management and marketing, to just being plain crap at what you do.  In a normal buoyant market there may be hope for even the least capable, but as conditions are now, if you aren’t sharp you won’t get to play.  As I have said before, this is a good thing.  Its the process of natural selection and we should come out of this experience, as a business community, smarter and better equipped.  However, I have my concerns.

Its no disgrace for an SME to lack a few key management skills.  If you are small, you are bound to be wanting in one area or another, its just a matter of where your strengths lie and what you do about your weaknesses that determines your destiny – that’s marketing.  My worries are two-fold.  Firstly, the natural instinct of far too many organisations in recent months has prompted an alarming HR trend and secondly, the support system for SMEs in the UK is failing miserably – and I’m not talking about the banks who seem hell-bent on some wild agenda to bring down the UK SME sector.

The HR trend I refer to is for firms to off-load senior people in pursuit of short-term payroll savings.  Its may seem an obvious quick-fix, but as I thought we all knew already, it brings only very short term benefit and beyond that its nothing more than the beginning of the end.   It affects organisations large and small in the same way, but simply because small businesses are less robust the effect it has on them is more often terminal.  Taking away managers (provided they are worthy of the title) from any organisation is like removing the rudder and the end result is invariably crash and burn.

In a similar way, organisations that think they are being smart by taking the Arsenal FC approach to business – hiring young inexperienced players and attempting to turn them into key strikers – are on a hiding to nothing too.  Inexperienced staff suck up key management time, involving them in micro-management that leaves them unavailable to perform their main leadership and innovation role.  It is also a customer satisfaction and operational efficiency nightmare that in times like these you just can’t afford.

To make matters worse, there’s nowhere for a UK SME that is short of management know-how, to go for help.  Years ago, a UK government initiative saw the foundation of an organisation called Business Link.  Basically, this was a joint-venture between the public and private sectors that was supposed to bring management skills to SMEs through a network of local consultancies.  Now, I have to put my hands up here and say that if I had my way they’d all be closed down and I bet nobody would even notice – apart from the exchequer who would immediately have a shed-load of cash to do something useful with.  Without exception, every SME that I have encountered, that has had any dealing with this bunch have nothing but disdain for them.  From what I have seen and experienced over the years they fail absolutely to operate as a network, they have no understanding of the realities of business and their methods are both outmoded and inflexible.  If ever there was a depository for no-hope graduates, with lots of meaningless qualifications and absolutely no grasp of reality, its Business Link – a typical public sector organisation in fact.  Anyway, rant aside, expecting Business Link to lead your SME out of recession is on a par with expecting Gordon Brown to win a personality contest – It ain’t going to happen!

Against this background I have been trying to get local politicians, government departments and business groups to consider ways of addressing some of these problems.  For example, most of the smart senior managers who have been victims of business cut-backs in recent months are still on the dole.  The managers with the very skills and experience that SMEs need right now are being paid (albeit a pitiful amount) to watch daytime TV and most of them are resigned to this reality for the rest of their lives.  That’s a fact supported by today’s unemployment figures and under-lined by a live phone-in on the BBC’s Radio Five Live this morning.    I approached one of the organisations employed by the Department of Work and Pensions to deliver Back to Work programmes for unemployed managers with the idea of devising a programme that would bring the need and the resource together and taking it to the DWP to seek funding.  It was like trying to raise the dead!  Rather than apply their minds to making something happen their every effort went into thinking of reasons why it wouldn’t work.  Just the kind of positive thinking we need to get us out of this mess!

I asked my local Tory candidate to help me get something going with the DWP and JobCentres, but got no reply.  I even offered free advice to a local trading group and received no reply to that either.  I approached the local paper and an independent employment agency with the idea of running a seminar for local managers of SMEs and neither were interested.

My mailing to a sample one-hundred local businesses offering them a free consultation that could get them thinking in the right direction had no takers and my follow-up calls revealed that they had mostly been approached by Business Link who failed them miserably and once bitten were put off the idea of consultants forever.

