Category Archives: communications

UK needs to catch up on in-store music.

Posted on Sunday 5 December 2010 | Leave a comment

I’m feeling guilty that I’ve been neglecting my blog for the last few months.  Time flies when you are having fun and I’ve been engrossed in developing a new offer with Immedia Broadcast, who lead the UK in the design and delivery of bespoke live radio solutions for commercial enterprises.

Having set the bar for the last ten years in the high-ticket radio  and TV solutions that have made them famous Immedia are keen to apply their skills and experience to the volume end of the market and I’ve been working with the  amazing technical, radio production and music psychology experts in Newbury in the South of England, to create what we have called Dreamstream, an off-the-peg music solution that smaller businesses can access for a minimal monthly subscription.  It’s still a work in progress, but take a look and let me know what you think of it so far.  www.dreamstream.co.uk

The journey has been fascinating and among the interesting processes we have encountered along the way, we commissioned a significant research piece that involved talking to 800 small store proprietors.  This as a bit of an eye-opener and maybe a pointer to why our small stores aren’t always realising their potential.

While I’m used to retailers in the US and elsewhere, who, regardless of their size, already recognise the business case behind in-store music, their UK counterparts definitely need help joining the dots.  There’s research everywhere (and its a fundamental of my “Brandships” principle) to establish beyond doubt that music, that reinforces and reflects your brand will make customers feel at home.  It also shows that as a result of this they stick around longer in the store and return more frequently and we all know that once you have achieved this you’ll see an increase in sales.

There’s another angle to the in-store music argument though and that’s the impact it has on employees.  Those of us who have worked with this tool will know that store staff are responsible for a lot of the complaints about in-store music.  It’s also often the employees who exacerbate the problem by messing around with the content and volume in the stores where they work.  However, retailers that get their music right will find that their employees are energised and more enthusiastic about their work and this in turn increases productivity and sales.  Its pretty conclusive – increased customer propensity and greater employee engagement and there are case studies on the Internet where retailers have shown increases of 20% in sales just from music, without any announcements or commercials.

Sadly, some UK independents remain sceptical.  Our research even found a few who believed that in-store music actually had a detrimental effect on business.  The reason for these opinions can only stem from their experience of some of the absolutely awful in-store music that we hear in the UK.  I think there’s a major education challenge facing the sector and, with current challenges of the new economy, and the drift towards “clone towns” we need to get cracking on this quickly.

It beggars belief that a cash-strapped shopkeeper will pay more than £300 each year on PPL and PRS music licences, only to waste it by playing local radio or worse still the dregs of their own music collections.  Music that works is the product of the marriage of science and art that you can only get from professionals.  These small businesses need to understand that the DIY approach is a recipe for disaster and local radio is not going to do it for them either.

UK independent retailers have a long way to go to catch up with their counterparts in the US and until they understand how to make the most of the opportunities like in-store music that are definitely available to them, their self-pity and claims of a market biased toward multiples aren’t going to receive much sympathy.

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Posted in brand, brand character, brand consultancy, brand development, branding, brands, brandships, business development, communications, efficiency, Full Efffect Marketing, marketing, music, phil darby, Retail, Retail marketing, retailer, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

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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

Credibility Gap?

Posted on Friday 15 October 2010 | Leave a comment

The failure of the Gap’s new “branding” exercise isn’t the only recent demonstration of how even big organisations still don’t “get” brand #101, but its a good one.

For those who aren’t up to speed on this story, Gap invested big money in a new logo, that their customers don’t like and in one of the purest forms of customer power I’ve seen, they responded by forcing the retailer to put their plans into quick reverse, abandoning the new logo and all the cash and energy they had invested in it’s development .

This is failure on a grand scale.  Apart from the fact that their customers clearly have a better appreciation of design than the Gap execs (The new logo design is pretty shoddy), on the most basic level its a major cash hit and therefore just plain inefficient, which we all know is simply not an option in today’s competitive environment.  These days you simply don’t get to score below 100% efficiency and survive for long.  Then its plain bad judgement, that can only be the result of a tragic customer disconnect – How could they not know what their customers would think of the design or how they would react?  Even I could see that one coming and I haven’t been in a Gap store for at least ten years!  The thing that worries me most though is that a business like Gap, with its heritage (Haight-Ashbury, the Hippie movement, record albums, jeans and all that) could fail to recognise that their brand,  undoubtedly an icon (until now), is a product of and belongs to their customers.

