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Bridging the gap between insights and action

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!

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

Deconstructing bollocks

Tuesday 19 January 2010 · Leave a Comment

A lot of years ago (I have to be sensitive here and not say how many, for fear of offending others mentioned in this story) a young goateed hot-shot was introduced to me as the new Deputy MD of McCormick Intermarco-Farner (Now Publicis) where I was working at the time.  Although we had very little direct contact (and I hate to further inflate his ego), John Ward made an impression on me that has lasted to this day.

At that time I was strugging to find my fit in the wonderful world of advertising agencies.  Sure, I was doing OK, but I lived with the constant nagging feeling that I saw things differently to everybody else.  It wasn’t until John turned up with his irreverence for institutional industry practices and viewpoints that I realised that different is good.

In fact, seeing things differently has become my greatest asset and one of the facets of my professional character that I value most is my natural instinct for de-mystifying the crap that a lot of people in this business seem to worship.  Over my years in the business I have developed a hatred of intellectual clutter.  We are in the communications business. Communications drive society and are what is supposed to elevate mankind above pond-life.  The thing about communications is, the more complicated you make them the less they work.  It is this belief that fuels my disdain for “experts” who construct a fug of mystique around their subject, I assume, in the paranoid conviction that if anybody actually gets to understand their stuff they’ll be out of a job.

From time-to-time I have tried different ways of describing, what I see as my mission to relieve the world (of marketing at least) of intellectual crap.  Then, a couple of weeks ago I happened upon the profile on LinkedIn of an author who in the “specialities” section had entered “Deconstructor of bollocks”!  Perfect!

Yes, the paths of John Ward, author and wit and I have very happily converged again.  Is this fate’ s hand?  I’m not sure, but I have since become an avid reader of John’s daily, tell-it-like-it-is missives.  In fact, today has been particularly trying and were it not for John’s hilarious piece on farting and the chuckle I had over his F11 story this morning I may well have pressed F11 myself (well, actually, it would be more my style to press someone else’s F11).  Don’t get the wrong idea about this bloke.  His expose of Gordon Brown’s drug dependence and the revelation that our PM’s poor eyesight isn’t wholly attributable to the fact that he’s a total wanker, sit alongside a terrific insight into what’s really happening to the relief effort in Haiti, to create a rarely balanced and infinitely sensible view of life.  I wish I had come up with “Deconstructing bollocks”, but more power to your elbow John and more visitors to your “The Slog” and “Not Born Yesterday” communities.

Categories: Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · John Ward · McCormick Intermarco-Farner · Not Born Yesterday · The Full Effect Company · The Slog · advertising · communications · consulting · deconstructing bollocks · marketing · phil darby

The measure of a marketer.

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).

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

Hang the data, get the basics right!

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.

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

Foreign trade and the new consumer

Thursday 15 January 2009 · 3 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wrestling with brand identity?

Tuesday 2 December 2008 · Leave a Comment

Anybody who reads this blog will know how important I think point of difference is.  I spend a lot of time with my clients helping them to develop “difference” and I admire brands that achieve it.  I’ve said many times that I always prefer different over “nice”.  Nice is usually insipid, rarely as “in your face” as a brand has to be and therefore can never be responsible for raising anybody’s pulse rate – and that’s what a brand has to do if, ultimately, it has a hope of succeeding.

With this as a backdrop I was delighted to see a brand from the past, in the shape of Mickey Rourke on screen this weekend in a trailer for his new movie “The Wrestler”.  Mickey is one of those “characters” who encountered the key danger associated with “difference” – that though some people (you hope “most”) will love you, there are bound to be a few at least who hate you with equal vehemence.  Its that narrow path that all brands walk.  We all love to be loved and its easy to see why, because of this, many brand managers try to be all things to all people and end up being nothing to anybody.  I tell my clients, its life, you can’t hope to be on everyone’s Christmas Card list so get over it.

It seems that after a spell in excile, self-imposed or otherwise, divided equally, it appears, between the gym and the botox clinic, Mickey Rourke has gotten over it and has come back with new, and in my book, rightly placed confidence.  I always thought he was a great actor, I don’t think I’d bother having a drinking contest with him, but I liked his difference and it seems that he has come to terms with the double-edged sword of popularity.  Listening to him talk about the movie it seemed to me that its a tad autobiographical.  I can’t wait to see it, but moreso I’m looking forward to seeing Mickey Rourke give us his different best for a few years yet.

Categories: Brand Discovery · Brand Model · Brand promise · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · Mickey Rourke · The Full Effect Company · The Wrestler · brand development · brand name · branding · brands · communications · consulting · difference · marketing · phil darby

I don’t want to be a celebrity. Get me out of here!

Thursday 13 November 2008 · Leave a Comment

Results of a UK survey announced today and discussed on BBC Radio Four’s Today Programme suggest that the aspiration of most school kids is to be “famous”.  There’s no thought of how and no appreciation of the work involved, and why should there be? Programmes like Big Brother and The X-factor and parasites like Paris Hilton have proved to us all that celebrity can be an occupation.  Why should our kids commit to working for recognition?

This thinking isn’t as new as you may think though and it certainly isn’t confined to the UK.  For one thing, I have been seeing it every day for as long as I have been hanging around Prague.  Here, you’ll find scores of young Czechs with aspirations to be important, high-profile business people, driving their Mercedes to their newly-built villas on the edge of town and not the vaguest idea of how they would achieve this and usually little hope of ever succeeding.  Its what has driven, what seems like an entire over-mortgaged generation who, facilitated by easy loans and sharp salesmen, are often driving the flashy cars before they have a real job.  It makes recruitment difficult too and in a land where unemployment is barely measurable, has driven salary levels ever-upward as kids fresh out of college demand salaries higher than their bosses purely on the basis of their school certificates.  I once challenged a young graduate to tell me why she thought she was worth 20,000 Koruna a month (a decent living at the time) and she replied “Because I am educated and speak English”.  She didn’t get it that I was hoping for something more tangible and actually got up and stormed out of the room saying that I didn’t understand when I started to explain that if I paid her the figure she was asking for she would have to deliver more than that in revenue!

But also, somewhere, in some land that I have yet to discover, I swear there is a Head-In-The-Clouds Business Academy that churns out no end of business executives who are also destined never to “get it”.  I come across them all the time.  I tend to be called in and arrive moments before the Official Receiver at which point I have it explained to me that business isn’t good and asked can I “help them fix it?”.    A short “discovery” period is usually enough to reveal that “isn’t good” was an understatement and often the business is effectively bankrupt.  I had one a few months ago where every sale the organisation made was actually costing them money.  They literally couldn’t afford to sell anything, but that’s another story.  Sometimes there’s a way that disaster can be avoided, but drastic measures are called for and almost without exception, this means changing the management perspective.  The trouble I find though is that whilst the theory is never questioned, when it comes to implementing the remedy these organisations just aren’t prepared to bite the bullet.  As the great Tom Lehrer said “… like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis …”. “Can’t you just do something to get us through without being so drastic?” is a question I often hear and the answer is “Yes, but after all the effort it will only mean that you go broke next month rather than this”.  The real surprise is how willingly so many managers will accept this as a solution.  No pain, no gain.

I have written and spoken many times in the past about the similarity between sportsmen and women and businessess and I was reflecting earlier today on the achievement, but most of all the determination and work of people like Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest man.  I also recall an interview that I heard in the last few weeks with someone involved in youth sports initiatives in the UK, who was saying that too many young kids with talent just aren’t prepared to put in the work it takes to realise their full potential.  The truth is that in most of the developed world life has been too cushy for too long to expect a rich vein of hungry young men and women prepared to sacrifice everything in the pursuit of true achievement and we are increasingly seeing sports champions from less privilaged societies rise to the top – four of the world’s top ten squash players are Egyptian, Usein Bolt is Jamaican (as if he hadn’t made his pride in this reality more than obvious!). 

In a world where dot-com billionaires still seem to be created at the drop of a hat, just because they are in the right place at the right time, I can’t tell you how great it is to, as I have this week, embark on a project with a small team of people with a great idea, tremendous passion and a commitment to 24/7 full-on physical effort (I don’t know how they do it) that defies normal human capability.  I really hope that I can help them make it work.  The world needs a few more business “celebrities” who got there by dint of real hard work and these guys really deserve a break.  Somehow, though, I get the feeling that they’ll make it regardless, just by shere determination.

Categories: Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · Usain Bolt · business development · business strategy · central europe · change management · consulting · developed markets · management · phil darby

Future-proofed brand consulting.

Monday 20 October 2008 · Leave a Comment

Earlier this week I caught an interview with the clinical psychologist and author Oliver James on BBC Radio 4.  Oliver James for those who have never heard of him (and I was one of you until this week) has written a number of books that focus on an affliction that he calls “affluenza” which, he claims is rife in the UK.  Now, I have never read any of his books and I haven’t studied his “teachings” but he made a few comments during the interview that struck a chord with me, especially in light of the current economic and environmental climate.

His basic premise is that people in the UK are especially unhappy and stressed because their values are shot. He claims that our lives revolve around the mission for affluence and ownership.  According to James we have entirely lost our sense of values, we confuse want with need, we see ourselves in terms of the stuff we own and indiscriminate ownership of anything and everything is our primary goal.  The more we own the more we need to acquire.  The process is perpetual and ultimately frustrating, to the point that we are unhealthy both pysiologically and psychologically.  He’s got us sussed then!

In the interview, he pointed out that people in other European countries are more content because they have more of a “make-do-and-mend” approach to life and he’s right.  My experience of Central European countries is that this is very much the case.  People there don’t throw things out when they break down, they fix them and if they can’t be fixed they are stripped of components that might serve to fix something else at some later date.  Prague’s local council periodically park a skip in the street where my part-time home is, for people to deposit larger throw-out items.  Things like broken TV’s and electrical equipment, furniture and other stuff that won’t fit in a bustbin.  (Councils in the UK should try this insead of making us trek to the not-so-local tip whenever we need to dispose of something or charging some exorbitant fee, on top of our local taxes, for collecting them).  The notable thing about this is that anybody (notably ex-pats) who throws anything into these skips is treated with rasied eyebrows and tut-tutting from their neighbours for being so frivolous and wasteful and you’ll often find as many people taking stuff out of the skips as you will folks depositing items there.  Now that’s re-cycling!

Depending on where you look in the Czech Republic you will find people who make-do-and-mend sometimes because they can’t afford to buy new things, but mostly, just because they just don’t see a reason to buy new stuff when old stuff continues to work.  The aesthetic is irrelevent.

The result of this disregard for how things look is a community where long “heavy metal” hairstyles and Iron Miaden T-shirts are still de-rigeur, homes are furnished with a mish-mash of hand-me-down furniture and where, until very recently, many cars were of questionable roadworthiness.  To this day its easy to spot the country people who come to Prague to visit their city-dewlling relatives by their dress and carrier-bag luggage.  As an English friend of mine commented – “Czechs just have no style”.  He was right, and, mostly, they don’t care, but does it matter?  The answer has to be “no”.

Oliver James would, I guess, argue that this is how things should be and I’m sure that Maslow would agree with him on the basis that his “self-actualisation” (the highest point in his hierarchy of personal evolution) leaves brands and acquisition behind.  Remove the need to justify your existance by ownership of stuff and life is much simpler.  We would all be happier and more fulfilled.  You might even find time to do something truly worthwhile.  Its not easy to get a Czech to work overtime at weekends even if you pay them double time.  They just don’t see why they should give up their free time to get more money that they don’t need.  

A friend of mine is convinced that within twenty years we’ll all be getting around on horses and growing our lunch in our own back yards and with the world economy patched up, but clearly in a long term decline, oil resources drying up with no viable alternative on the horizon and the US and Australia set to run out of water any day now, its a scene that’s easy to visualise.

The irony is that while Central Europeans may have a healthier perspective than we do right now, that’s all set to change,  There’s a growing clammour among the young in these countries to be like their counterparts in the West.  In fact their acquisitiveness is frighteneing at times.  They are desperate to have everything that we have, even though they earn less and branded products are largely significantly more expensive than in the UK.  It makes you wonder how they’ll deal with the resultant stress, given that they arean’t really aclimatised to the condition.

If my friend with the horsey theory is right, our mobility in future will be limited by our capacity to walk and we will revert to a world of tribes.  Communities, each with its own personality, values, style, dependent for success on membership – brands in fact.  I have to say that I’m somewhat relieved to know that, worst-case scenario, I’m still in a growth industry!

Categories: BBC · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · Maslow · The Full Effect Company · brand development · branding · brands · central europe · community · consulting · developed markets · marketing · phil darby · recession · social groups

Maintaining eyeball-to-eyeball retailing

Monday 2 June 2008 · Leave a Comment

The trouble with business success is that its like a computer game – you overcome one set of problems, arrive at a new level and then find that there’s a whole new set of problems to overcome. What’s more, because they are always new challenges, you encounter them with no experience upon which to base your response, so you are perpetually learning on the job. And its a treadmill that once you are on, you can’t get off – every level of success brings new challenges and every solution moves you to the next level.

Organisations in every sector will know what I am talking about and one of the major challenges that becomes bigger with every advance you make is that of just managing the day-to-day of your business. Those of you who know me or who take the time to read my stuff or turn up for my seminars and workshops will know that I’m no fan of routines or bureaucracy, but I’ll be the first to admit that you have to have a way of tackling the ever-growing challenge of the day-to-day. You’ll also know that one of my big things is the impact that apparently insignificant actions, that happen well away from the boardroom, will always have on your overall success.  This also highlights the demand for a way of passing information up and down the chain of command.

It’s a dilemma with a couple of possible solutions. The one favoured in the past and which is still, sadly, adopted by the head-in-the-sand school of management is dictatorship – basically you give nobody the space or the authority to do anything other than what you instruct them to do. The problem with this, as many organisations and a number of countries have spectacularly demonstrated, is that it involves a level of micro-management (and/or a degree of coercion) that no organisation can sustain and even if you succeed in controlling things you are going to miss out on a bunch of valuable and increasingly rare opportunities. The other route is delegation … Agaaaaaaaaaaaah! I can hear the muffled cries from below sand level in boardrooms around the world right now, but if you are one of those to whom this sounds like heracy, there’s no escaping it – its time you went cold turkey on those old habits, put down the stick and find yourself a carrot – yes, as the man said, your future is orange!

I spend a great deal of time in the retail world. One of the things that I have always loved about the sector is that its one of the last bastions of the entrepreneur, where you can actually get stuff done and try new ideas while they are still new. New stuff often represents less of a risk for a retailer than it does to other types of organisation because retailers have eyeball-to-eyeball contact with the customer and therefore understand them better and therefore have maximum scope for making a sale. That’s why when an fmcg company wants to understand customers one of the places they go for insight is the retailers who channel their products.

Retailers are big businesses these days. They have access to an unbelievable volume of data and partners who can analyse it inside-out and tell them the innermost secrets of consumer minds. However, its a two-edged sword. Because they are so big a retailer’s chain of command has lengthened. No longer can it be taken for granted that the folks on their front line have that retail blood, possess the corporate gene or really understand the objectives that you set for them – unless you tell them that is.

Did you ever play Chinese Whispers as a kid? You know, that game where you all stand in a line and the person at one end whispers a message into the ear of the second and the message is passed down the line from there, usually to arrive much changed at the other end? The famous example being “Send three and fourpence …” quoted from the first world war (so Google it!). The same applies to the instructions and customer feedback that is transmitted back and forth between the shop floor and the retail boardroom. Most organisations, retailers included, now acknowledge the need to give their sales people, at least, some discretion at the point of sale. The trouble is that in order to make the right choices the shop assistant needs a load of information and motivation and that’s where most organisations fail.

What I am talking about here is internal marketing. When I started my career in what was called the “Advertising, Marketing and Display Department” of a national retailer I tackled this by introducing a regular (weekly or monthly, I can’t remember) bulletin containing instructions and insights, which we mailed (can’t even imagine doing so now) to every manager of every one of our 100+ stores (that was a big retail chain then!). My contemporary take on this solution is a far more complex integration of things like Internet, direct mail, mobile training workshops and special events, based on my essential tool for all businesses the Full Effect Marketing Brand Model.

Internal marketing for today’s unwieldy companies, if tackled in this way, provides the essential two-way flow of information that’s the stuff of success and absolutely essential to retail and a few other sectors where entrepreneurship still lives. The Full Effect Marketing Brand Model establishes ten critical aspects of the brand, including the Brand Promise that will be an important basis of every decision in every corner of every business and the integrated communications routes that are Full Effect Marketing itself ensure consistency in message (in just the same way that your external communications should). If everybody in your business “gets it”, as they will if this is done properly, the decisions that they make in their every-day functions will be the right ones an you’ll get accurate reliable feedback from the shop floor that in turn will make the decisions you make than much easier.

It may well be that, given the number of employees involved, internal marketing is more complex for retailers than for other types of business, but we have the technology and its really just a matter of understanding how to use it. A typical retail integrated internal marketing campaign might incorporate in-store radio or TV, a LAN or WAN university and direct mail. I recently created a travelling circus for a retailer that took training to the shop floor in a way they had never seen it before and I created a plan for another retailer that involved a radical internal promotion/event that was never launched (due to unforeseen circumstances unconnected to the event) but which was exciting, colourful, competitive, contemporary and above all very educational.

I see signs all the time of retailers who are losing their grip. The ideas that are agreed on in the boardroom are not always being represented on the shop floor. Sure this happens in other sectors too, but for a retailer, building that up-close-and-personal relationship with customers is what its all about. So, get a grip. sort out your internal marketing and let’s not lose it!

Categories: Brand Model · CRM · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · Retail · The Full Effect Company · advertising · below-the-line · brand · communications · community · consulting · corporate · customer · customer service · customers · decision · decision-making · efficiency · internal marketing · management · marketing · phil darby · retailer · sales

Go ahead. Make a decision!

Tuesday 20 May 2008 · Leave a Comment

When I was an up-and-coming ad. man I spend an enlightening few years in the employ of Michael Conroy, then MD at McCormick Intermarco-Farner and more recently President of Publicis-FCB in the UK. Michael is one of those truly charming, eloquent Irishmen to whom philosophising comes as naturally as breathing and one of his mantras has stuck with me to this day.

I have always been told that I was impatient and have tended to take this as an accusation. These days though, with the benefit of age and the overview that facilitates I see things differently. Maybe I have been blessed with the ability to see things without the clutter of unimportant details, but it often seems to me that people make decision-making unnecessarily complicated. Most of the really successful businessmen that I have met over the years have told me that a significant factor in their success has been the ability to make decisions and in today’s business world, if not in the past, this is definitely a pre-requisite to success. That’s probably why, apart from stuff that doesn’t deliver its promise, indecision and procrastination makes me madder than March hare! I really can’t bear to see a missed opportunity and in most cases behind every one of the there’s a ditherer. Business opportunities are so rare and valuable these days any that are missed because someone can’t piss or get off the pot represent a criminal waste! To me I see someone who can’t make a decision as somebody who lacks clarity of vision, and as a business developer clients who fall into this group only make my work harder.

I always loved Michael Conroy’s ability to illustrate a point with a story or anecdote and the one I recall about indecision was that half the decisions you make in your life have no consequence beyond the next minute of your life, half of those that remain have no consequence beyond the next hour, half of those that have not already been accounted for have a consequence of a day, and half of those that are left matter might impact on the next week. Half of those that remain might hold consequences for the next month and half of the rest might impact on the next year of your life, and so on. Ultimately you will see that of all the decisions you make in your life only a handful really matter in the great scheme of things. The thing is that when you have to make them you have no idea which decisions are the significant ones so you may as well just get on and make them and hope that if your decision is wrong it will only matter for a short while. Now, I think that’s a great piece of advice and one that, had I not already been well along this thought process might have changed my life. As it was, it merely gave me an anecdote to pull out of the bag from time to time to illustrate the point.

This approach definitely works. Sir Ralph Halpern resurrected the Burton Group of retail brands in the UK with an aggressive campaign of innovation. He once told me that he had no fewer than twenty pilot formats up and running at any one time and explained (Though it was probably obvious enough) that if only one in twenty succeeded, that one concept would pretty quickly more than cover the cost of the nineteen failures. So if anybody on his team came up with a concept that looked half-decent, they would give it a go!

Don’t get me wrong though. I am not advocating recklessness. While Michael Conroy gave me license to get on with it and think on my feet Stanley Kalms, the charman of the great Dixons Stores Group (now Dixons Stores International) added stability to my decision-making approach with his insistence on minimising risk. “I don’t mind taking risks” he once told me “As long as it doesn’t cost me anything” and with that he challenged me on one of my great ideas one day to “Show me how if this doesn’t work I don’t have to pay”. Which, incidentally, I did.

This isn’t a “get out of jail” card for the risk-averse it just points to something that separates the boys from the men. You still have to do your homework, but it can’t be allowed to slow you down so I have to admit, I’m not sure if it means that you have to weigh up all the odds very quickly or just know what to prioritise. Actually there is a bit of magic dust around some of the really great business people I have met that leads me to believe that its more about knowing instinctively what’s important, than exploring every avenue, and that demands a mindset that’s more genetic than acquired.

So, yes, its vital that you make business decisions quickly and I personally have far more time for someone who does than I do for procrastinators, but you have to make each decision on the basis of knowledge. You can acquire that at the time which means having resources and applying them efficiently and probably with a degree of prioritisation, which in turn means knowing, maybe instinctively, what’s important. It also points to accumulated knowledge, life experience and all that stuff as being an important aspect of sound decision-making.

So if your finger has been hovering over a button for the last six weeks, my advice is get on and push it. Minimise the risk by all means, you’d be stupid not to, but be decisive. The chances are that if you are wrong it won’t matter that much, but if you don’t push it, its an absolute cert than you won’t get that opportunity again!

Categories: Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · business strategy · communications · consulting · decision · decision-making · indecision · management · marketing · opportunity · phil darby