Category Archives: internal marketing

Building Brand Britain

Posted on Tuesday 16 August 2011 | 1 Comment

Over that last week or so, prompted by the UK riots, we Brits have listened to endless analyses and proclamations by local community members, civil servants and politicians centred on fixing our “broken society”.  As always with these situations, there has been plenty of scepticism heaped on the potential any new initiative has for success.  However, there is only one real obstacle to all the remedial plans announced by David Cameron and others and that’s motivation.

I believe that Dave is a good motivator and getting better, he talks sense, even though his opponent Ed Miliband, seems intent on trying to neutralise that with mindless and responsible political point-scoring.  (If I were him I’d shut up before people started to realise that it’s the left-wing, crap that his party has expounded for decades that has given certain sectors of society the idea that they have rights they haven’t earned and therefore created this disaffection).

The marketers among us will recognise the task facing us as brand-building and as anybody reading this blog over the last few years will know building Brand Britain is one of my pet subjects. The problem is that we have singularly failed to respond to the obvious need to develop Brand Britain and we still don’t have the right people in harness to tackle the job.  Forget the political masseurs, data-analysis’s and bean-counters, where are the marketers in the team?  Without them we won’t get past first base because the people who are currently in the driving seat simply don’t get it.

Over the past few years I have approached politicians, government departments, local councils and private enterprises with initiatives designed to help build Brand Britain.  In many cases, because I have always believed that unemployment and local business initiatives are both inextricably linked and critical to the cause, these initiatives have addressed local unemployment, been designed to strengthen communities and help the mid-sized local businesses who are the key to the future of our nation, shift up a gear and take on the world.

The responses I have received from the public sector jobs-worths in particular, though unsurprising have been nonetheless frustrating.  Unimaginative Job Centre Plus employees civil servants and local councillors have simply disregarded projects and initiatives as representing just another unwelcome task.  There’s no point and very little scope for public sector workers like these to adopt an initiative that’s not dictated letter by letter from Whitehall because their world isn’t a meritocracy.  Why should they take on something they aren’t compelled to?  There’s nothing in it for them.  Besides, these people aren’t employed for their creativity and they are entombed in a culture that actively discourages any kind of creative thinking, so expecting them to appreciate any concept is always an ask too far.

Life skills that should have been taught throughout a person’s school life, if not at the cradle, are belatedly outsourced by Job Centre Plus to HR and recruitment companies.  I’ve spoken to a few of these contractors.  They view these projects with the glee of a paedophile assigned to changing room duty at kids swimming gala and submit proposals that represent minimal input and maximum income for them with the balls-out cheek that comes from knowing the people assigning these projects don’t have the first idea what they are doing and are just relieved to have a tick in the “assigned” box.  When I have gone to these organisations to volunteer help and advice, the response has been eerily uniform and something to the effect that “…we‘ve managed to blag the approval of the JCP people for this half-baked programme, so there’s nothing in it for us if we actually do the job properly”.

These are the kinds of issues that will threaten any British brand development programme and unless someone wakes up pretty quickly and recognises that we ARE building a brand and therefore need to follow the appropriate process, we are destined to failure once again.  That means someone (Dave will do) having a clear picture of what Brand Britain looks like and starting with the mother of all internal marketing campaigns that will bring the public sector and government puppet masters into line behind the concept.  The public are motivated, the players are listening and we’re unlikely to find ourselves with a better promise of success for a brand building venture than now this side of World War Three.

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Posted in Big Society, brand, brand Britain, brand character, brand community, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand equity, brand loyalty, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, change, communications, Conservative, CRM, culture, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, England, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Government, Human resources, integrated marketing, internal marketing, Job Centre Plus, marketing, marketing experience, marketing skills, National Branding, phil darby, The Big Society, The Full Effect Company

When customer service is more about internal marketing than training

Posted on Monday 2 May 2011 | Leave a comment

Because, unlike most other countries, when a bank holiday coincides with a weekend, we Brits nominate the nearest weekday a public holiday, today (Monday 2nd May) was Mayday bank holiday in the UK.  As a consequence, I caught “Don’t Get Done Get Dom” on daytime TV where, cheeky chappie Dominic Little champions the consumer cause.  The object of his ire this week were the retailers Currys and PC World and Dom had a mailbag full of customer service complaints that he set out to resolve with the retailers’ parent Dixons Stores Group.