Nobody could deny that the old Gap blue square and serif font was due for an update, but it was exactly what a logo should be – a reflection of the business, which could definitely benefit from a face-lift .  However, you simply don’t change anything about a brand like this without involving your brand community (customers, employees, partners etc.) in the process.  If you are daft enough to try, the very least you would do is research the result, but the really, really criminal thing about this is that whoever drove and approved this change clearly didn’t understand that a logo is a product of the brand, not the other way around.  Gap may feel the need to be current, but having a logo that meets that criteria doesn’t do it.  Newsflash – If you want people to think you are current and relevant, you have BE current and relevant.  The logo design comes later.  I can only guess that like a lot of other businesses, Gap considered up-dating the logo was a cheaper option than actually addressing the issue.  However, it might just turn out to have been a dam-site more costly in the long run.

What Gap have attempted is the retail equivalent of a comb-over.  But you can’t kid a customer and to try to do so can only have one outcome – loss of customer trust and your own credibility and integrity.

The cost of Gap’s error won’t just add up to the bill for the design work and signage, it will undoubtedly cost them customers who are right now questioning their relationship with the brand (brandship).  This represents a serious plight.  You don’t easily win back customers who feel betrayed.  Its certainly many times harder and more costly than acquiring customers in the first place.

My guess is that Gap lost their brand community a while back.  They failed to maintain the brandships their business was built on.  Remember, Gap was a ground breaker in retail brand building, so this is all the more sad.  A brand development initiative could have been just the ticket to re-engage its community.

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Posted in American, brand, brand character, brand development, Brand Discovery, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, communications, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Gap, marketing, phil darby, Retail, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Are retailers raping brands, or are our brands willing victims?

Posted on Wednesday 25 August 2010 | Leave a comment

We all like a bargain and, as always when the squeeze is on, there has been a surge in the fortunes of retailers who can pander to that need over the last few years.  TK Maxx built their UK reputation on the mountains of liquidated stock, over-orders and manufacturers over-production that were accumulating across Europe, but these days we are all more frugal and surplus stock is a rare sight.  Walk around you local TK Maxx these days and you’ll see stuff that is clearly straight out of the factory and looking suspiciously like re-specd versions of mainstream branded products.  It’s a bit of a let-down by the retailer, but what is this doing for the brands?

It’s understandable that, faced with a shortage of supply in certain categories, retailers like TK Maxx would go looking for alternative sources to support their “Designer labels for less” claim, but for me, at least in some departments, they are failing.  They’ve never been too strong in the footwear department for instance, but, I guess, having staked out their shoe pitch they probably feel its incumbant on them to protect their claim.  Unfortunately that seems to mean introducing minority brands or “brands” that nobody has heard of (because they are just labels that manufacturers slap on to inferior product to help them hood-wink the odd independent retailer into a purchase and not real consumer brands) and it seems to me, even ordering production runs in inferior materials to get the price down.  This might keep their shoe racks full, but it’s not even close to where TK Maxx have in the past tried to persuade me they stood.  It won’t be long before this development is acknowledged by enough consumers to represent a concern to the people running the business.  Somebody said to me only the other day that TK Maxx was a con, but this practice won’t only damage their business, it will reflect on the brands that have stooped to re-engineering their products to meet the retailer’s demands and even those legitimate brands that have constituted the genuine bargains that TK Maxx was built on.

Of course, there are a lot of brands with equity earned in the past that hasn’t been leveraged in recent years, often because the organisations that own them have abandoned them or shut up shop themselves.  SportsDirect is a retailer that has been quick to realise this and have built a very successful business on rebadging inferior Asian-made sportswear and equipment with famous labels from the past like Lonsdale, Kangol, Dunlop and Slazenger.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of people being able to buy a pair of sports shorts for £5, but by sewing a Slazenger label onto them Sports Direct have surely done irreparable damage to this old brand.  Before long, consumers who have been reassured by the label will realise that all they have is a pair of shorts from a Vietnamese sweat shop and henceforth that’s the association Slazenger will have with everybody.

When its a case of retailers buying from independent manufacturers I expect they’ll excuse the practice with the claim that it’s at least keeping the a consenting manufacturer in business and I’m sure there are many willing victims, but when the retailer is buying the brands with the sole purpose of abusing them, it raises a whole new bunch of issues.  Sports Direct own Dunlop in the UK and you can buy Dunlop squash rackets for £30 in their stores that look very much like those used by the world’s top players who they sponsor.  However, the shop versions are just mass-produced rackets from an Asian factory and the similarity to the pro gear ends with the badge, as anybody gullible enough to buy one will soon discover.

