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Entries categorized as ‘efficiency’

Where the growth is.

Thursday 2 October 2008 · 2 Comments

Listen! Hear that? Its the sound of the penny dropping in thousands of boardrooms around the globe. Actually, I didn’t hear it either, but its like a black hole, you might not see it, but there’s increasing evidence of it having happened. 

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I have had a few interesting discussions lately with organisations that were looking to leverage their brand community and all of a sudden it seems I am falling over organisations that are doing the same. I was in  Stavanger early this week, talking to investors, business managers and marketing services businesses and the theme emerged there and yesterday in Prague I met a marketer from a leading mobile operator who had this issue clearly in view too.  

At last businesses are realising that its not viable to rely on acquisition to generate your growth - its far too expensive and the return is modest, mainly because most markets are fully subscribed and everyone is buttoning down and tying-in their customers.  The only untethered targets are in emerging economies where you’ll be climbing over your competitors to reach the same customers.  You have to do this of course for the sake of your long-term health, but its more important than ever to do it efficiently and if you visit this post frequently you’ll know that I think we still have some way to go in developing efficient marketing.  However, that’s another subject.

There aren’t a lot of folks around right now who are looking for stuff to spend their cash on, most are struggling with the commitments they already have and those that aren’t are quickly becoming as rare as hen’s teeth.  Other than the poor inundated souls in these new territories there just aren’t going to be any new customers to chase so your growth has to come from your existing customers.  This is nothing new.  Way back in 2005 the State of Marketing Survey that was conducted by IDG for Prophet revealed that 62% of business growth was already comming from existing customers and that organisations were looking to the same segment for 72% of their growth in 2006 (it doesn’t seem that Prophet have followed up on that report so I can’t say that they were right although its a believable figure).

So, there’s still no doubt that the emphasis has to be on growth from existing customers (in fact it might be moreso) but factors like the arrival of recession mean that even this cash cow is about to become tougher to milk.  So where is the easy growth going to come from?  The answer to that question takes us straight back to The Brand As A Medium, one of my long time causes, but, of course, to to be in this game you first have to have a strong brand community. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, I’ve been promoting the need for brand development for years.  If you weren’t listening and didn’t get your brand in shape you are in trouble because you don’t build the kind of brand strength you will need to make this work, overnight.  In the past I’ve managed to deliver measurable results from brand-building programmes over a twelve month time-span, but, everything is tougher now and if your brand isn’t sorted already, you need to be thinking in terms of a three-year development phase before your community offers third parties any real value.  Sorry, but these are the facts!

Before you jump from your executive balcony though …  If you start now, and I mean this minute, today, and run a brand development programme in parrallel with an operational efficiency drive you might just emerge from the recession fit for battle.  Note please, I’m not saying you’ll achieve growth to match that of the businesses that did their prep.  You might get something short term, but for you payback will come when trading conditions improve.  Never before has Full Effect Marketing and programmes like Brand Discovery been more relevant.

Categories: Brand Discovery · Brand Model · Brand promise · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · advertising · brand · brand development · brand name · branding · brands · business development · business strategy · community · efficiency · integrated marketing · internal marketing · management · marketing · media · phil darby · strategy · third-party advertisers

The new challenge for marketers in Central Europe

Friday 29 August 2008 · No Comments

Things tend to run to a pattern.  When Middle East markets started to develop I witnessed how the initial surge of ex-pat managers was replaced wholesale by cheaper local workers just as soon as their bosses felt they could handle things.  Things started to slide shortly afterwards giving rise to the scramble to reinstate many of the key ex-pat managers before the appropriate balance of local/ex-pat managers was finally established.  Not for the first time the adage “there’s no substitute for experience” was given credence.  But, history repeats itself and I’m now watching the same pattern unravel in Central Europe.

Nobody would fail to understand the pride that drives people in emerging markets to take control of their own businesses as soon as they feel able.  However, there’s often an element of naivety associated with this process and that has definitely been the case in some of the Central European nations who have chased off their “expensive” ex-pat managers, or large corporates who have reassigned their senior foreign managers, to other parts of the world.  Nobody would deny the progress that these nations have all made from their Communist roots to the realities of commercialism, but maybe one important reality has been missed.

