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The world is watching!

Friday 7 November 2008 · No Comments

barack-capitolMuch has already been written about the Obama victory in the US elections and I am sure there will be much more to come.  This is, after all, a momentous event to so many people, for so many reasons that it could take a long time to raise and explore them all,  but, as you might expect, I have a few thoughts on this and I’d like to raise two in particular that are close to my heart.

This week the American people have said “enough” in the most emphatic fashion.  Enough talk, enough manipulation, enough aggression and above all, enough indifference.  This is no mere electoral vicissitude, the turn-out tells us that.  This is proof that the criticism levelled at the US in recent years by many Middle Eastern spokesmen and increasingly from their counterparts in other parts of the world, that the US is not a democracy, is bollocks.  The people have reclaimed democracy, this is it in action - big time!  For once at least, the pollsters were right and despite the predictions of the Republican die-hards people were as straight-talking at the exit polls as they were in the main event - they said they had voted Obama and they did.  Make no mistake about it, the American people have spoken and, at what I believe was the eleventh hour, they have said to the world “Bush is not what we are”.

Of course, there has been a great deal of damage done to at least a couple of brands along the way.  Firstly the Republican brand has taken a hammering beyond belief, which itself is an illustration of how a wayward son or sub-brand (in this case Bush) can damage the corporate brand.  I have been saying for years that there’s corporate DNA in every sub-brand and batting on about how this relationship works in practice.  I couldn’t have wished for a better demonstration.  After the most expensive campaign in US history the Republicans are about to discover that it can cost a hundred times as much to bring a disappointed customer back to your store than it does to build on the relationships you already have a sell again to existing customers.

However, the greatest damage has been done to brand USA.  This result can leave no compos mentis person in any doubt that it was voter apathy that put Bush into the White House, but life is a learning process and the lesson of the last few years has been that there’s more to this presidential gig that the electorate had realised.  The President is your representative in every way possible.  What he or she (for that day will dawn too) says and does, is taken by the people of the rest of the world to demonstrate the attitudes of the American people and at last, I think the message has hit home!  If you elect a buffoon, we think you are all buffoons, if you appoint an aggressive war-monger we take this as a fair indication of your general state of mind.  And who would blame us?  You have, after all, always told us you are a democracy.

Just as the president is not just a local act, neither is he or she just a figurehead.  As many corporate brands with high profile and popular spokespeople have discovered, its not just a case of putting the right celebrity with an attractive message on your promotional material you have to deliver, and that’s the hard part and my second point!  The enormity of the task facing Obama right now is mind-boggling.  He has to be certain that his promise is clearly defined - in Full Effect Marketing terms create a brand model.  Just as we do with Brand Discovery he then has to ensure that every one who is enlisted by him understands the promise and its implications and is totally committed to playing their individual role in delivering that promise.  This much alone could be a lifetime of internal marketing, given the way that governments and civil servants operate.  However, only when he has done this can he be confident that every government action or initiative is consistent - that’s consistent with each other and with the brand promise.

Nevertheless, I’m not worried about whether Obama understands this.  I am sure he does.  What I’m worried about is the possibility that having nominated a driver for this bus the rest of America might think that they can sit back and enjoy the ride.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  This thing is only going to work if the people play their part too in demonstrating to the world that the brand USA promise has substance.  Having mustered the strength of purpose to stop the rot, it would be one of the world’s biggest disappointments if the American people were to slide back into apathy and indifference.

If the lessons have been learned, this could be the biggest watershed in American history since the declaration of independence.  This is not just the appointment of a new President, its not even the nomination of the first black President, nor is it just the re-birth of democracy in the land that was founded on that principle, its the chance for the American people to stand around and behind their President and the promise he represents and tell the world this is what they stand for and above all, play their part in making sure America delivers.  It never was more true.  The world (really) is watching!