It’s a neat route to a quick-buck for Sports Direct, but in the long-term, what they are doing is burning brands – squeezing the life out of them, discarding them and moving on to their nerxt victim.  I guess they have concluded that there are enough old brands with decent equity around to earn their founders the retirement they have their hearts set on and they’ll no doubt go on buying brands and squeezing the life out of them all the way to Dorset’s Sandbanks real estate, but I’m not so sure and anyway, I hate waste as much as I despise abuse and this practice smacks of large helpings of both.

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Posted in brand, Brand Ambassador, brand character, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand equity, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, communications, Dunlop, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, marketing, phil darby, retailer, Sports Direct, The Full Effect Company, TK Max, transparency, Uncategorized

When profit is literally music to the ears of customers … and employees

Posted on Monday 9 August 2010 | Leave a comment

We all know that music influences our actions.  There is endless research on the way music is used in sports psychology and there can’t be any fitness centres of gyms where music isn’t a constant feature.  There are also reams of papers by retailers revealing the impact that in-store radio has had on their business.

Retailers are old hands at this and apart from the in-store radio and TV of the larger multiples, retailers of all types and sizes have used music, in it’s simplest form, for many years to create atmosphere that entices customers to a store and creates an atmosphere where shoppers will linger longer, and we all know the longer people stay in a store the more they spend.

However, anybody who has worked in the in-store music arena will also be familiar with the complaints of shop workers who have to listen to it for the entire day, not just a few minutes that a customer spends in a store.  This is where the error of buying into cheap in-store music. with its loops, repeats and sound-alike bands, is highlighted, but it’s also an indicator of how music can be applied in other situations to`improve employee performance.

Because I have spent so many years advising retailers around the world I’m at home with the role of in-store music, ratio and TV, but I’ve also worked with businesses in corporate TV and spent time in offices like that of Sky TV in London, where music is a constant factor of office life so I have first-hand experience of the motivating power of workplace music. Like anything else, there’s good and bad in this field and while the muzac that so many stores and hotels opt for can ruin a business by frightening customers away and making an employees day a real drag, great music can make retail tills ring and boost energy levels.  However, this music thing isn’t as simple  as a lot of people think.  Anybody who really knows the subject will appreciate the psychology that goes into matching music types to audiences, moods and brand character.

In retailing there are both customer and employee profiles to consider, regional differences, business types and the variety of day-part patterns to be accommodated in any music strategy.  Fail to do this and your workplace music could literally be doing more harm than good.  There are three ways in which workplace broadcasting of one type or another can increase the profitability of a business.

In its simplest form music will create or enhance an atmosphere that strengthens a brand, provides an inviting atmosphere or increases productivity by motivating staff.  Get it right and even om this most basic level any business can achieve all three.

On the next level up, music, even by itself, can be used to prompt retail sales.  A UK supermarket played Spanish music in its wine department and significantly increased sales of Spanish wine.  However, with announcements or commercials that effect can be massively increased.  Another specialist UK retailer I know of achieved a 600% uplift in sales of one line in tests.

On the third level, in-store radio is already being used by many businesses not only to motivate employees, but to train them with product information, procedural updates and training modules transmitted out of retail opening or during office hours.

No business can afford to ignore or take this music thing lightly. It’s a legitimate business tool and increasingly scientific in its approach.  You are unlikely to get it right without help.  On the most basic level there are business out there playing radios, CDs and MP3s, oblivious to the fact that to do so in the UK requires licenses that costs upwards of £350 every year.  Avoidance could cost a whole lot more – I saw a post on a forum last week by a Chinese restaurant owner who was facing a bill for thousands of pounds!  My advice, don’t risk it and don’t try to avoid the fees by using non-licensed music – everyone hates it so it won’t bring any benefits. Bring in experts instead and profit from a well, thought out and executed workplace music strategy.

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Posted in background music, brand, brand character, brand development, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, communications, customer, efficiency, employees, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, in-store music, integrated marketing, phil darby, Retail marketing, retailer, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized, workplace music

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Blue may be the new green, but does it suit your business?

Posted on Monday 21 June 2010 | 1 Comment

So, the debate is pretty well done and dusted – the Green movement is dead. A victim of the same monarchical culture that has buried so many other great ideas and business over the years.  Adam Werbach pointed all this out to us in his speech “Eulogy for the Green Movement” at the Commonwealth Institute in San Francisco way back in 2004.  The mistake he made then was not to offer an alternative and as a result he was vilified by old Greenies, the press and a bunch of other people with no imagination or brains to work it out for themselves.  As he said, people don’t like being called “dead”!  So, he returned to the same venue in 2009 with the missing pieces, which he has called “The Birth of Blue“. Yes, without a doubt, Blue is the new Green, so start adapting your wardrobe.

