May 20, 2014 | Change, Communication, Leadership, Marketing, Small business
“Serendipity” . Luck that takes the form of finding valuable or pleasant things that are not looked for. Websters Dictionary.
My old Dad used to say “Son, the harder I work, the luckier I get” and it has usually worked out that way.
It follows then that if you combine the definition of Serendipity and Dads old chestnut, Serendipity can be managed.
How you ask!
- Recognise that Serendipity is a state of mind rather than a quantitative outcome, and should be managed that way.
- It requires a management culture that has everyone working together, “alignment of strategy and activity” as a popular management article would probably purr. A utopian notion, but doable.
- Ensure there is “spare” time allocated to staff to pursue ideas, contribute to collaborative activities, and look for improvements. Personnel whose performance measures are quantitative box ticking exercises are unlikely to risk compromising their KPI’s by allocating time to potentially serendipitous pursuits.
- Provide the forums for casual and social interaction. This can be done in all sorts of ways from the way the offices are designed to organising staff picnics.
- Encourage the behaviours you are seeking by publicly recognising it when it happens. Financial and organisational rewards are of little value, but is the social rewards that really count.
- Trust and respect are critical components of productive collaboration. Neither can allocated, both need to be earned. “Ideo“, the creative agency has it nailed, one of their core values is “Make others successful”. When everyone works to make others successful, trust and respect follow, and the culture tends to expel anyone who does not work with that culture and its behaviours.
The great benefit if success in these endeavours is that it will make your place a great place to work, and that ends up attracting the best talent, attracting interesting, challenging and rewarding customers, and making good money. A virtuous circle.
That’s how.
May 19, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Small business
Imagehaven, Innovation by design
On several occasions last week I found myself frustrated that I could not find a piece of information I needed on a website, I knew it had to be there somewhere, it is just that someone had effectively if inadvertently hidden it. GGGRRRRR
Over the years I have asked many people, individually and in audiences, what for them constitutes the perfect website.
There have been many answers, but there are always three that recur almost every time:
- Simple, clear, and quick to navigate.
- The information needed is on the site.
- We know what to do next.
How easy is that?, yet how often do we find ourselves searching a site, getting frustrated before we move onto the next likely one in the search list.
Usually it appears that the confusion and clutter comes from a few common sources. Designers try and put all the information up front, rather than creating a hierarchy of information that reflects the way people search, they let their “designer” genes run riot with the result that there is simply too much “design”, or that the original design has been added to over time like a house that goes through a series of renovations and extensions and ends up just being a collection of rooms.
It is really just a question of thought being put into the design. The combination of white space, written information, graphics, and calls to action (CTA). There are many “rules” of design around, this article by Zoe Sadokierski from UTS offers some of the perspective of history, that can be usefully applied to website design, but a bit of common sense goes a long way.
Next time you set out to design a site, consider these three simple rules, or you could just call the gurus at Imagehaven.
May 16, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Social Media
Building brands has always been the core of successful marketing efforts, and by comparison to what it is now, it used to be simple. Do a bit of market research, make stuff, generate distribution, throw money at advertising, generate volume, make more stuff, advertise more….. a virtuous circle that if you had the deep pockets, was hard to stuff up. This no longer works.
Marketing and branding have become socialised. Consumer electronics is a category among many that has created new categories of products that are heavily influenced by reviews, and comment curation by users, which pushes the boundaries very quickly. Nokia was killed by missing the social phenomena of the smartphone. They had the mobile phone market by the shorts, had every opportunity to see the emerging technology, but failed to harness it along with the social cachet.
The other side of socialised branding, it can be a killer.
This trend is evident everywhere you look in consumer markets. I would contend that brand-building is no longer possible without social being a major factor in the mix. It is also true to observe, as Bob Hoffman continues to point out in his wonderful blog, that very few, if any, brands come to prominence without advertising, despite what the social media promoters would have you believe.
Building your marketing strategies with the reality of socialised marketing and branding being a major factor in the mix is just plain dumb.
May 11, 2014 | Branding, Change, Marketing, Social Media
Scott Galloway. L2 Thinktank.
Mitch Joel may have flogged his Twist Image agency to WPP, but hopefully he keeps on writing his blog and alerting us to terrific stuff like this presentation Winners and Losers in the Digital age, by Scott Galloway.
Read the post, watch the presentation, have a squizz at Galloways L2 site, and apply it to your business and situation.
May 6, 2014 | Change, Management, Marketing, retail, Small business
Courtesy High McLeod @ Gaping Void
Retail has changed, very quickly and in a fundamental way, but not for everyone.
Retailers, the blokes with the bricks and mortar still hold sway in most markets, but to varying degrees, and can continue to do so if they are as smart as they have been in the past.
Consumers no longer have to go down to the store to buy much of their stuff, their store increasingly is in the palm of their hand. That is fine for cameras, refrigerators, and perhaps baked beans in a can, but not so good for fresh produce, meat, fruit & veg, and dairy, categories that are driving the profitability of supermarket retailers.
If we know anything, we know new models will come to light.
In the past, producers needed retailers to break down their bulk product, whether it be jeans, baked beans or refrigerators, and sell to consumers, but now consumers can go direct. So, it is not just the retailers who face change, it is the producers.
Held to ransom for years by retail that in effect sold them retail real estate while selling to the consumers, suppliers have some leverage back, and a few of them are game enough to love it.
The question both needs to answer is how they can best meet the needs of the newly empowered by information, consumer, who does not really care who supplies them the product, it is just about the convenience, choice, delivery and price of a transaction.
Looked at from this perspective, the retailer has a role to play in the relationships consumers have with brands, and suppliers, but they must make their money from a different model, one that relies on the manner in which they “touch” the sales process, rather than being the one solely in charge.
Sales leads that come from social media and the web are still just as likely to generate a sale in a physical retailer as they are on the web, and given that web sales are still a small proportion of total sales, using the web should be a seen as an opportunity, a bonus, not a threat, as Tesco in Korea has demonstrated.
It is perhaps telling of the times that the ACCC is mounting a case against Coles for beating up on its suppliers to improve its earnings. Nothing new there, but Coles management has an obligation to maximise earnings for shareholders.
The horse has bolted.
SME’s in the Australian food supply chain are now a rare breed, killed off my the high $A, retailer housebrand strategies, the scale of multinational competition, and poor management. The two retailers seem to have realised that without local supply, their long term options are limited, and so seem to be softening their short term demands in recognition that the sustainability of the food production value chain is in their interests.
PS Earlier today, after the initial publication of this post, I became aware that Big Sister Foods had been put in the hands of the administrators. While Big Sister is an Aussie company, part of that small club of natives, it spent 20 years as a part of Reckitt & Coleman in the 70’s and 80’s. Sadly I am not surprised, as their current website is about the worst I have ever seen, perhaps indicative of the declining state of the business.
May 5, 2014 | Change, Communication, Social Media
The Atlantic has made the call, at least asked the question.
Is Twitter dying?
I have no idea, as I am not a real twitter fan, never have been, simply because I do not see the sustainable business model yet, although there is no doubt of the disruptive impact of twitter on traditional media.
The thought of spending more of my most valuable and finite resource, time, on a platform that can deliver numbers, and can deliver with work some semblance of a community has never grabbed me, as the opportunity cost just seemed too high.
Surviving on advertising in a world where advertising space is now close to infinite, and thus almost worthless unless you can employ a degree of targeting that requires a degree of engagement that usually only comes from an existing relationships seems fraught with the sorts of hooks snake-oil salesmen use to catch the unwary.
Perhaps I am just getting old.
What twitter has done, which has benefited all of us is to highlight the value of condensing a message into its core, distilling out all the verbal trappings we often add in that really add no value. In addition, there is no doubt that the immediacy of twitter has played a vital role in getting information out about nasty, momentous, and often funny things that happen. The first time this was evident to me was the London bombings, when news came out via twitter way before any formal network could work out what had happened, and since then, Twitter has been the newsbreaker on almost every occasion.
So, I do not think twitter is dying, just trying to grow up.