Its sad that our SMEs – our commercial future – are stuck like rabbits in a car’s headlights, while Theresa May the Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary and the Employment Minister Jim Knight, who together have solutions to some of these problems in their gift, bitch about minutia and argue out party politics on national radio.  The inability to run a piss-up in a brewery is endemic in our society and clearly, it goes right to the top!  Maybe we should recruit our next government from the ranks of our unemployed managers?  Now there’s a thought!

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Posted in business development, business strategy, change management, Department of Work and Pensions, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, HR, Human resources, ideas, ideation, innovation, integrated marketing, Jim Knight, Job Centre, management, marketing, natural selection, phil darby, recruitment, Small and Medium Enterprises, SMEs, The Full Effect Company, Theresa May, Uncategorized

Bridging the gap between insights and action

Posted on Monday 1 February 2010 | Leave a comment

A while ago I sat through a credentials presentation by the MD of one of the leading international data management consultancies.  At one point in the process a slide came up and the presenter went into a series of claims saying that they had shown so-and-so organisation how to save twenty million pounds and another client how to save thirty million etc.  Now, I’ve been in these situations before and even if I hadn’t, I would have been sensitive to the weasel, so I asked the obvious question.  “So, you showed them how to save all this money, what did they actually save?”  – Stunned silence.

It quickly became clear that the consultancy didn’t know how much some of the organisations in question had saved, or even if they had saved anything at all, because their proposals often weren’t acted upon.  In other cases the saving was minimal or nothing.  This isn’t unusual of course.  The ideas that the consultancy had offered were probably quite sound, but the problem that all these people have is that their clients are rarely capable of introducing the changes to processes or programmes that the data identifies as necessary and they themselves are not equipped to help beyond the point, at best, of identifying the kind of action required.

Its a few years ago that Jim Taylor in his book Space Race was lamenting the failure of advertising agencies to respond to their clients’ demands  for integrated solutions, but, sadly, things haven’t improved much.  The management consultancies as Jim prophesied, have taken the lead and the ad-agencies have just watched them disappear in a cloud of dust over the marketing horizon.  This is perhaps understandable when you consider that advertising agencies have for decades sat at the head of their clients’ marketing support roster, but things move on and today the traditional advertising role is revealed for what it is – just a very small corner of the bigger picture.  Sure, its a tough pill to swallow when you are used to being king of the hill, but I find it disappointing that even today the majority of advertising people I come across continue to describe what they do as “integrated marketing” which only illustrates how far they are away from understanding the wider landscape or the role they could play in it.  In fact, there are significant new opportunities for advertising agencies in the world of new model marketing that, if they just gave up trying to persuade us that they are still running the show, they could adjust to and solve the problem of their dwindling revenues.  I know, I’ve introduced a few agencies to these new opportunities and helped them add tens of millions of dollars in incremental billings as a result.

What clients need is an end-to-end seamless process for delivering truly integrated strategies and if the marketing services sector doesn’t come up with a model that works clients have no other option, but to take control, assemble narrowly focused marketing services specialists into project teams and make them work to eye-wateringly constrictive briefs.  I’ve helped a few clients of mine put teams like these together.  They are not for everybody, but they work well once you have all the resources.

The biggest impediment to achieving the single-source, end-to-end solution is culture.  At one end of the process sit the data nerds whose lives are written in binary code.  At the other are the creative advertising folks.  They don’t make good neighbours at the best of times, but trying to get them to agree on a single business model is a little like introducing George Dubya to a MENSA convention.  The reason that the management consultancies, as Jim Taylor predicted, are doing so well out of this, is that they sit with their structures and practices perspective, somewhere in the middle.  They aren’t great at data or creative, but manage a sort of average attempt at a solution that’s acceptable, in a businesslike sort of way, to a lot of half-arsed client organisations.

