Marketing is dead; Long live marketing

Marketing is dead; Long live marketing

Jul 15, 2019 | Branding, Marketing

 

In 1973 I graduated with a marketing degree, something few had heard of. My father was appalled, as I had set out to get an accounting degree, but had been waylaid by some  new age nonsense that would not get me a job.

Several years later, after quenching my wanderlust, I went looking for a job back in Australia. At that time, marketing was becoming important in a couple of areas, the food industry, and FMCG more generally, being the leader.

I was lucky and scored a job in an environment  which would give rise to one of the (formerly) great Australian brands; Meadow Lea.

Brands had become important through the 20th century in food, as they were a mark of quality, and reassurance that there were no nasties in there that would terminally stunt your growth.  Pretty important in food that you have not grown yourself,  and it is where the big brands emerged, creating the cycle of scale.

Large volumes enables capital expenditure,  and advertising, which exploded when TV emerged in the 50’s, creating massive consumer brands that dominated the landscape of our lives. The corollary is  that there were also many smaller brands, yapping around the edges, stealing a crust here and there, and generally keeping the big blokes honest.

Supermarkets built their scale for the same reasons, delivering price and convenience to consumers, then progressively they  set out to capture some of the proprietary margin of the big brands by leveraging their distribution muscle, by launching house brands in the 80’s. The very first one was a ‘No Frills’ margarine, launched by Franklins in Sydney, supplied by what became Meadow Lea Foods.

Then came the marketing ‘Big Bang’, the arrival of the internet.

I remember seeing the first fax around 1983, and thinking ‘this will change the world’ and it did, but not how I expected, and the fax was nothing compared to the disruption 20 years later.

Suddenly there were thousands of ways to communicate, TV remained, and still does remain an important vehicle, but like an aged boxing champion, is unable to deliver the impact of his youth against a horde of more agile, and stronger contenders who learn on the job every day.

The big brand owners, not wanting to miss out on this new wave of communication channels chucked money and their established ways of doing things at them, and wondered why they were being ignored. At the same time, supermarkets doubled down on housebrands, setting out to market their retail brands as someone you could trust to deliver quality and integrity, while consumers recognised that health regulations made putting nasties in food products a thing of the past.

Who needs brands anymore?

Well, the answer to that question is just about anyone who needs to offer a sense of security, certainty of performance, and a guarantee that they will stand behind their products performance,  to their customers and potential customers. That means anyone pushing the established boundaries of production, distribution, or technology.

Obviously Google, Facebook, Apple, et al fall into this category, and they have built huge global brands in less than 20 years, but those brands look nothing like those of my early years.

They have been built using new channels, as well as reimagining the old ones and executing at scale in ways unimaginable to incumbents. Apple is now the most successful bricks and mortar retailer in the world, when measured on the retailers own key KPI, margin per square foot of retail space, Amazon Go, and Whole Foods are rethinking FMCG retailing, and their bookstores are popping up in places where Dymocks,   Borders, et al closed down a decade ago.

The challenge is that the new marketers emerging now have no idea of how to really build a real brand. FMCG brands are largely irrelevant, so that training ground has gone, the new places to get marketing experience is in tech, and financial services. Tech is building brands despite themselves, simply because they are replacing the old ways with new ones, and financial services, well,  look how puny and irrelevant their brands are in the face of profit pressures, and simply nobody will believe them anymore.

Trust is zero.

Brands cost money to build, and take time building them is an investment in the future, and will not pay off until the future arrives. Unless you have the skills now, the future is looking bleak.

Fortunately there are a few old heads around who still remember, and recognise the ‘4 P’s’ still apply, and a few new heads, not seduced by the newest, shiny tech tool that skates across the surface of brand building

Brands are everywhere, without them, chaos will prevail, but to build one today, you need to be smarter than the next bloke, not just be lucky enough to have more resources and distribution scale. Genuine, creative and forward looking marketing is getting another lease of life.

 Call me when you need a dose of invaluable experience.

 

Header cartoon courtesy Tom Fishburn at www.marketoonsist.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

Genuflecting at the tomb of the unknown customer

Genuflecting at the tomb of the unknown customer

Jul 12, 2019 | Branding, Marketing

More money is thrown at the tomb of the unknown customer than any other source of marketing waste.

Unless you can define very well indeed who your customer is, you will be wasting most of any time, effort, and money you spend.

Defining who your ideal customer is involves choices, as you also  have to determine who is not, and therefore you will not spend resources trying to reach and influence them. This is really difficult for most, especially smaller businesses, to whom turning away a potential customer is an appalling thought.

Over 35 years ago I took over as Marketing Manager of the newly formed General Products Division of Dairy Farmers.