Over the last few years the consumer group Which have consistently highlighted DSG’s customer service deficiencies, its surveys revealing a customer satisfaction rating of something in the region of 30%, so the state of affairs can’t be news to DSGI management.  It’s bemusing therefore that, if they have done anything at all it’s had little or no impact on the end product, which frankly appears as bad as ever.

How can it be that a big organisation like DSGI can firstly deliver such poor customer service and secondly fail to address the fact when its pointed out to them in such irrefutable fashion?  Well, it could be that it’s a strategic choice.  I’ve heard of organisations before that had made the conscious decision to set their customer service rating target low because they had calculated that the cost of raising it above that point would not be recouped.  Putting aside the many and obvious flaws in that argument, I can’t imagine that a 30% rating would be acceptable to anybody, so I have to assume that this state of affairs is rather more an accident than a plan.

The feedback Dom received from DSG management was confusing.  Their comments suggested that they view inconsistencies in customer handling skills as an inevitable consequence of their rapid pace of recruitment and accepted that limitations in training capacity would result in new employees arriving on the shop floor with limited or no training.

I don’t buy any of this.  Firstly training may be an issue, but the fundamental problem here is clearly internal marketing.  The reported problems had far more to do with the willingness of customer-facing staff to disappoint or even upset customers than it did with processes, which it seems were largely not at fault anyway because all the customer issues were resolved once Dom had escalated them.

It seems obvious to me that the focus of DSGI employees is miss-aligned.  They seem to act on the assumption that customer satisfaction was secondary to adherence to processes (which they misunderstood anyway).  Yes, training would help them get to grips with the processes, but internal marketing is the tool to set customer satisfaction as the priority.  Once that’s established, when an employee can see that they are in danger of disappointing a customer they’ll realise that the process, as they understood it, is leading them down the wrong path and put the brakes on.

I don’t accept that employees find themselves on the shop floor without first receiving training either.  Training like this doesn’t have to be process-based.  In fact, the priority should be a culture-based induction that can be undertaken by the local manager, on-line or in a classroom, depending on time and cost pressures and there are many ways in which this process can be policed.

Over the years I have devised and run numerous training and internal marketing programmes, for retailers, who have witnessed improvements despite high volume recruitment.  In fact internal marketing, linked to a clear brand model reduces employee turnover, so volume demands are usually reduced too.  The evidence of Dominic Little leads me to suspect that DSGI are making a fundamental error in thinking that training holds the solution to their problems.  My belief is that they need to take a step further back.  Their customer service issues and a number of their other problems are, I am sure, all down to the lack of a clearly defined brand model and the internal marketing programme that makes it live and the sooner they recognise that and address it the sooner they will stop finding themselves the focus of programmes like Don’t Get Done Get Dom.

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Posted in Brand Model, branding, brands, Currys, customer service, customer support, customers, employees, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, internal marketing, PC World, phil darby, Retail, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

It pays to engage your employees

Posted on Wednesday 13 April 2011 | Leave a comment

Only a real idiot would fail to nurture and care for his employees.  After all, your employees ARE your business.  Their personal traits are your assets, their values are your values and their passions the seeds of your future products.  They have the ideas that, in an environment where a business is only as good as its NEXT big idea, are the difference between success and failure.  Its also down to them that these ideas get turned into products and services and delivered to market and the level of efficiency with which they do that is also in their gift.  That’s why my Brand Discovery programme focusses on engaging the organisations’ workforce.  They, not the directors are after all, going to bring the brand to life.

Internal marketing will deliver by far the fastest performance improvement for pretty well any business.  For one thing its massively neglected.  Many businesses don’t even have a budget for it and we are all familliar with the law of diminishing return, so its easy to see why a little attention given to such a neglected subject will quickly deliver disproportionate results.  When I am faced with a business that’s strapped for cash, but needs to turn around, my first call will be to the internal marketing toolbox.  Its rare for my marketing strategies not to include HR initiatives.  I usually have HR people on my project teams and I’ve frequently delivered results without increasing marketing investment by switching marketing funds from external communications to internal initiatives.

