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Entries categorized as ‘consulting’

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

Thursday 13 November 2008 · No Comments

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 · No Comments

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 · No Comments

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 · No Comments

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

Since when was marketing the same as communications or sales?

Monday 19 May 2008 · No Comments

I’ve been having one of those weeks when the same question repeatedly turns up and this week it has been an old one that never ceases to surprise me. Early in the process of my Brand Discovery programme workshops we get around to defining marketing. Simple you might think, but you’d be surprised. There’s no lack of confidence behind the answers I get, but there are some very weird ideas!

The most common problem is that people - and remember the people I am talking to are supposed to be marketers so they should have this well and truly sorted - confuse marketing and marketing communication. Of course communication is a critical component of marketing, but it’s by no means the whole deal and if that’s your universe then not only is life going to be difficult and boring you won’t actually achieve much.

The other popular misconception is that marketing and sales are the same thing. We see the mistake made every day in recruitment ads. but just because some half-wit, or even a few of them don’t know their arses from their elbows doesn’t make it any less of a crime to agree with them. A crime, by the way, for which I believe perpetrators should be strung up by their delicate body parts and flogged with a copy of one of those marketing tombs that these people have on their bookshelf, but none of them (apparently) read!

You know what I mean. Read beyond the headline of an ad. for a marketing manager and the text describes a sales job. Yes, sales are a component of marketing, but they are just another bus-stop on the scenic route to profit. Marketing is far broader and more complex than sales.

If you Google definitions of “marketing” you’ll see the same mistakes time and again, but the dictionary definition and the one that thankfully you’ll come up with most frequently goes something like this:

“Marketing is the process of generating profit by identifying and leveraging an organisation’s resources to satisfy consumer needs.

Simple isn’t it? Well, yes and no. Its succinct for sure, but the implications are complex. Looking at it like this (which I absolutely believe is the correct definition - that’s why I wrote it!) it’s instantly obvious that marketing plays a part in every function within any organisation. Its about designing products and service offers that you can deliver using the resources at your disposal and which satisfy consumer needs, making sure that they are available and at the right price and telling potential customers about it and more.

While you are doing this you get to understand more about customers, competitors and market trends, which helps you identify your weaknesses (wrong manufacturing equipment, poor distribution and my favourite, people and recruitment etc.) and fix them, adding new people, resources and changing practices and structures. So, though this might sound like heresy to some people, marketing is well and truly a part of operations, distribution, manufacturing and recruitment for a start.

This same insight also enables marketers to understand the relevance of the product offer and define how to improve that too so (perhaps less radically) marketing involves a contribution to product design.

Even when you have the right product, life is such that there are probably a dozen alternative and equivalent products for consumers to choose from in their local store - Hey, I didn’t say this was easy! - and that’s where brands come in. Sure, you can begin to create an emotional differentiation in the cosmetics and packaging of your product - ask Philips Apple, Sony, Harley Davidson and pretty well all the auto manufacturers about this. However, that’s only a small step in the direction of branding and brand development and I’m not going to explain more - That’s what I get paid for!

In the “making sure you can deliver it …” department we get into internal marketing, which involves training and therefore brings HR into the equation. This is another of my favourite areas and one in which I think pretty well every business I see is under-performing. Delivery not only concerns the physical delivery of a product, but embraces the delivery of the emotional promise inherent in every brand. OK, you’ve heard me say this before, but its where most organisations slip up so I make no apologies for repeating myself.

Apart from not knowing what marketing is, the thing that prevents most organisations marketing effectively is their structure, practices and above all culture (I say “above all” because if the culture is right then the rest tends to get sorted). Most businesses are set up in silos representing different departments and that perpetuates a lack of cooperation between disciplines. Worse still, marketing is frequently viewed as one of the junior functions, sometimes even treated as separate to the mainstream business. Needless to say there isn’t much of a future for an organisation that doesn’t acknowledge the central role of marketing, but its essential for everyone on the team, whatever their specialisation, to be able to influence the work of other departments, which for most organisations means a new structure and set of practices. Thankfully I am increasingly encountering astute CEOs who create businesses with the cross-fertilisation and specialist accountability that is essential to business success in today’s competitive marketplace.