The fact is that the growth and development that Central Europe has experienced, has, so far, been against a backdrop of a strong European/world economy.  Such was the local competition that for many businesses, success in these markets has been a case of nothing more than turning up and opening your doors for business, but its all change as small consumer bases are spoilt for choice, investors look to other regions of the world for bigger and quicker returns on their investment and the state of the world economy has called time on the gravy train.  Now its game on, real business and the question is “are local managers up to the challenge?”

It seems that the local managers in the CE offices of global giants are better-trained and therefore better equipped than those of smaller, albeit still often multi-national, concerns (although I know of one global where the levels of competence demonstrated by local managers is truly appalling).  However, as the economy shifts and the challenges it represents change, businesses here are definitely sliding further and faster than you would expect in the West and already a couple of businesses that I know of are busy enticing back the ex-pat managers they waved goodbye to not too long ago.  You just can’t make up for fifty years of isolation, in a period when technological and commercial advances were faster and more substantial than ever before, with fifteen years of training in a cushy market, however intensive that training may be.  When the chips are down you need your best men and women and it looks like the best here are reaching the limit of their capability.

A few years ago my then teenage son spent his summer in Prague working as an intern in an advertising agency.  He was assigned to an account team among graduates who were all a good few years older than he was.  Within a couple of weeks he naturally assumed control of a major presentation, which was highly successful, giving rise to a comment by the agency MD that my son was a genius.  Much as fatherly pride might allow me to acknowledge this observation, in reality I have to point out that the truth is that, in this context at least, he wasn’t anything special.  However, having been brought up in a commercial environment he had learned by osmosis and his responses to decision-making situations and his understanding of basic commerce meant that many choices that his temporary colleagues were able to make only as a result of training, he made instinctively and therefore far quicker and appropriately.  These days there isn’t quite such a gulf between the decision-making capability of westerners and locals, but there’s no doubt that local managers are often less confident than you would expect their counterparts in Western markets to be.  Furthermore, where there is confidence it is still frequently and dangerously miss-placed.

To be fair I also have to acknowledge that a notable number of ex-pats who didn’t have the skills and experience to succeed in business in the West have, in the absence of any serious local competition, managed to create quite substantial businesses in these countries.  Such businesses are not excluded from the laws of business gravity though, and many now show signs of having reached the limit of their competence.  It seems that the limitations of their founders and the usual and consequential lack of a capable senior and mid-level management structure have conspired to leave many of these organisations vulnerable too.

So where are we going with this?  The so far gravity-defying Czech economy, despite vastly inflated property prices and increasing supermarket bills, appears on the surface to be healthier than most of its European neighbours, but if things start to slide it would seem that it will take the best that the best managers can offer to avoid some serious retrenchment.  Whether local managers (indigenous or ex-pat) are up to the challenge is yet to be seen, but so far the signs are not good and my guess is that the skills of those who are good enough wll be stretched far too thin.

There are a healthy number of SMEs in the Czech Market for example, but when you study them closely they are largely one-man-and-a-dog operations that are going nowhere, even in the favourable conditions that have prevailed so far.  Czechs are largely not commercially ambitious and most of those who are, set their sights on the trappings of success rather than the performance standards and quality of execution that will bring them.  My guess is that the commercial landscape of countries like this will change dramatically in the near future.  A purge of dead wood maybe and a wake-up for the complacent who think that they had “made it”.  Its all grist to the mill of commerce, but I am sure that some of the people that I see on a daily basis in Central Europe will be shocked to say the least, to see substantial organisations that they had assumed, because of their scale, were bullet-proof, disappearing from the business map.  The writing is on the wall for some already.

I am sure the tourism sector will be among the first to face the challenge.  Until now places like Prague have represented good value for travellers from the West, but this is no longer the case.  Strength of the Czech Korun combined with the high margins that typically inefficient businesses require, mean that prices for most things are (at least) equal to those in the UK.  Branded goods are usually more expensive and quality of domestic products and service remain well below the West.  Service is a particular issue.  With hard-pressed Westerners forced to be picky about where they spend their holiday money, it may be that the summer surge of tourists on which economies like Prague’s depend will be reduced to a trickle.  There’s a counter to this of course, because while the traditional Western tourists to Prague may turn away, everyone in the West will be sliding down the holiday scale a little and it may be that travellers who had previously gone to more exotic resorts or cities will discover the alternative that is Central Europe.  Somehow, though, I don’t think so.  Word travels fast, especially in the holiday sector.

I’m not predicting a dramatic collapse by any means, but I would be very surprised if we weren’t going to witness a watershed in the commercial development of some of these Central European countries.

Categories: Brand Discovery · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · Government · The Full Effect Company · brand development · business development · business strategy · central europe · communications · communist · customer · customers · decision · decision-making · developed markets · efficiency · indecision · innovation · management · marketing · opportunity · phil darby

Are we losing sight of strategy?

Thursday 28 August 2008 · No Comments

I was sifting through my spam filter earlier, trying to decide where to buy the Viagra that will “make her smile tonight” and provide an outing for the “massive tool” that I am assured can be mine without surgery, when I came across a mail from an old colleague that had been misdirected there.

I was delighted to hear from him after a lengthy silence, but his message was sad.  Basically, the gist is that he has come to the conclusion that despite their constant talk, organisations really don’t want strategy anymore.  In fact, he suggested that if you corner many senior managers in the pub they’ll tell you that in their opinion, strategy just gets in the way of real day-to-day business.  As a consequence my old colleague is now resigned to a daily routine of moving the usual tactical shit back and forth between an ever-decreasing number of parking places.

These days we are all pretty well agreed that the fundamental difference between a successful oragnisation and an unsuccessful one is efficiency.  The thing is that in an effort to increase their efficiency many organisations have thrown the baby out with the bathwater - reducing head-count without establishing a stragic framework or methodology.  For those of us who have undertaken house renovations on any scale this is akin to setting up your Acrow props to keep the ceiling in place, knocking down the supporting wall and then removing the props without first installing the RSJ.  The result is that your days thereafter will be spent addressing the purely tactical issue of preventing parts of your bedroom from moving into your lounge.  Most organisation will find that it is possible for them to reduce their marketing head-count, but only if there is a strategic framework in which the tactical day-to-day can operate.  If not, the tactical will take over and demand ever increasing time and resource.

If, like me, you studied such things when notes were taken with a pen and paper (if not a slate!) you’ll be familiar with the debate over the relationship between transactional and transformational management.  Having decided that the traditional cycle, which alternated between a transactional and transformational business model, produced business modulations with a less that acceptable aggregate performance, we concluded that a business model that included both elements operating simultaneously was the way to go.  The idea was, and is, that the transformational guys (or strategists) focus on devising new products, services, and marketing ideas, which they then hand over to transactors to perpetuate.  Any organisation is only as good as its next big idea and this is the only way an organisation can generate essential innovation whilst still managing the day-to-day.

Without the appropriate strategic support an organisation is driven ever further into the mire of purely tactical marketing.  Its a mire because a purely tactical approach is slow.  You get left behind.  To keep up you have to continually throw in more resource, which is self-defeating, or add pressure to your personnel, which in turn inevitably leads to dissatisfaction, resignations, lack of continuity, skills gaps and, of course, poor performance on every level.

Going back to the “efficiency” thing, successful organisations are those that reach the market objective first.  Imagine two people, one blindfolded, standing at the end of a corridor littered with largish obstacles.  Now, visualise what would happen if you told them both to get to the opposite end of the corridor as quickly as possible.  The result would be a pretty accurate illustration of the difference between an organisation with a strategy and one without - strategy is your long vision.  You can bumble around without it for a while, but you’ll never win against a competitor with a their tactical and strategic (or transactional and transformational) elements working together.  Strategy is what helps you use your resources more efficiently.  It is not a luxury that you can cut back on when cash is short, but the means to make that cash go further.

We are all familiar with the facts that show that organisations that maintain or even increase their marketing efforts through a recession end up on top when the recession lifts, but I wonder if this result is as much a product of the organisations concerned, stopping and thinking about their business in order to make the bold decision to buck the trend, as it is the investment itself.  If you look at the winners in this scenario they tend to be enlightened businesses with a firm grasp of the real issues and a sound strategic habit.

Despite all the lessons of the past, it remains a common recessionary practice to cut back on strategy and focus on the short-term when times get tough.  Now I think about it, I have probably encountered an increasing number of businesses in recent months that appear to be retrenching into the tactical.  I even had the CEO of a major listed company tell me the other day that he was too busy with day-to-day business to find the time to work on strategy, but is my old colleague right?  Are businesses really abandoning the long-vision in favour of the tactical treadmill, or is this just a predictable recessionary blip?  I can’t really believe that the former is so, but what do you think?

Now, where is that Viagra supplier …?

Categories: Brand Discovery · Brand Model · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · brand · brand development · brands · business development · business strategy · efficiency · innovation · management · marketing · promise

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

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

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

Delivering the customer service promise … or not!

Wednesday 27 February 2008 · No Comments

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I’m on a customer service kick again having just wasted the best part of a day battling with O2’s customer support.

In the Czech Republic Telefonica O2 recently acquired the once state-owned Czech Telecom and their mobile counterpart Eurotel and with them what was probably the worst customer service in the developed world.  Somehow the arrogance of public ownership had combined with a Communist appreciation of what customer service is all about, absolutely no consumer insights and zero training to create a customer service resource that had infinite flexibility to be able NOT to deliver whatever you needed.  Yes, I am sure they actually went out of their way to make life impossible!

Luckily the boys at Telefonica have risen to the challenge and in a reasonably short period have begun to respond to  current needs, anticipate future ones and even create processes for resolving them.

My problem was that as a self-confessed media junkie (integration was invented just for me) I travel the world with my lap-top set up to deliver English language TV, movies, news etc. wherever I may be.  I’m not usually at my Prague base for long periods of time but this month I appear to have outstayed my welcome (at least with Telefonica/O2) by downloading more than they think I should have (Maybe something to do with watching the entire first series of Lost!?).  The result being that I received a hefty slap on the wrist in the form of a download speed restriction that reduced my bandwidth from 4mb to 88kbps - very friendly!

Now, I could launch into one of my pet subjects here with a piece entitled “When is unlimited download not unlimited?” and turn this whole thing around into a case for revealing the “fair user policy” that some ISPs adopt for the miss-sell that it represents - to my mind if you buy unlimited download you should get unlimited download and anything short of that should be considered breach of contract.  However, I’m determined to keep to the point here, which is … why having gone to all the trouble of training and devising programmes for the resolution of customer issues anybody - and Telefonica are not alone here - should hand it over to web site developers to completely bugger up.

Why, when everyone seems to be talking about and nodding to the suggestion that you should never be more than a couple of clicks away from satisfaction on any web site, do so many organisations that I believe genuinely understand customers and want to solve their problems, have web sites with customer support that you need GPS and a native guide to find your way around? (My old English teacher would love that sentence/paragraph!)

All I wanted to do was buy a quid’s worth of extra bandwidth to see me through the week and it took four phone calls and more time on the O2 web site that I would care to recall (or add-up the cost of).  The reasons for this were firstly that this service is not available via the telephone customer service, only on line.  Secondly, web site navigation was unending, but my biggest issue is that, for some reason that I can’t fathom, Telefonica O2 insist on giving things cute names that you are supposed to instinctively relate.

Pardon me for being simple, but if I want to buy extra bandwidth I’m looking for a menu item that says something like “buy extra bandwidth”.  Unfortunately T/O2 don’t see it that way.  They think that its far more appropriate to list “Data Klik” among a never ending menu of similarly cute names at the end of a navigation challenge that goes like this.

Home>Private>Customer Care>On-line Services and applications>Log-in (this is great because you are supposed to have at your fingertips a sixteen character login and password that you won’t have used since the day you set up your modem)>My services>Data Klik (if you knew it was call this)>order>send.  Sorted!

Maybe I’m slow, but it took me conversations with four different customer service representatives to fathom that route.  Yes, I couldn’t buy the service on the phone but I had to use the phone service to find out how to use the on-line service - does that make sense? - No, of course not!  Only the last guy gave me the impression that he had ever seen the web site himself or knew that what I was looking for was “data klik”.  One thought I could buy it from a colleague over the phone, but having transferred me the colleague was as confused as I was, another cut me off and didn’t call back (I assume they have number recognition at the telephone company?) the third gave me completely the wrong instructions - Oh, and I got through to a recorded message that told me that there were no operators available, but if I left a message they would call me back, which I did.  That was two days ago now and I’m still waiting!

So, I guess at least some of the morals of this story are:

  • Never trust a web developer to create a customer service web site
  • Keep marketing speak out of it - call a spade a spade and everyone will understand.
  • If your mechanism doesn’t deliver your customer service, you have no customer service.

Actually, this experience actually had a negative influence on my opinion of Telefonica/O2 and it is a really good example of where the inefficiencies lie in organisations like this.  They could significant and directly reduce their need for investment by fixing this problem, but it will be a drop in the ocean compared to the savings they would make if they just stopped pissing customers off by putting them through this mill. 

As the market leader by a long way they may be less driven than their competitors on issues like this and rather less concerned than they should be about achieving efficiencies and increasing ROI, but as one of their competitors has pledged to take their leadership position within two years I hardly think they can afford to hang around. 

Of course this is my old subject Integrated Marketing again and how it applies to the delivery of the brand promise - in this case the promise is “customer service”!

Categories: CRM · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · O2 · Telefonica · The Full Effect Company · brand · brands · call centre · central europe · contact centre · customer service · design · efficiency · management · marketing · navigation · on-line · phil darby · purchasing · web site

Expanding the “Genetic Marketing” idea

Thursday 3 January 2008 · 2 Comments

For those of you who might be interested in the concept I floated in my post last month ”So it looks like marketing might be science after all” you can download a short summary of my thoughts on this subject here.  Feel free to come back and add your own thoughts and comments or join the discussion on LinkedIn.com. under “Genetic Marketing”.

Categories: CRM · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · consulting · data · data analysis · efficiency · gene · genetic · ideas · innovation · marketing · phil darby · recruitment · strategy

“Integrated Marketing”. If you don’t know what it is, you probably aren’t doing it!

Tuesday 1 January 2008 · 4 Comments

I’ve been trawling the blogs this week and I’m amazed at just how confused some of the “experts” are about integrated marketing.  For example, it seems to be a  common misconception that “integrated marketing” is buying all your marcoms from one source. 

Apart from the fact that this is impossible anyway (the range of elements is infinitely wider than any one marketing firm could accommodate) its just utter bollocks!  Buying all your services from one place, if it were not complete fiction, might be a termed a one-stop shop, which is the band-waggon that a bunch of terminally unimaginative marketing services firms jumped on back in the seventies when they realised that their gravy train was heading into a siding, but forget it, you are not even close.  So let’s start at the beginning.

“Marketing” is the process of leveraging an organisation’s resources to deliver the solution to a customer need - right?  Its not advertising or any other kind of communication and its certainly not “sales” (Don’t all those recruitment ads for marketing managers that are really sales jobs just do your head in?) although both of these are components of marketing.

Conversely, “communication”, is not “marketing” but something that we all use, all the time, including when we are “doing” marketing, in which context it involves stuff like advertising, PR (That’s Press and Public Relations), direct marketing, web for sure (I wish I hadn’t started this list because all those that I don’t list you’ll think I’ve forgotten!  Please take it that we all know the traditional media routes).  It also means that often forgotten and massively misunderstood area - internal marketing.  However, it embraces stuff like the way your phones are answered, the way your company vehicles are driven, the look and feel of your stores, the attitude of your sales staff, your products themselves, where the are sold … I could go on, but the last time a workshop of mine made a list we had to stop at a hundred and counting.  Take it from me no organisation appreciates all the ways in which it communicates.

“Sales” come into it for the first time somewhere in the middle of the marketing process - the stages before are the lead up to the sale and the bits afterwards are CRM leading on to repeat purchases (which is where the investment really starts to pay off).

“Integrated”, last time I looked at a dictionary, meant “combining”.  I don’t think that’s changed.  So “integrated marketing” is (drum roll) “combining your marketing”!  Simple isn’t it?  Well, no actually, it isn’t.

“Integrated marketing” means taking all your marketing elements and making sure that they are all working efficiently and effectively together to achieve a common goal. 

So, if marketing involves every area of a business, to be integrated you have to embrace every aspect of your business with a single strategy that addresses every function - an integrated business and marketing strategy - and ultimately one management point.  However, the big obstacle to actually “doing” integrated marketing is the way that most businesses are set up.  The traditional business model encourages silos and ivory tower thinking, positions marketing as a separate, support function and therefore actually prevents  integration!

To achieve the kind of efficiency that is essential for a business today the organisation has to be built around its brand, marketing has to be the core discipline and firmly in the driving seat and the marketing department coordinates.  There is no other way, this is how it works and the organisations that have quit arguing and just got on with it are now reaping the rewards.  Great for them because they have established a new level of competition.  Using a soccer analogy its as though they are playing 4-4-2 when the rest are still using the 2-3-5 formation that went out with the introduction of the off-side law in the 1920’s.

The thought of changing their structure and introducing new thinking is viewed by many organisations as a step too far, which is why we see many businesses clinging on to the old ways.  However, they’ll either change or die and the sooner they start with a new approach the less painful and the more manageable the change process will be.  In fact, it needn’t be as traumatic as some people expect, as long as its done early enough and there’s just about time to get in on the act, although we are well into the eleventh hour already.

Its clear why a marketing services firm like an advertising agency isn’t going to be able to help you out - its a long way beyond their area of expertise, although it doesn’t stop some of them offering.  Its also nothing that  design group or branding agency can solve for you either, although we need these firms, who at least understand a little of the subject, to contribute their communications expertise to integrated marketing strategies.  There’s no getting away from it, its up to the organisation to take the initiative and prepare the ground.  Such an organisation should also be ready to handle the ongoing coordination and management, although probably with the support of a marketing or business specialist, but beware, there are a great many so-called experts out there who don’t really get it.

Categories: CRM · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · advertising · brand · brands · consulting · customer service · efficiency · internal marketing · management · marketing · phil darby · sales · strategy

You are only as good as your NEXT big idea!

Monday 17 December 2007 · No Comments

ideaedit.jpgIs yours an “ideas organisation”?  If not you’d better get it together quick, because this is the era of innovation!

More than ever before, ideas are the currency of business.  You know that smart, latest thing, all-singing-all-dancing, electronic doo-dah you just carried home from the store? - Its obsolete!  Yes that’s right - dead, old hat, done, finished with, give it to your granny.  Meet son-of-your-doo-dah.  Yes, he’s there on the production line in all his gleaming glory, just in front of, hey … can it be … it sure is … son-of-son-of-your doo-dah!  In fact products in competitive sectors have no end of descendants in various stages of development heading for the stores, but the phenomenon isn’t exclusive to electronics or even consumer goods.  Product development is the future for any business and if you want to have a future at all you are going to have to liberate some of the ideas that are in your organisation.  Yes, that’s right, they are there already … well, some anyway.

A few years back I was having a conversation with a junior secretary in an advertising agency whose role it was to gather and collate local competitive activity for a major retail chain in towns where they were planning expansion.  Out of that conversation grew an entirely new, breakthrough product/service called Store Report that not only assessed the competition, but provided national retailers with local campaign flexibility and a range of plug-in promotions to supplement their national activity.  The thing was, it wasn’t my idea it was the secretary’s and it wouldn’t have seen the light of day if I hadn’t, by chance, been chatting with her.  Store Report spawned its own business unit and generated revenue for years to come, but most of all it demonstrated to me and, I guess the management of the agency that ideas are locked inside the heads of employees in organisations everywhere - an ideas organisation just liberates them!

So how do you become an ideas organisation?  Well, I’m afraid its back to brand development and internal marketing again.  There’s no getting away from it your brand is the source of every success and failure you have had or will have.  Being an ideas organisation is in your DNA … or not, as the case may be.  Unfortunately for a great many organisations it is usually not, but it is a strand that you can grow back if the people at the top of your organisation are truly committed and you take an organised approach that starts with a brand model (See “Brand Discovery” tab above).

Categories: Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · brands · consulting · corporate · efficiency · innovation · internal marketing · management · marketing · phil darby · strategy