The brand of yoghurt we had was Ski, market leader in a small, and slowly growing market. When I joined, Yoplait had just launched, and the market had exploded.  Ski’s volumes were about the same, but share had dropped to single figures as Yoplait had, rightly,  taken all the growth for itself.

During a qualitative research project aimed at understanding who was buying yoghurt, which brands they preferred and why, the researcher asked the respondents to describe each of the major brands in human terms.

Yoplait was an educated, hip, self reliant, confident young woman who had her life in order the way she wanted it.

Ski was a reliable 50 year old farmer in wellies.

The advertising plan that was in place when I arrived was just more of the same old stuff, trying to convince ‘Miss Yoplait’ that the wellie wearing farmer was a good choice for her.

Might not have worked very well, so it was changed, and Ski started on a 5 year roll of product innovation that led to market leadership.

25 years later, Chobani came along and has done the same thing, again, as the so called marketers who followed, lost sight of the consumer, leaving the field open for a better targeted offer from a newcomer.

Need some help thinking this challenging stuff through? Give me a call.

The huge power of relative risk in sales.

The huge power of relative risk in sales.

Jun 28, 2019 | Communication, Sales

‘Risk’ is an emotive word, it immediately conjures up danger, and an instinctive reluctance to avoid it, if at all possible.

Relative risk is often used in a selling situation as a means to motivate the potential buyer to take that last step, and buy, immediately. The risk may be of missing out, of a price rise, or of an unpleasant event happening, and many other things that might incite a sense of urgency. Unless you apply some added, and not usually made available logic, you can be seduced by the size of the stated risk, and buy, when it may not be a logically consistent decision to do so.

When you see the word ‘Risk’ in a brochure, offering research numbers that demonstrate how much this new ‘whizzo’, newly developed after much research,  will reduce your risk, do not take them at face value.

For example, if I was selling a new medication aimed at older fathers, of which there is an increasing number, I might use something like the copy following.

‘For men of 50 fathering children, there is an 18% greater chance of those children suffering seizures, than children of a father of 30′. New ABC medication from XYZ company can more than halve this risk’

This first part of this copy would be alarming to any man in this group, but misleading. It is a relative risk, comparing one group to another. It does not tell you how likely it is that an individual child will have a seizure, which is an absolute risk. The second part, promises a huge reduction in this risk as an inducement to buy, but again, very misleading, because the reduction in risk is relative.

Had the copy been complete, it would also have told the reader:

The child of a father aged 30 has a risk of seizure of .024%, 24 out of 100,000 children.

The child of a father aged 50 has a risk of seizure of .028%, 28 out of 100,000 children.

(Data source new scientist November 2018)

An increase of 18% to the risk of children of fathers over 50 suffering seizures, compared to that of fathers of 30 sounds shocking, but when you consider it is 4 children in 100,000, it is less so. Equally, the reduction coming from new ABC medication is less impressive when viewed as an absolute reduction, from 4 to 2, and the (poor) statistician in me tells me it is within the boundaries of statistical error in any event.

Daniel Kahneman in his great book ‘Thinking Fast & Slow’ uses a number of examples similar to the one above, and in addition would apply the question: ‘How much would you pay to reduce the risk of your child having seizures from 4/100,000 to 2/100,000’? to get a better measure of the price difference between a purely rational decision, and an emotional one.

Emotion sells way, way better than rationality, so the usual way to present data will almost  inevitably be relative. Watch out for it, and ask the appropriate questions before you jump to a purchase decision. 

 

Header cartoon courtesy of Scott Adams and ‘Dilbert’ https://dilbert.com/

Where to easily find the real value in Facebook

Where to easily find the real value in Facebook

Jun 26, 2019 | Marketing, Social Media

 

Facebook has made organic reach virtually (pun intended) impossible in the quest to empty marketers pockets of advertising funds, at which they have been astonishingly successful. This is despite their appalling management of privacy and enabling some pretty dodgy, some would call it reprehensible, activity.

The only option left, and it is a good one, is to take advantage of the groups that Facebook has encouraged to flourish.

Marketers should be taking advantage of groups, but to do so requires a greater level of discipline and investment than many seem to be able to muster. 

Following are the three main considerations.

Common interest.

Groups are by definition places where there is a common interest that draws members. However, common interest is not enough to generate the engagement that marketers need, there needs to be collaboration amongst the members, that creates its own two sided discussion. If the levels of two way discussion fall, so will the interest levels of participants, who will then wander off, digitally speaking. For marketers prepared to put in some leg work, selectively adding value to the groups specifically around your value proposition can be very useful.

Group control.