A structure like this works because it acknowledges that everyone around the table has capabilities or ideas beyond the boundaries of their defined role, but understands that specialists should call the shots in their own environment. For example, marketers tell the manufacturing/operations guys what they should make, the manufacturers decide how they are going to do this and identify what they need from everyone else in order to achieve that. This includes, for instance, the level of investment that the CEO needs to find. If to create the products, produce and deliver them requires a change in personnel the HR department either re-assign existing human resources or hire and train new people.

It works in reverse too. Having devised a strategy for delivering the necessary human resource, the HR people will hire the communications specialists to devise the communications that deliver the right people to the door and because communications is the essence of training the marketing people will be lending their expertise to this too. At each of these cross-over points there is opportunity for all parties’ input.

Part of the framework of HR strategy (as well as design, manufacturing and every other strategy in the organisation) will be the Brand Model that the Marketing Department has created with contributions from the board. No organisation is going to get very far from home without a Brand Model.

To bring us back to our second great misconception; a Brand Model is where marketing and sales rub shoulders because when the sales folks take to the stage in this business pantomime they will also have to be working within the framework of the Brand Model. The HR folks will have seen to it that they are the right people for the job and together with the marketing people will have created a training programme that will deliver them to their cue. Now its their turn to represent the brand and its promise - in fact, they could be the only flesh-and-blood manifestation of the brand the customer gets to see, so not only will they find it easier to sell if they work within the Brand Model and maintain consistency of message (see earlier [posts on consistency), but the organisation is depending on how faithfully they represent the brand promise for future sales.

Even though this is a very much simplified scenario the fact that marketing impacts on every area of every business should be pretty obvious. So, if you find yourself in one of my seminars or workshops and this question comes up, you’ll know not to tell me that marketing is the same as communications or sales.

Categories: Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · brand · communications · consulting · efficiency · management · marketing · phil darby · recruitment · sales · strategy

What’s HR to do with marketing?

Thursday 17 April 2008 · No Comments

OK, I know I rattle on a lot about the various vested interests within organisations that prevent real cohesion or an integrated approach, but that’s because I keep bumping into ivory tower-builders and political dead-heads who undermine organisations’ success.

For instance, those of you who know me will know that I have always promoted the idea of HR as a marketing function.  After all, the definition of marketing is to leverage an organisation’s resources in order to deliver something that people want or need in the most efficient way and the biggest resource any organisation has are its people. So, as long as HR is about managing the employee resource it has to be a marketing function.

The problem is that HR people so rarely see it this way. There’s something so separatist about the way that HR is set up in most organisations that I come across, you would think that their role had nothing at all to do with the business.

I came across a national retail organisation the other day that was having great difficulty recruiting good store managers. This same organisation however, had recruited a manager in waiting and put her “on ice” as a deputy manager at one of its stores . This manager made an real impact and was very highly thought of so when the incumbent manager went on extended leave she stepped into the manager’s role and immediately produced better figures and team spirit.

The regular manager walked back into her job after six months or so and the stand-in was stepped down again. Odd enough in itself, but for some months the organisation continued to pay her a manager’s salary, so she lived with it. Then came the whammy, because the organisation’s HR people discovered some months down the line that they had been paying her as a manager when she had been acting as a deputy and demanded the incremental salary back from her. They were at pains to point out to me that they were legally entitled to do so, but, of course, that’s hardly the point.  It takes a very special level of stupidity for any organisation to do this route let alone one that was having problems finding good people.

The HR position was that “rules are rules” and the woman wasn’t entitled to a manager’s salary if she wasn’t doing a manager’s job. It quite escaped them that it was their fault that she wasn’t doing the job and as for the small matter of pissing-off a valuable employee, they didn’t see it as their problem. Their job was to enforce the rules, it was the job of operations to field that one! Frankly, I hope they go broke (and it seems they might), but even then I’m sure they won’t get it.

A couple of weeks back I was chatting with the global HR Director of one of our most respected marketing services groups who was explaining to me why the marcoms sector had a really primitive approach to HR (Tell me about it!) However, I’m not sure they are as alone in this as he seems to think. There are so many things wrong with the HR set-up in most organisations that its hard to know where to start, but there are two critical issues:

A) Although they are dealing with people most HR departments appear to be hide-bound by bureaucracy - and we all know where that leads.

B) So few HR people understand how crucial their role is to the delivery of the brand promise and certainly don’t visualise themselves as marketers.

Brands are communities and that means they are the sum of the attitudes, standards and opinions of their members. I work with organisations to drive business growth by developing their brands, not, by means of the papering-over-the-cracks-and-making-empty-promises approach that appears to be the default position adopted by most organisations, but by actually delivering a promise that people respond to. Delivery has a lot to do with having the right employees, so recruitment (under general HR) plays a critical role. My agency friend waxed lyrical about the deficiencies of recruitment consultants and their numbers-driven approach and plans to solve this one by removing outsourced recruitment entirely and replacing it with an in-house department that serves the organisation’s global needs. More power to his elbow I say!

Success is also about getting all of your people behind the brand and pushing in the same direction, which is what internal marketing is all about.  This is also very much a job for HR under the general management of their marketing colleagues yet I frequently have to argue with clients for the inclusion of HR people in the brand discovery workshops I run, which to me is a key indicator of old-fashioned, unenlightened, inefficient, or just plain shoddy management.

Of course, HR people are often the authors of their own destiny in this respect.  While it all seems pretty logical to me, I often feel myself slipping into Columbus’s shoes as he received the reaction to his suggestion that the world wasn’t flat! Then again, identifying the chicken and the egg in this cycle is something of a challenge.  Maybe  HR people have just been trained into this viewpoint by generations of sadly-lacking general management.

In the final analysis though, the argument is redundant, because as soon as you start identifying the things that drive success, you inevitably home in on the brand and when you dig into this you can’t help but realise how critical the HR function is to your brand development.  It all comes back to the need for an organised approach like my Brand Discovery programme, which I know isn’t the only programme in this area, but you’ll excuse me if I stick to the view that its the best - unless you know different that is?

Categories: Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · HR · Human resources · The Full Effect Company · brand · brand development · brands · change · consistency · consulting · internal marketing · management · marketing · phil darby · strategy

That National Branding thing again!

Wednesday 26 March 2008 · 1 Comment

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I’m back in the UK for a while at the moment and my inadvertent, but perfect timing landed me right in the middle of one of my favorite debates - national branding.

I wrote a post about this about a year ago and added it to this blog in January (”Brand Britain”). I’m fascinated by the issues of large-scale brand development projects and they don’t come much larger than national branding. I’m also fascinated by the workings of government, so this is an area where I get some seriously big kicks. Of course, the participants in this debate rarely recognise the subject as “branding”. I have heard it referred to by many names this week, but that’s what it is aright and all the private sector rules apply.

The subject seemed to come to the surface this week in reaction to a new report, commissioned by the government and prepared by Lord Goldsmith on “Citizenship”. In their usual helpful way the British press have leapt upon a small recommendation that Lord Goldsmith made within it - that British kids should swear allegiance to the Queen and/or the flag on a daily basis at school. Of course they have as usual and probably on purpose, completely miss-represented what he was saying. The interpretation that they have been pedalling being that if kids are made to swear allegiance to the flag regularly enough they’ll start to conform - of course this very much a reversal of the truth and I am sure nowhere near what Lord Goldsmith was saying.

By way of putting my cards on the table I have to say that I believe that many, if not all of the ills of our nation (and probably many other nations too) stem from a lack of national pride. National pride is a larger-scale equivalent of self-respect and very much the same kind of thing that drives the family communities that Conservative leader David Cameron is going on about. Its also that same emotional soup from which strong brands derive. Nations, and brands are both communities and communities are built on the reassurance, feeling of belonging and confidence that arise when beliefs, attitudes and values are shared.

I was having a conversation with a chap in Prague a few weeks ago who was convinced that the reason that Czechs have become so bickering, back-biting and self-absorbed since the fall of communism is that their hatred of their communist oppressors that was once a common bond wasn’t replaced with anything else. Sadly, being basically clueless, the politicians there haven’t even come close to being up for this key task. As a result the country now has no focus, no common objective, no shared belief and as a result a state of every man for himself has developed in the void. For the Czechs this fact represents a seriously missed opportunity - the country was a blank sheet of paper, everyone was looking for a lead. The invitation was out for someone to pull it all together and nobody stepped up to the plate. While the first second republic president Havel was great at galvanising a generally ambivalent nation towards revolution, he proved singularly incapable of filling the void he had created. Klaus on the other hand, as witnessed by his New York speech three weeks ago, appears to be representing the emerging grab-all-you-can philosophy that is dominant in the republic now.

In the UK the task of focusing or re-focusing a nation is rather more complex. In exactly the same way that the structures and practices that a large organisation develops to help it maintain a status quo become the biggest obstacle to change, the UK is finding that, even though it may have the will to change the structures and practices of government and all other interested parties, that have been built and reinforced over the centuries now prevent that change.

Its not unlike the story that is unfolding in the US right now too. Obama recognises the need for change and seems to have a reasonable theory for bringing it about, while Hilary claims that her experience and insights of the people and the system give her the understanding Barak lacks when it comes to pre-empting and overcoming resistance to change. She says he will fail because he’s not going to know where the ambushes are going to come from (Although I’m not sure that she agrees with the principles of change any more than the ambushers she is so familiar with!).

However, as Barak says, once you recognise the need for change you are duty-bound to start trying to bring it about and that’s where US politics are ahead of the UK - they have Barak Obama, we Brits don’t seem to have anybody focussed enough to make it all happen. This fact mirrors my experience in brand development too. I frequently come across organisations who have in the past brought in some of the heavy guns to help them address their brand issues only to find that while they are great on spotting the problem and coming up with solutions, they often fail miserably when it comes to implementing them. My answer to this is a logical step-by-step approach that tackles all the obstacles in order. I go through this methodically, which takes time, but ensures that ultimately the required changes are brought about.

The first step with any project like this is to establish common ground (That’s what my Brand Model is all about) and that’s where the problems lie in the UK. I’ve listened to the views on this subject of a good many spokespeople for different interested parties over the last week or so and while I can see that there is fundamental agreement between many of them few of them recognise it, many are arguing about semantics and a very large proportion of them are confusing cause and effect. None of the people who I have heard representing any of the organisations seem to have a clue how to get things moving and all are very narrowly and tactically focussed.

What we and every other nation need is a senior minister whose sole responsibility is as champion of our national brand. Only then will we begin to be able to introduce the understanding among stakeholders and the initiatives we need to drive brand development. Its what is happening in the private sector, many businesses have directors responsible for brand development.

Compelling kids to salute the flag is definitely not the way to go, but a sure sign of the success of any national branding initiative would be if kids really wanted to raise their baseball hats when they passed a national flag. Actually, its not completely beyond hope either. As a part-time resident of Prague I see more Brit tourists wearing the George flag or Union Jack as they wander the attractions (or more commonly fall over in a bar!) and we are all familiar with the crowds at international football matches and other sporting events. So there’s is something to build on. So where is that national brand builder going to come from?

Categories: Barack · Clinton · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · Government · National Branding · The Full Effect Company · Tourism · brand · brands · change · communist · consulting · czech · hilary · internal marketing · management · marketing · phil darby · social groups · strategy · tradition

Data, strategy and tactics

Friday 29 February 2008 · No Comments

We’re all very hot on strategy these days.  It seems everyone is suddenly a strategist.  There’s also a lot of talk about data collection.  However, a problem I find on my travels around organisations is that too few organisations put the two concepts together. 

Every business needs a data strategy, if you don’t have one you’ll be wasting time and money.  The spectrum of data abusing businesses that I come across ranges from those that are drowning under a deluge of data that they can’t organise or analyse (trying to drink from the fire hose) or those which have big holes in their insights where they forgot to ask some of the key questions. 

The sobering thought is, if you are in the drowning category you will have paid for data that you can’t use.  If you have holes you’ll have paid for half the picture when the full picture would usually have cost you the same - either way, its inefficient and as we all know, these days you are either efficient or on the slippery slope to the trash bin.  Yet many organisation still just collect data piecemeal, as and when they feel they can, with no particular rhyme or reason.

There’s a third category of data abusers too, which is probably the biggest in terms their data use and that’s businesses that have data and have managed to turn it into insights, but are unable to act upon them.  Mostly this is because organisations that are heavily into data, like financial services groups, are using it for direct marketing and a lot of that is systematised and/or automated to such a degree that their structures and even their culture is bound up in the system.  Once you have a system like this its hard to change.  The bottom line there is that your scope for improvemrent is confined to, as a well-known data marketer friend of mine is renown for repeating, “polishing turds”.

Next time you get a presentation from a data management consultancy or analyst, stop them at the slide that lists the savings that they claim they helped their clients achieve.  There is always a slide like this and the wording if they are honest at all is a dead give-away.  Usually its something like “we showed so-and-so how they could save £20million on their DM investment”.  The weasels there are “showed” and “could” because the bane of most data consultancies lives is the fact that very little of the potential savings that they identify are ever achieved.

I spent a good part of last year working with one of our biggest data management consultancies to develop an end-to-end process for collecting analysing and acting on data and I can assure you that data takes on almost magical properties if its managed like this.  Rather than “polish turds”, or to put it more elegantly “refine tactical activity”, we created a model that applied carefully gathered and analysed data at both strategic and tactical level.  The end result was a data driven approach to marketing where marketing was where it should be, firmly in the driving seat of the business and the entire business was built around a brand community with a heart that beat in time to that of its customers.  The data drove the brand development, which in turn drove the internal marketing and therefore the “promise” delivery (including product and offer development), right through to the tactical communications and promotional initiatives.  And this is the way it works, from the top not as the in the case of the tactical application model, with the tail wagging the dog!

This kind of thing is only possible when you start with a clear vision of what you need to know, how data will contribute to that knowledge and how you are going to get that data - in other words a data strategy.  You’ll need the right tools for the job too of course.  I still see quite large firms who keep their data on an Excel spread sheet - it doesn’t work, get real!  You’ll also need to get used to the idea that you should collect data at every touch-point, which is perfectly feasible if you apply a little ingenuity.  Once you get your head around that things get a bit easier.  Then all you have to do is convince your marketing services partners that their initiatives need to contribute to data collection and that the data they collect will in turn influence their future initiatives (or as one agency bright-spark put it “anything it says may be used against them!”).  Too bloody right and about time I say!

Categories: Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · advertising · analytics · brand · brands · consulting · data · data analysis · efficiency · marketing · media · phil darby · strategy · tactical

How big is a “big idea”?

Friday 29 February 2008 · 1 Comment

dreamstime_1859101.jpgI talk a lot about “the big idea” to clients and the delegates to my seminars, in fact anybody who will listen. The fashion in marketing these days seems to be to focus on the delivery of the message rather more than the message itself and while I think its right that we should all be striving to make delivery more efficient, the danger is that some of us are ignoring an equally important issue. You might have the best delivery system in the business, but if you don’t have anything worth saying you may as well not bother!

Maybe it harks back to my creative roots, but I am passionate about “the big idea”. Its a principle that applies equally to all areas of business not just marketing communications, but I can’t help having that “Yes!” reaction when I see some of the great creative solutions that have come from marketing services firms like Lowe and Droga5 (some of their recent stuff blows me away).

I was talking to the VP Marketing of a global telco a couple of weeks ago and he was expressing his frustration at not being able to find a marketing services firm that genuinely embraced the “big idea”. The point he was making was that if he briefed an advertising agency they would come back with a response that worked on TV and maybe some other media, but didn’t really have legs in the context of the far greater communications arena that we acknowledge today. The same applied if he briefed a promotions company or an experiential agency. He felt that nobody was capable of separating the “idea” from the media - nothing changes then!

There’s another aspect to this that was brought home to me recently in a dialogue I was having on another blog. The subject there was “trade shows” and most contributors were commenting that as new methods of measurement were becoming available and practical they were revealing that trade shows weren’t viable. My angle on this was that, as with any other communications route, the bar has been raised considerably and like TV, and press there was no point investing in a trade show unless you had a “big dea” that would cut through and get you noticed. One contributor responded with the statement that he had found that even with a “big idea” he was struggling and he posted photos of a recent trade show exhibit. Once I saw these I realise that it isn’t about acceptance of the need for a big idea, but having the discernment to recognise how big a “big idea” had to be. His example was positively pants! Definitely grounds for firing his agency.

There’s a parallel here with the delegates to my Brand Discovery workshops, who when it comes to the point where they have to nominate their “point of difference” always come up with stuff that is mundane and very ordinary. Of course, that’s why we marketing folks are here, but I think that even in our world genuine creativity is rare. I see far too many so-so agencies who think they have cracked it - its self delusional.

Going back to Droga5, In response to a brief to tackle in-school use of mobile phones that was disrupting lessons, they did a deal with Motorola and gave away a million mobile phones to students in New York schools as the focal point of their “Million” project (take a look at their case study here). These phones were on a discrete network that delivered only educational content during school hours, but reverted to a normal phone network outside of those hours. Students earned credits to spend on phone calls and other stuff by accessing the educational content. The cost of the exercise was covered in full by advertising, which means that anybody could have done this … if they had the imagination. Now that’s a big idea!

Categories: The Full Effect Company · Trade shows · advertising · below-the-line · brand · brands · consulting · ideas · innovation · marketing · media · phil darby · strategy · the big idea

So, what makes you so different?

Friday 29 February 2008 · No Comments

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Strong personalities appeal to me and I don’t think I’m alone in that. In fact I was reading research last week that suggested that most of us find people with strong characters more attractive than people who were just “nice”. Of course, it’s great, if you can be both - “nice” and “interesting” - but if its an either/or give me “interesting” every time. It adds up to some difficult relationships, but hey! … it makes life colourful and most importantly for us marketers - its engaging!.

This factor influences us in more ways than we might at first appreciate. For instance, it influences the brands that we buy. Think about it. Its how Apple (full of character) scored over Big Blue (full of … boringness?) or how Mark Ecko, the T-shirt guy made his rhinoceros the thing to have on your chest or back pocket (who saw that Air Force One stunt? - Wild!). Talking of aircraft, I don’t know anybody who would consider Ryan Air’s Michael O’Leary to be Mr Nice Guy, but he has become one of those people you love to hate and his airline is a runaway success. Conversely, you don’t see any cool people wearing T-shirts with “Boots the chemist” printed on them because Boots are boring!

This is not some kind of new radical thinking of course. Adam Morgan explained how it works in his book Eating The Big Fish(still one of my favourites) way back in 1998. Its “lighthouse branding” and its the basis of challenger brand marketing. If you are a market leader you might think you can afford to be boring (that’s why so many market leaders are) and of course, once you are there, in the top slot its easy to fall into the trap of believing you don’t have to put yourself out too much thinking of new stuff to make yourself interesting, but while you are kicking back, give a thought to some of the big organisations who had their business snuck away from them while they were resting on their laurels. I can think of a few who are heading that way now.

I’m no advocate of superficial branding, but it’s certainly true that if you want to be successful you have to be the best at what you do and if you can’t be the best being different will certainly buy you the first rung on the ladder. One of the nine elements (the nine P’s) in the brand models we create in my Brand Discovery workshops defines the brand’s “Point of difference”. It still surprises me how few of the delegates to my workshops really appreciate what “different” really means. Rarely is anybody extreme enough at the first pass around the table and its clear that most organisations delude themselves by believing that their very ordinary traits make them distinctive. I usually find that the best way to identify a potential point of difference is to ask customers. For instance, some years ago I worked on this with a mobile phone company whose subscribers told us that they were sick of the complicated tariffs that mobile operators offered. They felt that they were making them confusing on purpose to disguise high costs. We replied with a real point of difference - one tariff for all, wrapped up in a “champions of the people” brand character, and it worked.

Most places that you see a real success story you will find a distinctive brand character - Starbucks, Harley Davidson, Virgin - and they’ll almost always be a response to a consumer need. Modern media makes it simple to gather consumer feedback at pretty much every point of contact so there’s no excuse for not knowing what your customers want, think or believe is interesting and as I always say - every communication in any communication strategy should be two-way. I find there are people who don’t think that’s possible, but you can usually get feedback if you really want it with a little applied ingenuity.

Of course, you still have to deliver your promise and in part that’s about maintaining your point of difference, but that’s the another chapter in my Full Effect Marketing story.

Categories: Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · advertising · brand · brands · consulting · ideas · innovation · marketing · phil darby · promise