It seems to me that the people to watch right now, even though they probably have further to travel than any of the other players, are the aformentioned data folks.  Sapient and Experian appear to be leading the field, but are taking different routes to the same conclusion.  Experian, or rather those very smart folks at Clarity Blue, who they acquired a couple of years back, seem to be building out from their established base in the direction of the objective, adding new skills and resources that understandably, because of their parentage, appear rather more functional that creative as yet.  Meanwhile Sapient dropped an advance party by helicopter, right at the objective, by acquiring one of my current favourite advertising agency networks, Nitro last year and are now have the task of working backwards to set up a supply line.  They probab;ly stand an equal chance of creating the necessary end-to-end process, but I’ve always seen the “big idea” as a vital component in any marketing strategy so my money is on Sapient’s Nito approach being first to deliver the goods.  Watch this space!

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Posted in advertising, agency management, analytics, Big Idea, business strategy, change management, communications, consulting, creativity, data, data analysis, efficiency, Experian, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, ideas, innovation, integrated marketing, integration, phil darby, Sapient, strategy, the big idea, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Tesco raise the bar for Czech retailers

Posted on Saturday 14 November 2009 | Leave a comment

12586_Tesco my1main

We Brits may not have invented the department store (that was the French of course) but we can pat ourselves on the back when it comes to developing exciting new variations on the theme.

Somewhere on my list of “neat formats worth a look-see” would be the new “My” store in the centre of Prague that was developed by Tesco with a little help from Fitch.  A couple of years ago the owners of the only Czech department store operator worthy of the description Kotva were planning to breathe new life into the corpse of their central Prague store by turning it into a showcase for Czech retail franchisees – a challenge in itself when you consider the dominance of foreign retailers in the Czech marketplace.  They had a stab at it, but it really didn’t come off too well and I’m sure they are still scratching around for “plan B”.  Tesco, on the other hand, have achieved a spectacular away win with My by delivering the promise Kotva made and some.

Tesco have brought their full retail might into play with a model that extends well beyond the creation of a showcase for local retailers.  In assembling this store using available Czech retailing components they have contributed massively to the understanding of the participating local operators of what retailing is all about.  This is more than a store, its an education from which I am sure the Czech retailers who participated will benefit and hopefully never look back.  Talk about raise the bar!  OK, so they supplemented local resources by bringing in a few mates like the long-awaited (as far as I am concerned anyway) Costa coffee people (until now Czechs thought the height of coffee art was Starbucks – heaven help them!) to get the mood going, but it all adds to the formula.  Every little helps and this is no small contribution to Czech retailing.  Congratulations Tesco!

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Posted in brand, brand development, branding, business strategy, customer service, customers, czech, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, ideas, phil darby, Raising the bar, Retail, Retail format, Retail marketing, retailer, Store design, Tesco, the big idea, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

At last! A glimmer of sanity

Posted on Friday 21 August 2009 | Leave a comment

It seems the penny is dropping, at least in a few places.  I was talking to the owner of an independent mens’ fashion chain in the UK this week and he gave me reason to hope!

Despite current trading conditions, here is one business that is expandidng.  “Money is cheap and there are plenty of independent operators eager to get out at any price so we are buying” he told me.  They have bought three new  stores and are negotiating for more.  They are in the process of refitting all their stores to strengthen their corporate look and they reckon, by the time the recession lifts they will be ready to hit the ground running.

Meanwhile the government’s Job Centre Plus announced a new programme aimed at getting the unemployed back to work in more bouyant sectors.  They announced this week that if you are unemployed for six months you can elect to start training in one of the skills designated locally as a source of employment without losing your unemployment benefit.  After a few weeks, they’ll put you forward for a role that will utilise your new skill and the employer will be able to secure grants to cover the cost of your completion of the course.  Sounds like an idea, but don’t get excited.  They shot themselves in the foot with another scheme that pays unemployed folks who can persuade an employer to take them on trial for a role that lack of experience would otherwise have excluded them from – a sort of free trial for the employer.  However the rub is that there has to be a genuine vacant job, which kinda’ neutralises the initiative.  After all, if you need to fill a role, and you get four-hundred applicants (which is not unusual at the moment), a proportion of whom are bound to be able to hit the ground running, you are hardly going to take a long-shot on someone who had never done the job before, however cheap they may be.