Anyone can create a group, for any reason, and manage the settings to your own agenda. I am a member of a local SME networking group that has three Facebook groups that serve different purposes. The first is a ‘public‘ group, where anyone can see and interact with posts, the second is a private group where only members of the network can  post and view the activity of others in the group. The third is a ‘secret’ group that has the current committee as its only members, and only those few can see anything posted, and respond. The first is a group that can  attract potential members and contributors to the activities of the group, the second is a collaboration of members where we can help each other in a myriad of ways, and the third is a very convenient communication channel for the committee to consider the manner in which the group is managed. The combination works well, and is very simple to set up. 

For a purpose.

Given it is easy to set up a group, when there is a specific purpose, you can set it up and leverage the potential reach amongst those who have an interest in your purpose. This can be anything from a product launch, technical forum to a personal interest, and everything in between. The challenge of course is to market the group to those who may buy into the purpose, and have something to contribute. Without a flow of quality content, such groups will have a very short life, but they have the potential to deliver considerable value to the group owner and members.

 

Groups are not the answer to most marketing challenges, at best they are a partial answer to some common questions, and can be a valuable part of a wider strategy. At least they can deliver a pathway to your own digital asset, your website that should remain a cornerstone of every  marketing activity. It is inevitable that Facebook will change the rules again, squeezing the algorithms that make groups useful, in order to keep the revenue flowing. However,  you  may as well use it while you can.

Almost exactly the same set of observations can be made about the group functions in other platforms. While the details differ, and none are anywhere near as sophisticated or provide the same sort of potential reach, they are all on the same path, monetising their access to your eyeballs in order to sell your details to advertisers.

 

 

 

Chemotherapy has no place in marketing.

Chemotherapy has no place in marketing.

Jun 24, 2019 | Marketing

Imagine you walk into your doctors office, and after the usual greetings, he just glances at you, and said ‘Chemotherapy’

After recovering, you would walk out.

The thought of undergoing chemotherapy without detailed examination of the malignancy to which it was to be applied, is absurd.

While this may be an unlikely scenario in medicine, it is one I see approximated  every day in the office of inexperienced and unthinking marketing people.

They jump to a solution before defining the problem. These days, the immediate ‘go to’ solution is more often than not, some shiny new digital toy that is claimed to fix all your problems while costing little, and walking on water.

The proper sequence to follow is to diagnose the problem being faced. This involves a detailed look at the causes, symptoms and consequences of a problem. It is not an easy task in most cases, which is why it gets jumped.

Qualitative research is often maligned, but done well will deliver insights that can later be tested, and uncover the questions that need to be answered. Unless you identify the right questions to ask, which is the power of qualitative research, your subsequent quantitative research will be nonsense, delivering answers to irrelevant or just plain wrong questions.

Secondly, once the dimensions of the problem are clearly understood,  you can develop strategies to address them. If the strategy is more of the same, it is a clear sign that you either do not understand the problem, or you need a better strategist.

Only after the strategies have been developed and articulated, can you move to the tactical part of addressing the problem, the means by which you fix it. Usually it is at this point where the biggest money is spent, often in a short time. It can be easily wasted if the appropriate levels of time, attention, and skill are not applied to the foregoing problem definition, and building a strategic framework that drives the tactical decisions.  

Header cartoon courtesy Tom Gauld at www.tomgauld.com  

 

Where does the ‘essential essence’ of marketing hide?

Where does the ‘essential essence’ of marketing hide?

Jun 21, 2019 | Branding, Marketing, Strategy

 

Great marketing is never entirely rational.

If it was we would call it economics, and be bored to death by its recitation.

‘Rational’ relies on precision, mathematics, and repeatability, not characteristics often seen in the behaviour of human beings.  We are driven by automatic things buried deep in our brains that have evolved to enable our relatively physically weak species, to become the dominant species on earth.

Individually our ancestors could not beat off a sabre toothed tiger, but together we saw them disappear while we prospered. We are disproportionally attuned to detect danger before we detect happiness, a foe before a friend, and are initially suspicious of anyone from outside the ‘tribe,’ and anything we do not understand.

Great marketing is the opposite to rational. It demands attention because it is different, it creates curiosity, because it is unexpected,  and interest because it is of value.

Creativity is the core of great marketing, as without creativity, every marketing strategy would be the same.  All marketers have access to the same data, can apply the same logic to a challenge, use the same models,  have the same distribution, so if logic reined, all would be the same for the same sort of product.

Instead, we have a cornucopia of strategies and tactical implementations, driven by some level of creativity. These days, sadly, most of the creativity has been squeezed out by the algorithms and demands of the rationalists running enterprises,  which is why there is so much poor marketing and advertising around.

If you want to be seen, be different, cause a stir in the bushes, build curiosity, be creative!

It will not always work as you expect, as creativity is about being first, which is usually bold and risky, it will not always win hearts and minds in the corner office, but as a marketer, it is your duty!

 

Header cartoon from the great Hugh McLeod at www.gapingvoid.com