A Marketing Red Flag

 

 

It is not often that marketing can learn from our esteemed political class. 

But we live in strange times.

In 2015 after the last General Election Jeremy Corbyn, an avowed radical, was overwhelmingly elected Leader of the Labour Party and by implication, Leader of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition.

 

Admittedly he required MPs in the first instance to ‘lend’ him their vote to get onto the ballot paper, an action that many have latterly come to regret.

But once on the ballot paper he proceeded to hoover up votes resulting in what can only be described as a walkover with 60% of the popular vote propelling him into the leadership position.

No one can doubt his a mandate.

And since his election he has continued to delight and mobilise his core supporters and those who elected him while upsetting in equal measure the Parliamentary Labour Party.

In the same week that the bulk of the Shadow Cabinet resign and the Parliamentary Labour Party overwhelmingly pass a motion of no confidence in his leadership Mr Corbyn addresses a passionate and enthusiastic and passionate impromptu rally of 4000+ supporters from within Labour Party.

As his support with his MPs fades and collapses, his support within the Labour Party grows and strengthens.

Who better represents the apolitical population of the country?

And this is at the heart of the question for the Labour Party?

And for many brands.

To date Mr Corbyn and his policies have not been seriously tested in the country.

But the polls, for what they are worth, would suggest that these are having limited effect in shifting popular opinion away from the Government and towards the Labour Party.

And this is what must be done for Labour to form the next government.

And in doing so it must learn to speak with those who are outside the tent, not in it.

These are the people it must persuade. Not the loyalists, the ultra-loyalists, the fanatics. They will buy your message come hell and high water.

It is the occasional buyers to whom the Labour Party must appeal. The swing voter.

It must stop talking to itself. It must craft a message that this group wants to hear.

In marketing terms we call this positioning.

And for any business, any brand to grow, it must find a positioning that appeals to its occasional consumers, not its loyal ones.

Growth will come when the consumer who buys you once a year buys you twice a year and more.

Loyal customers will keep on buying and have no more to give.

From cars to airlines to chocolate to Jeremy Corbyn, the rules are just the same.

Me, myself, I...

The humble shopping trolley.

Too often seen as a nuisance.

Clogging up our canals and rivers. Our streets. Our car parks.

Getting in the way.

But the shopping trolley as we come to know and love it, transformed the way we shop

But its success was not guaranteed.

It made its first appearance in 1937 in America in a supermarket chain owned by supermarket mogul, Sylvan Goldman.

He set out to solve a simple problem-how to get his customers to buy more than they could carry in a hand basket?

‘When the housewife got her basket full’, he once said ‘it was too heavy for her to carry and she stopped shopping,…..I thought if there was some way we could give the customer two baskets to shop with and still have one hand free to shop, we could do considerably more business.'

His first attempt based on a folding chair with wheels, could carry two baskets and could be rolled through the aisles.

He patented the design as the ‘No Basket Carrying Plan’.

The design with the rear swinging door came later.

And this design was acquired by Goldman and still forms the basic design for today’s shopping trolley.

The royalties from these designs and patents made Goldman a very rich man.

But when the trolleys first made their appearance in Goldman’s stores, they were ignored. Women refused to give up their hand baskets.

Women saw them as baby prams. And were offended.

‘I have pushed my last pram’, they complained.

And they offended men who found them effeminate.

For them it was a sign of manly strength to be able to carry round a fully loaded hand basket.

It took a careful understanding of human psychology to change attitude and behaviour.

And Goldman’s persistence.

He appealed to the ego of his shoppers.

By hiring fake shoppers, male and female, to use the trolleys in his stores, looking handsome and happy while they did it.

It worked.

And the shopping trolley was a success.

Because we all seek a positive self-image for ourselves.

We all want to feel good about ourselves.

This is why male respondents donate more to charity when approached by attractive female fundraisers.

Because we want to project and maintain a positive self-image in the eyes of the opposite sex.

And if we think we will be happier and better looking using a shopping trolley, of course we will fall for it.

It helps us make us feel good about ourselves.

Ego is a powerful motivator of behaviour. And can help consumers buy.

No man or woman likes to look bad.