Categories: American · Barack · Brand Discovery · Brand Model · Brand promise · Democracy · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · Government · National Branding · Obama · Politicing · President · Senate · The Full Effect Company · US · brand · brand development · branding · brands · change management · communications · consistency · internal marketing · marketing · phil darby

Why the recession could be good for business

Monday 13 October 2008 · No Comments

Today the UK government has called time on the excesses, self interest and downright bad management of the financial services sector, by taking control of British banks.  Whether it will have the desired effect remains to be seen, but frankly, its about time.  I lost patience with the sector a while back, when a leading FS manager told me that it wasn’t in his interest to “put customers first” and now we are witnessing the product of this mind-set.

I’m not a fan of this government, but it does seem that they’ve got this right and for once I feel the Britain is looking bold and decisive.  UK Gov’s move may not produce a level playing field, but hopefully it will create a more sensible game, however the fall-out is sure to continue with customers far from relaxed about choosing financial patners. And that’s where the potential is.  Ultimately, the banks and financial institutions that are first to persuade consumers and businesses that they can be trusted will triumph.

Trust, is the very basis of any Brandship - the relationships between brands and their stakeholders - so its easy to see that, given the revelations of the last few weeks, the brand equity of banks is as low as a limbo-dancing gnome.  For now they are all tarred with the same brush.  We all know now that for years banks have been tricking us into believing that they were on our side while craftily lining their own pockets with our cash, so for any financial services business to dig themselves out of this one is a big ask.  However, that’s the challenge they all face and its clear that the same old, same old just isn’t going to cut it.  This time they have to be transparent and build brands with real integrity.  Attempting this feat with their existing management in place would be like a paedophile applying for a job as a kids’ swimming instructor, and that’s why the government stepping into the management shoes will, at least, give a few of them a chance.  Now its a case of a massive change management process and that can only be good for business.  Who’ll be first to the tape.

While the banks are working on this one, the rest of the commercial world are considering how they can survive the after shock.  There’s no doubt about it, a lot of businesses are going to tumble in the next few months, but amid the rubble there’s a real opportunity for the bold.

As we’ve seen with banks in the US and UK, there are always bigger vultures to pick over the bones of the those that fail and in this vein a good many short-term wins will be had by organisations with strong and inviting brand communities that can offer shelter to the customers of their deceased competitors.  This will come about in two ways - pro-active, acquisition by competitors and investors of organisations and brands on the verge of a crash and reactive, mopping up by strong brands of the displaced customers of their weaker competitors.

But moreso than in the normal process of acquisition the challenge doesn’t end acquisition.  Its one thing to provide a consumer with temporary shelter, but although the cost of acquisition could be modest compared to the recent past, the real test will be whether these brands can persuade their new customers to make a home with them.  This is where I see the real potential.  I foresee a period of floating customers, like deserted wives, reluctant to commit to long-term relationships and suitor brands falling over themselves to reel them in and turn them into life-partners.  And I predict, honesty will prevail.  If nothing else worthwhile comes of this situation I be live it will convince a few more brands to stop making empty-promises and a shift to genuineness, transparency and a genuine commitment to customer satisfaction.  Another reason why the recession will be good for business.

Because brand communities are a product of their members - significantly their customers - any acquisitive organisations will also have to be wary of the risk of alienating their existing customers as the dynamic of their brand is changed by a large influx of new members, but, if they are sufficiently sorted to have created a strong enough brand community to pull off the acquisition trick in the first place the chances are they’ll have this under control too.

Its common practice in recessionary times for organisations to tighten their belts and sit it out, but the record clearly shows that this is not the path to success and it definitely isn’t the way to go now.  If you want to to make the most of the opportunities that the recession is providing you need to be pro-active, take a close look at your brand and your organisation.  Are you in shape to meet the challenge?  If not get to work.  At the end of this recession the organisations that deserve success will have it and there’ll be some gaps in the line up too.  But then again, I’ve always felt that Darwin nailed it with the process of natural selection.   I think we’ll all be better off for the clear out.