In fact, Blue isn’t anything new.  Just as the demise of Green followed the familiar path beaten by Communism, a few religions and other movements that relied on compliance under threat rather than a voluntary embrace.  Adam isn’t alone in what has done, but where he scores the bonus is in introducing an imaginative and practical solution, in this case, by adapting a proven approach to a different problem.  I say proven with the certainly of first-hand knowledge, because along with all the other initiatives, cultures and institutions that have successfully adopted this kind of strategy, I have been following it for years with my programme of brand transformation that I call Brand Discovery.

History couldn’t possibly give us more conclusive proof that a culture based on strict rules will fail, yet its not surprising that governments worldwide have adopted a heavy-handed approach to getting us all in line behind the sustainability thing.  When you throw old ladies in jail for putting paper in her rubbish, or stick tracking devices and chips in wheely-bins you really can’t expect anything, but resistance from folks.  The same applies to any community, brand or organisation.  If you make a community welcoming, comfortable and rewarding enough people will want to be a part of it.  Conversely, if you want to drive people away from a place you make it threatening and unpleasant.  Maybe if we gave less thought to prisoner’s rights and conditions incarceration might represent more of a disincentive to criminals?  However, I digress.

Green failed because it didn’t welcome people to its community and brands fail for the same reason.  What constitutes “welcoming” is another discussion and will vary from one brand or community to another, but what I want to do now is focus on the process involved. Its simple really.  You firstly need to lay out all the facts and associated issues in a clear and unbiased way (something that governments just don’t seem capable of).  You then fuel debate and discussion and LISTEN (something that few organisations of any kind find natural). People will work out their own relationships with the problem or issue at hand and if you really are listening, you’ll discover that they are writing your strategy for you.

Sustainability, affects us all.  It influences communication, travel, jobs, in fact pretty well everything in everybody’s life.  As our schoolkids are learing (and these future customers are way ahead of us on this see Graeme Codrington’s Hanna’s Rules) nobody can avoid it, so its really just a matter of helping people understand how it affects them individually.  Then you can start to offer them suggestions of things that they can do to help, if not themselves, their kids, avoid a future that’s far less inviting than that which we have today.

Brand Discovery encourages brand stakeholders to nominate things that they can each do to ensure that they are contributing to a bigger shared objective – the delivery of a brand promise.  Blue takes the same approach by asking people to nominate a DOT – Do One Thing – that will bring them closer to living a sustainable life.  What Blue also realises is that entire national populations are too large to work with successfully, so it relies on dividing nations into smaller work-groups.  They, cleverly chose businesses … large ones.  Their first candidate was Wal-mart, a community of almost two-million employees, not to mention partners and suppliers (I’ve visited countries with smaller populations!) where the approach has proven to be a great success.  More including Morrisons and Sainsbury’s in the UK are following their lead.

The issue isn’t going to disappear by itself and the emerging generations of customers and consumers place sustainable living far higher on their list of priorities than we or our forbears have so its not difficult to see the attraction for a corporation of engaging in sustainability.  In fact, businesses that don’t embrace the cause are going to suffer big-time in the future.

However, if you think it’s just a case of flying a sustainability flag outside your corporate HQ you are wrong.  Apart from their understanding of the importance of sustainability, emerging consumers have inherited a realisation from our generation and they just mistrust pretty well anything that the corporate world tells them, so you are seriously going to have to walk the talk.  What we are talking about here represents a significant change for most organisations.  You are going to need a strategy and there are few organisations around with the perspective and in-house resources to tackle this alone, but before you even find your partner to help you with this you need to understand that blue really is your colour and be ready to trust in your chosen Gok Wan.

In the coming months I will be working on this with my clients, testing out, ideas, introducing initiatives and all the time doing all I can to live sustainably.  Next week I’m off to Marketing Week Live in London and, as I try always to do, I’ll be minimising my carbon footprint by travelling by train.  I’ll be tweeting as I go and hopefully producing a bit of audio on Twaud.io or Cinch.com from the show.  Among the questions I’ll be asking of the people I meet there will be how their organisations are rising to this challenge.  So follow me on Twitter @thefulltweet and make your own contribution.

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Posted in Adam Werbach, Blue Movement, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand equity, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, business strategy, carbon neutral, change management, communications, communist, consulting, customer, customers, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, green lobby, marketing, Marketing Week Live, phil darby, Saatchi & Saatchi, Saatchi's, Sustainability, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Your future is bright young things. So invest in your brand community.