We all want to look good in the eyes of ourselves, our family, our friends.

We all want to do the right thing.

And that must work no matter what we are buying. From cars to baked beans to financial services.

Even when it comes to using a shopping trolley.

My unreasonably fair lady

Ask anyone to name an Irish author and you might get Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. And

not much else.

But if you were to ask the Man on the Clapham Omnibus to name anything written by Shaw you might get ‘My Fair Lady’.

It wasn’t.

That was Lerner and Loewe.

But he did write ‘Pygmalion’, the play on which the musical is based.

His name might be famous but famous for what.

Yet this was a man who wrote more than 60 plays.

Including ‘Man and Superman’, ‘Arms and the man’, ‘Major Barbara’, and ‘Saint Joan’.

And he is the only person to have been awarded a Nobel Prize (for literature) and an Oscar (for best adapted screenplay) for his film adaptation of his play ’Pygmalion’.

He had nothing to do with ‘My Fair Lady’ which appeared 3 years after his death.

But Shaw was far more than a playwright.

He wanted to change society, not through revolution, but through a gradual promotion of socialism.

He was a leading light in the Fabian Society which became the foundation philosophy of the Labour Party

He was a man of vision and championed many causes unpopular at the time but which we now take for granted.

He wanted to change society, to change the world, to make it a better place.

A man determined to leave his thumbprint on the world around him.

He spoke for a woman’s right to vote which begat Margaret Thatcher.

He promoted universal healthcare which begat the NHS.

He championed a minimum wage which begat the Living Wage, a cause now taken up by George Osborne.

And he sought the abolition of hereditary privilege which begat the introduction of Life Peers.

He helped establish the London School of Economics.

After death he even funded a new alphabet, the Shavian Alphabet, to address the vagaries of English spelling.

He was not a man to accept the world as it was.

He wanted a better world, a different world. He wanted society, the world to change, to progress. And he would use his skills as a writer, as an essayist and a lecturer to bring this about.

But his most impactful words appear in ‘Maxims for Revolutionaries’ in ‘Man and Superman’:

‘The reasonable adapts himself to the conditions around him. The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man’

You might describe these words as at the heart of Shaw’s approach to life.

And a philosophy adopted at great personal cost by Rosa Parks to end segregation in America; by Nelson Mandela to end apartheid; even by Tim Berners Lee to improve our lives through the World Wide Web.

This has to be the most important quote in the world. Ever. For anyone wanting to challenge and change.

And that is why it behoves us all to be unreasonable. To adapt the world to ourselves. In everything we do.

How unreasonable are you going to be today?

You do the maths...

Last week I was in conversation with a young business school student I know who was specialising in marketing. Consequently he was less keen on the financial and accounting aspects of his course. He was rather surprised that despite his indifference to the numbers he was still getting ok marks in these papers.

This attitude is wrong.

Marketing and finance are not mutually exclusive concepts. It is important that marketers of all ages get the financial aspects of the business.

For one thing marketing is all about profitably meeting customer needs. How can you do this if you don’t understand the financials behind the proposition that is being marketed?

And for another thing marketers hoping to reach a general management position and even the board, and some marketers can and do reach such exalted positions, must have an understanding of the business model of the business in which they work and its commercial drivers, including the financials.

And lastly it is no use any marketer bemoaning that the finance people don’t understand marketing. Make them understand. And just like making any foreigner understand what you are saying, it helps so much if you speak their language.

And that is why marketers must learn to understand, appreciate and love the numbers. You will be a much better marketer if you do. And it really is not that difficult.

And if anyone wants to better understand the importance of being able to read the books. Watch ‘Dragons Den’. The one thing that lets anyone with a great and innovative idea down? They don’t get the numbers. Brilliant idea, brilliant marketing, brilliant sales but no idea how to monetise the marketing and make money.

So don’t give up on the numbers. You never know when they might come in handy.

Shop till you drop-from funnels to fishbones

Is the High St dead?

It has recently been reported that vacancy rates in the High St are at an all time high with a significant number of these vacant lots being described as ‘long term sick with little or no prospect of reoccupation as shops’.

It’s really easy to be gloomy and to blame politicians, the state of the economy, out of town shopping, the internet and a host of other factors for this situation. The reality is that consumer behaviour has changed and it is not going to change back no matter what the politicians and planners do or how the economy recovers.

So shops RIP?

No. And here’s one reason why.

A few weeks back a friend of mine bought some tiles online to be collected from his local DIY store. When he went to collect the assistant advised him that he had checked all the tiles to make sure they all had the same batch number; asked if he had the right grouting; advised him on the right tools to buy; and provided some advice on how to do a good job.

Brilliant.

And lest anyone thinks that this thinking is only relevant to the traditional retailer, think again. Such thinking also applies to anyone who sells stuff. And that must be just about every business in the land.

But for High St retail to survive it must learn to think differently about what it does and how it does it.

The traditional way of thinking about the role of the shop has been as a stage in the Sales Funnel, the place where consumers came to buy. And as a customer journey this was seen as a total linear process. The internet and in particular mobile connectivity has changed all that and with it new retail business models, think click and collect, have emerged and will continue to emerge. As someone said ‘if you are in bricks and mortar you must be in digital too…or you are dead’.

Consumers now will come into the shop armed with all the latest knowledge, will look at the products, will go back online to read reviews, compare prices and hopefully buy. This journey looks less like a Purchase Funnel, more like a Purchase Fishbone. And must be understood.

Consequently whereas in the past the bricks on the High St were the place the shopper went to buy. But going forward the store will be the brand and product showcase that drives revenues across all channels, less a profit centre and more an essential brand overhead that helps build meaningful product and brand saliency.

In this world the store is a destination that will augment the brand experience and will be focussed less on driving sales and more on engaging the customer through dramatic customer experiences and in-store theatrification.

And in this environment the role of the sales assistant is vital. As customers become increasingly well informed they expect more from the service they receive in store. They expect their store assistants to be empowered, informed and able to match the high level of knowledge of the consumer but also add to it and provide additional value. After all, if automation can take care of the purely transactional or navigational aspects of service, then investing in a human had better offer something more for their money and give customers a compelling reason to venture into a bricks-and-mortar store.

And if you want to see the future take a peek inside a Nike store, an Apple store or Selfridges. These stores direction sign the future and for any local High St to survive as a retail centre every butcher, baker and candlestick maker needs to examine these trends and think how these might be applied closer to home.

The connected, always on consumer is here to stay as are out of town shopping centres. And as we can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube, everyone with an interest in the High St needs to embrace these changes and think long and hard how to respond.

So what do you think about the future of retail? Do you think it’s on its last legs? Where have you seen examples of great retailing that fills you with optimism for the future of the High St.

Light bulb moment

Does your business do market research? Does it find it helpful and useful?

David Ogilvy, the guru of Mad Men everywhere, once opined that ‘the trouble with market research is that consumers don't think how they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say’.

You may also have come across a phenomenon known as the Hawthorne Effect. This has absolutely nothing do with market research per se but does provide some insight into how people think and behave.

And note the key word here-‘people’. Too often in marketing  we use words like ‘customer’ or ‘consumer’ which hides the reality that we are serving people, with all their biases, prejudices and irrationalities.

In essence the Hawthorn Effect is derived from a series of psychological experiments from the 1920s at the Hawthorn Works, a light bulb factory, to determine if changes to the heating, lighting and other environmental factors made workers more or less productive. It found that workers' productivity seemed to improve when any changes were made and slumped when the study was concluded. This suggested that the productivity gain occurred because the workers knew they were being monitored and it was this factor which biased the results rather than the changes themselves.

And maybe this is why David O said what he said. Maybe all market research is influenced in the same way. Maybe people in a drive to be helpful provide answers and explanations to the market researchers that a) they think they want to hear and/or b) which are rational when in reality they act irrationally.

Having sat behind the mirror in numerous focus groups and listened to more research presentations than are strictly necessary, it is clear few research programmes show a real understanding of how people’s brains work.

Maybe we need fewer market researchers speaking with and listening to people, and more psychologists.

For as people we are far more intuitive, emotional and impulsive when we pass judgement and make decisions than we like to admit. Impulsivity is by far a more common human trait than calculation. We are Systems 1 people. And academic studies in cognitive psychology tell us that people take the ‘Systems 1’, automatic, route 90% of the time and then we often engage our ‘Systems 2’, considered, brain to post-rationalise our instinctive decision.

Traditional market research studies have a tendency to uncover our System 2 response. Not our System 1 response. And this is why market research findings can often be meaningless, useless and highly misleading unless we can find a way to disentangle these responses to get to the truth, if there is indeed a truth.

And why do people not engage their brains when making decisions? Why are we more instinctive than we will admit? Because if we relied on System 2 thinking all the time we would never make a decision.

The world is a complex place and because we are constantly bombarded with too much information and stimuli we find short cuts. And this why we do we what we do.

These short cuts and rule of thumb strategies shorten decision making time and allow people to function without constantly stopping to think about what we should do next.

Instead we take the default option and do what we have always done or is the least troublesome thing to do. We do what flatters and massages our ego. We do what everyone else is doing. We do the first thing that comes into our head.

Research rarely uncovers that sort of thing. And yet as marketers we commission research project after project to convince ourselves we are meeting a customer need; or to show our bosses that we have listened to customers; or to protect our backsides. What a waste.

Instead of listening to what people say we should find ways to observe what they do and apply a knowledge and understanding of psychology to test and determine reasons why. Far more insightful.

Or alternatively find a way to explore consumer reaction just as they flip from System 1 to System 2 thinking, as they transition from the unconscious to the conscious.

So how much money do you waste on market research? Found out anything useful?

Knickers in a twist

I am annoyed. Dismayed. And even embarrassed that my fellow marketing professionals either sanctioned such practise or failed to stop this.

And the cause of this ire?

A recent e-mail communication from a significant High St brand inviting me to join their special club.... for women's knickers.

Did it not occur to someone that I am a man? Did no one realise that I might not be all that interested in women's knickers? It is not as if I have ever bought women's knickers from which they could assess my propensity to buy more pairs.

Naturally I pointed this out to the brand only to be told that ' this was a blanket e-mail which they do regularly although we do understand where you are coming from'.

And there's the rub. This brand might do brilliant TV ads but they have much to learn about CRM and database marketing.

In days of yore, when I was a lad, to write to customers cost about 40p per pack. You therefore made damn sure that you were writing to the right customer about the right thing. Anything else was a waste of money

But in this day and age when it costs fractions of a penny to send e- mails there is no real cost in carpet bombing the database without a thought to relevance.

This is wrong and ought to be banned.

But of course there is ought a cost. There is a cost to the brand and to its reputation. There is a cost of losing customers through opt outs and unsubscribes.  And of course there is the cost of unrealised lost business as a consequence.

Database marketing is not difficult-all anyone has to do is to get the right message to the right customer at the right time. Simples.

And to determine this all that is required is the information that the customer tells you about him or herself, acquired data, mixed with the data and insight derived from their behaviour and from the behaviour of similar people. Even more simples.

And of course the wit to use this understanding to direct the most appropriate message to the most appropriate people.

My pants people must have observed, or at least should have observed, that I don't buy women's pants; that the majority of men don’t buy women's pants on a regular basis; and that I am a man.

Conclusion-don’t e-mail me, and all other men who don’t buy pants on a regular basis, about women's lingerie.

I am guessing that your in-box is filled on a daily basis with irrelevant offers. It might even be the case that because it’s cheap to do your business might even be doing blanket e-mails with little thought to relevance and frequency. And the impact on the customer.

Are unsubscribes monitored? Are open and CTRs checked? What is the trend? How do they compare against industry norms? These should be known and form a crucial aspect of the campaign KPIs and its evaluation. It’s not just about sales. What else is happening?

Blanket e-mails are pants. No matter the content or the category.  And with the application of insight and intelligence, it is easily possible to make your marketing smarter.

Blankets are best kept on the bed. They have no role in marketing.

Letting the train take the strain

Last week I had to visit London and it was in the unlikely setting of the train station that I found inspiration for this week’s words of wit and wisdom.

For it was at the train station that I met a truly inspiring man and for those of us involved in the business of marketing and the marketing of business the example he sets should one we should all aspire to follow.

This is his story.

While waiting to travel  I came across the Marketing Director for the line – there he was meeting, greeting and talking with the passengers, his customers. As someone in the same line of business, I was curious why he was out and about at this ungodly hour. His reply interested me.

‘We have just introduced a few changes and I was interested in hearing what my customers thought about it. And I wanted to support the staff’.

Now compare this attitude with my recent experience with the call centre of a major and very well known business, an experience far from smooth and efficient. And getting nowhere with the customer service team I asked to speak to their Head of Customer Service to be told ‘I am sorry but he does not speak to customers’.

Are you as amazed and as dumfounded at that statement as I was? This is an organisation where I was assured that ‘your call is very important to us’ and ‘customer service is our number one priority’. Yeah, right. But it is also an organisation where its senior management do not think customers a species important enough to speak with.

Too often marketing teams and senior executives learn their customer feedback through the prism of a market research report or a presentation of customer complaints. Rarely do they meet customers and get feedback raw and emotional, nor experience what customers are experiencing.

I recently read an interview with the American general who led the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan who said that ‘you cannot build understanding or engagement through a bullet proof windscreen’.

And what applies on the battlefield can also be applied by marketers who too often seek to build understanding through their own bullet proof windscreen. Only we call it market research.

One major financial services company I know regularly asks its executive team to walk in the footsteps of its customers through a series of real transactions and also record and log their observations, feelings and emotions. In this way those who are mandating the process to be followed come face to face with the reality of their decisions and their instructions at the moment of truth for their customers. This business is learning a lot from my American general.

All of us in the business of marketing can learn from this and get out from behind our bullet proof windscreens to talk with customers and to regularly shop the customer shop.

And this will send a very powerful signal to your customers and to your front line staff, the kind of an organisation you want to be. And you will be amazed at what you will learn and uncover.

In the meantime I will continue to let my favourite train take the strain.

A question of degree

I have been in serious recruitment mode in recent weeks.  And it has been very interesting, and to some degree a tad depressing, reading through the wide variety of CVs that I have been sent.

And I have also over the past few months been out and about speaking at various universities, business schools and colleges, meeting some of this country’s brightest talent.

And there is a trend appearing.

It is noticeable that many more of these young people are either spending or have spent their university years, studying for a business or marketing degree, no doubt among other pursuits. This did get me wondering whether having a business or marketing degree is important for marketing success.

I must declare an interest here.  I do not have a marketing or business degree but a degree in history. I will let others determine whether or not I am a marketing success. I do have MBA though only acquired when I  knew what my lecturers were talking about!

But I am often asked is a history degree relevant to a marketing career and do you need a business or marketing degree to get on in marketing?

Now I can’t speak here for others, though I suspect I am not alone, but I can share with you what I look for when hiring marketing talent.

Firstly I think people should go to university to study something  they are going to enjoy exploring. It should be an end itself not a means to an end unless you want to be a doctor, a lawyer or something with a high vocational content. So if marketing or business is what floats your boat and is something your truly passionate about, then go ahead and spend 3 or 4 years lost in books studying these topics.

But that is necessarily what is going to get you ahead in the world of marketing.

A wise man once said to me to hire for attitude and train for aptitude. And he is so right.

When recruiting I look for people who obsess about the customer and who are passionate about wanting to the do the right thing for the consumer.  Marketing shouldn’t just be a job where you turn up at 9 and go home at 5 but an all consuming vocation and dedication to make life better for the customer and the consumer. We are all customers and we should all be looking to learn from our own consumer experiences and from the consumption of other people’s marketing. Unless the person in front of me can demonstrate this passion and commitment  it is unlikely we will get the chance to work together.

Secondly I want people who come imbued with a restless curiosity, who see their workplace and the world around them as a university where they can go explore,  making connections of disparate thinking to create and form new ideas and innovative thinking. People who seek out and optimise opportunities that expose themselves to new insights, new perspectives and new connections are people who will constantly be asking ‘why not’ and constantly looking to find new and different ways to add value to themselves, their customers, and their brand.

Steve Jobs used to say that ‘a good techie is a good techie but one with other interests really moves the needle’. You can say the same about great marketers and what is good enough for Mr Jobs, who would synthesise learnings  from humanities, calligraphy, theology and liberal arts,  is more than good enough for me.

Learning and development opportunities are all around us, every day. I want to work with people who see and understand this; who read widely; who are interested in meeting with and talking to new people; who seize opportunities to learn new things; people who are happy to go exploring.

And lastly I want people who can think with rigour. And just about any subject taught at university can train the mind to do that though clearly I think historians do it best of all!

Problem solving in business is like writing an essay or answering an exam question. We start with identifying the problem, the challenge or the exam question; we research the issue and isolate the facts (and from time to time the figures); whenever possible we challenge the facts and the range of arguments to destruction; and we build a case and construct our argument leading to a conclusion or a recommendation that addresses the original exam question. This is what I mean by a rigorous and well trained mind.

Marketers cannot just rely on intuition and creativity to be successful. Businesses just don’t work that way and the importance of constructing a rigorous, well engineered and carefully constructed argument cannot be under-estimated.

That is what I first learnt studying history. The facts I deal with today in the businesses and for the customers  I am privileged to serve may be very different but the skills of building my case in writing essays about some obscure Anglo Saxon tribal chieftain or the politics of the French enlightenment are what underpin my ability to be a marketer, great or otherwise.

And so for me passion, an enquiring mind and rigorous analysis are what help make great marketers not marketing degrees or MBAs.

Do you agree? What do you look for when recruiting marketing talent? Share your thoughts and ideas. It is never too old for anyone to learn.

And remember, innovation is nothing but undiscovered plagiarism.

Have I got news for you?

What is the point of PR?

Now the answer to many of you might be really obvious but I
only ask having met in the course of my professional duties a
 wide variety of young PR professionals over the last few weeks. All nice people but all intent on chasing headlines and coverage to the exclusion of just about everything else and all rightly proud of the creativity demonstrated through the PR campaigns they had planned and executed to deliver these banner headlines.

But surely good PR is more than just coming up with crazier and crazier stunts to chase the headlines and to get your brand or news as close as possible to the front of the newspaper?

And yet if you look at the standard measure of PR success, the Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) measure, maybe the role of PR is just about coverage.

On this basis Hitler’s PR agency and those charged with looking after PR for the Costa cruise ships have done a mighty fine job over the years and recent weeks.

To check I wasn’t going mad I had a look at the Chartered Institute of PR’s definition of PR and this re-assured me and confirmed that I wasn’t losing my senses. To the professional PR body,  public relations  ‘ is about reputation - the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you ....Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics’.

I can buy that.

Sadly I think a lot of PR professionals bewitched by the need to generate banner high headlines for their brand are losing sight of this definition. And the ubiquitous use of AVE as a measure of PR efficiency to prove the ROI of PR is contributing massively to the PR profession and many agencies failing to understand that there is more to PR than just coverage.

In other words while AVE is great for measuring PR efficiency, though there are other and arguably better measures out there to do that job, it does do a lousy job at measuring effectiveness and how good our PR programmes are at helping build and drive reputation.

And of course if we all start to see PR as an element in building and maintaining brand reputation there is every likelihood that brands and all in the marketing profession charged with helping to manage this reputation across all channels of communication will develop a joined up and more integrated approach to communications.

It is therefore time for the profession and agencies to move away from AVE and the headline grabbing mindset and to initiate a better informed measurement structure to drive the right behaviours.

I have four key measures which ought to be used in a balanced way to measure ongoing efficiency AND effectiveness and which should help move us away from grabbing headlines to the detriment of all else:

·         Favourability-categorised by positive/neutral negative and measured as a Net Favourability Score (NFS). This can be combined with impacts to show Net Favourability Impact Score calculated by (positive mentions x impacts-negative mentions x impacts). This would be my key measure of effectiveness

·         Key message penetration-percentage of coverage containing key messages

·         Amplification-number of times your message is passed on, an especially useful measure for PR coverage in social media.

·         AVE,  or even better cost per 1000 impacts-the prime measure of efficiency and should only be used  if effectiveness measured.

If we as marketers, PR professional or the agencies supporting our marketing programmes agree that this is the way forward, PR may have a point after all.

And if we do this we won’t just have news for you but the right news for you.