My fascination with this subject explained my glee when I came across Dr David Kelly’s account of “Designing Curious Employees“.  Just about every paragraph on this piece contains a priceless insight that most businesses I encounter could do well to contemplate.

Although he may not express it in these terms, David Kelly recognises that getting your employees behind your brand is the key to success.  Brands fail because they don’t live up to expectations and that’s down to employees, but for employees to do their stuff requires that they are comitted to playing their part in delivering your brand promise and in my experience few employees even know what that is, let alone have a sense of ownership.  Most businesses issue instructions to their employees rather than explain and involve them in decision and as Dr Kelley says, that’s the worst thing you can do. Why should they feel anything for a concept or even a business that they haven’t been allowed to participate in the development of?

Keeping them in the loop is but a facet of internal marketing.  If you want your employees to truly own your strategy (and belive me you do) they have to have played a part in its formulation.  There are all kinds of tools that you can engage to ensure this is happening, but most of all you need to engage your ears.  Once they know you are listening, in my experience emplyees will respond with all manner of ideas and suggestions that could set your business on the road to success.  I once created an entire business unit from an idea that came from a junior secretary and businesses that harness their people power are doing the same every day.  So, take heed of what David Kelly says.  Internal marketing is a powerful tool that in the right hands can transform a business.

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Posted in brand, brand character, brand community, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand equity, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, communications, decision-making, Dr. David Kelly, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, internal marketing, marketing, phil darby, The Full Effect Company, Training, Uncategorized

Halfords’ customer service sucks – well, it would if I had my way!

Posted on Thursday 3 March 2011 | Leave a comment

I’ve never had anything against Halfords.  In fact, I could refer to various supportive comments that I have made over the years.  They seems to have carved a niche for themselves in the bike sector, they triumphed in a deal to distribute Boardman bikes, they were smart enough to partner with an auto service business and now fit the products they sell to motorists and cyclists alike and they made the forray into Poland and the Czech Republic.

Their staff in the UK at least, while nothing to write home about, are certainly, if Mary Portas is to be believed, as good as you would expect from a multiple specialist retailer these days.  On the down-side, their on-line performance leaves a lot to be desired and dealing with their head-office at any level is a bit like wading through porridge, but its my recent experience of their approach to customer support that has sent my overall personal satisfaction rating way into the red.

OK, so Halfords aren’t having the best of times at the moment.  Like-for-like sales are down and despite all the usual excuses – recession, weather, cost of car ownership etc – that always has something to do with the way you treat your customers.  You’d be right to point out here that, last we heard, profits were up, due in part to a concerted effort to drag their back office, logistics and pipeline into something approaching the twenty-first century – Oh, and a quick reverse out of the Czech Republic and Poland.  Nevertheless, I still hold on to the idea that if you treat your customers well you’ll succeed whatever the size the market may shrink to.

Halfords has never gone out of its way to make customers feel wanted.  It wasn’t that long ago that they undertook to respond customer-support e-mails …  wait for it …”within eight days”!  Communication has been a bit quicker lately, but that’s not a lot of use if they aren’t being helpful.  Someone should point out to them that making statements like “we value your custom” and “we pride ourselves on our customer service” is all very well, but until you actually resolve issues its only “lip-service”, not “customer service”!

If you drop your Tesco shopping on the way to the car, Tesco will replace any broken items.  They don’t have to, it’s just their way of making you feel good.  You may consider this as giving 110%, but, let’s face it, it costs Tesco tuppence and the value to them in customer satisfaction ratings is worth far more than that.  Yes, every little helps!  In contrast, telling you they make every effort to make you satisfied, is “job done” in Halfords book!

Last weekend I bought a four-litre plastic container of concentrated screen-wash from Halfords, along with a bunch of other stuff.  I placed it in the passenger foot-well of my car and drove home, only to discover, when I arrived, that the foot-well was now an inch-deep in screen-wash and the container was almost empty – no doubt where that had come from then!

