May 30, 2023 | Change, Innovation, Marketing
In this new world of marketing, being reshaped by Artificial Intelligence, how should those concerned with the longevity and salience of their brands respond?
Innovate.
AI is really good at looking at what has happened in the past, but has yet to develop a crystal ball to tell the future. Marketers key responsibility is to tell the future, then shape the resource allocation decisions their enterprises make to best leverage what they think will happen. No future comes in a linear fashion, but AI can only reflect in a linear way, in response to the algorithms on which it was trained.
Strategise.
Strategy is a game of choice, where what you will not do is at least as important and often more so than what you will do. Again, these choices are based on what you think might happen, and as noted, these are never linear choices. Strategy in a world being homogenised by access to data will be more fundamentally important than ever.
Manage Communication structures.
Yesterday’s world was dominated by silos. The simple fact is that customers do not care about your silos, only how you deliver value to them. Enterprises have evolved hierarchical silo structures as the most efficient way to allocate and manage resources. That remained true until the mid-nineties, and most enterprises still have not got the memo. Today, even any hint of silos and barriers to communication internally, and more importantly with customers, will lead to a rapid and fiery death at the hands of data and its scribe, AI.
Remove marketing complexity.
The last 20 years have seen a multiplication and fragmentation of communication channels to customers and consumers, along with the inevitable silent middlemen and rent seekers who just siphon off dollars with little or no value add. The complexity of the choices and channels has created a situation where the analysis of the value of marketing expenditure is little short of a children’s guessing game. This is despite and partly because of because of the plethora of options and tools. The only way to address this complexity is to cut the gordian know and simplify, simplify, and then simplify some more. In other words, marketing focus driven by strategy. Easy to say, hard to do.
Generate attention.
The main game of being relevant in a huge homogeneous crowd is to first generate attention. You do that by being different, and being different with a big dose of energy being injected into the differences that are relevant to customers and consumers because they solve real problems, delivering them real value.
If you do all that, while leveraging the capabilities of AI, and digital systems generally, it will be your competitors that struggle, while you are ahead of the game.
Header cartoon credit: Tom Gauld
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 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
Apr 24, 2023 | Communication, Marketing
So called ‘Content Marketing” or alternatively, ‘inbound marketing’, has become the poster boy of marketing. It has attracted marketing budgets like a magnet in an iron filings factory.
Often, we see content that has been produced for contents sake, without any analytical consideration or real value. It has become so easy to produce superficial generalities that pass uninformed scrutiny using AI tools, that ‘thinking’ is becoming rare.
Creating content that will deliver a return is an investment, and like every investment, marketers should be looking for a return, seeking to improve the performance of the resources they deploy.
Just making assumptions, no matter how obvious, can end up badly.
As a young marketer, I made the huge mistake of assuming that consumers could see the pack of a product I managed through my eyes, and were as desperate as I was to rectify the damage it was clearly doing to a good brand.
That assumption was a huge mistake that nearly ended my budding marketing career before it really took off.
The point is that we are now just all creating content, assuming our current and potential customers can read our minds and see the value in it, be overwhelmed, and just buy.
Never happens, you must build a framework within which your content makes no assumptions. Following are a few seemingly simple steps:
Have goals for your content.
It does not matter how beautifully written and illustrated your content may be, if the reader does not know what you want them to do with it. When you want them to try a product, tell them. When you want them to sign up for a webinar, or free e-book, tell them.
Write for the persona.
Content with a commercial intent is different from being a journalist telling a wide story. You need to engage a very specific group of people and convert them to a transaction. This is best done by a skilled salesperson looking them in the eye, but the second best is great content that they see as written for them. To achieve this, you need to be very certain and specific of the desired audience. First step is creating those personas, and when you have them, write to them as you would a friend.
Write to a calendar.
This comes from knowing your audience and the markets they are in. If you are selling real estate, it makes more sense to write about the great outdoor entertaining area in spring, than the huge log fireplace which will keep the house warm. Keep that one for the autumn. It is also the case that your committed audience come to expect some sort of rhythm to your writing. Once a month, once a week, every day, whatever it is, establish and keep to the rhythm so that it becomes part of their lives. I consume a wide range of the content of others, the only common factor is that they all have a predictable rhythm.
Have your own voice.
Ensure you have a tone of voice that is consistent across all the platforms you use. I always recommend that my clients write their own content. They may have it researched, drafted, and a first draft edit by others, but they do the writing. In that way it is them speaking as close to one to one as they can get to the individuals in their audience.
Have your own ‘Home base’.
Content lasts forever once it is posted, it can continue to deliver for you, but it needs a home. The platforms out there make their money by collecting information attractive to advertisers, then restricting access unless you pay them for it. Facebook started with total access to the newsfeeds of those to whom you were connected, it is now down by most counts to less than 2%. LinkedIn has made huge changes since being bought by Microsoft as they progressively monetised the platform. All platforms are there to make a return, not to act as a public service. You must have your own home base, digital real estate that you own, that you can do with what you wish. The challenge of course is that you must figure out how to drive the traffic you want to your home.