Posted on Wednesday 16 June 2010 | Leave a comment

I hate to be repetitive, but for the second time this week I find myself shouting “hear, hear!” to a piece by Graeme Codrington.  This time he’s talking on the subject of employee relations.  In particular the challenge of holding on to the bright young things that represent the future for all of us.  But, while I agree with what Graeme says, I see this from another perspective – the perspective of “brand community”.

Graeme, as usual, is right (don’t you just hate folks who are always right?).  Too few organisations focus on creating an environment where employees feel they really belong – a community.  In this article he talks about the old days of outback mining companies that established towns and provided all the facilities their employees needed to live with their families, because they knew that without this infrastructure they simply wouldn’t have any employees.  He also points to the fact that initiatives like these were early victims of the bean-counters, looking through distorted spectacles for ways of squeezing more profit from a business.

So, what has an outback mining community to do with a modern business?  Well, it’s not as different as you may think because whether they are rock-face workers or the smart graduates that an international business needs to build its future on, when there’s a shortage, there’s a shortage, and belive me, there are definitely not enough bright young things to go around.  If you doubt that, just give a thought to the last time you marvelled at some meaningless procedure a business that you were dealing with insisted on taking you through – smart people don’t waste your time (or theirs) with stuff like this!

Graeme talks about investing in the things that make work a great place to be.  A while back, I visited an organisation whose offices were so much better and more comfortable that the homes where the employees lived, that they socialised there too.  In fact it was sometimes difficult to persuade them to go home at all!  However, it isn’t quite as simple as office bars, sofas and a few pot-plants.  My real interest in this subject comes from my passion for brands and my belief that while, as Graeme says, there’s a cost involved in making yourself the employer of choice for smart people, it doesn’t have to be as big an investment as many might think.  I see this as a part of the marketing function and in most organisations there a budget for this and, if you do it right, it is guaranteed to bring a handsome reward.  What’s more I know that with the technology we have at our fingertips today, you can measure anything and that includes the return you get on investment in your “brand community”, so the proof that this kind of investment pays-back is there.

In fact, one of the founding principles of my Full Effect Marketing is that a small proportion of your total marketing investment re-directed to internal marketing will bring a disproportionately high return.  And, have no doubt, what we are talking about here is “marketing”; specifically building a brand community where all stakeholders (investors, partners, suppliers, customers AND employees) feel a sense of belonging and ownership.  It works like this:  great brand community = happy and dedicated employees = consistency over time because they stick around = improved return on training investment = better decisions = smarter (and more efficient) execution = happy customers = job satisfaction … you get the idea.  Its called “Brandship” and yes, you have individual Brandships with every one of your “stakeholders” (I hate the word “stakeholder” too so let’s just talk about “community”).

The chance of you being a lighthouse organisation in the future (or even being around at all, given the competition we are all going to face) is very much based on the desirability of your “Brand Community”, not just for customers, but for employees.  But there’s another aspect to this.  A brand community isn’t something that’s dictated from the boardroom.  Employees aren’t going to respond to a community that YOU think they should like.  It has to be a place where they genuinely feel “at home”.  A place that they have created.  In fact, the organisation doesn’t even own the brand community.  You just get to be caretaker or janitor.  A powerful brand community is a product of and owned by its members so if you want to create the real thing (and I suggest this should be your objective) you are going to have to engage another Full Effect Marketing idea, which is that all your communications should be two-way, because you are only going to get it right by listening.

Who has come across a large organisation where all the employees get a free pair of Replay jeans?  I have, because we did it at Oskar Mobile in the Czech Republic that not only became the world’s most successful third operator ever, but, against awesome odds, were nominated World’s Best Mobile Operator; success that was driven entirely by their brand community.  This and many other initiatives like it were prompted by employees themselves, who also made a movie themselves about what a great place Oskar was to work.  The movie in turn was distributed to recruiters and shown at conferences and job fairs as well as posted in the Internet and as a result they were getting thousands of unsolicited job applications every week.  The original Saatchi & Saatchi was a community that worked and played together and it was this that drove our international growth.  I remember walking into a recently acquired agency in Helsinki and being bombarded with questions from everyone about the people and happenings in our London Charlotte Street offices.  Our London softball team had shirt with “Official softball team of the biggest advertising agency in the world” printed across the back and people in our offices around the world wore it with pride.

This is what I mean when I talk about Brand Communities and it’s why I created my Brand Discovery programme.  Every day the idea of the central role of “brand” in any business is gaining more credence.  If you aren’t focussing on this already you should be.