Categories: Brand Discovery · Brand Model · Brand promise · CRM · Competitors · Darwin · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · bankers · banks · brand · brand development · brand name · branding · brands · business development · business strategy · change management · community · customer · customer service · customers · internal marketing · management · marketing · natural selection · opportunity · phil darby · promise · recession · strategy · transparency

Where the growth is.

Thursday 2 October 2008 · 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creating an Ideas Organisation

Thursday 18 September 2008 · No Comments

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!

Categories: Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · Training · ideas · innovation · internal marketing · management · marketing · phil darby · strategy · the big idea · workshops

There’s a right way and there’s a wrong way …

Friday 5 September 2008 · No Comments

I’ve just spent two weeks looking into a company whose brand has massive awareness.  Great, you might think, but no, because while everyone has heard of this business, it seems to me that they have massive negative equity.  Like Walmart?  No, way worse than that.  This business seems to be universally hated!

I say “seems to be” because I can’t say for sure - they have no research.  A basic omission you may think, but they didn’t seem to agree and don’t want to pay for any.  I did the usual on-line checking, but this was hampered by a massive web farm they had set up to control negative comment and social networking (a sure indication of a business that had their priorities up their arse!).  It seemed to support my intuition, but I didn’t come up with enough hard facts.

Staggeringly, this business is big, number one in their sector with fourteen years of YonY growth.  How did they do it?  Actually, it isn’t that big a mystery.  They succeeded on a rising market, with no competition, where all they had to do was turn up and set out their stall, then count the money - and they milked it!  Inexperienced and sometimes just plain stupid management had made just about every mistake in the book, screwing customers, suppliers and partners alike.  However - and I love it when this happens! - they seem to have reached the end of their road.  Economic conditions, social change, emerging competition and saturated markets have conspired to hack their share value to bits and turn their business into a Shadow of its former self - send for the consultant!

After that imagine how refreshing it was to come across not one, but two businesses that had got it all right.  Sadly, they are not my clients, but in an interview with Time Magazine’s The Curious Capitalist John Mackey, CEO and co-founder of Whole Food Markets and Kip Tindell, CEO and co-founder of Container Store, gave me the kind of lift that’s only possible when all your firmly held beliefs are affirmed in a single action.

These guys tick all the boxes in my Full Effect Marketing philosophy and Brand Discovery programme.  In this lengthy interview they explain how important it has proven to them as entrepreneurs to have defined the parameters of their brands up front.  They didn’t tackle this in a particularly formal way but, as is the case with so many great entrepreneurs they each instinctively created what I call a “Brand Model”, without which their businesses, and anybody else’s, would not be scalable.

Once you have this the rest is possible, if not always simple.  I still have a struggle sometimes driving my clients through the process of internal marketing - sharing the model, its reasoning and constraints with employees at every level and getting them behind the cause, but as John and Kip knew, empowering your employees is the vital key to growth.  The client, whose tale I opened this post with, complained at our first meeting that he was forced to micromanage because his people weren’t up to the job.  I argued that things aren’t always what they seem and that I usually find that the “people” aren’t always the problem that they seem.  “But what if they are the problem?” he asked.  “I guess you have to have a clear out” I replied.

Of course you have to have great people to have a great business, and John and Kip both underline how important it is to recruit the best, but how great they are is very much dependent on how well you manage them and again, instinctively John and Kip knew this.

A great business is built around a great brand.  Every brand is a community that all your stakeholders play a part in creating.  Again, after my experience with the client I feel the need to clarify - stakeholders are investors, suppliers, partners, employees as well as customers.   You have to ask yourself “Are these people, who I want to do business with going to want to be a part of my community?” and when you get a “yes” you then set about making them feel as welcome, engaged and comfortable as you can.

These two talk about the importance of engaging your employees and your suppliers, how vital it is to share information with your community and confirm that though there will undoubtedly be leaks as a result the advantages vastly outweigh the disadvantages.  They talk about the innovation and risk - both requisites of business growth, best quality and satisfying and delighting.  I could have filled this post with clips from the interview, but go there and read for yourself.

It didn’t take me two weeks to realise that what my client wanted was for me to paper over the cracks in his business.  He didn’t want to change it,  I doubt that he would even be flexible enough to do so and I suspect that anything I would do would be too little too late anyway.  I’m not even sure even now that he recognises how serious his situation is.

Unsurprisingly, he isn’t a client any longer.  Which is a pity, because I do love a challenge, I hate to give up on anything and I could see the glimmer of a couple of opportunities, but I doubt I would have been able to persuade him to explore them.  To quote John, or was it Kip, “Life’s short and then you are dead” so I’m off to find my next project.

Categories: Brand Model · Brand promise · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · brand name · branding · brands · business development · business strategy · change · community · container store · customers · employees · honesty · internal marketing · john mackey · kip tindell · marketing · phil darby · transparency · wholefood market

Is your customer satisfaction holed beneath the surface? It’s that Icberg Imperative again!

Tuesday 24 June 2008 · No Comments

I just landed on a great little blog that I visit from time to time called Customers Rock. In particular a new post entitled Airline Customer Service Makes All The Difference. Its not that we don’t all know this already, but that it relates to my previous post on internal marketing and provides a platform to reintroduce one of my old favourites - The Iceberg Imperative.

The Iceberg Imperative states (and I should know because I invented it!) that nine-tenths of an organisation’s communications go on below the surface. The things that combine to create your customers impression of your brand, the attitudes, values and standards that are inherent in the customer experience and cause either delight or disappointment (and too often outright alienation) are, whatever you may believe, rarely controlled by the boardroom. All too often the management approach is to seek to maintain brand integrity by legislating for every point-of-delivery eventuality, but that just produces a two-foot high process manual that nobody can read, runs up a massive process training commitment and is inevitably a waste of time and effort, because a is the nature of these things, you’ll never, ever accommodate every possible scenario.

The better practice is to bring your front-line employees (in fact every employee) into the loop. Make them as intimate with your Brand Model, its values, standards, objectives and above all its inherent “promise” as you are, so that whatever situation they encounter their response will be reflective of the brand and in line with customer expectation. This way you deliver your Brand Promise and don’t have disappointed customers.

Of course this doesn’t just happen by telepathy you have to invest as much time and effort in bringing your stakeholders behind the brand as you do in the sexy media routes that you use to make your promise to end-users. And there’s the rub. Have you studied the marketing budget breakdown in your organisation lately? My bet is that you’ll find the balance between external promise-making investment and internal promise-delivering investment is way out of line.

Given that most organisations don’t get this internal marketing thing at all and massively under-invest in it anyway, its logical that a comparatively small shift in the balance of marketing investment in favour of internal marketing will bring a disproportionately high return (provided you invest wisely in a serious strategy). There’s no set proportion, its an empirical process so you’ll have to play around with it, but it has worked for my clients.

Interestingly, and I’m at a loss to understand why they haven’t spotted this years ago, it works too for marketing services organisations who are all bleating about their share of the pie being eroded, because internal marketing demands the same skills and largely the same media as an external marketing campaign, so its a great opportunity for them to strengthen relationships with their clients and increase revenue. A no-brainer really.

Categories: Brand Discovery · Brand Model · Brand promise · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · brand development · brands · communications · customer · customer service · customers · internal marketing · marketing · media · phil darby

Bridging the chasm between your boardroom and the front line

Monday 23 June 2008 · No Comments

I recently spent a few days at home in the UK and discovered UK morning TV. In particular a BBC programme called “Don’t Get Done Get Dom” where a consumer’s champion called Dominic Little (hence the “Dom”) tackles companies on behalf of customers who in one way or another feel they have been let down by them. I don’t know how typical the episodes that I caught were, but there was a very obvious common theme to the main cases.

One company that stands out was called SafeStyle Windows, a replacement window company that dramatically screwed up an installation. Another was a holiday company that had let down a couple who booked an expensive holiday. The common theme with these and others was that the customers (who were all more tenacious to start with than most I’ve come across ) all spent weeks and in some cases months trying to deal with Customer Service representatives to no avail.

Coincidentally I was having the same kind of experience with the Auto and Cycle store chain Halfords who might be the market leader in the UK by a long way, but still (or maybe because of that fact) run their show like amateur hour. My issue with them concerned a product listed on their web site that involved a product description, price and photograph that appeared to refer to three different products. I e-mailed Halfords customer service who redefined themselves as “customer abusers” by sending me an auto response that undertook to reply within SEVEN DAYS!!! In the even they exceeded that deadline by a further day by which time I’d bought the product elsewhere anyway. Well Mr Halfords, them’s the breaks!

In fact, I am sure that the folks sitting around the boardroom tables at Halfords, SafeStyle Windows and the holiday company (whose name escapes me) would be horrified if they realised how their Brand Promise was being massacred by front-line troops, but I’m equally prepared to accept that these same front-line troops are sure that they are doing what is expected of them. I realise that the picture is skewed by the directors, who I know are out there, of organisations who are happy to abuse customers as they hide behind their customer services people, but who are all sweetness and light and conciliatory once someone like Dominic Little gets past the razor-wire. However, assuming that the majority of managers are smart enough to realise that the trick to growing a business is to always delight your customers, the clear issue here is the gulf between the boardroom and the front line.

This is what internal marketing is all about, of course, but its a subject that I know most organisations fail to understand and vastly underestimate the importance of. It takes a special effort and a shift in attitude of senior managers to set up an internal marketing programme from scratch, but there’s no avoiding it if you want to stay in business these days. I often hear from directors that such an initiative would be too disruptive for their organisation and its true it can be if the concept is as alien to you as it is to some of the businesses I come across. That’s why I developed Brand Discovery, a programme of internal marketing that takes logical steps to ensure that all stakeholders are signed up and fully committed to playing their role in the delivery of the Brand Promise. What’s different about Brand Discovery is that it is an ongoing programme that becomes part of an organisation’s DNA and brings about change more by osmosis than revolution. There’s no longer a need to put the brakes on a business in order to change direction. Sure the benefits of Brand Discovery take time to filter through to your bottom line, but its not that long and I would argue that taking a more radical approach slows the momentum of a business short-term and therefore would never challenge the overall commercial benefit of Brand Discovery.

Whichever approach you take, if you are not already focussing on bridging that chasm between your boardroom and your front line with internal marketing you need to get moving. Unless, of course you want your ten minutes of fame on Don’t Get Done Get Dom!

Categories: Brand Discovery · Brand Model · Brand promise · CRM · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · National Branding · The Full Effect Company · below-the-line · brand development · brands · business development · customer · customer service · customers · internal marketing · management · marketing · phil darby · promise

Specialised Specialized customer service

Thursday 5 June 2008 · No Comments

If ever I thought that I was wasting my time banging on about the the essential role of internal marketing in great customer service, I could count on a bike business to restore my faith. Yet again, a bike company (Specialized to be precise) has demonstrated how the kind of stakeholder commitment that can only be the result of great internal marketing, delivers customer service that fortunes are built on!

If you have been reading my blog for a while you’ll know that I have reported a few times on the great customer service I have received from bike businesses like RockShox (Now part of Sram), WTB and Bradburn. What is it about these businesses that make their customer service so much better than most other businesses I encounter?

OK, so I probably have more contact with bike companies than a lot of people because I ride a lot, have bikes and break components from time to time (although I am usually pretty good with my stuff), but biking isn’t my life and there are a whole lot of other businesses that supply me with products and services that relate to other things that I do, so its not that my experience is narrow.

It’s not that they are particularly small businesses either. Specialized is a major global concern so they face the same internal communications issues as any other global and they are not alone among bike businesses in this - biking is big business! So it can’t be that they are compact enough for the brand message to be easily communicated to the people on the front line. It has to be something to do with the potency of the message itself, the passion and commitment that it raises in stakeholders and/or the way it is communicated.

I guess there are few people working in bike businesses who aren’t themselves bikers, so maybe they are just more committed to the ideals of the business. Bikers are a community and within that big community there are very powerful individual brands, each representing a community of its own (those I have mentioned included). A Specialized bike is probably something rather too commonplace for a Yeti rider for example, while if you are a Specialised convert you’ll appreciate their build-quality, innovation and engineering and maybe view Trek as cheap and mass-produced - that’s “positioning” at work. (Sorry but I’m not privy to the Brand Models so I’m not sure which boxes they are each trying to tick, but then again, if they were all perfect I would know wouldn’t I!).

So, a bike manufacturer, because its stakeholders mostly comprise bikers, is working with pretty fertile ground. There’s also already a propensity for bikers to sign up to brand communities, but you still have to have a peg to hang your hat on - that big idea - and the internal marketing communications, so the fact that they are doing so well with their customer service means that these guys clearly know their stuff. (Although I do think that the press advertising that’s part of most bike companies’ external marketing generally sucks. But that’s another post).

There is room for improvement though. For example, one of the biggest challenges for any manufacturer is to get their Brand Promise represented consistently at the point of sale and Specialized, like all businesses struggle there sometimes. I have come across many instances where a manufacturer’s Brand Promise isn’t evident at the local bike shop, the UK’s most dominant wholesaler/distributor for instance, appears to be universally despised by retailers, which can’t be good for anyone’s business, but Specialised do better than most with their customer service even at the sharp end of their sales chain and this has to be down to sound internal marketing. So, if anybody at Specialised is listening, I’d be interested to hear what you do and even more interested to help you reign in those local bike shop owners and staff a bit tighter.

Oh, and thanks to Duncan Cruxton at Specialized for sorting my cycle computer problem!

Categories: Brand Discovery · Brand Model · Brand promise · CRM · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · Retail · The Full Effect Company · brand development · brands · communications · community · customer · customer service · customers · internal marketing · management · marketing · phil darby · promise · retailer

Maintaining eyeball-to-eyeball retailing

Monday 2 June 2008 · No Comments

The trouble with business success is that its like a computer game - you overcome one set of problems, arrive at a new level and then find that there’s a whole new set of problems to overcome. What’s more, because they are always new challenges, you encounter them with no experience upon which to base your response, so you are perpetually learning on the job. And its a treadmill that once you are on, you can’t get off - every level of success brings new challenges and every solution moves you to the next level.

Organisations in every sector will know what I am talking about and one of the major challenges that becomes bigger with every advance you make is that of just managing the day-to-day of your business. Those of you who know me or who take the time to read my stuff or turn up for my seminars and workshops will know that I’m no fan of routines or bureaucracy, but I’ll be the first to admit that you have to have a way of tackling the ever-growing challenge of the day-to-day. You’ll also know that one of my big things is the impact that apparently insignificant actions, that happen well away from the boardroom, will always have on your overall success.  This also highlights the demand for a way of passing information up and down the chain of command.

It’s a dilemma with a couple of possible solutions. The one favoured in the past and which is still, sadly, adopted by the head-in-the-sand school of management is dictatorship - basically you give nobody the space or the authority to do anything other than what you instruct them to do. The problem with this, as many organisations and a number of countries have spectacularly demonstrated, is that it involves a level of micro-management (and/or a degree of coercion) that no organisation can sustain and even if you succeed in controlling things you are going to miss out on a bunch of valuable and increasingly rare opportunities. The other route is delegation … Agaaaaaaaaaaaah! I can hear the muffled cries from below sand level in boardrooms around the world right now, but if you are one of those to whom this sounds like heracy, there’s no escaping it - its time you went cold turkey on those old habits, put down the stick and find yourself a carrot - yes, as the man said, your future is orange!

I spend a great deal of time in the retail world. One of the things that I have always loved about the sector is that its one of the last bastions of the entrepreneur, where you can actually get stuff done and try new ideas while they are still new. New stuff often represents less of a risk for a retailer than it does to other types of organisation because retailers have eyeball-to-eyeball contact with the customer and therefore understand them better and therefore have maximum scope for making a sale. That’s why when an fmcg company wants to understand customers one of the places they go for insight is the retailers who channel their products.

Retailers are big businesses these days. They have access to an unbelievable volume of data and partners who can analyse it inside-out and tell them the innermost secrets of consumer minds. However, its a two-edged sword. Because they are so big a retailer’s chain of command has lengthened. No longer can it be taken for granted that the folks on their front line have that retail blood, possess the corporate gene or really understand the objectives that you set for them - unless you tell them that is.

Did you ever play Chinese Whispers as a kid? You know, that game where you all stand in a line and the person at one end whispers a message into the ear of the second and the message is passed down the line from there, usually to arrive much changed at the other end? The famous example being “Send three and fourpence …” quoted from the first world war (so Google it!). The same applies to the instructions and customer feedback that is transmitted back and forth between the shop floor and the retail boardroom. Most organisations, retailers included, now acknowledge the need to give their sales people, at least, some discretion at the point of sale. The trouble is that in order to make the right choices the shop assistant needs a load of information and motivation and that’s where most organisations fail.

What I am talking about here is internal marketing. When I started my career in what was called the “Advertising, Marketing and Display Department” of a national retailer I tackled this by introducing a regular (weekly or monthly, I can’t remember) bulletin containing instructions and insights, which we mailed (can’t even imagine doing so now) to every manager of every one of our 100+ stores (that was a big retail chain then!). My contemporary take on this solution is a far more complex integration of things like Internet, direct mail, mobile training workshops and special events, based on my essential tool for all businesses the Full Effect Marketing Brand Model.

Internal marketing for today’s unwieldy companies, if tackled in this way, provides the essential two-way flow of information that’s the stuff of success and absolutely essential to retail and a few other sectors where entrepreneurship still lives. The Full Effect Marketing Brand Model establishes ten critical aspects of the brand, including the Brand Promise that will be an important basis of every decision in every corner of every business and the integrated communications routes that are Full Effect Marketing itself ensure consistency in message (in just the same way that your external communications should). If everybody in your business “gets it”, as they will if this is done properly, the decisions that they make in their every-day functions will be the right ones an you’ll get accurate reliable feedback from the shop floor that in turn will make the decisions you make than much easier.

It may well be that, given the number of employees involved, internal marketing is more complex for retailers than for other types of business, but we have the technology and its really just a matter of understanding how to use it. A typical retail integrated internal marketing campaign might incorporate in-store radio or TV, a LAN or WAN university and direct mail. I recently created a travelling circus for a retailer that took training to the shop floor in a way they had never seen it before and I created a plan for another retailer that involved a radical internal promotion/event that was never launched (due to unforeseen circumstances unconnected to the event) but which was exciting, colourful, competitive, contemporary and above all very educational.

I see signs all the time of retailers who are losing their grip. The ideas that are agreed on in the boardroom are not always being represented on the shop floor. Sure this happens in other sectors too, but for a retailer, building that up-close-and-personal relationship with customers is what its all about. So, get a grip. sort out your internal marketing and let’s not lose it!

Categories: Brand Model · CRM · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · Retail · The Full Effect Company · advertising · below-the-line · brand · communications · community · consulting · corporate · customer · customer service · customers · decision · decision-making · efficiency · internal marketing · management · marketing · phil darby · retailer · sales

Business body-building

Friday 30 May 2008 · No Comments

Anybody involved in sports training knows that if you want to develop muscles you do so by constantly pushing them beyond their limits. You push weights that are heavier than you have pushed before, the fibres in your muscles break and bleed and you feed them protein to fix them and they become bigger and better than before.  So, nothing is easy, right?

The great squash player and recently retired World Champion and World Number one Peter Nicol was training at his peak by pushing his boundaries too. Like other elite sportsmen and women he followed the theory that your brain has a built-in fail-safe that protects you from over-doing it, that this margin is rather larger than it needs to be.  By ignoring the messages you get from your brain during exercise that tell us mere mortals to ease-off you demonstrate to your brain that you can do more without actually dying. Next time your brain lets you go further before telling you to stop. Well, it worked for Peter!

The business world isn’t much different, Last evening I went out to eat with my son. We found our way to one of those up-scale food courts with a host of trendy restaurants (and inevitably a few less trendy or up-scale ones) and set about making our choice. As it was we ended up at the hand-made burger restaurant and it was great, but during our deliberations we considered (for a nanosecond at least) TGI Friday’s.

I remember Friday’s from when my son was a child (that’s twenty years ago) and we used to go to our local TGI occasionally for a treat. It was always a kid’s place to me, but apart from being about as far away from grown up dining as you could get, then it was new, and funky and they tried. I mention this because yesterday we concluded that TGI Friday’s have committed that unforgivable sin - they are still doing the same old thing!

This is an old chestnut of mine - business success being more about the fact that you are new and different than what that difference is and that once you have established your place on the map with a new formula, you are duty-bound to start looking at improvement or re-invention. However, that’s not quite my main point here.

Last week one of the guys I mountain bike with accused me of being too competitive. I say accused because that’s how he meant his comment to be interpreted, but frankly I was flattered. Personally, I would rarely use the words “too” and “competitive” in the same sentence. His point was that I tend to streak off up hills leaving everyone else behind and disillusioned. Now, I have to say that this isn’t strictly true. In fact there are many of my riding chums that leave me behind in the same way in such circumstances, but as far as the group in question were concerned, I guess my critic was correct - Its all a matter of context and the relative fitness or skills of those who you are riding with at the time. The point I made in reply was that while I’ll buy the “competitive” label its not that I am competing with the guys who are riding with me particularly (although that has been known) I compete with myself, trying to push my limits because, although the view from the top of a climb is always a reward for the effort involved the real point is the challenge of getting there as quickly as I can and quicker than the last time. The fact that I am quicker than you isn’t really a concern to me, but, inevitably if I always approach my rides in this way I’ll improve to the point where I will beat you and ultimately any other challengers every time.

I approach my work in the same way. I start every project with the objective of doing it better than I did last time. Sure I have the competition in my peripheral vision, but I’m focussed on my own Personal Best. As long as I always work that way my performance will improve by increments and when I have been doing it for long enough (and I’ve been at this for a while now) I guess I’ll beat anybody.

Because I work this way I am more than usually irritated by businesses and people who don’t rise to the challenge in the same way. Its perfectly clear to me that once you have a Brand Model to represent your objectives (because a Brand Model will always be the starting point of any business development strategy), if everyone in an organisation approached their work like a body-builder or sports-person their organisation would pretty soon be unbeatable.

This thinking is similar to the 110% philosophy. I heard an American business guru explain this by asking a room full of people what percentage of their objective they thought it was reasonable to achieve. The suggestions were something like 85% or 90%. He then equated this to an airline’s success in delivering passengers to their destination and drove the point home by suggesting that it represented a plane crash every so-many minutes. “So you think that’s acceptable?” he asked. It was a simple next step for delegates to nominate 110% success their objective with the expectation being 100% achievement.

Whichever way you look at it its clear that if you want to succeed you are going to have to put yourself out a bit, aim high, compete with yourself. This is reasonably easy for most senior managers because they have a better perspective of the business. Further down the chain of command though its harder to relate to. That’s where internal marketing, that other message that I keep repeating, comes in. Its the internal marketing that gets your workforce thinking like a body-builder and which provides the incentive. I also feel that a lot of business attach too much importance to what their competitors are doing. I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t be interested in the guy down the street, but all too often the performance that competitors achieve becomes your objective and that’s bad for a lot of reasons.

So, if you want your business to succeed you too must remember the lessons of our great sports-people and think like a body-builder focus on your own performance, aim to be better every time and don’t stop when you win - keep at it and make your competitors eat your dust!

Categories: Brand Model · Competitors · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · business development · business strategy · communications · internal marketing · management · marketing · strategy