Repurpose and resurrect your content.
Content once created and posted lasts forever, and can be used and reused many times, and in many forms, on the many different platforms. While the ‘half-life’ of content on a public platform like Facebook or twitter can be measured in a few minutes, content on your website is always there, can be found with a search, and can continue to deliver value for a long time. A number of my older posts deliver readers every day, many of whom stay, subscribe, and engage with the newer content as it is posted.
Leverage your analytics.
The free Google analytics package gives you a pile of information that can be used to improve what you are doing, and ensure it is finding the right audiences. Not using it is silly.
This is all simple to say, but very hard to do.
Like all things that are hard, it takes a considerable commitment to be able to stand out, be different, and deliver value that generates a return on your investment in content. You should recognise that digital marketing, if it is to be effective, is not ‘free’. Not only are you giving the platforms access to your eyeballs for further remarketing for their benefit, but you are also making the investment of your most valuable resources, time and energy.
You should always consider the return you receive from investments you make.
Header image credit: Dall-E robotic image generator
Mar 22, 2023 | Branding, Communication
‘If you want to change the world, change the metaphor‘. Joseph Campbell
Every storyteller knows how powerful metaphors are, we all use them to describe to ourselves and others, the complex situations and challenges we face. The tales our parents read us as children are all metaphors, almost always describing desirable behaviour. I remember my father telling me the ‘angry bee’ metaphor on several occasions as a kid. Once when I was losing a tennis match, and my temper, he said, ‘An angry bee stings, and dies. It was therefore better not to get angry’. (I later discovered it was a metaphor Seneca had used to try and persuade Nero that being a murdering pyromaniac would not be good for his legacy)
Metaphors can also be subtle uses of language that go largely unnoticed, but which can have a significant effect on the way we think about a situation. For example, ‘crime wave’ is an emotive term that may lead to someone reading the term conclude that there was more crime than if the numbers were simply stated. The latter lacks the drama and emotive impact of the former.
Similarly, President Reagans ‘war on crime’ drove a military type response to drugs that resulted in a huge increase in incarceration rates, but no reduction in the availability of drugs. The ‘war’ was won when the ‘enemy’ was stopped, while doing nothing to address the causes of them becoming enemies in the first place. (Americans seem to be very good at this sort of self- delusion)
There is a substantial body of academic evidence surrounding the proposition that the use of metaphors counts for much more than we would naturally assume.
A former client, an SME whose lifeblood was being able to get to the senior people in target businesses in a B2B environment, found themselves struggling.
Many of those he needed to speak to, build a relationship with, and persuade that his solution was one that could be deployed easily, were increasingly protected by personal assistants in various forms.
He referred to them as ‘gate-keepers’ which they were. Their job was to ensure as far as possible that their bosses time was not wasted, that distractions were minimised and that they only saw the most important things.
My clients product did not necessarily fall into the ‘must see’ category, and he was therefore often frustrated.
After several conversations, we changed the metaphor in his mental model of the PA as ‘gate-keepers’ to one where they were ‘enablers’. In other words, he took the view that his task was not to get to the MD through the gatekeeper, but to engage the gatekeeper and turn them into an ‘enabler’ and even an advocate for their product.
Once this approach was understood and implemented, the results were spectacular.
Consider for a moment the impact of the current usage of the words ‘War’ and ‘China’ in any political statement from proponents of the AUKUS submarine deal. The language and the resultant frame through which most will consider the merits of this project will be influenced by the usage of those two words. Had anyone in power used the term ‘industrial development catalyst’ or ‘nation building’ it would have significantly changed the nature of the ‘debate’ surrounding this decision.
Metaphors are a natural and very important component of our communication. We learn to understand them as children, using them automatically to communicate effectively.
What metaphors are you using in your communication?
Mar 17, 2023 | Communication, Sales
Goliath, contrary to the stories, usually does win, it is just that we simply never hear about it. There is no drama, no unexpected outcome, no backstory of how little, under resourced David beat the giant who had all the advantages, and got away with the prize.
We use these stories in marketing all the time, because they work, and we know they work, because they have been told to us as stories when we were kids, and we remember them.
They have meaning.
Go to a live event, with someone selling something from the stage, and you will always hear pretty much the same sequence: hardship, battling against the odds, a personalised stage of despair then some insight that shows them the path, which made them hugely successful.
Now they want to help you walk the same path, they offer a picture of what it will be like at the end of the path, you just must be brave enough to take those steps, to grasp the opportunity they are offering, which they know works, because they are the living proof.
Trouble is, just buying the books and courses of someone who has been successful does not make you successful.
In fact, the reality is usually that the only success that someone flogging a book or course has had, is in selling you a book or a course.