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Posted in analytics, brand, brand character, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, change management, communications, community, data analysis, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Graeme Codrington, integrated marketing, integration, internal marketing, management, marketing, phil darby, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Consistency – or how to avoid your business going to hell on the back of a truck!

Posted on Monday 14 June 2010 | 1 Comment

The founding principle of Full Effect Marketing is that efficient organisations are always more successful that inefficient ones.  That’s never changed and I can’t imagine it ever will.  Most of you, I know will think its an obvious thing to say and few people argue with me when I say it.  However, what I mean when  talk about efficiency is often different to what other visualise it as.

When I do presentations on Full Effect Marketing a key topic is always consistency.  It’s simple.  If you are aiming for efficiency the last thing you want is waste and inconsistency creates waste.  I talk a lot about the way organisations view their marketing communications.  They invest large sums in sexy media that reach large audiences in impactful ways and devote inordinate man-hours and effort to honing these communications to make them bring miniscule increments of return on investment – efficiency.  And its tough.  Everyone is getting more efficient, your media dollar buys less every year and production costs go up.  The truth is that we are all so good at communications these days that we are all fighting over that last ten percent of the scope of the media.  But are we so smart?  Because, while we are all beating each other to death over decreasing return with big budget advertising campaigns, most of us are ignoring the fact that the hard-won benefit is leaking out of  a side door.  It’s a little like filling a bucket with a hole in the bottom from a tap.  You perhaps don’t care that much that there’s a small amount of water spilling out.  After all, you are filling from a big tap, dealing with big volume, a trickle isn’t going to make that much difference.  However, it is making a difference and if you ignore the leak for long enough, it will get worse until you’ve probably leaked away the equivalent of a bucketful of water – or, a year’s advertising budget.  Even in its early stages, a leak is making some difference and it could be the difference between what you have in your budget to invest and the extra that your competitor down the road is investing that’s making life tough for you.  Either way, its inefficient.

I talk a lot about consistency in communications and most organisations have a lot of communications.  Usually far more than they at first realise and certainly more than any one person in that organisation can manage.  I don’t just mean consistency between different communications, but consistency between what you say and what you do.  Get any of this out of kilter and you are being inefficient.  That’s the reason for my Brand Discovery programme and it’s why one of the rules of  Full Effect Marketing is “refocus on internal marketing”, because if you have got all this communication going on and no one person can manage it all, the only way you can achieve a level of efficiency that’s appropriate in today’s competitive marketplace is to ensure that everyone in your organisation is saying the same thing and behaving consistently.  And the only way that you can be confident that this is happening is to get all your stakeholders on the same page and committed to playing their part in the big picture.  That’s about sharing information and its the job of internal marketing.  Pretty well every business I have come across could improve their return on communications and marketing investment by switching focus towards internal marketing.  Ten percent of investment, switched from external communications (making a promise) to internal communications (delivering the promise) will almost always deliver a level of return that an organisation could only dream of achieving from external investment.

So, against this backdrop I discovered this short clip from a presentation by a very smart guy called Graeme Codrington who I can’t seem to find anything to argue with on any subject that he covers.  What Graeme does here is illustrate better than I ever could, how an apparently minor leak by a leading brand, that could have been fixed, had they focussed a bit more on internal marketing, significantly reduced their marketing efficiency and points to dire consequences for the sustainability of the business.

Thanks you Graeme!

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Posted in advertising, Brand Discovery, brands, brandships, communications, consistency, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Graeme Codrington, integrated marketing, integration, internal marketing, marketing, phil darby, The Full Effect Company

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The disappointing reality of Twitter

Posted on Thursday 10 June 2010 | 1 Comment

Twitter is a great tool when used creatively, but, don’t forget, it’s just medium like any other and the same rules apply.  There are a few brands that really work social networking and a few celebrities who bolster their brand by entertaining us in this new media space, but I find the majority of tweeters, in reality (because I think Twitter brings out the “real” in everybody) a bit of a let-down.  So, while we marketers push our clients into social networking, I can’t help wondering whether this isn’t a bit like giving a firearm to a toddler.

