You're fired

''The Apprentice'' and the art and science of building a world class brand

Lord Sugar is back.

And with him comes the usual group of self-preening, tub thumping, back stabbing, backside covering, sycophantic, ego centric Apprentice wannabees.

But while watching the first episodes of this real life soap it struck me that the principles that underlie the development of the cast list for this real life soap can also be used to help build stronger brands.

In essence a brand is a promise delivered. In other words no matter the category in which your brand is competing, the brand must deliver the promise it makes to its target customers day in, day out, and across all its touchpoints.  A tough ask in any business.

But how exactly do you define the promise of your brand and what it’s going to stand for in the first place so that it’s distinctive from the competition, relevant to your business and its ability to deliver, and which meets the emotional and rational needs of your customers?

Too often this chase to find, pin down and articulate the very essence of a brand becomes a game of Scrabble as brand specialists leaf through dictionaries and thesauruses to find word nuances to define brand benefits, values and personality. One such expert has described this process as one which produces ‘a pile of disconnected words that looks like nothing less than an explosion in a bombed thesaurus factory.’ It is no wonder that many brands end up looking and acting like crazy mixed up kids.

This is where we can learn from programmes like ‘The Apprentice’. Indeed any work of ensemble characters like ‘The Only Way is Essex’, ‘Downton Abbey’ or even X Factor abides by these principles.

Authors and scriptwriters work on the premise that there are small number of identifiable characters that appear regularly in myths, fairytales, literature and film that resonate powerfully with us across all ages and all cultures. And so we will regularly find characters like heroes and super heroes, magicians, jokers, outlaws and mavericks in our fairy tales, books and even TV soaps.

If this approach works for story tellers why can it not work for brand story tellers to help define what their brand is and what it can become? At the end of the day a brand is a story that people want to be part of, with a character with values with whom its audience wants to be associated.

Now although the experts aren’t fully agreed on whether there are 12, 16, 20 or even more of these basic character types, properly known as Archetypes, the following list of 12 seems to cover the most basic character types

	CAREGIVER	REGULAR GUY	HERO	INNOCENT
Helps people to...	Care for others	Connect with others	Triumph	Always do the right thing
	CREATOR	LOVER	OUTLAW	EXPLORER
Helps people to...	Create something new	Find and give love	Break the rules	Maintain independence
	RULER	JESTER	MAGICIAN	SAGE
Helps people to...	Become the best	Have a good time	Make dreams come true	Find the truth

It is early days and the characters not yet fully formed and they may all be trying to stake out aggressive Hero and Ruler personalities but look more closely and we see different shades of personality starting to show.Already Michael Copp, Essex’s loveable rogue, was clearly positioned as  the series Ordinary Guy; Jenna Whittingham who claims to be ‘protective of others’ is the Caregiver;  while Bilyana Apostolova, who was booted out of the programme in the first week, was a dead ringer as an Explorer. It will be interesting to see in the coming weeks how the charcters develop and the Archetypes emerge.

But let’s look at this in brand terms.  Harley Davidson is clearly an Outlaw brand, Landrover is obviously positioned as an Explorer,  Disney could only be a Magician brand and Domestos, a brand which kills all known germs dead, a Hero to mums everywhere.

By assessing as part of the brand development process who the brand is or could be, we can get a clear direction for the development of the brand personality, values, benefits and essence. It gives us a definable persona and character for the brand determining how it should look, act and feel to the consumer in a far more consistent way than using a dictionary and thesaurus might. And allows us to create stories for our brands populated with real, diverse and well drawn characters, just like the producers of ‘The Apprentice’.

Persil have over recent years used this thinking brilliantly to drive a differentiated positioning in the laundry market. Classically washing powders, and look at Ariel adverts to see this, portray themselves as Caregiver brands usually with the mum using the brand to take care of her family’s whites and colours. Persil shifted the category with its ‘dirt is good ‘campaign adopting an Explorer brand positioning and encouraging families to play in the mud. A very different approach.

Strong well –defined and firmly-grounded brands develop and deliver their promise in much the same way as the characters on ‘The Apprentice’ do. They rely less on an ability to play Scrabble well and more on a deeper understanding of characterisation. And while this approach doesn’t always guarantee a happy ending, it should lead to a cracking good story.

How well can you tell the story of your brand?

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.

Home sweet home

In recent months I have finally paid off my mortgage and for the first time in 25 or so years I own outright every single brick, roof tile and breeze block. It is a great feeling knowing that you are no longer out at work to feed that particular monkey. And if you are not yet there I hope that it will not be too long before you too are in this position.

And I hope that when you get there your mortgage lender understands the principles of a great customer experience better than mine did.

It was not that they made life especially hard when it came to obtaining and completing the necessary paperwork. Indeed for a large business they were actually quite efficient. And I am sure that they did everything they were supposed to do right.

But the customer journey they had designed no doubt to be as efficient as possible, really failed to grasp the significance and emotionality of what was to me a major life event. And this is where those who designed this particular experience went wrong.

Would it have hurt them to enclose with the paperwork  a nice letter acknowledging the significance of this event; thanking me for being privileged to be part of this journey with me;  and wishing me all the best in the next stage of my journey through life?

I have spoken before about the need for marketing folk to experience the customer experience if they want to understand the frustrations, and hopefully the joys, that customers will endure and sometimes enjoy when doing business with your business.

But there is a lot more we can and should do if we want to develop and put in place mind blowingly great and truly differentiating customer experiences.

Now many people may think that it is only entertainment type businesses or those in say the leisure and hospitality industry who need to fuss about the customer experience. Wrong. In my opinion whatever the service or the product a customer is buying or receiving, that customer will have an experience of some sort and all service encounters in all businesses provide an opportunity for emotional engagement, however mundane the product or service might be. Repaying a mortgage is hardly a Disneyworld experience, is it?

So no matter your industry or sector, you should concern yourself with the customer experience and if you work in marketing, you ought to obsess about this whether you work in financial services or retail; automotive or FMCG; education or hospitality; and even, especially, the public sector.

I would like to suggest that anyone thinking about the customer experience should consider three broad principles. 

Move from operational service quality to customer perceived quality. Too many businesses emphasise and maybe over emphasise operational service quality. This needs to be balanced by the need to examine and think about how the service being delivered is perceived by the customer. Operational service quality, delivering the service to specification every time, is a great way to regularise the service experience cost efficiently but might not be so great for the customer. I am sure that in my case the operational service quality was high in that the service was delivered to specification with calls and letters being answered within set timescales and the like but the experience still left me with a hollow feeling. More should be done to understand the quality as perceived by me.

Look beyond the basics.  It goes without saying that anyone with a passion for improving the customer experience will identify the touch points that matter along the customer corridor and remove foul ups and snarls in this area. But we must do more. Delivering on these foundational experiences, the minimum standard customers expect in their everyday contact with a brand, does not define it or differentiate the brand. This is merely an essential building block, and if not present, will turn customers away. But instead we must look beyond the basics to deliver true delight and a unique brand experience. We must find and develop the differentiating experiences which have the potential to separate the brand from competitors and signature experiences which are essential to defining the brand uniquely and which only your brand can do and can become known for.

Map emotions not just behaviours. Too often we limit analysis of the customer journey to how our business behaves across and through the customer corridor and we compare this to how the customer wants us to behave to provide a detailed customer journey map through this corridor identifying improvement opportunities as we go.  Usually these maps will focus on things like reliability, responsiveness, accessibility and problem solving.  But how often do we plot out or obtain data on how the customer is feeling at each stage of the journey through the customer journey, how the customer wants to feel and even how we want the customer to feel? This might not come easy to businesses used to thinking rationally and making decisions based on hard facts and solid data but emotion mapping through the customer corridor is as essential as behavioural mapping. If my mortgage lender had thought harder about how they wanted me to feel or indeed was feeling, I am sure they would have developed and delivered a more emotional and a better experience

Great customer experiences don’t just happen. They are carefully designed and beautifully constructed. And I do wish more businesses would think more about this. After all they owe it to their customers.

How do you go about building a great customer experience in your business? What factors do you consider?

All thoughts welcome.

Drilled to bits

I think I now know where CRM is going wrong.

A week or so back I was wandering aimlessly around my local Homebase as men have a tendency to do. Loitering by a stand for Black and Decker drills, and for no apparent reason, I remembered a long forgotten marketing lesson I was once taught-Black and Decker don’t sell drills...they sell holes.

And I think that is where those who deal in, advise on or practice CRM are going wrong.

Now if at this point you have no idea what CRM is-it stands for Customer Relationship Management and is the art and science of getting the right proposition to the right customer through the right channel at the right time.

In passing I should also point out that in many sectors the consumer does not want or seek a relationship and certainly does not want to be managed. So even the term is wrong for a start and at the very least we ought to be talking about Customer Engagement. However that is a whole other story.

More importantly, for as long as I have worked in marketing, and that is a very long time, marketers have peddled the idea of CRM to our businesses based on the futile premise of one-one marketing. Consequently the history of CRM over the past 20 or so years is littered with significant investment failures in CRM systems and programmes with only a few notable and well known cases getting this investment working properly: Tesco and its Clubcard being the best and most quoted case study in this space.

But like the man who wants a perfect hole and not a drill, businesses don’t want CRM but want and need more responsive marketing which generates a higher and increasing return on marketing investment.

But for too long many of us in the profession have talked about CRM almost as if it were an end itself. We have confused the art and science of the discipline with technology and computer systems. We have over obsessed on data and analytics. And we have positioned it as a standalone panacea to business ills.

Instead the data and the analytics, the technology and the systems should be seen as part of a process which results in more responsive marketing. A process which fuses meaningful customer insight with inspired creative to deliver personalised and relevant communications which are engaging and responsive.  In other words we should see the outputs from our CRM programme as the intelligence that powers the creative look and feel and delivers it where it will be most effective.  I call this intelligent marketing.

In this world CRM is not an end in itself nor a discrete and standalone discipline but is and must be seen as part of a greater whole. And this is how it ought to position and market itself. I would love it if I never saw or heard the CRM acronym again but instead we talked about intelligent marketing.

Marketers should strike CRM from their vocabulary and focus instead on intelligent marketing; stop talking about the process and start to deliver the benefits; in other words it is about holes, not drills.

CRM RIP.

And to think that this all started because I was looking at drills in Homebase.

But what do you think? All comments welcome.

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.

How tight are your briefs?

This week I want you to consider how tight your briefs are.

We all know how lovely tight briefs are and for those of us in the marketing profession the tighter our briefs the better.

What is the most important document a marketer is ever going to write? The brief. And so good brief writing is an essential skill for anyone working in marketing and one I fear we as a profession are beginning to lack.

I hope I am not going to come over like your grandfather pointing out that it was so much better in my day but sometimes I do wonder if the rigour and quality of training in core marketing disciplines today is as good as it was in my day.

And when it comes to writing a tight brief there is always room for improvement. Even for oldies.

The brief is your instruction to your creative agencies. It encapsulates and crystallises your thinking, your insight and your business challenge to allow them to weave their creative magic. It also acts as your agreement with your agency and if their response bears little relationship to the brief you can ask them to start again. Without a brief in place, how are you going to judge the work when it comes back to you?

And, equally importantly, a good well written brief allows you as the marketer to ensure you have obtained the engagement of the business.

You would not spend millions of pounds on a new computer system or new premises without a detailed specification so why would you not want to do the same for your advertising or your communications? After all it is only your brand we are talking about.

In short the tighter our briefs, the better the end product and the final results will be.The GIGO principle of garbage in, garbage out also applies in marketing.

To help in the process of writing a great brief, here are my four simple rules:.

Put it in writing. Not only does this avoid any misunderstanding later but it also forces you as the client to consider deeply and thoroughly what you are asking for. The brief is not a form to be filled in at the last minute but a strategic document based on deep rigour and analysis. As someone far better than me once said:

‘Ultimately the point of communications is to get people to do things. Which people? What things? The basis of a great brief is right there. Everything else is detail’.

Make it inspiring. The job of the brief is tighten up thinking and to provide a simple insight that will enthuse and inspire the creative team to memorably dramatise and bring to life the brand response to the insight.

Set clear objectives Make sure your objectives are crystal clear with a clear and focused understanding of how the creative and the communications programme will be measured and evaluated. The more concrete the measure, the better. Contrary to popular belief marketers want to help solve business problems and it is a great frustration for all involved in the process when there is no clear and credible problem to solve.

Keep it brief. A great brief is not the longest or the most detailed. It’s the one whose clarity and focus creates the platform for a great strategic and creative leap, a blinding customer insight and an effective solution. Briefs are a summation and a crystallisation of your thinking. As Blaise Pascal put it in 1657

‘I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter’.

Clearly a man ahead of his time. But it is so true. Too much information and detail can fog and obscure the process. If you need more than two pages to produce a brief, you have missed the point.

And so there you have it. It’s official. Marketers prefer tight briefs to big briefs.

Love story

I was really interested to hear Warren Buckley, BT’s Customer Service Director, tell a recent event that ‘marketers need to embark on a love affair with their customer service counterparts or risk failing their brands’.

I couldn’t agree more. I may have had some issues in the past with BT and its customer service teams but on this occasion Mr Buckley, a man who does respond to customer e-mails, has got it spot on.

Mr Buckley’s comment was that by having a dialogue with the customer service teams, marketers could save a whole load of money on customer research. Yes they would but I think there is far far more to it than that.

It always amazes me that marketers don’t pay more attention to the brand experience being delivered day in, day out through their customer service teams. For too long this has been seen as the preserve of the customer service chief while marketers take the line of least resistance and focus on their brand wheels, their ads and the other visual symbols of their power but it is on the ground where their brand hits the road where they can make a real difference. This is where marketers need to start to fall in love.

Mr Buckley wants marketers to work with their colleagues to determine a consistent tone of voice for marketing campaigns and responses to customer queries. I would want marketers to go a lot further.

As you know it never ceases to amaze me how few marketers and customer service chiefs actually put their customer services teams to the test and actually experience the service through a customer's eyes. You will be amazed what you might find out. If you want to improve the quality of airline food, serve it in the Board Room, is my principle.

I did hear last week of one CEO who spent the weekend putting his customer service to the test and then spent Monday firing off a series of e-mails to his operations and customer service bosses with required fixes. Good on him. More of us need to do that to get our own direct and real impressions of the service our business delivers.

Speaking as a marketer, and a customer, here are my top 5 things that we need to be looking for in our customer service departments:

#1 Is the IVR system intuitive and easy to use? If we adopt a principle online that the customer should be within 2 clicks of the service they way, why not follow this principle on the phone and make it easy to get to speak to someone.

#2 How customer friendly is the tone of voice? It is always best to use personal and not impersonal pronouns, scrap jargon and three letter acronyms, use the active and not the passive case. And why don’t people sign letters and put a name to them instead of using the corporate squiggle?

#3 Why not take the name of the customer before asking for an account or an order number? I am a person not a number. Take the name and use it. It will make the call sound more personal.

#4 Why not scrap call duration targets? Targets forces call handlers to aim to hurry the call. Scrap the target and more calls will be resolved.

#5 Why tell customers that the Marketing Director or Customer Services Directors doesn’t speak to customers? If your job is to stop your business doing dumb things to customers, you should speak and listen to customers.

And one final thought, give the customer service people some empowerment to do the right thing for the customer instead of slavishly following a script or a process. In many instances I have no doubt that people do their job properly but fail to deliver a satisfying customer experience. This might help.

Obviously there is more to the love affair than this but hopefully this is a start.

Next week is Valentine’s Day, a perfect time for marketers to fall in love with customer service...and vice versa.