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

 

 

8 things to remember about that hugely persuasive data.

8 things to remember about that hugely persuasive data.

Jun 17, 2019 | Governance, Marketing

‘In God we trust, all others bring data’ . This statement is generally attributed to W. Edwards Deming, way back in the 50’s.

It is as true now as it was then, with some pretty significant caveats. 

You need to know the provenance of any data you choose to use, as data is just data, and it can be managed, coalesced, manipulated, misrepresented, and outright lied about, so be careful.

Some things to remember.

  • Data is mostly history, and the future is rarely the same as the past. Data that is really a forecast should not be called data, it is a ‘best guess,’ or wishful thinking,’ or ‘what the boss told me to say,’ or ‘I need this to keep my job,’ or a thousand other things.
  • Data is always incomplete no matter how complete you think it is. There is always some level of context that can give it greater, or even a different meaning, that is missing. Part of the challenge is being able to make a decision without being overwhelmed and developing a form of ‘common sense blindness’, caused by a tsunami of data.
  • Data provenance is always useful to know. What is the source of the data? When it comes from customers, it may be more useful than when it comes from a supplier trying to sell you something. When you see claims like ‘This lotion has been scientifically proven to cure male pattern baldness in 92.5% of cases’, you know the ‘scientific test’ was done on 10 hairy blokes from the local footy side.
  • Data is objective, but the analysis of data is not. It is subject to a host of human emotions and contexts, and can be interpreted in a number of ways, depending on the mood, experience, domain knowledge and a host of other things, of the analyser.
  • Data ages quickly. What was pretty right now, might not be so right in a years time.
  • The world is full of conflicting data, the challenge is to know which pieces to believe and use, and which to discard. Anticipating the actions of your competitor with the same set of data is a very useful exercise. Put yourself in their position and ask yourself what would I do now?
  • Data can distract, as we are visual animals, and visuals are a powerful way of communicating, so be sure that what is being communicated by those fancy graphs is actually what the data says.
  • Data should be able to tell us which is correlation, and what is simply some random causation. These two may be the two most confused states, and are certainly amongst the most used red herrings

Data should be one of the foundations of all our decision making, and we rarely have all we need. Therefore we are forced to make often difficult choices with limited data, implementing those decisions, measuring the impacts, and adjusting tactically as you learn. It pays to understand what you are relying on when you make those choices.

Cartoon header: courtesy www.XKCD.com

Two crucial learning tools for SME’s

Two crucial learning tools for SME’s

Jun 5, 2019 | Marketing, Small business

Rationally analysing the impact of decisions made, or about to be made, is a crucial and challenging  task.

Most people instinctively overestimate their ability to generate favourable outcomes from a decision, and underestimate the difficulties of implementation.

In my local shopping strip recently, an optimistic young couple opened a pizza place. A few seats, for eat in, but too few to be called a restaurant. They clearly invested quite a bit of money, and being a local I gave them a try, and had a conversation at the same time. The owner had not really considered the fact that there was a long established, and heavily patronised pizza place about 3 minutes  walk away, with better parking, and that there was a very pleasant and cheap Italian restaurant that has Pizza on the menu just 4 doors down in the strip. This is in addition to the wall to wall promotion of  home delivery pizza by the big chains. Even in the face of those facts recited to him, he remained very confident that they would succeed, without any solid reason why that was to be the case. To my mind it was blind optimism in the face of overwhelming   odds, and while the pizza was OK, it was nothing special.

I expect it to close any day.

Tool 1. A Pre-Mortem.

Had he done a pre-mortem, he may have avoided the mistake.

Let me explain.

A pre mortem is obviously,  the opposite to a post mortem, conducted after death. In this case, it is conducted before the final decision is made to invest.

In a corporate environment, you gather the responsible people in a room before the switch is flicked and conduct a simple exercise, with a challenge. “The project proceeds as planned, but you are now a year into the future, and it has been a disaster. Examine the reason for that disaster”.

This sort of thinking assists in removing the blinkers, of curbing baseless optimism, and of mitigating the impact of the noisiest proponent of a project.

Had the young couple down the road conducted such an exercise, they may have anticipated what was obvious to an outsider, even with a quick glance.

Tool 2. A Post-Mortem

The second tool is obviously a post-mortem, done after death. In a commercial context this is often described as an ‘After Action Review’ or AAR. In this exercise, you examine what worked as planned, and what did not, for lessons to be applied in the future. Post mortems are common after a capital expenditure,  a review of the degree to which the outcomes of a Capex matched the forecasts in the capital plan, but they are rare in my experience in other areas of an enterprise. They should be an essential part of every activity, as only by examining the logic behind a decision  with the benefit of hindsight, can we learn to make better decisions.

When it would help to have someone around who does this stuff routinely, give me a call.

Header cartoon is again by Hugh McLeod of www.Gapinvoid.com. While you may not be able to be the only one in the world, be the only one in the street, or locality, or you will fail. When you cannot define your differentiator to the few who might care, you will be in real trouble.

How much is a seat at the creative table?

How much is a seat at the creative table?

Jun 3, 2019 | Branding, Marketing

The nature of the 24 hour marketing turnaround has led to piles of rubbish advertising. The ‘big idea’ of my youth, the search for that magic something that will engage and motivate  has been replaced by piles of small expressions that get left on the table.

Creativity requires time, curiosity, an awareness of what is around you, a tolerance for risk, and an irreverence for the status quo. These are no longer common in an environment of the 24 hour turnaround, but when you see an example, you notice it, remember it, and just perhaps it influences behaviour.

However, from time to time, someone  also takes advantage of the quick cycle and comes up with something creative, irreverent, and different, and it works.

As a young marketer, one of the key metrics was awareness. How much did we have to spend to generate a specific level of awareness?

The ad in the header was as far as I am aware, just on a few Ikea stores in Queensland. The cost would have been almost nothing,  the impact significant. Most poster ads go unnoticed, this one was noticed, and the new age tools spread it, which is how it came to me.

A terrific idea.

My favourite marketing guru, Albert Einstein quipped, amongst his many, ‘Creativity is intelligence having fun’

Somebody in Ikea was having a lot of fun!

 

PS. June 4.

It turns out the ad in the header was a ‘fake ad’ put out by a creative consultancy, Adrian Elton, in an effort to get the attention of Ikea management. 

I am sure it worked, as Ikea is not stupid. This is an example of a big idea, so lacking in todays churn of mediocre ideas passed off as content creation.

The simple, and real reason Bill blew it

The simple, and real reason Bill blew it

May 21, 2019 | Marketing, Personal Rant

In the tsunami of analysis seeking to understand the loss of the election by Labor, I have yet to hear anyone put their finger on what I consider to be the real reason.

Psychology.

Specifically Prospect Theory.

Prospect Theory was articulated by Nobel laureate Danial Kahneman in his great book (required reading) ‘Thinking Fast & Slow’. It is the psychological relationship between the pain of a prospective loss, compared to the pleasure of a prospective gain. In the published theory Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Tversky put the effect as twice the expected pleasure from the gain necessary to overcome the prospective pain of loss. However, in interviews, he has said that the relationship is more like 5-7 times, but when writing the papers, they thought nobody would believe them, so they settled on twice.

Think about this relationship as it applied to the offers of the two major parties on Saturday.

Labor promised some pain for a few, but failed to articulate who the few were, and justify the pain, so all voters saw was ‘Pain’. By contrast, the Liberals promised no pain, and lots of gain, albeit almost totally bereft of detail beyond election rhetoric.

It was not so obvious to me beforehand, but with the benefit of that magnificent justifying mechanism, hindsight, it is as obvious as the  nose on your face. Labor did  not just need a better salesman, which they certainly did, they also needed someone who understood the psychology underpinning successful marketing.

Header cartoon is from www.tomgauld.com with my thanks.

The new competitive advantage in a digital world

The new competitive advantage in a digital world

May 15, 2019 | Communication, Marketing

Data collection has become an obsession of marketers in particular, but all sorts of other assorted boffins as well.  We have data up to the wahzoo, and do not know what to do with it all. So, we throw it against the wall and come up with all sorts of nonsensical stuff designed to sell digital ads to marketers too silly to think clearly about what they are doing, and why they should be doing it with digital.

Data is now a huge, though largely unmapped  industry, infested with data snips designed to track consumers so they can be targeted by advertisers, or perhaps more accurately, promised by the sellers of digital space to silly advertisers with too much of someone else’s money to spend.

The only industry that has actually done well in this mess are the scammers, and those who produce ad blockers, which in itself is a measure of how poorly  served we are.

Advertising used to be the means by which we were delivered information important to making purchase decisions. Now digital advertising is used as a means to follow up, make money for the scammers and fraudsters, and  occasionally, set about delivering information to someone who wants it.

The new competitive advantage is not to get more data, but to be able to turn the data you have into actionable market intelligence. 

This brings us back to the foundation of advertising and marketing,  understanding your customer better than your opposition. Given they usually have the same data set as you, your competitive advantage is in the use you make of it.

Header cartoon courtesy Tom Fishburne at www.marketoonist.com