Jun 11, 2012 | Branding, Change, Communication, Management, Marketing
Today in Sydney has been about as miserable as it gets. Rainy, cold, grey, just plain shitty, and not fair for a public holiday.
What a relief it was to find a distracting way to spend the afternoon.
After watching the replay of the unfinished French Open final, assiduously avoiding any media when I “rose” so I did not know the score, I started to clean up the hard drive of my laptop, removing some of the stuff that had accumulated to clog it up.
Amongst the “random savings”, were quite a number of advertisements I had accumulated from various sites, all of which had the common element of having struck me at some time as being enormously creative, funny, engaging, delivering a serious message, or just sufficiently different to really cut through, when flogging stuff from cars and fashion to condoms and computers. They all, in one way or another, rang my creative bell.
It also struck me that we are in the middle of a huge confluence of two enormously powerful forces, technical development, and creativity, that is changing everything. Hardly an original insight.
The technical advances of the last 15 years have reduced the costs of technology, and the distribution of content to relatively miniscule proportions, which has opened up huge new opportunities for creativity to be seen. However, the digital media has become so clogged with content, from the great to the absolutely inane, that being seen is still the greatest challenge, so creativity remains an essential element of all successful communication. It has also offered up the opportunity to focus laser-like on a very small group of individuals, delivering a compelling message that they would have been unlikely to get in the old mass communication days.
I cannot finish without offering my pick as the best ad of all time, at least the best I have seen. Perhaps surprisingly, it comes from my childhood, so is a very old ad, but is a very simple execution delivering a powerful message in unequivocal terms. Pity the companies management was not up to same standard as their communications people.
May 23, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Marketing
The holy grail, the prime objective of billions of dollars of advertising, the wall behind which many campaigns that have failed to generate incremental sales have hidden, Brand Loyalty.
I cannot help but wonder if the label “Brand Loyalty” is sometimes just a metaphor for making the purchase choice easier. The environment we inhabit is now so absolutely over-run with messages information, and tactics to build “customer engagement”, that we all must have a serious case of cogitative overload, weather we know it or not, so we need a mechanism to sort the options.
In this context I am reminded of the old “KISS” principal, Keep It Simple Stupid.
Apple is often cited as the greatest marketing machine we have ever seen, an accolade I am comfortable with, but perhaps there is another dimension. Rather than building brand loyalty, perhaps they have just so simplified the purchase decision in an environment that is psychologically threatening by the number of alternatives, and the techno-speak that most use as communication , that they grab the sales almost by default.
Apple has successfully made buying a piece of tech few buyers understand simple, and attached a cache to that simplicity. This spoof makes the point, but mind the language.
Apr 27, 2012 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales
The costs of advertising only get counted when you do lousy advertising.
When you place an ad, and you get a great response, the costs are never considered, but place a lousy ad, getting little response, then the cost is alarming.
Therefore the task is to be sufficiently compelling to a targeted audience to bring a quality response, then the cost is not considered, because you get an outcome that (presumably) makes commercial sense.
My son recently sold a car on line, it was a good car, but not one that would be for everyone. He thought he would just put up an ad, and it would just sell, easy, because it was a good car, and the price offered good value.
Failure, this first ad got almost no response, and those that did respond were not interested in the car, just getting it at half the advertised price.
We had another shot at writing an ad, putting in much more detail, and then placed it more specifically to attract a specialised buyer, one to whom the particular characteristics of the car beyond the provision of a transport device would be of value.
It got a number of responses, several very good ones, and it sold very quickly at the full price.
The cost of the second ad was irrelevant, but he is still complaining about the first placement.
Apr 24, 2012 | Branding, Collaboration, Communication, Marketing
Trust is a greatly over-used word in management conversations, and has therefore lost much of its meaning, becoming a cliché for “lets hope”.
People trust brands when they deliver consistently over time, but trust is like a bucket with a hole in the bottom, you need to keep pouring water in to keep up with the inevitable losses for a whole range of reasons. Stop adding to the bucket for a moment, and you lose ground that is very hard to make up.
In discussing collaborative structures of various types, “Trust” is grossly overused, and should be replaced by an alternative description, “Reputational Capital” which implies more of the appreciation/depreciation continuum better understood by managers.
Collaborations work only in the presence of people who individually work to ensure that by their efforts others will benefit, and the whole system remains healthy. This is consistent irrespective of the size and nature of the collaboration, from major corporate initiatives, to self managed teams on the factory floor, the local tennis club, and web based sharing platforms like Zipcar. The Reputation of all participants is paramount to collaborative success.
Amazon, Zappos and Ebay rewrote the book on reputational capital with their review systems, and the principals used are now in wide use across many web platforms to provide buyers and sellers with certainty.
How long will it be before there is a web-wide statement of our activity, that accounts for all our activity, irrespective of the platform, an accounting of our Reputational Capital, a “klout” type score that measures not activity, but the satisfaction delivered to the people on the receiving end of all the transactions an individual originates.
Mar 29, 2012 | Change, Communication, Innovation, Social Media
It is all a matter of perspective.
Digital marketing implies an application of the existing disciplines of marketing, just tweaked a bit to accommodate the presence in the environment of digital options, facebook, linkedin, Pin it, and the rest.
Marketing in a digital world implies a pivot, the old rules no longer apply, because the world has changed.
Comscore has released their latest research, summarised and commented on in Mike Stelzner’s great Social Media Examiner blog. The impact of on line shopping, our seeming addiction to social sites and the opportunities to find new ways to engage with consumers as they conduct their digital lives, is delivering a host of new businesses, business models, and service opportunities not on the radar just a couple of years ago. Just look at the sudden emergence of cloud computing, the question is not where in the organisation responsibility for operating the cloud interactions should reside, but how can we best leverage the opportunities thrown up by this piece of the digital revolution.
Digital is no longer an option if medium term commercial survival is an objective, weather it be marketing, managing manufacturing, customer relationships and inventory, or just doodling, it is the other side of the inflexion point.
Not every body is there yet, but it will not be long, so don’t be late.
Mar 22, 2012 | Communication
In a recent negotiation, a good faith, and non confrontational negotiation conducted in English between one of my clients and a prospective investor from East Asia who spoke virtually fluent but non colloquial English, we suffered from a misunderstanding emerging from differing cultural interpretations of the same words.
We discovered, again, that communication is only completed when the intention of the speaker is clear and unambiguous to the receiver of the words. It is very easy to assume an understanding of the meaning of a word or phrase, simply because they register.
