Category Archives: efficiency

Don’t be a knee-jerk. Turn that bad patch into an opportunity.

Posted on Tuesday 28 December 2010 | Leave a comment

Last week following a rare (these days) squash triumph I was chatting to a couple of players behind the courts who pointed out that having looked like the Xmas turkey at one point, in their words, I’d refused to panic and managed to pull myself into the lead point-by-point and held on until the end.

I was reflecting on this conversation a while later and realised that the “not panicking” thing also has parallels in business.  Most organisations go through rough patches at some point in their history, but what separates the men from the boys is the way they rise (or don’t) to the challenge.

Even rock bottom  is no time for knee-jerk responses, unless your instincts are flawless (and if that were the case, you probably wouldn’t be having lean times in the first place).  Failure is more often a case of the business not keeping to strategy than it is the strategy itself, so, first off, take an honest and close look at your business to be sure that you are staying true to your aims at every point in your delivery process.

Don’t make the mistake of switching all your resources to the front line either.  You have to remember that sales have their own gestation period.  If your sales ratio is one in twenty leads, doubling your sales resources will only give you the ability to follow up twice as many leads.  You may get twice as many sales for a limited period this way, but you’ll very quickly realise you’ll need twice as many leads to keep going and that’s about the rest of your marketing machine.  In fact, best practice is firstly to focus on activities earlier in your marketing process to increase the quality of the leads that you generate, improving your sales ratio and thereby increasing the efficiency with which you use your sales force.

Failure to maintain your strategic initiative will quickly find you on the kind of expensive and labour-intensive tactical mill-wheel that just about every business in the developed world is trying to stay away from.  Not only are you unlikely to influence your sales ratio, your lead-generating initiatives will have stopped, so nobody will have set up future sales opportunities and you’ll be back to square-one, condemning yourself forever to door-knocking for sales, which, as we all know is very inefficient indeed.

There are a few other things that you can do too.  Look at your sales process model and dinterrogate the links where the fall-out occurs.  If people seem to be interested in your product, but don’t end up buying, work out why this is.  Maybe its a pricing issue?  It’s amazing how many businesses still try to sell parity products at premium prices, but, when times are hard, these are the businesses that suffer.  Being more expensive than your competitors isn’t always the end of the road as long as you are offering at least equivalent value.  If the price you are asking buys more features or benefits than your competitors’ emphasise your advantage at every point in the sales chain.  However, you’d be wise to make sure first that the added features are ones that your market cares about.  Don’t start by kidding yourself that just because your bundle is bigger it is worth any more to your customers – ask them.

When all else fails your only option is to reduce your price, which means taking a close look at your delivery system and cutting out inefficient practices.  If you think you are running lean already, think again.  A good marketer can usually find ways to improve the efficiency of even the most streamlined business.

Of course, it could just be that you need to be more creative in the way you stack the deal.  For example, payment plans can be cut and diced many ways to suit specific customer needs.  Consider what you and your customers need and tailor your offer accordingly.  If you need cash-flow, structure your offer with an incentive for up-front payment or introduce a sliding scale payment plan that covers your liabilities, but makes your product more accessible.  Conversely, if shifting dated inventory is your problem maybe you need to create a deferred payment scheme that will enable customers to get hold of your stuff whilst tying them in to you for longer.  If you manage to resist the knee-jerk, you could even come out of your bad patch in better shape than before.

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Posted in Brand Discovery, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, marketing, phil darby, sales, Squash, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

UK needs to catch up on in-store music.

Posted on Sunday 5 December 2010 | Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Strategic alliances – success in numbers

Posted on Wednesday 18 August 2010 | Leave a comment

Developing a business has never been easy, but until relatively recently you could “get by” while being half-arsed.  The trouble with that reality is that it has bred a generation of managers who aren’t that creative when it comes to taking on a real challenge.

These days, only those on top of their game will survive and you simply have to be innovatve in opening up and leveraging opportunities.  Business is  a battle so maybe we should be taking lessons from some of the old generals.  For example, a strategist once told me that only three percent of battles in history have ever been won with a head-on attack.  Being a strategist he was probably making that fact up, but its an unbeliveable thought.  Be creative in your strategy and you could out flank your competition.  In the Czech mobile market the third operator, who wasn’t given a hope in a population of just 12million people, became the world’s most successful third operator and the fastest growing mobile operator ever, by taking a different approach.  While everyone else was building networks from  the population centres out into the rural areas Oskar started in remote spots and headed the other way, becoming  “liberators of the common people” who didn’t have fixed lines worth a fig and badly wanted to gain access to the rest of the world! Oskar’s success was well documented.