I took it back to the store where the manager pointed out that the seal that should have prevented the cap from coming off the container, had been broken, presumably by someone in the store, which he added, was not unusual.  He replaced the purchase, but I still had a screen-wash lake in my car and thick-pile carpets that don’t come out just like that.  On his instructions I e-mailed Halfords’ customer service to seek recompense for the cost of having my car bailed.  And after a couple of days I received a reply.  Apparently, they don’t see that its anything to do with them and suggested that if I had taken proper precautions while transporting the screen-wash I wouldn’t now have an on-board swimming pool, steamed-up windows and a very smelly car.  I get the impression they think that by explaining this to me they resolved my issue.  I’m sure I just went into their customer service database as another satisfied customer, but right now I feel as though the customer service manager should personally suck the screenwash out of my carpets!

They may be making a profit, but with an attitude to customer service like this, in a shrinking market I wouldn’t put my money on this lasting long!

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Posted in automotive, community, customer, customer service, customers, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Halfords, internal marketing, marketing, phil darby, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Brand Britain or Big Society. Could Cameron use some marketing expertise?

Posted on Sunday 13 February 2011 | Leave a comment

It may be another word for the kind of national service the countries of Central and Eastern Europe have only recently abandoned, but it seems to me that David Cameron’s “Big Society” idea is missing a basic ingredient for success.

Those who have followed my comments on National Branding in the past will understand where I am coming from on this.  I’m all in favour of a self-supporting society and a move away from the nanny state that far too many of us have grown to rely on, but are those who are driving the Big Society initiative seeing it as a step towards Brand Britain or reliant on it?  My feeling is that in order to get there you have first to nurture a feeling of belonging among the populous and, judging from the debates on the Big Society that are currently taking place, this just isn’t there and the media are doing their usual best to divide us still further.

I see there are a number of facets to the Big Society.  There’s the need for us to stand on our own feet as individuals again, there’s the need to cut the cost of the services and resources that have supported the lazy and over reliant among us and there’s the belief that by focussing on community and encouraging people to participate, society and our nation can begin to realise the many opportunities that a community mindset opens up.  However, government is missing far too many opportunities to “big up” British and Brits’ achievements and, as I have said before, this is a key component of any Brand Britain development programme.

If I am reading Dave’s agenda right, I can’t see anybody grabbing and managing this initiative nor can I see what is being done, apart from a lot of talk (which has its place, of course) to get everyone on the same page.  If the “Big Society” is, after all just a money-saving scheme, then David Cameron is surely missing the bigger trick?  Anyway, ultimately it won’t work, because the people who are supposed to be implementing the programme at local level have neither the skills or experience to make the right judgements or the motivation that a real Brand Britain campaign would provide.

Cameron and the Tories may have come closer than previous governments to getting this kind of campaign right, but we need a whole lot more internal marketing and brand-building to be brought to bear if the Big Society is going to be the really worthwhile initiative I hope and believe was the intention.

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Posted in Big Idea, Big Society, brand, brand Britain, brand development, Brand equity, branding, brands, brandships, central europe, community, Conservative, David Cameron, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, internal marketing, National Branding, phil darby, the big idea, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

In successful companies employees dance on tables

Posted on Sunday 16 January 2011 | Leave a comment

You don’t need me to tell you, its tough out there.  Many businesses that I come across are struggling to adjust to the new rules of business and a few are still realising that many of the old ways of running a business simply don’t work anymore, but, old habits die hard.

I’m seeing a disappointing return to purely tactical focus and its hard to persuade the companies heading in this direction and whose priority is to pay this month’s wage bill, that  it’s a dead-end street.  A still more worrying trend I am witnessing though is towards whip-cracking.  Much as I sympathise with the desperation of managers who simply don’t understand why the approaches they have used successfully for years to build or run a business don’t work in the era of new model marketing, flogging your staff is the desperate last twitch of management that has already failed.  High-pressure tactics like this are doomed to failure in both the long and the short-term.

I overheard a conversation last week where a middle manager was bemoaning the loss of the “good old days”.  “I remember …” he said “… the days when, if I was out of the office for a day, I’d return to find my stuff all pushed to one end of my desk because someone had been dancing on it!”.  Extreme perhaps, but there are offices throughout England where the atmosphere is so dour and depressing that its hard to imagine that this kind of thing once happened in successful businesses.

My mind goes back to a quote by Tom Peters in one of his early presentation where he begged business leaders to ask themselves if there was a spring in their employees’ step as they walked across the parking lot from their car to the office each morning, saying “If there isn’t, it’s your fault!”.  His overarching point being that unless employees are happy and enthusiastic about their work, your business will fail.

How many organisations, who today are battling to put together a business strategy that works under the new rules, are paying attention to the absolutely vital element of employee engagement?  Without the backing and buy-in of employees, no business will stand a chance of delivering its brand promise, and when you fail at that you’ve just failed!

For those tempted to respond with “… but we never did any of this stuff before”, I’ll underline what I have said earlier and many times before – If you got away with this omission in the past, it was only because the competition (despite what you may have thought then) wasn’t that tough.  Now its “game on” and there’s no room for slack.  No business can afford this level of inefficiency and, believe me, trying to deliver a promise without having first secured the committment of your employees is inefficient in the extreme.

If you think its par for the course for managers to be hated by employees, forget it!  If you confuse respect for you as a manager with distant or non-existing relationships with your staff you need to take a reality check.  Successful businesses have always had figureheads who employees are happy to stand behind – Richard Branson, Bill Muirhead, Maurice and Charles Saatchi, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, Steve Jobs … I could make a long list, but you get the idea.  Developing and leveraging relationships like these are all part of the internal marketing task.  Don’t side-step the issue.  These internal “brandships” are the key to the “brandships” you have with customers and that’s what drives your business.  When you need all the help you can get to keep afloat, the last thing you should do is abandon your internal relationship-building, so double-check your marketing strategy to ensure you are doing all you can to get your employees dancing on the tables!

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Posted in Bill Muirhead, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, business strategy, Charles Saatchi, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, industrial relations, internal marketing, marketing, Maurice Saatchi, phil darby, Saatchi & Saatchi, Saatchi's, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, Steve jobs, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

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

Everything you do is part of touching the customer with the brand

Posted on Thursday 17 June 2010 | Leave a comment

In an interview with Forbes today Horace Luke, Chief  Innovation Office at HTC said “Everything from a sneaker eyelet to a brochure to a trade exhibition is part of touching the customer with the brand”.  Great!  A nerd who gets it!  But why stop there?

What Horace is telling us is that the strength of a brand is in its consistency.  To be credible a brand has to achieve consistency, represent the same values and opinions at every touch point. Organisations can no longer get away with paying lip-service to a brand promise, customers are too savvy, too well-informed and too suspicious and if you slip up at any point in your relationship with them they’ll be on to you like a cheated wife!  You simply have to walk the talk, deliver that promise.  Its a simple and logical concept that’s not so difficult to make happen.  You just have to realise that it isn’t done by legislation.  Only by listening and sharing information will you get everyone in your organisation on the same page and from there consistent delivery is an easy road.  Horace is clearly a department head who you can rely on to pass the message down the line and my bet is that everyone in his group share his perspective and clarity of purpose.

This is my passion and it’s why I created Brand Discovery, the means by which organisations can represent their brand consistently at every level.  But if you are still asking why brand is so important you should take time out to read another of today’s rich veins of wisdom, this time from Graham Codrington (That man again! I promise we don’t have any kind of relationship, but he definitely gets it!)

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Posted in brand, brand character, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, consistency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Graeme Codrington, Horace Luke, HTC, integrated marketing, integration, internal marketing, marketing, phil darby, The Full Effect Company

Your future is bright young things. So invest in your brand community.

Posted on Wednesday 16 June 2010 | Leave a comment

I hate to be repetitive, but for the second time this week I find myself shouting “hear, hear!” to a piece by Graeme Codrington.  This time he’s talking on the subject of employee relations.  In particular the challenge of holding on to the bright young things that represent the future for all of us.  But, while I agree with what Graeme says, I see this from another perspective – the perspective of “brand community”.

Graeme, as usual, is right (don’t you just hate folks who are always right?).  Too few organisations focus on creating an environment where employees feel they really belong – a community.  In this article he talks about the old days of outback mining companies that established towns and provided all the facilities their employees needed to live with their families, because they knew that without this infrastructure they simply wouldn’t have any employees.  He also points to the fact that initiatives like these were early victims of the bean-counters, looking through distorted spectacles for ways of squeezing more profit from a business.

So, what has an outback mining community to do with a modern business?  Well, it’s not as different as you may think because whether they are rock-face workers or the smart graduates that an international business needs to build its future on, when there’s a shortage, there’s a shortage, and belive me, there are definitely not enough bright young things to go around.  If you doubt that, just give a thought to the last time you marvelled at some meaningless procedure a business that you were dealing with insisted on taking you through – smart people don’t waste your time (or theirs) with stuff like this!

Graeme talks about investing in the things that make work a great place to be.  A while back, I visited an organisation whose offices were so much better and more comfortable that the homes where the employees lived, that they socialised there too.  In fact it was sometimes difficult to persuade them to go home at all!  However, it isn’t quite as simple as office bars, sofas and a few pot-plants.  My real interest in this subject comes from my passion for brands and my belief that while, as Graeme says, there’s a cost involved in making yourself the employer of choice for smart people, it doesn’t have to be as big an investment as many might think.  I see this as a part of the marketing function and in most organisations there a budget for this and, if you do it right, it is guaranteed to bring a handsome reward.  What’s more I know that with the technology we have at our fingertips today, you can measure anything and that includes the return you get on investment in your “brand community”, so the proof that this kind of investment pays-back is there.

In fact, one of the founding principles of my Full Effect Marketing is that a small proportion of your total marketing investment re-directed to internal marketing will bring a disproportionately high return.  And, have no doubt, what we are talking about here is “marketing”; specifically building a brand community where all stakeholders (investors, partners, suppliers, customers AND employees) feel a sense of belonging and ownership.  It works like this:  great brand community = happy and dedicated employees = consistency over time because they stick around = improved return on training investment = better decisions = smarter (and more efficient) execution = happy customers = job satisfaction … you get the idea.  Its called “Brandship” and yes, you have individual Brandships with every one of your “stakeholders” (I hate the word “stakeholder” too so let’s just talk about “community”).

The chance of you being a lighthouse organisation in the future (or even being around at all, given the competition we are all going to face) is very much based on the desirability of your “Brand Community”, not just for customers, but for employees.  But there’s another aspect to this.  A brand community isn’t something that’s dictated from the boardroom.  Employees aren’t going to respond to a community that YOU think they should like.  It has to be a place where they genuinely feel “at home”.  A place that they have created.  In fact, the organisation doesn’t even own the brand community.  You just get to be caretaker or janitor.  A powerful brand community is a product of and owned by its members so if you want to create the real thing (and I suggest this should be your objective) you are going to have to engage another Full Effect Marketing idea, which is that all your communications should be two-way, because you are only going to get it right by listening.

Who has come across a large organisation where all the employees get a free pair of Replay jeans?  I have, because we did it at Oskar Mobile in the Czech Republic that not only became the world’s most successful third operator ever, but, against awesome odds, were nominated World’s Best Mobile Operator; success that was driven entirely by their brand community.  This and many other initiatives like it were prompted by employees themselves, who also made a movie themselves about what a great place Oskar was to work.  The movie in turn was distributed to recruiters and shown at conferences and job fairs as well as posted in the Internet and as a result they were getting thousands of unsolicited job applications every week.  The original Saatchi & Saatchi was a community that worked and played together and it was this that drove our international growth.  I remember walking into a recently acquired agency in Helsinki and being bombarded with questions from everyone about the people and happenings in our London Charlotte Street offices.  Our London softball team had shirt with “Official softball team of the biggest advertising agency in the world” printed across the back and people in our offices around the world wore it with pride.

This is what I mean when I talk about Brand Communities and it’s why I created my Brand Discovery programme.  Every day the idea of the central role of “brand” in any business is gaining more credence.  If you aren’t focussing on this already you should be.

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Posted in analytics, brand, brand character, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, change management, communications, community, data analysis, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Graeme Codrington, integrated marketing, integration, internal marketing, management, marketing, phil darby, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

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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