The fact that this scheme excludes people who want to go to prospective employers with a proposition like “give me X weeks to demonstrate that I can make a difference to your business in a way you never thought of and you won’t even have to pay me” underlines the gulf that exists between the public sector ivory towers and the real world of business, where we are in desperate need of entrepreneurship.  But, hey, mighty oaks … and all that!

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Posted in business development, business strategy, Job Centre, marketing, opportunity, phil darby, recession, retailer, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

The future is definitely grey.

Posted on Monday 1 June 2009 | Leave a comment

I had an interesting meeting in London last week, with a few people from one of our bigger and better-known global organisations, who, like everybody else right now are looking for ways to stretch their budgets.

I have been saying for years, the difference between successful companies and unsuccessful ones is efficiency – nothing more or less.  Its a matter of what you can do with the resources at your disposal. What’s happened in the last few months to make this issues more critical is, of course, the recession.  Now the race is really hotting up and even the most successful organisations are racing to find ways to maintain or even increase pressure on their competitors while reducing their investment .  In other words everyone is desperate to increase efficiency in every area of their organisation and that puts Full Effect Marketing bang on target.

The people I was talking to were by anybody’s standard successful and their efficiency is probably about as good as it can get using contemporary practices, philosophies and models, but as more and more organisations have discovered recently this just isn’t good enough.  They cited three issues that they are struggling with right now, all of which boiled down to the same thing.

  • Too many short-lived propositions – or as I would express it, campaigns with no legs – so they were wasting time, effort and money setting up and running a continuous stream of short tactical propositions that are going nowhere.
  • Missed opportunities brought about by failing to recognise and plan to exploit all their options ahead of time.  This sometimes means that they have had to hold up launches while forgotten elements were nailed on (with the kind of compromises that you have to expect when this happens), occasionally they effectively plan-out potential that they have missed, so that to reinstate it later means cumbersome and inefficient delivery and also, from time to time they just miss opportunities altogether.
  • Inefficient execution or just failing to engage all the expertise within the organisation early enough to ensure that campaigns are delivered on time with all the Is dotted and Ts crossed.

As they said, no longer can they afford to invest in promotions and propositions that don’t milk investment for all its worth.  If only a few more organisations recognised that.  Their problem is that they were viewing these problems as training deficiencies, when the truth was far more fundamental.

Its a fact that executives in most organisations, like policemen, are much younger than they used to be.  This has its advantages, such as high energy levels and enthusiasm (although I sometimes wonder about this), plus, of course younger managers are usually cheaper to employ and hungry for success, which enables employers to apply the carrot principle with greater success.  However its not all pluses.  There are disadvantages too and the biggest and most significant, as far as the scenario we are talking about here is concerned, is a lack of experience.  While business is becoming more complicated with a full-hand comprising more and far more diverse disciplines, executives, because they are younger, have experienced fewer (simply because they just haven’t had time to acquire more) and as careers develop, the focus seems to be on depth rather than breadth of experience.  This limits both their understanding and their management capability and adds to the reliance many larger organisations (and this one was a case in point) have on processes, the only purpose of which is to overcome experience deficiencies, but, which, in the process, limit scope for free-thought.

The thing about establishing the perspective that allows us to see all the implications and opportunities of an initiative is that its pretty well impossible, to processise.  The vision that enables an executive to see all the opportunities and identify all the departments, specialists and skills that need to be engaged in efficient delivery is simply a product of experience.  So, if you can’t processise this stuff the only option left is to employ people with the experience.  I’m not saying that youth has no place in the modern recruitment strategy, but there’s no getting away from it, if you want to up your game to the kind of level that we all need going forward from today, you need experience too and that means creating a blend of young and older executives and creating a culture in which they can work together, combining everyone’s skills to deliver the solutions a modern business needs.