Think about it.  Most of our best new businesses, brands and products are successful because they are different.  Anything “me too” is usually consigned to obscurity and probably ridicule forever.  As I keep telling my audiences – You are only as good as your NEXT big idea, and being different is a large ingredient in a successful formula!

Today I’ve been talking about the benefit that communities of interest and strategic partnerships can bring to a business with great ideas and limited resource.  I’ve taken particular pleasure over the years in helping business form and leverage relationships like these.  There’s no better way for an entrepreneurial concern to make it to the big time than by piggy-backing someone else’s sales network or manufacturing capability, but look for your own solutions, be creative!  There are many ways to forge and benefit from links to other business and however small you are, there’s a likelihood that you have skills, expertise or other resources that you can barter.  The entrepreneurialism of a small business is often a sttrength in these situations and an SME can easily find itself in the driving seat of a partnership with a cotrporate.  In fact, I advise all my clients to devise a strategy for seeking out partners and forging alliances.  If you approach another organisation with a partnership proposal you are by that very fact already controlling the agenda.  Keep it that way.

Throughout history, conquering armies have created alliances that swelled their numbers and added to their resources.  Your partners don’t even have to like the idea of sharing with you, but they’ll warm to the notion of being on the winning side.

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Posted in Big Idea, business development, community of interest, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, phil darby, strategic alliance, the big idea, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

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

Posted on Monday 9 August 2010 | Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Brand stewardship – what’s it mean to you?

Posted on Sunday 4 July 2010 | Leave a comment

Last week I was put on the spot when someone asked me for my views on “brand stewardship”. Apart from the fact that its like asking for my view on world peace – I could either just say “I’m in favour of it” or talk for three hours -  the term “brand stewardship” poses a question in itself.  I mean what is it?  What’s the difference between “stewardship” and “management” or “development” and, given that anything to do with a brand touches on every aspect of a business, where should I start (or end for that matter)?

Let’s begin with nomenclature.  My guess is that someone, somewhere, at some time in the past, came up with the “stewardship” concept in order to accommodate the fact that the closest we can ever get to owning a brand is in the role of minder.  But why not “management”?  I assume that this must be based on the belief that “management” sounds a bit too formal and structured for something that is very human and organic.  So far, even though I have a loathing of the terminology that marketing people think up to make themselves appear smart, but actually just confuses everybody, I can live with all of this and if I’m right, I guess I understand the question and whether you call it stewardship, management or development it’s all about caring for a brand.  I’m going to assume that a brand steward is like the steward of a golf club – he’s there to make sure processes are adhered to and everything is kept in shape but he/she doesn’t have an executive role. So, let me try to summarise my views on “brand stewardship”.

I must have explained my understanding of what a brand is hundreds of times, but to this day defining “brand” even among the “marketers” who participate, remains a critical component of most of my workshops and seminars.  Such are the vagaries and inconsistencies within the marketing business.  I view brands as communities, which, like any other is really just a group of people with something (or things) in common.  A large part of this is values and beliefs. Some members of a brand community create a product or services that reflect these beliefs and values and others buy and use them.

People buy BMW’s because Brandenbergischen Motorenwerke belive in things like quality, engineering excellence and innovation and the cars and motorcycles they produce are manifestations of that.  If you need a car and  these things are important to you, its logical that you’ll feel comfortable in the BMW community.  Similarly, Apple is all about innovation and style, so if these subjects are important to you, you’ll probably own a Mac., i-Phone or i-Pad.

These brands and others have taken the time and trouble to drive awareness of what they stand for and as a result the brands themselves have become icons for a clearly defined set of values – you have YUPPIES driving BMWs and then there’s “white van man”.  Provided the reality measures up to the promise you’ll have the reassurance of knowing what to expect from a product wearing a familiar label.  It works the other way too.  Owning a BMW or a Mac is a badge of belonging to a community – a symbol of your beliefs – and because, as Maslow revealed, most of us are insecure, sales of many products are driven by people who have a need to wear a badge denoting our belonging to a group.  Why else would we wear clothing large areas of which are taken up with advertisements for their manufacturers?

However, this is a bit simplistic.  Few people, for instance, will find a single brand community that represents everything they stand for so most of us combine a portfolio of brands to represent different aspects of our belief system.  If you think of a brand community as a residential community you’ll recognise that you choose to live in a place because it is “your kind of place” but because the brand thing is not exclusive, when you move in you bring the trappings of your other communities with you.  In this way, while joining the community may broaden your horizons, at the same time, to some extent, you’ll enrich the community with the stuff you bring with you.  That explains why brand communities are constantly changing.

All truly great brands are like Marmite. However broad and diversified your brand community may be you are never going to appeal to everyone, and you shouldn’t want to.  Brands with broad appeal are inherently weak because, along with the need to belong we also have a need to express our individuality.  That’s where quirky niche brands play their part in life’s rich tapestry.  A strong brand is normally vivid or distinctive and while stark differentiation like this means it won’t be to everyone’s taste, distinctive brands will foster deep relationships with community members (I call these “Brandships”) and strong loyalty.  These factors are the keys to sales, profit and longevity.

Difference is very often synonymous with newness.  Its relatively easy to be different when you are the new kid on the block, but the success that your newness drives will take you ever closer to becoming “the establishment”.  The more successful you become the greater the challenge of maintaining your difference becomes.  A successful brand will recognise that it is the difference of the products it makes rather than the products themselves that is responsible for their success and as their products become familiar and competitors bring look-alikes to market, they’ll find new ways of representing “difference”, just as Apple have done by constantly changing their products and introducing radical new ideas.  Of course, some new products and ideas will fail, but failure is good because it is a product of innovation, change, experimentation.  While longevity can be a valuable and reassuring asset it is important to recognise that having been around for a long time may not count for much if you’ve not changed anything about your business in all that time.

Brand stewardship in many ways is just the same as any kind of management or indeed parenthood.  Its mostly about facilitation, providing the scope, tools and resources and opening the doors to opportunity, guiding where necessary, but avoiding imposing your own values or rules on your charge.  Its about providing opportunities for discourse, listening to what your members are saying both to you and each other, providing what they need to do the things they want to do (Which also means predicting what they will need in the future), offering up suggestions and being around to fix things that go wrong.  In other words, providing access, introducing communications like on-line or social networking, fuelling and being involved in discussion, collecting insights and data, analysing it and developing products and services that because of all of this you can be confident your community will welcome and generally policing.

In order to do all of this you first of all have to be absolutely clear what the brand and its community is all about – its that values and beliefs thing again – and to do this you’ll need a methodology to help you condense, what is a complex thing into as simple a form as possible.  My Brand Discovery programme introduces such methodology and using it any business can create an eleven-element Brand Model that will sum up their brand.  But that’s just the beginning.  You then have to apply it to your business, making sure that the actions you take on every level of the organisation reflect and support the essence of your brand.  That will take a brand Steward into every corner of your business where he/she will influence pretty well everything that is done.  This can be a risky job in organisations that don’t already have a team-playing culture, which is why Brand Discovery also provides an ongoing management system that engages everyone in the organisation, gives them the tools they need to ensure that their decisions and actions are aligned to the brand promise and ensuring they are fully involved in the process of keeping your brand alive.

Good brand stewardship drives things like Cupidtino the new dating service for Apple users, Saturn’s annual owners factory tour, Yeti bikes’ bashes, Harley Davidson’s HOG chapters and many other different elements of the communities of discerning brands around the world.  Good brand stewardship is the reason why innovative organisations innovate and efficient businesses are efficient, but, as I said earlier, it’s a very big subject and this is a very simple answer.  If you want the whole nine-yards we’ll need a much longer discussion.

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Posted in Apple, brand, brand character, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, business development, business strategy, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Harley Davidson, i-Pad, ideas, innovation, integrated marketing, internal marketing, marketing, phil darby, saturn Motors, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized, Yeti Cycles

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

Posted on Monday 14 June 2010 | 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

Thanks you Graeme!

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

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Waitrose show us the shape of retailing in the new economy.

Posted on Monday 15 March 2010 | Leave a comment

Its happening far less frequently recently, because most organisations appear to have slithered into a state of cerebral hibernation, while they wait for someone else to fix the world, but every now and again I come across an initiative that prompts a fist-pump and a big “YESSSS!”.  This time Its Waitrose with the masterclass in how to trade in the post-recession, economy.

In fact I first proposed this strategy to another retailer about ten years ago and I’ve put it to others since.  I even, on one occasion, met with prospective channel owners and gained their commitment to the idea.  All my client had to do was sign on the line and they’d have secured a new revenue stream ahead of the game, but each time the retailers in question chickened out.  I have never understood why retailers have been so slow to take this obvious step.

I’ve always considered retailing to be the last bastion of the entrepreneur.  Its certainly the only sector where you can trial new ideas at minimal cost and get direct feedback from customers in a weekend, so with revenue and more importantly, profit, so illusive these days, retailers should be launching new initiatives on a daily basis.  If ever there was a time to pull those proposals out from the bottom draw and dust them off its now and this one is begging for an airing.  I’m just chuffed to bits that its a smart, switched-on business like Waitrose that’s going to take up the challenge.  I’ve always liked John Lewis partnership.  If ever an organisation had their internal marketing and brand building sorted its them and, as I keep saying, when your brand community is strong you can do anything.

Its been decades since a retail brand was only a name over a door and if ever there was a real brand community anywhere its going to be in the retail sector.  The relationships we have (Brandships) with retailers are like no other and its going to take an act of spectacular incompetence for Waitrose to fail in this venture.

Now, let’s see if they leverage all the opportunities and which of their “me-too” competitors will have the balls to take them on.  Yes, retailing is alive and well after all and living in Bracknell!  Game on!

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Posted in Big Idea, brand, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand equity, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, business development, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, ideas, ideation, innovation, internal marketing, John Lewis Partnership, marketing, phil darby, Retail, Retail marketing, retailer, the big idea, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized, Waitrose

Diversity in Redditch and the public sector challenge

Posted on Wednesday 10 March 2010 | Leave a comment

One of the hottest buzz-words in the UK public sector right now appears to be “diversity” which, as I understand it, basically means celebrating the richness of the UK culture or getting on with your ethnic minority neighbours.  As the conquerors and oppressors of innumerable cultures in the past we Brits are falling over backwards to make up for our evil past by making the folks we have displaced feel “at home at our place”.  Just the kind of thing guaranteed to get lefties throwing public money around like confetti – which it seems is just what they are doing.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the diversity idea is fine.  It might not feature much above chip-and-pin wheely bins and installing badger tunnels under trunk roads on my “must do with taxpayers money” list in these hard times, but if was standing for election right now I wouldn’t be making a big thing about adding it to my list of proposed public sector spending cuts either.  However, initiatives like this do tend to reveal the yawning gulf that exists between well conceived national policy and local government naivety (or depending on how you see it “incompetence”).

Last week was Chinese New Year – the year of the tiger or something – and the town where I stay when I am in the UK staged a diversity event.  This was devised and has been run for the past few years by a husband-and-wife team who have some nice, if a little cutesy, ideas and, it seems, a simplistic and naive approach to management.  They told me that over the years the event has grown, although they didn’t seem to have access to any numbers other than a rough guess that visitors currently numbered around two-hundred, which it seems to me is more a bit of a get-together than an event – I’ve had bigger parties in my Prague apartment.  However, more power to their elbow.  If they are prepared to flog themselves to death for a year to entertain a couple of bus-loads of people then good luck to them.  But here’s the rub.

There wasn’t an ounce of commercialism in the venture at all.  Everything was a cost.  Every glaring revenue-generating opportunity, from the provision of chinese food by local restaurants to face painting and lantern-making for the kids, was duly ignored in the name of purity.  But purity has a price and in this case the taxpayer was footing the bill … not once, but twice!  Firstly the County Council were contributing taxpayers money from their “diversity” fund and then every visitor was paying for a ticket at the rate of £5 a head or £12 for a family of four, which, when you add it all up, isn’t cheap when most of the labour was voluntary.  But the real bummer was that the limited resources, skills and experience of the organisers resulted in a bit of a shot in the foot.

Firstly the publicity in the local paper quoted the price of family tickets at £5 insead of £12 so every family that turned up was instantly annoyed.  The price included a shambles of a children’s theatre production which the organisers seemed to think was just fine because the kids had only had two days to prepare for it (they didn’t seem to get it that people were paying, the organisers had had at least a year to work out how to prepare better and the kids were probably embarrassed to hell).  Tickets also included a “chinese meal” served in the Town Hall Council Chamber, which was organised on a sitting schedule, was an hour late and not very good and, to cap it all, by the time diners had extracted themselves from the lunch the volunteers who had set up and were supposed to be running the side-shows in another building, had decided that nobody was coming, so packed up and left, which meant that there were no activities.

I appreciate that there are folks out there who might think that I am being unsympathetic, but I do believe these things are a great idea, they just have to be viable and there is absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t be.  I don’t think its the place of local government/taxpayers to pay for them – underwrite them by all means, but only if there is a business plan and a genuine attempt by the organisers to make them viable.  There was a film maker sent by the County Council to record the event, undoubtedly to “big” it and them up at Whitehall at some future date, but actually what was needed was for the council nobs to get their fat-cat Business Link buddies to give the organisers some free advice and support – make a contribution for a change.  I am sure that even Business Link could run a raffle (well, maybe not)!

Diversity is a great idea, but in the hands of do-gooding local councils, as in this case, ideas can produce the opposite to the intended response with visitors leaving feeling angry and disappointed and taxpayers feeling betrayed.  Wholesome events don’t have to cost money either.  The Prague Marathon – the third largest marathon franchise in the world – and in a developing economy to boot – runs on a team of six full-time employees.  All the rest are volunteers and sponsored activities and I would be embarrassed to tell you how much revenue that generates!

With the UK facing the prospect of unprecedented cutbacks in public spending our public sector needs to get real.  The easy option, and I’m certain that it will emerge, will be for local services to be cut back and events like this to fall victim to the axe, but if the folks at County Hall deserve to stay in their jobs this wouldn’t be the case.  That’s the challenge to the public sector, who, for the first time is going to have to demonstrate some commercial competence.  Running a country, a county or a town is a business.  Customers are looking for improved value.  If you can’t hack it, stand aside and let someone who can see the ball.

Meanwhile I genuinely do appreciate the effort and commitment that the organisers put into Chinese New Year in Redditch and I feel as bad as anyone about it not hitting the mark, but next time, I’d like to see the County Council support them with expert help and advice rather than cash, even if that advice is to bring in someone to show them how to make this the event it could be.

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Posted in Chinese new year, customer service, diversity, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, ideas, local goverment, marketing, phil darby, public sector, recession, Redditch, social groups, The Full Effect Company, Tourism, Uncategorized

Today’s great, untapped opportunity for marketing services firms

Posted on Thursday 4 March 2010 | Leave a comment

I have just been reading a report of a speech by agency CEO Brian Weiner that was written by Jodi Harris for iMedia Connection.  It seems that Brian like so many in our industry have identified the problem facing our sector, but is his remedy correct?  I’ll leave you to decide.  For my part, I firmly belive that the model for the agency of the future is well established already. I started my Full Effect Company twenty years ago and today it exactly matches the needs of today’s clients.

We focus on “integrated marketing” and don’t, as so many who use the term do, limit our horizons to “integrated communications” and call it “marketing” – that’s just sellotape marketing.

We place the brand at the centre of the organisation, adapting core communications skills to build powerful brand communities, comprising lasting customer relationships that massively improve efficiency, which is the single thing that separates commercial success and failure.

We are not only media neutral, but address all the issues that influence the success of an organisation in a single end-to-end strategy, because that’s the only sensible way to work. Marketing services firms with traditional structures and practices can’t do this.

We have a defined way of working that is nothing like any agency I have come across and a network of independent experts covering the total range of marketing (not mere marketing communications because that just doesn’t work) disciplines who come together in infinite permutations to deliver the appropriate formula. Traditional agency structures can’t do this and are forced to deliver compromised solutions.

Even from the modest sample of comments on the iMedia piece, it seems that I am not the only one to have cracked this, although I am probably one of the early movers and today I advise agencies around the world as they develop their own models and take them to market. The millions of dollars in incremental billings that my agency clients have won as a result are testament to Full Effect Marketing and the undoubted opportunities that are emerging in the new world economy. So I certainly agree with Brian Weiner on one point – there are tremendous opportunities right now for marketing services firms that “get it” …   largely because there are so  many that don’t!

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Posted in advertising, agency management, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, branding, brands, brandships, Brian Weiner, business development, business strategy, change, change management, communications, community, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, integrated marketing, integration, marketing, phil darby, recession, The Full Effect Company, tradition

How customer service will drive growth for marketing services firms.

Posted on Monday 15 February 2010 | Leave a comment

It seems that my piece on customer service has been made topical by Toyota who last week received all the wrong kind of media attention as they struggled to make the best of, not one, but two, recalls that seem to have miss-fired on them.  But it does give me an opportunity to quickly revisit the subject, which I feel is too-often paid lip-service and nothing more by organisations that should know better.

The squeaky-clean Japanese may have been undermined by nudges and winks to the media by their competitors, but with the markets being as they are, they are bound to have been looking for any opportunity to snipe away at a competitor like Toyota and the Japs should have seen it coming.  I can imagine the Toyota folks in their war room planning their strategy for these recalls, considering the merits and demerits of holding back while their suppliers manufactured accelerator pedal parts, getting them to their dealers and priming their dealers to undertake the upgrade.  The same with the brake software.  You don’t solve these problems over night and they must have been only a matter of a week or so away from fixing both of these issues in their usual efficient and quiet way when someone spilt the beans and wound up a journo or two, but shit happens and they should have been expecting it.

There is no doubting Toyota’s internal marketing skills though and when your back is against the wall like this its internal marketing that can save your arse.  As I have said many times before you can run a business with a strict set of rules, rigid processes, a stick and a carrot – Communists have run entire countries like this for decades, but we all know where they ultimately ended up and why.  When something comes out of left field the team that wins is the one comprising real experts with a clear vision of what they are trying to achieve, total commitment and license to make decisions and apply their skills how they see fit – that’s what internal marketing gives you.

On a smaller, but still global scale I have been involved with another sports equipment manufacturer recently, who it seems has a problem with one of their products that they have chosen to take a softly-softly approach to.  In this case they appear to have got away with it, but maybe only because their competitors aren’t as smart or blood-thirsty as Toyota’s.  They fixed the problem with a small change in the spec of the product in subsequent production runs, which was easier for them to achieve than a car manufacturer.  If customers spotted the problem with the early examples, they replaced them swiftly with interest.  An approach like this is only possible if you have good internal marketing.  It only takes a few retailers or distributors to short-change a customer with a grievance and you are stuffed.

Meanwhile, in the same week I had a run-in with my bank and received a £100 cheque in the post by way of an apology.  If a bank can get it anybody can, so maybe we are finally beginning to understand the relative value of existing customers and the two in the bush and the part that internal marketing and customer service play in the future of a business.

This brings me to my real point.  I’m still amazed at the scarcity of marketing services firms that recognise the opportunity that this represents for them to buck the trend to declining revenues.  On the most basic level any proposal that an agency puts together in response to a client brief should include an appendix of ideas for taking the campaign to the internal market – its a no-brainer, but most of the presentations I see miss that vital element.  It makes me wonder sometimes what the agencies are thinking about when they try to pass themselves off as “marketing experts”.

One of the most successful pitches I managed for an agency was in response to an advertising brief, but opened with a list of twenty key initiatives that the client could introduce to develop their business.  We prioritised six, one of which answered the original advertising brief.  Three were internal marketing.  All of these initiatives leveraged the fundamental communications skills of any advertising agency.  We covered all six in detail and won the lot!  It doubled the size of the agency and led to two more new large-scale clients and a new business unit.

What we did here was fundamental, marketing #101 – identify your resources and find new ways to apply them.  Any agency deserving a place in the broader marketing community will do this kind of thing instinctively.  Sadly few do and the demise of many speaks for itself but with the lessons of Toyota ringing in the ear of every marketer right now, there’s no excuse for any agency that fails to grab this opportunity.

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Posted in advertising, agency management, automotive, brand development, Brand promise, business development, communications, customer, customer service, customers, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, integrated marketing, integration, internal marketing, marketing, phil darby, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized