The year has been a blur, they go faster as I get older, something I find disturbing. Rushing headlong towards the daisy bed seems illogical when there is so much left to do.
I will be 64 in a few weeks, must be a song there somewhere, but it seems that the older I get, the more I learn.
How does that work?
Perhaps that is because I have a wide and deep foundation built up over all those years that offers many places to tuck some added knowledge in, and the connections to other parts of the foundation are that more visible.
Anyway, here are the headline things that struck me during the year.
All that is old is new again.
The king of Mad Men, David Ogilvy said it best, something like 50 years ago. “It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.” Never before has this been so relevant, as we drown in a sea of mediocre so called ‘content”. What is an old fashioned ad if it is not content? What is an informative film made to show users how to build something, or adjust the points on my old Dodge, if not content. Just because the rules of engagement have changed, i.e., those on the other end of a communication can now tell us if it sucks, either by writing to us, responding on a site that scored whatever it s we flog, or ignoring it. The challenge remains the same. Find your market and build an emotional connection with them.
Scale is not everything.
In the pre internet days, a young academic named Michael Porter wrote the definitive book on competition. One of his 5 forces was all about scale. If you had it, you carried the hammer others could only aspire to, volume sales, negotiating power in your supply chains, power to advertise and promote, it was a huge barrier to either scale or hide behind.
No longer.
The net has destroyed much of the competitive power of scale. One of the greatest wielders of power I see every day are the two FMCG retail gorillas in Australia, who between them hold 75% of FMCG (CPG to my US friends) market share. Yesterday I went into woollies to buy the Xmas ham. My job for years. In about 30 linear feet of chiller shelf, with many SKU’s of ham on the bone, not one was a proprietary brand. Every single SKU was Woolworths in some guise or another. Clearly buying scale at work for woollies, but I walked out hamless, and went to a small supplier who has a retail outlet about 15 k from my home and bought a ham there. Good price, good service, and probably a better ham because the margins had not been screwed to the bone by Woolies exercising their power of scale. (poor pun, sorry)
The tool relies on the tradesman.
There are so many tools around, to do just about everything, but by themselves they do nothing. All still require a skilled person to get the most out of them.
I have laid many bricks in the course of renovating two old houses, paid my way through Uni all those years ago on building sites, so I know how to do it, but look in my backyard, and you can tell the brinks I have laid, and those laid by a tradesman. If you want something done properly, only do it yourself it is what you do, not what some webinar on YouTube tells you can do.
Do not be seduced by the newest shiny thing.
Simplicity is really hard.
‘The ultimate sophistication is simplicity’.
Steve jobs said those words, and others before and after have said similar things that have been proven time and time again over the years. In todays world it holds more true than ever when it is operationally now so easy to add features few want, sacrificing simplicity and elegance in the process.
We tend to fall in love with our products, forgetting people do not care about them, only what they will do for them, what problems they solve, what value they deliver.
Dunbar’s number still rules.
We might have hundreds, even thousands of “friends” and connections, but we can only manage a limited number. We have been again seduced to believe that there is value in the breadth of many connections, sacrificing the depth with a lesser number. I would rather have a list of 100 people who knew me well, would take a phone call from me, recognise the value I can bring to them, and are prepared to recommend me to others based on that value, than a million friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other of the other houses of digital one night stands.
Customers are people.
Customers and potential customers are not “targets” or ‘target audiences’, or ‘potentials’ or ‘rusted-on’ or any of the other expressions I hear regularly. They are people , they control their pockets in ways unimaginable just a few short years ago. Treating them with distain, or even a hint of condescension, tan they are able and willing to pack up and go elsewhere. The power is very much in their hands now, not those of the marketer, so make your communication as personal and specific as you can. I get lots of emails with the salutation “Dear Friend”. If I was so effing dear, why not use mu name. They never get opened, and a rule gets put in my email package to dump them into the Spam file never to be seen again. Dear friend indeed, give me a break!
Trust is the make or break metric.
Trust is a word that gets bandied around like a novelty game at the Easter show. Everyone agrees that trust is a key, but so few recognise that Trust comes from consistent, transparent and generous behaviour, it is hard earned and easily lost, and never given without deep consideration. Don’t let this important word pass your lips unless you really mean it, and back it up with behaviour over a long period.
The nature of assets.
Almost forever, corporate assets in enterprises of any size from micro of MNC have been one of three in some sort of ratio: people, technology, and capital.
Now there is a fourth.
Data.
The integration of data cross functionally, through the value chain, and increasingly with outside “big data” is becoming rapidly more important than the traditional three as the world digitises and competition is increasingly dependent on the availability and accuracy of data from a range of sources.
One of my mates runs a small freight business. He recently added GPS, and a simple program to route his small fleet in real time, that integrates with public traffic info. Now he is wondering if he can do with less trucks, and maybe make a bit of a return on his investment for a change.
Recall the furore when the email addresses of Ashley Madison subscribers were hacked and made available for download. The asset value of data has rarely been more publicly demonstrated.
Beware the seductive hiss.
Snake oil salesman have found a new well of clichés and poisonous bullshit to throw at you.
Beware.
Next time you hear the word ‘awesome’ (my current greatest hate cliché) run like hell, and save yourself the time and potentially money these sophisticated purveyors of snake oil will try and winkle out of you.