Quite smart people fail to fully understand what they are doing with Twitter.  For instance, I decided to follow the dragons from the TV series Dragons Den.  After all, they are accomplished business people so my expectation – reasonable I think – was that I might pick up a few business insights and maybe the inside track of a few Dragon’s Den stories.  How wrong could  I have been?  I can live with the fact that Deborah Meaden hasn’t used her profile.  At least she isn’t wasting my time or contradicting her on-screen brand persona.  Theo Paphitis started Tweeting, but gave up after a week.  Probably too busy counting his money – fair enough!  While James Caan seems to have grasped the golden rule of Twitter – If you haven’t got anything to say, shut up! Peter  Jones and Duncan Bannatyne, in contrast, must have done untold damage to their personal brands (although my guess is that Peter Jones’s brand equity had already been drastically diminished by his appearance on that ghastly TV commercial for insurance or something) by resorting to a drawn-out and vulgar public game of  one-upmanship – a constant barrage of claims and counter claims about whose holiday was most lavish and who had the most money.  A mistake on so many levels and very much in the realm of failing to deliver their brand promise, which, as any marketer knows, is the number one no-no for any brand.

You might argue that Stephen Fry, raconteur, wit and professional twit, has less to lose.  I’d expected a few one-liners maybe, clever use of 140 characters and elegant satire from him, but instead when opening my Twitter home page I was greeted each day with a torrent of meaningless and undecipherable text-speak, all from him.  I quickly “unfollowed”.

The BBC newsreader, presenter and journalist Susanna Reid might fall toward the “homely” end of the newsperson scale, but for heaven’s sake, a morning TV presenter is supposed to be smart.  On Twitter she appears decidedly dippy and spent three days last week canvassing advice on how to set up her i-Pad – hardly the place to get into a long forum-type discussion and definitely not one where a serious newsperson should be seen struggling with household appliances.  Very much out-classed by her co-presenter Sian Williams, who, at least, sticks to business.

Apart from shattering a few of my illusions, these Tweets, I have also just discovered, are having another more significant impact on my own brand.  Because my Tweet history is linked to my LinkedIn profile where they appear for everyone to see, I find I am inadvertently breaking one of my own basic rules for brands – “beware the company you keep”.  As I have said many times, consistency is the secret of a strong brand and the company it keeps, which means other brands, distributors, retailers, famous people and more, are taken as stong indicators of your values and beliefs.  The same applies to personal brands.  I should waste no time in acting on my instinct to unfollow the Tweeters that I have ben unimpressed by.

If I was disappointed by individual Tweeters corporate users have proven no better.  There are no brand communities more potent than those of retailers, but so few really get the Twitter and FaceBook thing.  I was talking about this to the head of marketing for one of the UK’s biggest restaurant chains a few weeks back and I’ve been sensitive to the way the sub-sector uses social networking ever since.  There are quite a few retail food chains that include Twitter and FaceBook in their communications portfolio, but the way they use the medium is very mixed.  For instance I have always considered Nandos to be a fun brand, ideally suited to Twitter, but a couple of weeks ago a bunch of international sportsmen were larging up Nandos on Twitter and there was no reaction from the company itself – an opportunity missed.  Similarly Taybarns had a load of  Tweets about a Carling promotion they were running and failed to leverage the opportunity.  This smacks of the old one-way communications habit that I thought had died out a few years ago and is the antithesis of what social networking is all about.  Twitter is for listening as well as talking.

Half using social networking is about as realistic as being a bit gay.  The fact is, either you are in or you are out and leveraging just some elements of Twitter doesn’t mean that the remaining elements aren’t working, it’s just that you aren’t controlling them. This applies to businesses and celebrities.  Maybe a Twitter account should come with a health warning “WARNING. TWITTER CAN SERIOUSLY JEPARDISE YOUR CREDIBILITY” or an induction course on how to, at least, avoid committing on-line hara-kiri.  The BBC at least seem to have spotted the dangers here and have sent Susanna Reid to it.  I know because she’s Tweeting the entire content live as I write this!  Probably the most interesting Tweets she’s sent so far in her Twitter experience.  I hope the first of many.

Oh, the power of the media and the innocence of those who don’t appreciate that the principles of branding apply to all of us!

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Posted in brand, brand Britain, brand character, brand development, Brand equity, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, communications, Dragon's Den, Duncan Bannatyne, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, James Caan, marketing, Nandos, Peter Jones, phil darby, promise, Social marketing, Social networking, Stephen Fry, Susanna Reid, Taybarns, The Full Effect Company, Theo Paphitis, Tweet, Twitter, Uncategorized

Britain’s biggest ever internal marketing campaign

Posted on Monday 24 May 2010 | Leave a comment

Image from BBC News. Click for full story.

As George Osborne announces the new government’s plan for its first £6billion tranche of public sector spending cuts, I am getting a distinctly uneasy feeling that there’s a spectre looming large in the shape of public sector employees, who could bring the county to its knees in an orgy of self-interest.

As one commentator put it this morning on the BBC, this isn’t just a plan to save £6billion+ is a plan to change the expectations we all have of government, in other words a re-branding and as with any other re-branding strategy, it has to start with the people delivering the promise.

I’ve worked with public sector organisations in the UK and elsewhere and I have to say that, certainly in the UK, despite their claims of having upped their game in recent years – and, to be honest, there’s a degree of truth to this – the sad fact is that the claim reveals the naiveté that is at the heart of the sector’s dire performance.  Frankly, most public sector employees, just don’t understand how out of kilter they are with their private sector counterparts.

I have sat at post-mortems for failed initiatives where the inadequacies of the people charged with the task at every level have been obvious.  I’ve heard people shrug-off any responsibility for watching colleagues fail or fall into pits that were perfectly obvious to all, but the person doing the falling, with comments like “that wasn’t my job”. I’ve witnessed total absence of any shared responsibility or common agenda, even seen people scramble over each other to assign blame to anyone who could be made to represent a target.  Worst of all, I have noted time and again the credence that managers give to this behaviour.  I’m not saying that stuff like this doesn’t happen in the private sector, but in the public sector its the prevailing culture.

I’m thinking of one regional public sector organisation in particular that is failing by a measure of two-thirds to meet its targets consistently, month after month.  It has employees at every level who may arguably have the ability to do their job, but simply don’t.  People who fill their day with an hour’s-worth of work and feel hard done by if they are ever questioned about their lack of progress.  Not only is the manager not managing the situation, there’s absolutely no consequences attached to the failure to deliver.  Each month he just turns up at a meeting and tells his bosses how much he’s missed his target by and they just nod and thank him.  I have first hand knowledge of a group of high-profile public sector organisations whose purpose is to provide specialist advice to the business sector whose “advisors” rarely have more than a grasp of the basics of their subject and certainly usually know far less than the people they are advising.  In the absence of expertise this organisation has fallen back on prescribed programmes, processes and practices executed by process-followers who force their “clients” into ill-fitting solutions, waste their time with totally unnecessary bureaucratic hoop-jumping and consider it a job well done.  The only real effort demonstrated by these and other public sector organisations I have encountered is in gathering tenuous data to support their continued existence.  This is what waste really looks like.

Apart from the blatant and intentional waste of time that goes on in these places there is inevitable consequential waste represented in the endless arse-scratching done by people who frequently just don’t have a clue what to do next.  But its the intentional waste, driven by the kind of self-interest we have seen demonstrated by Royal Mail, British Gas and now British Airways employees that will be the nail in Britain’s coffin.

I’m concerned that the public sector, being what it is, will put the usual knee-jerk interpretation on the message from Whitehall – reduced funds = reduced services – but that’s not necessarily the case.  Cut out the waste, the processes that waste time for all of us and do nothing, but keep people on the government payroll and, in percentage terms, the reduction in services will be nothing like the reduction in investment.  The public sector just has to stop putting itself first and start doing what’s sensible and right.

If the British people are to be persuaded to consider “government” in a new light, the Government must firstly define what their promise is and then undertake the massive task of getting the people responsible for delivering it committed to the task.  Only once they are confident that every employee is determined to play their part in delivering that promise to the full, can the promise be made with any credibility or any chance of success.  It’s a big ask, a massive challenge, its internal marketing on a scale that has probably never before been tackled.

Pitfalls lie on every side.  When the Labour party finally manage to get their act into any kind of togetherness their traditional support of trades unions like Unite might mean that they contribute to the obstacles facing any re-branding strategy.  Unions themselves are going to have to be realistic in their demands and employees at every level will need to be put straight on the need to contribute to a shared objective rather than perpetuate the self-interest that has been largely responsible for bringing us to this mess.  This requires transparency by the government regarding their agenda, sharing the brand vision and mission and the provision of the information that people need to understand for themselves why the strategy has been chosen and more importantly, what they must do to play their part in its delivery.

It’s about communication on every level embracing every media route – press relations, the internet and electronic media, direct marketing, corporate videos … you name it.  A fully integrated campaign the like of which we haven’t seen before, certainly in this country.  Maybe it’s an opportunity for the COI to really show us what they can do in terms of strategy and efficient project management, but more than that, its an opportunity for the best in every area of marketing and communications to contribute to a project that is really worthwhile.

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Posted in BBC, brand, brand Britain, brand character, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, communications, community, David Cameron, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, george orborne, integrated marketing, integration, internal marketing, local goverment, marketing, National Branding, phil darby, promise, public sector, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized