Category Archives: innovation

There’s a lesson for us all in Alice

Posted on Saturday 6 March 2010 | Leave a comment


It seems that the only time I get to the movies these days is with my daughter, so I’m delighted that she is now of an age where her tastes are more refined than “The Chipmunks” and the traditional Czech fairy stories that, being genuinely bi-lingual she is happy to watch, but I find interesting only from the point of view that they go a long way to explain the strangeness of the Czech psyche.  Today we saw Jonny Depp and Tim Burton’s Alice in 3D Wonderland.

Having said that, there’s nothing stranger than Depp, Burton and the inimitable Helena Bonham-Carter, my love for whom has only been deepened by her portrayal of the Red Queen.  The melding of live action and the most brilliant animation was seamless and absolutely compelling and the entire production is simply awesome.  Its imagination matching that of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) quirk for quirk.

Earlier in the day I had been discussing Michael Jackson’s extreme attention to detail and in my previous post I mention the considerable detail that Sade has obviously gone to in the production of her new album.  Alice however takes attention to detail to a whole new level.  This might be the first movie I have ever felt inclined to watch again, just to pick up the fine detail that I sensed I had missed with the initial viewing.  In these days of instant stardom and accolades for people with no talent other than to be in the right place at the right time, I find it particularly reassuring that there are examples, like this, of real craft, born of hard work, that stands out so vividly from the so-so that many have come to accept as “as good as it gets” – Just as a great brand should.

Its no coincidence that the Alice theme aligns so well to the branding story either.  Be true to yourself, be different and, as Alice’s father says, achieve the impossible by believing it to be possible.  Nothing drives me to despair more than people and organisations who tell me something can’t be done.  Frankly it just makes me determined to prove them wrong.  Any organisation is only as good as its next big idea and marketers should be leading the way by leading their organisations to do things and go places that nobody has done or gone to before – just like Alice’s father, Alice and Lewis Carroll.

Another interesting thing about this production is that it underlines how relationships between brands can really work.  I beat on endlessly about the way that the “company you keep” will influence your brand and here we have a classic story with a considerable brand community combining with the contemporary Burton brand as though they were made for each other.  If either brand had proven not to be up to the challenge of the twenty-first century audience both would have suffered, but this is a perfect match with Burton and Depp bringing Alice bang up-to-date in a way that will surely lead a whole new generation to discover this great story for themselves.

Is this a kids’ story?  Sure, kids will love it, as mine has, but Alice is an affirmation of what life is all about, brought right up to date as a lesson for everyone at every level of life.  You simply have to take your family.

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Posted in Alice in Wonderland, Big Idea, brand, brand character, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, creativity, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, innovation, Johnny Depp, marketing, phil darby, the big idea, The Full Effect Company, Tim Burton

Britain’s unemployed managers – the solution to SMEs’ problems

Posted on Wednesday 17 February 2010 | Leave a comment

I’m back in the UK for a while and, inspired by the tales of the many struggling businesses in my local area, I’m trying to do my thing for SMEs .  I say “trying”, because, as my Granny used to say “You can’t help folks who won’t be helped”.

Most “small businesses” are small because they haven’t got what it takes to be big.  The deficiencies come in many forms and span all areas of business from lack of key skills like financial, operational management and marketing, to just being plain crap at what you do.  In a normal buoyant market there may be hope for even the least capable, but as conditions are now, if you aren’t sharp you won’t get to play.  As I have said before, this is a good thing.  Its the process of natural selection and we should come out of this experience, as a business community, smarter and better equipped.  However, I have my concerns.

Its no disgrace for an SME to lack a few key management skills.  If you are small, you are bound to be wanting in one area or another, its just a matter of where your strengths lie and what you do about your weaknesses that determines your destiny – that’s marketing.  My worries are two-fold.  Firstly, the natural instinct of far too many organisations in recent months has prompted an alarming HR trend and secondly, the support system for SMEs in the UK is failing miserably – and I’m not talking about the banks who seem hell-bent on some wild agenda to bring down the UK SME sector.

The HR trend I refer to is for firms to off-load senior people in pursuit of short-term payroll savings.  Its may seem an obvious quick-fix, but as I thought we all knew already, it brings only very short term benefit and beyond that its nothing more than the beginning of the end.   It affects organisations large and small in the same way, but simply because small businesses are less robust the effect it has on them is more often terminal.  Taking away managers (provided they are worthy of the title) from any organisation is like removing the rudder and the end result is invariably crash and burn.

In a similar way, organisations that think they are being smart by taking the Arsenal FC approach to business – hiring young inexperienced players and attempting to turn them into key strikers – are on a hiding to nothing too.  Inexperienced staff suck up key management time, involving them in micro-management that leaves them unavailable to perform their main leadership and innovation role.  It is also a customer satisfaction and operational efficiency nightmare that in times like these you just can’t afford.

To make matters worse, there’s nowhere for a UK SME that is short of management know-how, to go for help.  Years ago, a UK government initiative saw the foundation of an organisation called Business Link.  Basically, this was a joint-venture between the public and private sectors that was supposed to bring management skills to SMEs through a network of local consultancies.  Now, I have to put my hands up here and say that if I had my way they’d all be closed down and I bet nobody would even notice – apart from the exchequer who would immediately have a shed-load of cash to do something useful with.  Without exception, every SME that I have encountered, that has had any dealing with this bunch have nothing but disdain for them.  From what I have seen and experienced over the years they fail absolutely to operate as a network, they have no understanding of the realities of business and their methods are both outmoded and inflexible.  If ever there was a depository for no-hope graduates, with lots of meaningless qualifications and absolutely no grasp of reality, its Business Link – a typical public sector organisation in fact.  Anyway, rant aside, expecting Business Link to lead your SME out of recession is on a par with expecting Gordon Brown to win a personality contest – It ain’t going to happen!

Against this background I have been trying to get local politicians, government departments and business groups to consider ways of addressing some of these problems.  For example, most of the smart senior managers who have been victims of business cut-backs in recent months are still on the dole.  The managers with the very skills and experience that SMEs need right now are being paid (albeit a pitiful amount) to watch daytime TV and most of them are resigned to this reality for the rest of their lives.  That’s a fact supported by today’s unemployment figures and under-lined by a live phone-in on the BBC’s Radio Five Live this morning.    I approached one of the organisations employed by the Department of Work and Pensions to deliver Back to Work programmes for unemployed managers with the idea of devising a programme that would bring the need and the resource together and taking it to the DWP to seek funding.  It was like trying to raise the dead!  Rather than apply their minds to making something happen their every effort went into thinking of reasons why it wouldn’t work.  Just the kind of positive thinking we need to get us out of this mess!

I asked my local Tory candidate to help me get something going with the DWP and JobCentres, but got no reply.  I even offered free advice to a local trading group and received no reply to that either.  I approached the local paper and an independent employment agency with the idea of running a seminar for local managers of SMEs and neither were interested.

My mailing to a sample one-hundred local businesses offering them a free consultation that could get them thinking in the right direction had no takers and my follow-up calls revealed that they had mostly been approached by Business Link who failed them miserably and once bitten were put off the idea of consultants forever.

Its sad that our SMEs – our commercial future – are stuck like rabbits in a car’s headlights, while Theresa May the Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary and the Employment Minister Jim Knight, who together have solutions to some of these problems in their gift, bitch about minutia and argue out party politics on national radio.  The inability to run a piss-up in a brewery is endemic in our society and clearly, it goes right to the top!  Maybe we should recruit our next government from the ranks of our unemployed managers?  Now there’s a thought!

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Posted in business development, business strategy, change management, Department of Work and Pensions, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, HR, Human resources, ideas, ideation, innovation, integrated marketing, Jim Knight, Job Centre, management, marketing, natural selection, phil darby, recruitment, Small and Medium Enterprises, SMEs, The Full Effect Company, Theresa May, Uncategorized

Bridging the gap between insights and action

Posted on Monday 1 February 2010 | Leave a comment

A while ago I sat through a credentials presentation by the MD of one of the leading international data management consultancies.  At one point in the process a slide came up and the presenter went into a series of claims saying that they had shown so-and-so organisation how to save twenty million pounds and another client how to save thirty million etc.  Now, I’ve been in these situations before and even if I hadn’t, I would have been sensitive to the weasel, so I asked the obvious question.  “So, you showed them how to save all this money, what did they actually save?”  – Stunned silence.

It quickly became clear that the consultancy didn’t know how much some of the organisations in question had saved, or even if they had saved anything at all, because their proposals often weren’t acted upon.  In other cases the saving was minimal or nothing.  This isn’t unusual of course.  The ideas that the consultancy had offered were probably quite sound, but the problem that all these people have is that their clients are rarely capable of introducing the changes to processes or programmes that the data identifies as necessary and they themselves are not equipped to help beyond the point, at best, of identifying the kind of action required.

Its a few years ago that Jim Taylor in his book Space Race was lamenting the failure of advertising agencies to respond to their clients’ demands  for integrated solutions, but, sadly, things haven’t improved much.  The management consultancies as Jim prophesied, have taken the lead and the ad-agencies have just watched them disappear in a cloud of dust over the marketing horizon.  This is perhaps understandable when you consider that advertising agencies have for decades sat at the head of their clients’ marketing support roster, but things move on and today the traditional advertising role is revealed for what it is – just a very small corner of the bigger picture.  Sure, its a tough pill to swallow when you are used to being king of the hill, but I find it disappointing that even today the majority of advertising people I come across continue to describe what they do as “integrated marketing” which only illustrates how far they are away from understanding the wider landscape or the role they could play in it.  In fact, there are significant new opportunities for advertising agencies in the world of new model marketing that, if they just gave up trying to persuade us that they are still running the show, they could adjust to and solve the problem of their dwindling revenues.  I know, I’ve introduced a few agencies to these new opportunities and helped them add tens of millions of dollars in incremental billings as a result.

What clients need is an end-to-end seamless process for delivering truly integrated strategies and if the marketing services sector doesn’t come up with a model that works clients have no other option, but to take control, assemble narrowly focused marketing services specialists into project teams and make them work to eye-wateringly constrictive briefs.  I’ve helped a few clients of mine put teams like these together.  They are not for everybody, but they work well once you have all the resources.

The biggest impediment to achieving the single-source, end-to-end solution is culture.  At one end of the process sit the data nerds whose lives are written in binary code.  At the other are the creative advertising folks.  They don’t make good neighbours at the best of times, but trying to get them to agree on a single business model is a little like introducing George Dubya to a MENSA convention.  The reason that the management consultancies, as Jim Taylor predicted, are doing so well out of this, is that they sit with their structures and practices perspective, somewhere in the middle.  They aren’t great at data or creative, but manage a sort of average attempt at a solution that’s acceptable, in a businesslike sort of way, to a lot of half-arsed client organisations.

It seems to me that the people to watch right now, even though they probably have further to travel than any of the other players, are the aformentioned data folks.  Sapient and Experian appear to be leading the field, but are taking different routes to the same conclusion.  Experian, or rather those very smart folks at Clarity Blue, who they acquired a couple of years back, seem to be building out from their established base in the direction of the objective, adding new skills and resources that understandably, because of their parentage, appear rather more functional that creative as yet.  Meanwhile Sapient dropped an advance party by helicopter, right at the objective, by acquiring one of my current favourite advertising agency networks, Nitro last year and are now have the task of working backwards to set up a supply line.  They probab;ly stand an equal chance of creating the necessary end-to-end process, but I’ve always seen the “big idea” as a vital component in any marketing strategy so my money is on Sapient’s Nito approach being first to deliver the goods.  Watch this space!

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

Are marketing services failing clients?

Posted on Monday 12 October 2009 | Leave a comment

I don’t agree with Saatchi’s Kevin Roberts on everything, but there’s a big overlap in our thinking and, hey, differences are what prompts innovation and make the world go round, so that’s good.  Yes?

The thing is that on the fundamentals we are on the same page and its always reassuring to know, when, as we marketers do, you are ploughing the lonely innovation furrow, that someone of Kevin’s gravitas agrees with you, at least in part.  That’s why I was delighted to hear him make three key points in an interview in Singapore recently (he probably made many more) that really resounded with me.

  1. The current economic situation is causing far more radical change than most people still realise and it’s going to go on for a year or two yet.  As a result, business leaders are desperate for ideas, but nervous of change, so the ideas that we take to them have to be bigger, better and more than ever before, grounded in sound commercial thinking.
  2. Marketing services businesses (Kevin focusses on Ad. agencies, I’d put brand consultancies up there too but all the other disciplines are failing their clients too) are generally way behind their clients and end users/consumers when it comes to realising what’s happening and responding to it (which, given that we are paid to be thought-leaders, is pretty damning)
  3. Awards are becoming counter-productive.  They are encouraging agency people to entrench in old-thinking.  It’s almost as though given their failure to deliver in the real world, agencies are retreating to a world of mutual admiration inhabited solely by their peers.

Where maybe I differ from Kevin is that I believe that its our job to lead our clients.  Not just to give them great ideas, but to help them fully exploit them.  This requires bigger thinking.  I am trying to go much further than most agencies, by not only coming up with new creative ideas, but having ideas about how business can change and reshape themselves, communicate internally as well as externally and do new things operationally that will enable them to get more out of the ideas.  And I go further than that even, because, as I just said, business leaders are not only desperate for ideas, but nervous of change too, so its my job as a marketer (and if you are a marketer, its your job too) to help them along the way with implementation.  That’s why I spent months working with buyers at a supermarket group to get them to think differently about their role and what they were buying and why I just devoted weeks to convincing a software organisation to take another look at the environment their otherwise great software creates for users, before they take it to market.

Sure its a lot of work, but that’s the game we are in now.  Be sure about that!

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Posted in advertising, agency management, Big Idea, brand, brand development, branding, brands, change, communications, difference, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, ideas, ideation, innovation, integrated marketing, integration, internal marketing, Kevin Roberts, management, marketing, recession, Saatchi & Saatchi, Saatchi's, the big idea, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Innovate your way through recession

Posted on Thursday 6 August 2009 | 1 Comment

You might be persuaded otherwise by the actions of some organisations, but now is the time to innovate.  And before you respond with the old “we can’t afford it” argument, let me tell you that every piece of evidence proves beyond any doubt that far from not being able to afford innovation, you simply can’t afford not to right now.  If you think the recession hit hard and fast, you ain’t seen nothing yet!  If your organisation is sitting there with its metaphorical head between its knees, you’ll know what I mean when the recession starts to lift and your competitors who have had their thinking hats on for the last months kick your sorry backside!

The trick to innovating in recession is no different to the basic rule in boom times.  In fact its the fundamental of every aspect of all business at any time and if you’ve been on this blog before you’ll know what’s coming next … efficiency!  Efficiency is ultimately the only thing that separates successful organisations from unsuccessful ones and, by and large we are all pretty bad at it.  The thing is that most of the time we can get away with being … so-so.  In recession however you really have walk the talk! Yes, tough markets sort out the men from the boys, the wheat from the chaff and by and large this time around the recession is definitely reducing the number of half-baked businesses.

The starting point for innovating efficiently is the same as the starting point for efficiency in every area of your business – focus, and the kind of focus I am talking about is the kind that comes from having a clearly defined brand encapsulated in a concise and straightforward Brand Model, such as that which I create with my Brand Discovery programme.

Among many other things, a Brand Model gives any organisation the criteria by which to judge the suitability of everything you do and used properly will enable you to prioritise, cut those ideas that aren’t going to support your Brand Promise, help those you decide to run contribute something truly worthwhile to your business and ensure that tactical initiatives have maximum long term value – that’s efficiency!

Over that last few months I have seen an increase in the number of calls  from organisations who are fine-tuning their brands and this is encouraging.  How they go about it though is sometimes a bit of a worry.  I have just spent some time with a national UK set-up that brought in one of the big consulting firms at colossal expense to help them with this and the result was very disappointing.  The consultancy came in, helped them create something approximating a brand model, which itself left a lot to be desired, and then walked away and left them to it.  Sadly this is a common experience.

A lot of folks don’t realise that building a brand model is one thing, but bringing it to life is where the challenge lies.  The model is really just the working drawings.  To turn it into something concrete – and that includes leveraging its capability to generate business-building ideas – means taking a new perspective on your business.  This in itself represents a radical change for some organisations and involves introducing new practices and maintaining a high level of discipline, all while running the day-to-day business as usual.  Its tough and, believe me it rarely works unless you have to have someone dedicated to keeping it all on track.  Some organisations employ their own brand champion, which really should be at board level, because they need to carry that kind of weight within the organisation, but it makes sense for most businesses to bring in consultants and that’s what I do.

On this foundation you can start building your “ideas organisation”.  Canvassing ideas from within your organisation is a campaign in itself, especially if its new to your culture.  You first have to start by reassuring everyone  that regardless of their level or function, their ideas are as likely as anybody’s  to be that golden key to the future of the business .  I once turned an idea from a junior secretary into a successful new business unit for one of my clients and you could do the same.  Believe me the key to a really great future is probably rattling around the head of one of your employees as we speak.

Once you are generating ideas you’ll need a process for selecting them and developing those that show promise.  Your Brand Model will be an immense help in this, but you still have to set out your day-to-day approach.  I find that its useful for a lot of reasons to offer the person who came up with the idea a role in its development – its motivating and it helps them develop new skills.  You have to decide how you want to set up and run your project teams – one for each idea currently in development – at what points you review projects and what criteria you will introduce at each review.  Its also a good idea to have a reporting system that feeds back to your employees, to maintain their interest and commitment to ideation.

When you have an “ideas organisation” culture, the support of your employees and the processes in place to develop the ideas you’ll be generating ideas, assessing their potential and bringing the most promising ones to market more quickly and efficiently that you probably imagine.  You can fine-tune all the elements of your innovation programme as you go, but ultimately you can’t help but be successful.  Remember, ideas are the currency of business and the race is on to emerge from the recession like a bullet from a gun with all the momentum that only new ideas can generate.

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Posted in Big Idea, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, business development, change, change management, efficiency, employees, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, ideas, ideation, innovation, integrated marketing, management, marketing, phil darby, Processes, strategy, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

The measure of a marketer.

Posted on Tuesday 17 March 2009 | 1 Comment

I have absolutely no doubt of two things.  Firstly that “marketing” means leveraging the resources of an organisation to satisfy the needs of end users and, secondly, that as marketers it is our fundamental responsibility to go places and do things that nobody had gone to or done before. These are the two basic truths upon which I base my work.  I’m happy to debate this with you, but I will win! However, I have come across a few illustrations recently of  woolly, cop-out thinking by marketers around the world that makes me fear for our future.

Firstly I became involved a few weeks ago in a discussion on LinkedIn, that might become its biggest yet, which started with a member asking if anybody was interested in setting up a “consultants’ group”.  The responses that followed were horrendous and I quickly came to the realisation that the relationships between a lot of consultants and their clients must be a bit like the blind leading the blind.  I was simply staggered by the narrow thinking of many of those consultants who contributed.

Then came the response on SimpliFlying.com to a report on the BBC interview last week with RyanAir’s Michael O’Leary.  SimpiFlying is a knowledgeable and highly respected blog that focuses on marketing within the airline sector, so you would expect that the majority visitors would be airline marketers.  That being the case, many of the contributions served only to underline O’Leary’s premise that airline managers are a bunch of sad, uninspired old gits (My words, his sentiment).  I’ve never been a particular supporter of O’Leary, but that might change after this interview.  I have, however, always admired his business and brand development nous, and I’m delighted to hear that his inspiration was Southwest Airlines in the US who are a case study that I use in many of my seminars and workshops.  O’Learly clearly understands branding far better than most of the contributors to this discussion.

The final nail in the marketer’s coffin was a recent campaign by Naked in Australia, an agency that I have always thought was quite OK, for their mens’ fashion client Witchery.  Appropriately, this was drawn to my attention by Adam Broitman on iMedia.com under the heading “Interactive’s Most Offensive Campaigns”, but the offense I took wasn’t that it was rude or in bad taste, but the fact that the production of such utter dross was sure to have incurred some level of carbon footprint.  Naked seem to have totally forgotten that for a viral campaign to work at all the material that’s seeded has to be interesting enough for someone to care enough to forward it.  I am used to clients thinking that a viral campaign is a solution in itself and forgetting, like any other medium, that its only as good as the content, but for any marketing specialist, let alone an agency of this standing to completely miss the point like this is unforgivable.  I fought to stay awake through the movie, only because I wanted to see why it was supposed to be so offensive.

As I said in my opening, we marketers are supposed to be taking our organisations or those of our clients, to places and getting them to do things that they would never dream of.  That’s our primary responsibility and when times are tough, as they are now and we all really need to be brave, its our job to save them from their natural tendency to dig a pit and wait for the flak to pass.  Our clients and colleagues should be beating a path to our door just to recharge at our power-point of creativity, innovation and entrepreurialism.  If they aren’t its our fault not theirs.  It means we are just too boring and that’s something a marketer should never be.

Thanks to Michael O’Leary for calling time on the old farts of aviation and talking up his ambition to pay us for travelling with him rather than the other way around and shame on those like the people who, whether RyanAir is their cup of tea or not as a carrier, aren’t smart enough marketers to recognise that this is how you build a brand (and the world’s biggest carrier).

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

Can you spot a “big idea”?

Posted on Monday 9 February 2009 | 1 Comment

magnifying-glassI’ve spoken long and often over the years about “the big idea”, and with everyone fighting for survival right now we all need a big idea more than ever.  So how do we recognise one when it pops up?

The popular marketers’ interpretation of  ”the big idea” focuses on communication – the creative solution that cuts through the noise of the marketplace and carries your message, to the willing ears of a grateful marketplace.  A big idea in this context can enhance a great product, service or brand and even put a less than great one in the frame.  Big communications ideas come in the shape of Lowe’s “You’ve Been Tangoed” or the old Allen Brandy and Marsh campaign “Milk Has Got a Lotta Bottle” or Cokes “Real Thing”.  You’ll have a few favourites of your own I am sure.

Level two is about the tactical offer.  I had the latest US campaign for Hyundai brought to my attention by Kathy Sharpe at Sharpe Partners.  This is a brilliant example of the big idea in action – talk about a bold response to consumer need!  This it my kind of marketing.  It uses a short term tactical offer as evidence of the brand promise.  Apart from providing a very compelling reason to buy, it says, “you are understood and protected when you are part of the Hyundai community”.  Exactly as it should be done!

On another level entirely the big idea is about the product itself.  We’ve been getting sloppy over the last few years and awarding the big ideas rosette to things that were far to low down on the “really necessary” scale, but all that is changing.  Today’s evidence points to the emergence of a new more critical consumer with a clearly more practical and rational agenda.  I’m not sure that X-box and Wii would be the success they have been if they arrived on the scene in the next couple of years, but a device that allows you to travel further on a litre of fuel or a means of prolonging the life of fresh food (without chemicals of course) now, there’s a big idea.

Then there’s the level where the big idea is the one upon which a brand culture is based.  My belief is that if you get this one right, all the rest just happens.  One of my personal favourites in this respect is SouthWest Airlines,  but you could add FaceBook, Google, Apple and many more.

The fact is that the BIG IDEA has to be big on all of these levels, but whichever level you are focusing on, there is a judgement criteria that I was introduced to by a colleague at the start of my career and which has stayed with me to this day.  Its based, not by accident,  on the acronym SIMPLE because, of course, all the best ideas are just that.  As well as interrogating your briefs and concepts with your Brand Model criteria try asking these questions to decide whether your idea is worth pursuing.

Is it Striking? The big idea always stands out.  You can’t walk past one, it sort of smacks you in the face its so outstanding.

Is it Ingenious? Its always a really neat solution.  One of those things that leave you asking “why didn’t I think of that?”

Is it going to be Memorable?  If people aren’t going to be talking about it long after you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil, forget it now.

Is it Pertinent? Is it an idea looking for a reason or a genuine solution to a need?

Is it Long-lasting? Especially now that nobody wants credit, who will part with hard-earned cash for something that they’ll have to replace soon? And you can definitely knock it on the head if its influenced by fashion. 

Finally, it just has to be Envied by the competition.  I mean the CEO of your competitor is going to be so green that he’ll fire his marketers and product development people and sent them off with a flea in their ear and a picture of your big idea to remind them what one looks like!

Sadly I’m seeing evidence that the current economic climate is causing some businesses to cut back on the development of new ideas and concepts.  Its a pity, because if you study your history, you’ll quickly realise that this is just when the development of new ideas plays biggest dividends.  Ideas don’t have to cost a fortune to develop and every business has hundreds of  ideas and concepts that it doesn’t even tap into.  My advice to any organisations is launch an internal campaign right now to unlock the potential that already exists within your workforce.  You might finds ways of increasing efficiency that will save you from the bankruptcy courts and you are bound to come up with something that you can spend this fallow period preparing for launch when the economy improves.  Ralph Halpern who brought the Burton Group from within days of bankruptcy to become one of Europe’s most successful retailers, made a policy of always having twenty or so pilot concepts on test.  The philosophy is that if only one is successful it pays many times over for the cost of those that fail.  Business is about ideas.  Striving for new, bigger and better products, processes, concepts and offers. 

I have worked with organisations around the world, helping them to leverage their brand communities, by adopting new ideas and a different perspective on their business.  It works.  I’ve seen organisations in the depths of  recession, create new business units that have become businesses in their own right, in some cases out-lasting the original trading concept.  So I know it can be done.  And the starting point is understanding what  big idea looks like and not wasting time on ideas that don’t measure up. 

So, make sure you have your Brand Model up-to-date and in shape, create your own equivalent to the SIMPLE judgement criteria and go to work on building your business, even during recession.

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Posted in Big Idea, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, communications, customers, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, innovation, internal marketing, marketing, phil darby, retailer, strategy, the big idea, The Full Effect Company

The next publishing revolution

Posted on Monday 19 January 2009 | Leave a comment

magazinesThe common dilemma of on-line publishers has always been whether they should derive revenue from subscriptions or advertising.  The choice for most has been the arguably simpler advertising route. But times have changed and some at least are being forced to question that wisdom.  Is it too late?

Early in the on-line publishing revolution proponents appear to have developed a consensus that said it wasn’t possible to have a model that generated revenues from both subscriptions and advertising.  Its easy to see how they arrived at that decision, the criteria for ad. sales is, after all, site traffic, but traffic is limited when payment is required for access. 

However, with advertising revenues falling and costs escalating, more than a few publishers are wishing they could go back and start again.  Readers are happy of course, and its a brave and optimistic man who will hang his reputation on persuading them to pay for what they already have for free.  Besides, while free access, will broaden your visitor profile, advertisers expect tight targeting and to some extent that’s what the web is all about.  So, is there another solution?

Maybe its time to change the way we view publishing?  That’s all types on-line and off.  Last year I was involved with a number of publishers who were all, internally at least, questioning their traditional understanding of the business they were in.  All healthy stuff. 

To me, publications have always represented the epitome of a brand.  I have said many times in this blog and elsewhere that brands are communities, held together by common interests, beliefs and values and publications, especially specialist press, are just that.

Mature operators in other sectors have come to recognise that selling anything is a whole lot simpler and requires far less investment if everyone you approach shares the same perspective.  That’s why brand development is so important.  The problem for publishers is that so few of them have leveraged their communities as, say an fmcg brand might do.  Basically, they have set up a really great store, but it has a very limited offer.  My belief is that now is the time for publishers to recognise that their business isn’t necessarily publishing, but that this is merely the means they have to gather an audience to whom they can make revenue-generating offers of pretty well any products and services that might appeal to their community members.

I’m not the only person who is thinking this way.  One of the UK’s biggest publishers (it wouldn’t be fair for me to say who) are developing a new strategy on this basis already and others are certainly discussing it.  I am working with another right now whose future clearly lies in diversification.  Of course, there is always the danger that diversification stretches resources and distracts managers from their core business, but we are developing a model that overcomes that and I can see a number of alternative routes to the same objective.

You don’t need me to tell you that times are hard and they’ll get tougher yet.  If your business is struggling now you are likely to be among the millions of victims of the economic downturn, so what better time (I guess you could have done it already) to take a radical look at your business model. 

There’s a silver lining in every cloud and if a publisher sees their future in owning interests in diversified businesses that could be fed by his community, there are a whole lot of struggling businesses with great products who are open to a very favourable deal right now.  And, once you get your corporate head around the paradigm shift, a switch like this isn’t that difficult to bring about, and it can happen very quickly.

I realise, that there are publishers who have so far been able to perfect that balancing act between subscriptions and advertising.  The result is usually a really great, tightly defined and high value community that advertisers prize.  But it is a balancing act that’s going to get tough to carry off and this doesn’t exclude these publishers from the opportunity.  In fact, it could be even more lucrative when starting from a base as stable as theirs.  Worth a thought I think.

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Posted in advertising, brand, brand development, branding, brands, business strategy, change, communications, community, Full Effect, innovation, marketing, on-line publishing, publishing, strategy, The Full Effect Company, tradition, Uncategorized, web site

Jingle on!

Posted on Friday 9 January 2009 | Leave a comment

It seems rumors of the jingle’s death have been greatly exaggerated … by me at least!  Having waxed on last month about how great life was when we all had a few jingles to hum as we went through our day, I had my attention drawn to an organisation that has brought the art into the 21st century.

Meet Now House, a business that not only proves that music is a viable and valuable contemporary marketing communications tool, but makes a strong case for integration, DM, social networking and The Big Idea in one neat initiative.

I say this because I became aware of Now House from their Christmas card, which I arrived at via a link from James van Etten’s Clippings and the card was one of those that not only could you forward to your own contacts, but was a rare example of one that you might actually forward without permanently destroying your street cred or losing all your friends.

I suspect that I am not alone in dreading the pre-holiday mailbox full of gag-inducing, unoriginal, dross that most people pass-off for Christmas greetings.  I always find myself wondering how apparently switched-on companies can waste such an opportunity to underline their innovation, by demonstrating the opposite so dramatically every December.  Because one sign of a well-run business is that they don’t waste free communications opportunities, my advice to any client who is looking for a business partner for any purpose, is choose the one that didn’t give the job of designing their Christmas card to the tea lady (not that I have anything against tea ladies you understand!).

The “big idea” is a constant theme of this blog and my little talks.  Basically, my point is that however great your delivery vehicle may be, it has to be delivering something useful and in this world of marketing noise one of the essential attributes of a decent campaign is “cut through” – without the big idea your media costs are going down the toilet. 

I was involved a few months ago in a debate about viral.  Someone (I can’t remember who now) suggested that viral marketing is a great way to piss money away and they are right.  Isn’t automation great?  Now you can lose a shed-load of cash and never leave your desk!  If you consider most of the viral campaigns you see, its clear that their originators think that being in this goovy new media environment is enough in itself.  They don’t stop to think that its a double-edged sword that’s gonna demonstrate what twats they are to gazillions rather than just millions of people if they don’t use it right.

What Now House did with their Christmas card was use the delivery vehicle in  a way that demonstrated their skills, reinforced their brand charater, was worth taking the time to open and seeded a viral chain that I am now, in January, still perpetuating – now that’s efficient marketing!

The sub-text to this is that if they are this switched on and still doing stuff with music then there must be something in not only this jingle thing, but the guys at Now House.

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Posted in advertising, below-the-line, Big Idea, brand name, branding, brands, communications, CRM, difference, efficiency, Full Efffect Marketing, Guerrilla marketing, innovation, integrated marketing, Jingle, marketing, Now House, phil darby, the big idea, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Creating an Ideas Organisation

Posted on Thursday 18 September 2008 | Leave a comment

I have an absolutely unshakable belief in the “ideas organisation”, which is why I get so pissed off by organisations that only want to perpetuate a winning formula.  They just don’t get it, do they?  The facts are indesputable, a winning formula is only winning when its new and original, once its old-hat or plagarised the value dissappears FAST and that’s getting to mean a realy short shelf life for most businesses.  As I have said many times before – “Your organisation is only as good as your NEXT big idea”.  Move on!

Of course, when your organisation is structured and geared to perpetuating the routine, its not easy to climb out of the rut.  This is noticeable at every level of an offending organisation.  In my Brand Discovery workshops I always start with an exercise designed to help delegates break the mold.  A quick and simple demonstration of how it feels to think normally.  Yes, normally, because normal thinking is what drives creativity.  The problem that we have is that we mistakenly belive that the way we think every day is normal.  Well, wake up and smell the coffee, you aren’t normal, you are conditioned!

Jennifer Goddard reports on BNET this week on Mr Mindmapping, Tony Buzan’s conference that she attended in Singapore, where he spoke of an experiment in Utah that pitted under-fives against graduates in a creativity test.  I think it is a rather old and well-known piece of research that he refers to, where the under-fives won 95% to 10%, thus proving, or so it would seem, that we start creative and have it beaten (read educated) out of us.  In one of my favourite presentations on TED, Ken Robinson promotes just this thought.

So with all this stuff working against you, how are you going to create your ideas organisation?  The way I see it, its not about workshops and brainstorming, useful though they may be once you are an ideas organisation.  Sadly, I usually find these things are more “last chance saloon” than “brave new world” and tend to find their way onto the agenda about the time an organisation realises it doesn’t have a hope. 

Great buinesses have idea generation in their DNA, or rather “idea liberation”, because the ideas are always there, hiding away in the corners of the minds of your employees, the task is to set them free.  How do you do this?  Well firstly you have to give them, value.  

We all have ideas, all the time.  Small ones, big ones, funny ones, evil ones, even profitable ones.  The reason that they don’t ever see the light of day is because we are embarassed to express them!  Why embarrassed?  Well, I guess that’s one of the mysteries of social conditioning, but basically most ideas are pants and we just can’t live with that.  We’re so insecure that we can’t bear the thought of people knowing that we had a stupid idea.  How how stupid an idea is that?

We have to learn the value of mistakes.  I’m sure Michaeangelo didn’t just turn up and knock off the Sistine chapel first attempt.  He must have had a warm up, a trial run, scrapped a few attempts even,  Shit, nobody’s that good!  So get real.  And the reality is that there are loads of crap ideas, but every now and then there is a really great one and it isn’t always obvious at first encounter which is which, so you have to give them all an airing.

So, if you want to be an Ideas Organisation, and, frankly, these days no organisation can afford not to be, the first step is to value ideas,  Sounds obvious, but take a look around you, it doesn’t happen.  We still value only the good ones and snigger at the people who come up with the runts.   We forget that, good or bad, all ideas are worth something because without the hopeless ones you won’t ever discover the great ones.  How do you gt to this, well, hey, I get paid for this, so If you want the “how”, hire me!

Once you have achived this though, step two involves creating the conduit through which the ideas are funnelled into the system.  What system?  The one you create in step three that’s what system.  Too fast for you?  OK, here’s it is again,

  • Step one – value ideas.  Convince yourself that ideas are always good and some are great.
  • Step two – build a communications conduit.  Two-way so that you can persuade your stakeholders that you value ideas, then they will too and as a result they’ll bring them to you.
  • Step three – develop a way of presenting the ideas.  Its important to help people express their ideas in the nearest to business terms they can get, and anyway, its a good business discipline training exercise for them.
  • Step four – Create a test process.  All you need do here is decide how these ideas are going to be explored, the stages that you will go though to minimise risk (Yes, of course there’s risk, the smart guys minimise it though)
  • Step five – establish criteria for judgement. You need to be able to tell as early as possible in your exploration whether an idea will fly, so you need a set of criteria.  You might choose generic ones that support only your Brand Model, or you might design a different set for each idea or every stage in theexploration process.  
  • Step six – Implement.  Its amazing how many great ideas get put on hold, until the time is right.  The time is NOW!  And, if you are facing difficult times such as we all are now, the time was yesterday, so you’ll have to move fast to catch up!  Every time there is recession in any part of the world the guys who push ahead with idea development end up being the winners.  Check the facts.

Now you’re “cooking on gas”.  You are an ideas organisation!  You’re not?  Didn’t like it then eh?  Oh well, it was just an idea!

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Posted in Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, ideas, innovation, internal marketing, management, marketing, phil darby, strategy, the big idea, The Full Effect Company, Training, Uncategorized, workshops