May 8, 2023 | Branding, Marketing
It seemed impossible to ignore that piece of luxurious marketing content being rammed down our throats over the weekend, after a build-up over previous weeks. After Christianity, the British monarchy is the most successful, long term marketing program on the planet, and what a show they produced on Saturday!.
Like most, I watched bits of the coronation at a mates place, conveniently happening on a Saturday evening. Along with a large and sometimes noisy bunch of friends, piles of delicious nibblies and a mountain of spicey BBQ’d sausages, the debate over the relevance of the occasion raged. There may have also been a few lubricants. My friend and his wife were born in England but came here to escape to the good weather and to dodge the crushing burden of just being English. It was however a big relief when Charlie stepped under the big hat, indicating the excruciatingly boring but for some compulsive watching was nearing an end.
To some it may be interesting to recall that if it were not for deed polls (or the royal equivalent) Charlie Windsor would have been named Charles Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. That mouthful was the family name of his mother Elizabeth, changed to Windsor by her great grandfather King George V in 1917. That change was probably prompted by the fact that London at the time was being bombed by King Georges first cousin Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, using the first heavy bomber capable of such a mission, the ‘Gotha’.
It seems a bit slow to change your family name from a German one to a British one after almost four years of war. Perhaps it was that Georgie did not want to upset his cousin any more than he already was.
I wonder what the Murdoch press would have made of that at the time. Ruperts father of course had been sending false reports back to George and his cronies from Gallipoli just two years earlier. Fake news reporting must run in the Murdoch family.
Families are often difficult, especially when the tree has grown in an environment insulated from any sort of genetic diversity, which perhaps explains a lot. It is however somewhat pleasing to see that apart from the inheritance of wealth and position at the tip of the artificial British social hierarchy, they are pretty normal. Broken marriages, sibling rivalry, affairs, seedy personal practises, the odd visit to barristers, grifters, and social media advisors, and the never-ending demands from people they do not know to donate money.
All good fun, and we finished the night watching ‘The Windsors’ on Netflix. If you haven’t caught up with it, hurry before it goes away. Satire to some is a documentary to others.
Vive le Republique!
May 5, 2023 | Leadership, Management
Amongst all the blather about remote work, there is an aspect that has received little attention, but in a couple of my clients is beginning to make itself known.
The ‘remote work’ idea is not applicable to everyone.
Office workers of all types are able to some extent, work remotely. They are saving commute time and money, childcare is more flexible, ‘family friendly’ and potentially delivering savings to their employers and to themselves.
However, those in factories, on building sites, driving trucks, are not able to work remotely, and find these benefits.
This is starting to cause friction. Those still punching a time clock, and subjected to the disciplines of shifts are starting to resent the freedom accorded to white collar workers.
During the covid lockdowns, it was OK, they understood. However, now the lockdowns are over, and the whiteys are still workingfrom home, or are they really working at all, or just logging in from the local café or pub?.
Why are they the lucky lot?
The benefit they are getting, dropping the kids to school, lunch with friends, and all the rest being denied to the blue collars.
They are getting pissed, and management needs to start considering the impact and implications of a differing set of expectations across the breadth of their workforce.
May 3, 2023 | Marketing, Strategy
Every person on the planet has a frame through which they view the world, built on their life experience, education, background and interests. Unconsciously we all bring these biases into the process of planning our businesses.
If you ask an accountant how to best address the climate crisis, they will give you a response that has an accounting and numeric base, ask the same question of an ecologist, economist, entomologist, or marketer, and you will get different answers, informed by their own unconscious biases.
So, how do we filter them out of our planning, which almost all of the time focusses on the opportunity, the impact of our innovation?
Business planning while having a place for risk assessment, always in my experience lends it far less weight than the opportunity.
In order to ‘de-bias the plan, ask yourself three questions, the first of which is strategist Roger Martin’s claimed most important question:
- What would have to be true? This forces you to consider the drivers of success in the situation being addressed in the plan.
- What future event could sink the plan?
- What would help us if the plan does sink: i.e., what is plan B that avoids commercial demolition?
Anticipating competitive action and planning to accommodate the impact is a necessary part of every plan. This is perhaps the most common failure amongst marketing plans I have seen, including my own.
A long time ago I was with Cerebos, one of the brands I managed was Cerola muesli, at that time a successful brand, and I was keen to expand the brand footprint. I saw a gap in the market between muesli and corn flakes. This was 40 years ago, and there was not the wide choice we have now. We developed a halfway product we called ‘Cerola Light and Crunchy.’ I wrote a marketing plan that had as its first step a test market in Adelaide.
In that plan, well thought out and detailed as it was, I failed to sufficiently consider any of the three questions.
At first, we did remarkably well. The logic we employed was well accepted, the retailer sell-in easily achieved targets, and consumer off-take was strong after the initial burst of advertising. Then in came Kellogg’s with a look-a-like product, ‘Just Right,’ and their resources just blew us away. Light &Crunchy never had a chance in the face of the weight of the competitive reaction by Kellogg’s, and we retreated, recognising the reality that we simply did not have what it took to poke a bear and expect to get away unscathed.
I never made that mistake again, and the only consolation I have is that ‘Just Right’ has survived and prospered, so at least my marketing logic was sound.
I do not agree with the conclusion in the header cartoon that you should roll over and play dead in the face of bear-like opposition. However, it is true that if you poke a bear, you had better do it in such a way that you have some sort of advantage that they cannot replicate.
Header cartoon credit: Tom Fishburne at marketoonist
May 1, 2023 | Change, Governance, Strategy
Strategy is all about choice: what we will not do is at least as important as what we will do.
When you dig a level deeper into the generic ‘will I or won’t I’, you come to the question of how do you make what are almost always difficult choices between options in the absence of full information.
At a top level, that choice is driven by two factors:
Cost structure.
There is always a cost to delivering product. Understanding the cost drivers associated with your product and business model is essential. You will then be able to make informed choices about how best to minimise those costs without compromising the value you deliver to customers.
Value creation.
Selling a product of any type depends on a buyer seeing the value created by their purchase as being greater than the cost of the purchase. ‘Value’ is a very personal term. The value of an expensive watch is not in the ability of that watch to tell the time, it resides in a range of psychological drivers that drive individual behaviour and choice.
Until recently, most of the costs involved were of a physical nature, now they are increasingly behavioural. Similarly with value creation, in the past it was the utility you got out of a physical purchase, but physical utility has been usurped by digital and emotional utility.
Understanding both is critical to success.
Apr 29, 2023 | Change, Innovation
30 years ago tomorrow, April 30, 1993, the public internet was born with the announcement by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research that they would publicly release the HTTP protocols that would change the world. These protocols had been created by Tim (now Sir Tim) Berners-Lee for use by academic and defence facilities and had been very tightly held. On April 30, 1993 they were posted on what would become the world’s first website and were to be freely available to all.
10 years ago, I posted a happy 20th message.
Leading up to that momentous release of the HTTP protocols, providing the initial foundation for today’s internet, the US department of defence had created the ARPANET (Advanced Research projects Agency Network) in 1969. The first email message being sent by Ray Tomlinson who first used the @ symbol to separate the recipient’s name from the network address to himself in 1971. By 1983 there was general agreement on the standards for communication on the internet, the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet protocol), and in 1985 the first domain, Symbolics.com was registered, which remains live today.
Once publicly released, the standardised protocols saw a mobilisation of innovative resources from around the world, resulting in rapid development of uses and tools.
Mosaic, the first popular web browser was launched in late 1993, and later was renamed Netscape navigator, and Yahoo launched in 1994. Microsoft launched their competitive search tool Explorer in 1995, later incorporating it free into Windows, leading to the move by the Clinton government to take action under the antitrust laws in 1998, resulting in an order to break up Microsoft. This order was later lost on appeal, significantly due to the evolving dominance of Google as the preferred search engine. Amazon launched in 1995, Google in 1998 and amongst the wave of tech IPO’s in 1999 was Napster, the first peer to peer file sharing service.
From the launch of Wikipedia in 2001, we again had a wave of launches, most of which failed, but a few became the unicorns that changed our lives, Facebook 2004, YouTube 2005, iPhone 2007, Instagram 2010, and so it continues.
The most recent inflection is obviously the explosion of AI tools since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022.
If you extrapolated from this birthday out to the next milestone, the 40th, the only thing we can say for sure is that you would be wildly, massively wrong. That happens every time such an inflection point is reached. Extrapolation is useless, instead we need to experiment and innovate, a continuous process that will take us in completely unpredictable directions.
I hope I am around to see it.