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Posted in business development, business strategy, change, change management, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, HR, Human resources, management, marketing, phil darby, Processes, recruitment, strategy, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Guerrilla marketing – Free muscle no marketer can afford to ignore

Posted on Friday 1 May 2009 | Leave a comment

I have never been able to resist a bargain.  That is why I love guerrilla marketing – Hey its usually free or almost free, who could say no?  Especially when you can build it into any integrated strategy to such good effect.  I have never understood why so many organisations look down on guerrilla as though it was appropriate only to small businesses.  I was working with an on-line publisher last year and came up with a neat little initiative that demonstrates just what can be done.

Our target was English-speaking businessmen with an interest in Central European markets.  The problem was one of awareness and the need to increase subscriptions.  I’m not a great fan of trade shows normally, partly because the cost of running a stand that is professional enough to give the right impression, more often than not, makes the idea non-viable.  However, if you don’t need a stand …

There was no doubt about it, major Central European trade shows were the most likely places to find the people we were looking for in any numbers, so we identified those with the highest visitor numbers from the most appropriate sectors of industry and called the organisers with a simple proposition – We would run advertising for their event in exchange for a free go-anywhere pass for our group of promoters and the go-ahead to distribute a card promoting a free offer that was bound to enhance the value of the show (In fact we ended up with a whole lot more than that).  The offer was a free limited period subscription to our publication (providing local CE market intelligence), which, if people signed up to it, would give us a great database and the opportunity to up-sell to paid-for subscriptions or just add permanent free subscribers with limited access who would add value to our offer to advertisers and sponsors. The show organisers, to my surprise and delight, nearly snatched our hand off!

Another great thing about initiatives like this is their flexibility.  We had no idea how this would perform so we opted for a two-month test-phase with an extended programme set up and ready to go the first month looked good.  Buoyed by the enthusiasm of trade show organisers, we decided to test a secondary target – employees of international firms that congregate in the large office complexes that you see around major Central European cities – and approached the largest property management companies with an offer similar to that we had made to the trade show organisers – free advertising in exchange for access to the lobbies of their buildings at peak times.  Same result!

That gave us two full months of promoter activity, with the office complex element filling in between the trade shows, which made maximum use of the promoters that we hired and trained for the client specially for the campaign.  Of course, the design of the material that the promoters were handing out and their sensitivity in selecting targets from the thousands of visitors to these shows and offices were critical factors in the efficiency of the first level of the campaign, but from there by funnelling responses through a carefully constructed CRM programme, we could generate revenue from subscriptions, boost readership/site visits and therefore enhance our value to advertisers, as well as sell ongoing advertising  to show organisers and exhibitors.  Every card we handed out carried a unique promotion code designating where and when it was handed out,  respondents entered the code to sign up for their trial, which gave use useful data too and we used that to strengthen our argument to the trade show organisers and exhibitors when we sold them advertising.  We also included all respondents in our new “recommend a friend” promotion, which caused a snowball effect. We did the whole thing for the kind of cost you could cover from petty cash – literally and the payback was way beyond anything that marketers would expect from a traditional campaign.

Guerrilla marketing definitely isn’t the reserve of small businesses and I’ve used all forms in many different ways over the years.  Taken seriously and partnered with the capability in other areas that large organisations always have, the effect of any investment can be magnified many times over.  Elements such as those that we used on this initiative have such a high pay-back level anyway, that they can’t help but improve the average ROI of any marketing strategy.

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Posted in below-the-line, business development, business strategy, central europe, communications, CRM, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Guerrilla, Guerrilla marketing, integrated marketing, integration, marketing, on-line publishing, phil darby, publishing, strategy, The Full Effect Company, Trade shows, Training, Uncategorized

The measure of a marketer.

Posted on Tuesday 17 March 2009 | 1 Comment

I have absolutely no doubt of two things.  Firstly that “marketing” means leveraging the resources of an organisation to satisfy the needs of end users and, secondly, that as marketers it is our fundamental responsibility to go places and do things that nobody had gone to or done before. These are the two basic truths upon which I base my work.  I’m happy to debate this with you, but I will win! However, I have come across a few illustrations recently of  woolly, cop-out thinking by marketers around the world that makes me fear for our future.

Firstly I became involved a few weeks ago in a discussion on LinkedIn, that might become its biggest yet, which started with a member asking if anybody was interested in setting up a “consultants’ group”.  The responses that followed were horrendous and I quickly came to the realisation that the relationships between a lot of consultants and their clients must be a bit like the blind leading the blind.  I was simply staggered by the narrow thinking of many of those consultants who contributed.

Then came the response on SimpliFlying.com to a report on the BBC interview last week with RyanAir’s Michael O’Leary.  SimpiFlying is a knowledgeable and highly respected blog that focuses on marketing within the airline sector, so you would expect that the majority visitors would be airline marketers.  That being the case, many of the contributions served only to underline O’Leary’s premise that airline managers are a bunch of sad, uninspired old gits (My words, his sentiment).  I’ve never been a particular supporter of O’Leary, but that might change after this interview.  I have, however, always admired his business and brand development nous, and I’m delighted to hear that his inspiration was Southwest Airlines in the US who are a case study that I use in many of my seminars and workshops.  O’Learly clearly understands branding far better than most of the contributors to this discussion.

The final nail in the marketer’s coffin was a recent campaign by Naked in Australia, an agency that I have always thought was quite OK, for their mens’ fashion client Witchery.  Appropriately, this was drawn to my attention by Adam Broitman on iMedia.com under the heading “Interactive’s Most Offensive Campaigns”, but the offense I took wasn’t that it was rude or in bad taste, but the fact that the production of such utter dross was sure to have incurred some level of carbon footprint.  Naked seem to have totally forgotten that for a viral campaign to work at all the material that’s seeded has to be interesting enough for someone to care enough to forward it.  I am used to clients thinking that a viral campaign is a solution in itself and forgetting, like any other medium, that its only as good as the content, but for any marketing specialist, let alone an agency of this standing to completely miss the point like this is unforgivable.  I fought to stay awake through the movie, only because I wanted to see why it was supposed to be so offensive.

As I said in my opening, we marketers are supposed to be taking our organisations or those of our clients, to places and getting them to do things that they would never dream of.  That’s our primary responsibility and when times are tough, as they are now and we all really need to be brave, its our job to save them from their natural tendency to dig a pit and wait for the flak to pass.  Our clients and colleagues should be beating a path to our door just to recharge at our power-point of creativity, innovation and entrepreurialism.  If they aren’t its our fault not theirs.  It means we are just too boring and that’s something a marketer should never be.

Thanks to Michael O’Leary for calling time on the old farts of aviation and talking up his ambition to pay us for travelling with him rather than the other way around and shame on those like the people who, whether RyanAir is their cup of tea or not as a carrier, aren’t smart enough marketers to recognise that this is how you build a brand (and the world’s biggest carrier).

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Posted in Airlines, BBC, Big Idea, brand, brand character, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, business development, business strategy, communications, consulting, creativity, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, ideas, innovation, integrated marketing, integration, marketing, Michael O'Leary, phil darby, RyanAir, strategy, the big idea, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized, viral

Hang the data, get the basics right!

Posted on Friday 20 February 2009 | Leave a comment

abcI’ve lost count of the number of times over the years that I’ve come across businesses that have allowed data and analysis to get in the way of their business development, but in the last few weeks I’ve come across two. 

Don’t get me wrong, data is my friend, but I have a great deal of experience too, which, if the data should tell me to jump of a high building, will warn me that it will hurt!  Way back when I started in this business a wise old advertising sage introduced me to the principles of research with the words “This is a light to guide your way, not a lamppost to lean on”.  He was right and the same applies to any form of data, yet I’m increasingly finding people who won’t take a pee unless the data tells them to.

There are simple reasons for this of course.  The stakes are often high and there’s big money and jobs on the line, so its easy to see why we have become risk-averse.  Its made worse though, by inexperienced managers, both in SMEs and in the large corporates.  Its a fact that today’s managers are younger and less experienced than they were twenty years ago, and experience is the key to success.  To make things worse, there’s even more to know now.  Its no wonder managers look for data to support their decisions.  But supporting decisions is fine, its when it makes the decisions you are in trouble!

I liken it to the debate over teaching schoolkids basic skills like how to do sums and write.  The purists argue that they’ll need this stuff when … wait for it … we don’t have computers anymore!  Now there’s thought!

Its important to recognise that the law of diminishing returns applies to any investment in data and analysis.  The more you do, the greater the investment required and the fewer point-gains you’ll get from it.  If you are Proctor and Gamble or Unilever the optimal point is much higher up the investment scale than it would be for your local corner shop.  That’s simply because 0.001% improvement on a gazillion dollars turnover will pay for the investment (probably a few times over) while if your turnover is that of the vast majority of businesses, that kind of improvement wouldn’t buy you a decent lunch, so there’s no point.

While large and unwieldy organisations tend to lose the advantage that data (potentially) gives them when the time comes to turn insights into action, at the small and medium enterprise (SME) end of the scale, there is no shortage of modest, easily implementable initiatives you can introduce to great effect without data and analysis, if you have experience.  But that’s a problem too, because, by definition, SMEs have less experience and a narrower skills base.   While someone like me will help a larger concern to interpret data and plan appropriate responses, when I am consulting for SMEs is more likely to involve filling in the gaps in their basic skills and experience.

When I first started my business, as an introductory offer, I promised any prospect a bottle of champagne if I couldn’t find ten ways to increase their ROI, but I never had to make that trip to the off-license.  Every business makes mistakes and its too easy for someone with broad enough experience to spot them and come up with a remedy.  I guarantee I can make significant improvements to the performance of any enterprise, large or small, and in the case of SMEs, usually without spending months wading through data and setting up programmes and analysis processes.  All that comes later and will undoubtedly help magnify the results, but the gearing is such that if you are running on three cylinders, getting the fourth to fire makes a hell of a lot of difference.  The introduction of simple sound practice, based on experience and observation, can bring a significant improvement in the bottom line for most SMEs in no time at all.  The expense is in the fine-tuning that’ll have you humming like a Ferrari. 

I have developed Full Effect Marketing to the point where any business, of any size, in any sector, anywhere in the world can plug in and play it.  I purposely stripped away the mystique that some of the big consultancies seem to like, so that it makes perfect sense to anybody and before somebody from a big organisation says, if its designed for SMEs (which it isn’t) its too basic for them – bollocks!  Marketing is basic, Full Effect Marketing just strips away the frills that have been added over the years by insecure marketing people who have thought that by dressing it up, it’ll appear that they are extra smart!

The two examples I encountered recently were both businesses sitting on the recession time bomb.  As I have said before, the game now is all about survival of the fittest – Business Darwinism – and if you aren’t fit you won’t survive.  Neither of these businesses had the basics right, yet they were fixated on data and research and locked into a kind of commercial catalepsy, waiting for the data to tell them what to do.  The answer was obvious to anybody with the right experience.  I don’t blame them for not knowing, it wasn’t their area of expertise, but what was frustrating was when they had the answers they still couldn’t bring themselves to take action, because they were stuck in the data-habit and didn’t have any to support the actions.  As a result, the one has sadly and quite avoidably, bitten the dust already, simply because it didn’t move quickly enough and other is teetering.

Maybe the fact that I have seen two such cases so close together is a symptom of the current business climate.  As I said, things right now, happen fast to businesses that aren’t in shape and there are a lot of them around.  Why is this?  Well apart from the experience quotient (which if you read the research is lower these days than twenty years ago because managers are younger) its because increased entrepreneurship and a boom market have resulted in a lot of businesses getting this far even though they were half-cocked.  Its just a build-up of failures waiting to happen.

I can’t pretend to be sorry to see a few businesses disappear – recession is cathartic, but I still think that there are tremendous opportunities in this recession for smaller businesses and challenger brands and I’m really excited at the prospect of seeing new names and ideas emerge.  Most of all, I’m looking forward to working with businesses that are made of the right stuff, getting the basics right, making things happen and then adding the data analysis that will scale those things.

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Posted in analytics, business development, business strategy, communications, consulting, data, data analysis, decision, decision-making, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, ideas, indecision, internal marketing, management, marketing, phil darby, Small and Medium Enterprises, SMEs, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

The retailer v. manufacturer head-to-head

Posted on Tuesday 27 January 2009 | Leave a comment

I caught an interesting piece in Marketing Week last week by Paul Benady.  He was reflecting on the current struggle between retailers and fmcg brands for control of consumers’ purses.  He made a number of good points and clearly highlighted the need for us all to get a grip of the relationship between our brands and the lives of consumers.

This isn’t really a struggle between retail brands and fmcg brands.  Its just the usual struggle between marketers and a test of how well they work with the resources they have.  In other words, how well they do their job.  Sure the big supermarket brands (not necessarily their businesses) are in good shape these days and the odds are in their favor because of this.  Yes they are close to consumers minds and could levage this advantage easily, but its by no means a done deal.  As Benady says there is a great deal of value in the fmcg brands – tradition, reassurance, longevity, reliability and quality. It would be ill-advised for them to pitch into the price-point battle, but I believe they have what it takes to win the war, if only they focus.

The danger, as usual, is that marketers may not see the wood for the trees.  There are rational and emotional elements to any brand relationship and marketers need to understand these and define clearly in their own minds which are which.  The two questions I ask brand guardians is

  1. Do your rational arguments strengthen your emotional relationship with your customer?
  2. Is your tactical activity reinforcing your strategic message?

Whilst it sounds logical, I see all kinds of brands where the rational argument is out of kilter with the emotional aspects of the relationship and I suspect that in an attempt to apese the price sensitivity of consumers over the next few months we’ll see a few brands throw the baby out with the bathwater in clumsy attempts to raise the price element in their value equation.

There’s also a good chance, because it happens too frequently anyway, that in an effort to protect what they see as their brand values some fmcg marketers will lose the message by wrapping it up in creative cotton wool.  This is no time to be shy.  If your point is valid and in line with your brand message, make it straight, not obliquely.  Its a chance for real smart creatives to show what they can do to reinforce the message.

Taking a swingometer view of things my feeling is that we’ll see a sharp swing towards price over the coming weeks and months, followed by an adjustment back towards quality that will result in a new value optimum.  Of course, this is where the supermarket brands are aiming with their presitge sub-brands, so to some extent they are already there, but they have arrived from the direction of price whereas most fmcg producers who venture there will be coming at it from the quality end of the scale, so there’s a clear difference and a variety of opportunities there.

The other decider will be how flexible manufacturers can be.  One of the great strengths of retailers has always been their ability to respond quickly. Of course, everyone should have seen this coming way back, so hopefully it won’t be a factor, but it will be interesting to see, over the next few months, who can deliver timely solutions that customers will respond to  and that are consistent with and will leverage their established brand values.

As I have said many times over the last few months – “Interesting times”.

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Posted in brand, brand character, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, business development, business strategy, communications, fmcg, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, integrated marketing, marketing, paul benady, Retail, retailer, strategy, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized