Category Archives: public sector

Britain’s biggest ever internal marketing campaign

Posted on Monday 24 May 2010 | Leave a comment

Image from BBC News. Click for full story.

As George Osborne announces the new government’s plan for its first £6billion tranche of public sector spending cuts, I am getting a distinctly uneasy feeling that there’s a spectre looming large in the shape of public sector employees, who could bring the county to its knees in an orgy of self-interest.

As one commentator put it this morning on the BBC, this isn’t just a plan to save £6billion+ is a plan to change the expectations we all have of government, in other words a re-branding and as with any other re-branding strategy, it has to start with the people delivering the promise.

I’ve worked with public sector organisations in the UK and elsewhere and I have to say that, certainly in the UK, despite their claims of having upped their game in recent years – and, to be honest, there’s a degree of truth to this – the sad fact is that the claim reveals the naiveté that is at the heart of the sector’s dire performance.  Frankly, most public sector employees, just don’t understand how out of kilter they are with their private sector counterparts.

I have sat at post-mortems for failed initiatives where the inadequacies of the people charged with the task at every level have been obvious.  I’ve heard people shrug-off any responsibility for watching colleagues fail or fall into pits that were perfectly obvious to all, but the person doing the falling, with comments like “that wasn’t my job”. I’ve witnessed total absence of any shared responsibility or common agenda, even seen people scramble over each other to assign blame to anyone who could be made to represent a target.  Worst of all, I have noted time and again the credence that managers give to this behaviour.  I’m not saying that stuff like this doesn’t happen in the private sector, but in the public sector its the prevailing culture.

I’m thinking of one regional public sector organisation in particular that is failing by a measure of two-thirds to meet its targets consistently, month after month.  It has employees at every level who may arguably have the ability to do their job, but simply don’t.  People who fill their day with an hour’s-worth of work and feel hard done by if they are ever questioned about their lack of progress.  Not only is the manager not managing the situation, there’s absolutely no consequences attached to the failure to deliver.  Each month he just turns up at a meeting and tells his bosses how much he’s missed his target by and they just nod and thank him.  I have first hand knowledge of a group of high-profile public sector organisations whose purpose is to provide specialist advice to the business sector whose “advisors” rarely have more than a grasp of the basics of their subject and certainly usually know far less than the people they are advising.  In the absence of expertise this organisation has fallen back on prescribed programmes, processes and practices executed by process-followers who force their “clients” into ill-fitting solutions, waste their time with totally unnecessary bureaucratic hoop-jumping and consider it a job well done.  The only real effort demonstrated by these and other public sector organisations I have encountered is in gathering tenuous data to support their continued existence.  This is what waste really looks like.

Apart from the blatant and intentional waste of time that goes on in these places there is inevitable consequential waste represented in the endless arse-scratching done by people who frequently just don’t have a clue what to do next.  But its the intentional waste, driven by the kind of self-interest we have seen demonstrated by Royal Mail, British Gas and now British Airways employees that will be the nail in Britain’s coffin.

I’m concerned that the public sector, being what it is, will put the usual knee-jerk interpretation on the message from Whitehall – reduced funds = reduced services – but that’s not necessarily the case.  Cut out the waste, the processes that waste time for all of us and do nothing, but keep people on the government payroll and, in percentage terms, the reduction in services will be nothing like the reduction in investment.  The public sector just has to stop putting itself first and start doing what’s sensible and right.

If the British people are to be persuaded to consider “government” in a new light, the Government must firstly define what their promise is and then undertake the massive task of getting the people responsible for delivering it committed to the task.  Only once they are confident that every employee is determined to play their part in delivering that promise to the full, can the promise be made with any credibility or any chance of success.  It’s a big ask, a massive challenge, its internal marketing on a scale that has probably never before been tackled.

Pitfalls lie on every side.  When the Labour party finally manage to get their act into any kind of togetherness their traditional support of trades unions like Unite might mean that they contribute to the obstacles facing any re-branding strategy.  Unions themselves are going to have to be realistic in their demands and employees at every level will need to be put straight on the need to contribute to a shared objective rather than perpetuate the self-interest that has been largely responsible for bringing us to this mess.  This requires transparency by the government regarding their agenda, sharing the brand vision and mission and the provision of the information that people need to understand for themselves why the strategy has been chosen and more importantly, what they must do to play their part in its delivery.

It’s about communication on every level embracing every media route – press relations, the internet and electronic media, direct marketing, corporate videos … you name it.  A fully integrated campaign the like of which we haven’t seen before, certainly in this country.  Maybe it’s an opportunity for the COI to really show us what they can do in terms of strategy and efficient project management, but more than that, its an opportunity for the best in every area of marketing and communications to contribute to a project that is really worthwhile.

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Posted in BBC, brand, brand Britain, brand character, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, communications, community, David Cameron, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, george orborne, integrated marketing, integration, internal marketing, local goverment, marketing, National Branding, phil darby, promise, public sector, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Internal Marketing may be the key to post recession survival, but its tougher for ex-public sector organisations.

Posted on Friday 12 March 2010 | Leave a comment

First it was the Post Office, then British Airways and now it appears that British Gas front-line employees are in revolt.  When your customer-facing staff are slagging of the organisation and/or it’s management you are well and truly buggered, but when is the penny going to drop here?  This isn’t about the evil hand of capitalism trying to squeeze the life out of dwindling customer base or white-knight customer service operatives standing ground on behalf of their customers.  Its  about one thing, pure and simple.  The failure of management to get employees behind the brand.  Brand Building is the fundamental of business today and it all starts with internal marketing – that’s where all of these organisations are failing.

I don’t want to make light of this.  For these organisations, each of which have among the worst industrial relations records in Britain, it’s a tough challenge.  Why these three in particular?  Well, there’s a clear common denominator here – they are all old public companies.  People who joined public sector organisations in the past and probably to some extent today, are motivated differently from those in the commercial sector.  They rarely think so, but it’s true however you cut it.  Order, rules that protect them from having to do absolutely anything that isn’t in their buttoned-down contracts of employment, endless holiday entitlement and decent money that turns up every month, regardless of how hard they work and how much they care – this is the world of the public sector employee.  Unless employees have a sense of belonging, commitment and shared responsibility, these organisations will never transform themselves into the lean commercial machines they simply have to be to survive, yet the employees who are at the centre of these rows are those with contracts that date from the pre-privatisation era and the self-interest that goes with them.

The reality is that while the world has moved on these organisations struggle to keep pace with a millstone around their necks.  That millstone being employees who are determined to stay right where they are.  It’s no coincidence that this is exactly what is happening in the former Communist countries.  Twenty years on from the Velvet Revolution it’s still a challenge to motivate Czech workers who spent fifty years just going through the motions while collecting the same money every month and commentators are now coming to the conclusion that it will take a few more generations before Czechs are attuned to commercial reality.

Once an organisation knows the scope of its resources, has a strategy and has defined their brand and its “promise”, the task is to get every stakeholder (and this isn’t just employees) fully committed to playing their part in the delivery of that promise.  That means telling them what that promise is, explaining why it has to be that way and helping every one of them understand what they can uniquely do on a day-by-day basis to help ensure the promise is delivered and, just as importantly, helping them fill the gaps in their skills base so that they can do it even better.  If you get this right there’s no argument and it will happen.  In the rare cases where a minority feel that they have some right to override the strategy that everyone else has signed up to, they’ll be neutralised by the commitment of the majority.  Apart from anything else, that’s one of the principles of change management.

It’s not surprising that businesses are only now waking up to what internal marketing is really about.  For years a remit of HR managers, internal marketing has only recently been handed to the people equipped to do the job – marketers – and we still have a lot of catching up to do.  One group who need to catch up most are marketing services organisations but this awakening could be the salvation of many, who, as we all know, are desperate for new ways to bond with clients and new sources of revenue.

A modern internal marketing campaign demands high levels of skills in all areas of communication.  I devised an internal marketing initiative for a retailer that involved teams of employees from each store competing in a national product and process knowledge quiz with regional heats, national finals and a grand finale in the capital.  Among other things, it involved event production, logistics, building a supporting web site and streaming videos of the contests, so we needed multimedia production skills and it also required that we bussed supporters to each event.  That’s what modern internal marketing looks like and if you want to get your employees on-side you need to start thinking about initiatives like this.

It may come as a surprise to the folks at the Post Office, BA and British Gas, but there are workforces in Britain and elsewhere who are taking wage cuts, accepting shorter working weeks, introducing new work practices and taking on extra responsibility because of their commitment to the brand community.  Internal marketing has always been the key to success.  In the new economy its the key to survival.

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Posted in Airlines, brand character, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, British Gas, business development, change, change management, communications, communist, events, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, HR, Human resources, industrial relations, integrated marketing, internal marketing, marketing, phil darby, promise, public sector, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Diversity in Redditch and the public sector challenge

Posted on Wednesday 10 March 2010 | Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go Direct-Gov – a promise too far?

Posted on Tuesday 12 January 2010 | Leave a comment

One of the fundamental principles behind Brand Discovery is that brands should never make promises they can’t deliver.  It sounds simple enough doesn’t it?  However there are still alarmingly few organisations who really get it, as has been demonstrated by HM Gov this month with their “Go direct gov” campaign.

Just to state the obvious the reason that this idea of avoiding making promises that you can’t deliver is so important is that it just costs you money – often quite a lot of money – and even if that was acceptable way-back in history somewhere, no organisation can afford to waste a cent these days.  Of course, that’s something that the public sector has always had difficulty coming to terms with, as this campaign powerfully demonstrates.

While it has been estimated that it costs ten times as much to sell to a new customer as it does to sell a second time to an existing one, it’s also true that it costs something like a hundred times as much to entice back a customer that you have disappointed.  I guess this doesn’t bother the public sector that much as they have a monopoly, but it should resound with the Labour party, who, I would have thought need all the credibility they can muster in the run up to election day.  So, while its important to make propositions that are attractive, if you raise expectations too high, you are bound to disappoint.  Brand Discovery tackles this by introducing businesses to a new approach to brand development that focusses as much on delivering the promise as it does making it.

This campaign by the UK’s biggest spender on advertising falls at the first hurdle by being incredible to start with.  Everyone knows that our government couldn’t run a piss-up in a brewery, so they are on to a loser straight off by suggesting that they can sort out insurance, car tax, pensions and the like at the click of a mouse and as one who this went to battle with the Gov’s on-line tax assessment process this year, I know that its massively more time-consuming, complicated and stressful than handing everything to an accountant, so there are definitely going to be some disappointed customers around.

Then there’s the execution.  I see there’s no creative credit given for the commercial – wise move by the creatives I think!  It seems that the agency has adopted the when-you-are-trying-to-really-blag-it-use-celebrities-with-popular-appeal” strategy that has proven to fail on just about every occasion its been pulled out of the drawer and dusted off.  However, apart from having Z-list celebrities anyway, why dress Christopher Biggins like a baby, and have Suggs prating around like an idiot?  It can’t have helped his credibility.  Its also a mystery to me why, apart from its association with Suggs and Madness, why anybody would use a song entitled “It Must Be Love” to promote anything to do with the government – Yuk!

Like a lot of public-sector initiatives this looks to me like a sound-enough concept (the business principle I mean, not the advertising) that’s been totally screwed up in its execution (Including the advertising).

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Posted in Big Idea, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, communications, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Government, ideas, marketing, National Branding, phil darby, public sector, the big idea, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Well it bloody well happened at Tourism Australia, didn’t it?

Posted on Tuesday 28 October 2008 | 1 Comment

I just knew it when I wrote about this in February!  I’ve been waiting in trepidation for the outcome and now we have it. Australia, the land that we hold in great affection for its rough-edges – Crocodile Dundee, Home and Away and Sir Les Patterson, has decided that its a luxury destination for poser aesthetes in search of their real self – Strewth!  Pour me a Bundy and lets get real here!

There’s no doubt about it Baz Luhrmann makes great cinema, but everything about this production leaves me asking “So what the bloody hell happened to Australia” and not, by any means, in a good way.  What we are witnessing here isn’t anything to do with attracting tourism to Australia, its about a new government attempting to remove every trace of their forebears, but having nothing to replace them with.  Yes, by all means when you gain office establish your brand quickly and decisively by doing something different, but for Christ’s sake do something sensible.

This isn’t Baz’s fault, and it may not even be the agency’s (they are just being opportunistic), but it most certainly is the fault of whoever wrote the brief and approved the strategy and that, I guess, was a politician or civil servant because any half-wit marketing person would know that if you are going to make claims you firstly want to know both that anybody cares and that you can back them up.  However popular retreats may be these days, I absolutely cannot belive that anything more than a handful of tripped-out tree-huggers are going to fork-out thousands of pounds on a re-awakening walk-about.  The Australian outback is about four-wheel-drive, Bush-Tucker Man and the Crocodile Trophy (the toughest mountain bike race in the world!) not competition for yoga-punting Maharishis with Bentleys in their back yards.  And just because some asshole in Canberra decides that his future lies in distancing himself from what his predecessors stood for, it doesn’t make it right, or even wise, to present Australia, that we all know, and understand just fine already, as something that it isn’t!

It might be argued that this is aimed at Americans, most of whom don’t know where Australia is, or have a passport that will get them there.  I have to admit, when it comes to selling something “different” to Americans the extreme adventure element of traditional Australian positioning is a bit too close to home and the historical Aboriginal card starts to offer hope.  However, if this were so its, at best, a case of bad timing because the high-flying banker-type who might, a few weeks ago, have been fooled into embarking on a voyage of self-discovery in the Aussie outback is struggling to afford the bus ride home from the soup kitchen these days!

This absolutely has to be a case of a no-substance politician wallpapering over reality.  If you want to change a nation (and Aus looks just fine as it is these days to me) stick to your strengths.  Politic your way to change, don’t just tell everyone that its come about and hope they don’t notice its all bullshit.  Oh, and butt out of marketing, its definitely not your forte.

I really, really hope that everyone gets this situation for what it is and doesn’t end up hating brand Australia for trying (because, believe me it won’t succeed) to jump on what it perceives as a gravy train.  Remember, while it takes ten times as much to attract new customers to your brand than it does to repeat sell to existing ones, the cost of attracting someone you’ve already pissed off by not delivering or trying to scam (or maybe in this case by selling out) could be a hundred times that.

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Posted in advertising, American, Australia, Australian Tourist Commission, bankers, Baz Luhrmann, brand, brand development, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, communications, customer, customers, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Government, honesty, maharishi, National Branding, phil darby, Politicing, public sector, Sir Les Patterson, The Full Effect Company, Tourism, tradition, Uncategorized

Alas, the UK National Health Service, I knew it!

Posted on Thursday 29 May 2008 | Leave a comment

A client of mine attended a conference last week of key figures from the UK’s National Health Service. He spent a total of eight hours in an auditorium with two hundred delegates listening to some big name (if not big talent) speakers and being amazed at the comments and questions from the floor. Never before, he tells me, had he witnessed such universal negativity and self-interest at an event like this. The whole sad moan-fest left him wanting to stand up and shout something like “Get a grip you sad, lazy idiots!”.

The demise of the UK’s once proud health service is the stuff of legend and there are many reasons why the jewel in the British crown has become so lacklustre. Fundamentally though, its about lousy management and a factor that, for our purposes right here, I’ll call “negative opportunism”, which was there in buckets-full at this conference.

I have witnessed this phenomenon many times in different places over the years and it has always annoyed me. Its when well-intentioned rules or procedures are laid down and those who are supposed to follow them immediately manipulate them to bring-about a situation where they feel they are excused from doing exactly what the rule is designed to achieve. Still with me? Good!

I am sure that it isn’t always entirely the fault of the people at the pointed end. After all, good rules are those that are most readily accepted and to achieve that much its a good idea to collaborate on their formulation with everyone that they affect. There’s a lack of this sometimes at UK government level – especially with our current government. Its also true that the UK health service has completely lost the plot. An organisation that was set up to ensure that basic healthcare was available to everyone is now unable to fund life-saving treatment for those with critical illnesses because its coffers have been drained by the cost of helping childless middle-class couples have quintuplets and women with large breasts have them reduced because it makes them self-conscious! Aneurin Bevan would turn in his grave!

At the conference in question my client reports that without exception the comments and questions from the floor were negative, destructive and un-cooperative. Everyone, it seemed was more concerned with proving that the system doesn’t work, or that expectations of them were unreasonably high than to get their arses into gear and make something happen. An accusation that might also be levelled at that other bastion of the lazy and self-interested, the UK teaching profession. I am not saying that this is a mind-set adopted by everyone employed in these public services. Of course it isn’t.  They may even be a minority, but sadly for us all, those with most influence are usually those with the biggest mouths and often the smallest intellect and it seems they were out in force last week.

I realise that these things aren’t as simple as they seem, but I et mad when there are fundamental mistakes or omissions.  What happens in the private sector that clearly doesn’t in the public is that businesses start with, or at least periodically identify, a fundamental objective or two and align their business structures and practices to realise them. In its simplest for, that’s what my Brand Discovery Programme does. If only we had a Brand Model for the National Health Service we could start on the internal marketing that every organisation needs to get its people behind the promise – and that I think is the key here. A Brand Model, correctly marketed internally gives good employees something reassuring  to focus on and provides floaters with a sense of purpose.  Once you start with this strategy it also becomes much easier to winkle out employees who, for their own reasons, are never going to comply with the spirit of the plan, which in this case it seems would have meant an empty auditorium!

Having admitted that it may not be so simple I have to say that this isn’t an excuse for not trying. I’m a UK tax-payer and I’m sick of wasting my tax money paying pubic servants to either do nothing to support, or actually work against the initiatives that could make our country a decent place to live. The good work that Margaret Thatcher did in starting to get us to think of running the country in the same fashion as we should run a business has almost entirely been undone in recent years.

I’m fascinated by the idea of applying commercial thinking, tools and practices to the public-sector, but sadly the successful businessmen who could make this kind of thing happen are usually too busy running their own enterprises to help out. There are exceptions, of course, and Tony Blair and to some extent Gordon Brown have done their best to harness this knowledge and experience by bringing in “government advisers” but it clearly hasn’t been enough.

Hopefully we will soon have a change of management and there will be a chance to start putting things right. I only hope that the patient hasn’t died before the treatment arrives!

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Posted in Brand Discovery, Brand Model, Conservative, David Cameron, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Government, internal marketing, national health service, NHS, phil darby, private sector, public sector, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized