by nick on October 31, 2008
There’s a lovely corner shop in my village. It’s completely typical, run by an Indian family where nana holds the night shift ‘till 10pm. It’s an extremely well run family business where the profits have gone back into structural renovations. You couldn’t buy a pack of mints from a more spotless mini supermarket.
But Tesco has spotted the success and is planting an Express at the other end of the village to open before Christmas. Tesco’s area and local managers will have set a pact to obliterate the incumbent. Our local staple for over a decade is now an impala in front of the cheetah.
Suddenly papers and magazines are being sold at this corner shop (much to the dismay of the paper shop, whose days really are numbered now), the already immaculate store is getting a winter revamp, and the long opening hours just got longer. They’re fighting and bravo to them.
What would you do if a whale – a metaphorical Orca in Tesco’s case – opened close enough to your business (on or offline) for you to smell their breath? Remember, if it all comes down to price, the whale wins.
Better yet, why aren’t we all treating each week as if it was our last whale-free week and fighting that hard? Why isn’t that par for effort?
by nick on October 18, 2008
I recently attended the Chartered Institute of Marketing event, ‘Communication for profitable customer relationships.’ I wasn’t going to post about it, but the best speaker of the day (Dr Neil Hair) blogged about it and I wanted to join him.
The day’s speakers were good, although Prof. Ballantyne from New Zealand was probably too academic for the business audience that (I felt) were looking for pointers, advice and ideas. But you kind of get the feeling that organisers of this ilk are pleased simply with bums on seats, not the strength of the message (i.e. the product). As the registration fills, you can almost feel the sense of relief as it becomes more about the number of paid attendees, than it does about the transfer of thoughts – surely the aim of the day.
The day was filled with references to Web 2.0, but it smacked of double standards: there wasn’t a video camera in sight. Where is the ‘sharable’ content following the event: speakers’ slides and notes, videos, discussion boards/walls, wikis, blog posts with comments? The exclusive network opportunity? Where is the follow up on a full room of highly interested (we’d paid to attend) business people? For an organisation that sells education, what does the CIM recommend for the attendees in line with what they heard on the day?
The idiots’ guide to marketing starts with ‘where’s the call to action’ so I stop myself anytime I’m about to say that, but the CIM really needs it said to itself. Personally, I’d have at least put a video running in the breaks, touting my wares with half a dozen CIM faces helping delegates ‘buy in’ to the institute and its offerings.
It all adds to my confusion with this organisation. They have a goliath website, but I cannot discover anything worth investigating amongst the plethora of PDFs (and yes, I have had paid access). Compare that to the content at the Marketing Profs site (or the more obvious FT and BBC business) where you could easily lose a day, or even a week, swimming in first-rate discovery and intellect.
Bang goes my chances of a Branch Chair offer now but I’ll say it again, TED is where the bar is for this type of event and the CIM should be striving toward them.
by nick on October 8, 2008
Heard anyone talking (bragging?) lately that her industry is recession resistant? It seems the DVD business is just that according to DreamWorks CEO, Jeffrey Katzenberg. Chocolate and cycling are seeing the same anecdotal sentiment as the crunching of credit gets ever louder.
But, just like the man, no business is an island. It needs a bank to handle transactions (and probably allow an overdraft); solicitors and accountants; suppliers who need their own supply chain; manufacturers who perhaps use global resources. And interest rates, inflation and oil prices will affect it and its staff universally.
It strikes me that regardless of your product, no company could possibly be wholly ‘resistant’ to the current trouble. Surely it becomes a case of how you handle the external pressures.
Yet again, Tesco appear to be teaching the high street that lesson.
by nick on October 3, 2008
The Royal Mint said last week that one in 50 pound coins you come across could be fake. This really hit home that bogus goods are seeping into everyday consumerism.
Earlier this year Channel 4’s Dispatches programme reported that companies are losing a fortune in revenue and brand credibility to counterfeiters. Much of the goods were imported, getting past the under-resourced customs agents. Some cases can be potentially lethal with the increased exposure of counterfeit drugs (I’m not thinking Viagra).
An Adidas fraud officer was filmed as he discovered luminous Chelsea football jerseys in an Asian street market two weeks before the shirt had been launched in London. Fake chicken eggs (yes, with yellow yokes) are apparently going down a storm in certain parts of China too poor to rear chickens – they actually manufactured one for the cameras. Product from Colgate to Channel was shown to be within the fraudsters’ varied capability.
The crux of the Dispatches’ argument was that if you employ developing countries to manufacture for you, then you can expect those countries to be imitating you as well. Especially if you leave and set up [a cheaper] shop elsewhere – highly likely as cost was the motivator that took you there in the first place.
Imitation is said to be the largest form of flattery but I doubt the Mint or Versace et al would agree here.
by nick on September 2, 2008
Is it me, or did an inordinate amount of the tech news from both sides of the pond seem to be about advertising last month? Not really surprising considering online is about the only area of advertising that’s going to grow this year. Here’s what I think are the more notable ones:
- The ever-innovative TiVo have paired up with Amazon to allow viewers to buy products they see in shows or adverts. This is new indeed and is pro-advertiser as opposed to TiVo’s previous innovation which allowed you to record programmes without the ads.
Evan Young their director of broadband services, said, “For example, if a guest on the Daily Show or Oprah has a new book, CD, or DVD out, you can purchase it on Amazon.com using your TiVo remote without missing a second of TV, whether the viewer is watching live or recorded.”
- ITV has been bigging up its ITV.com audience numbers but sales head, Rupert Howell, had some refreshing words about online cannibalising offline ads. “The growth of the internet as an advertising medium is taking business away from direct marketing, classified and local and regional press but doesn’t appear to be taking away from television. What matters is that we outgrow the growth in internet advertising – in the first half of this year, the internet grew as an advertising medium by 24% and we grew at 43%.”
- Google’s acquisition of Double click appears to have changed their mind on invasive cookies and privacy (DoubleClick plants cookies on users’ computers who see the ads it serves). Advertisers will be cock-a-hoop as they can limit the number of times a single user sees their ads and see how many different people have seen it. They can also track how many people saw an ad and then visited their website.
But what of internet users? Google promises a better experience, because “they will no longer see the same ad over and over again.” The message: cookies are good for you. Better get used to it.
- YouTube is now showing ads plus video, much to the dismay of the NY Times. But if you’d bought the company for $1.65 billion (as Google did) could you persuade the board not to sell, sell, sell?
- Yahoo! has pre-announced a new opt-out so that users of Yahoo services can request not to be on the receiving end of targeted advertising. Though it looks like they will still plant cookies and collect data, even if it doesn’t use the information for behavioural targeting purposes.
- Video search index Blinkx attempting to buy MIVA, the pay-per-click ad network. Blinkx reckons the acquisition would allow it to more quickly roll out the technologies it’s developed over the last year – like its own video advertising proposition, AdHoc.
It seems the eye(ball)s have it – yours, via your monitor. There are plenty out there spending big money to get to them.
by nick on August 16, 2008
Every person in your organisation who has contact – direct or otherwise – with your customers is a marketer. Fact. The guy who served me popcorn in the cinema on the weekend is a marketer. He could’ve asked cheerily ‘What movie are you guys heading to?’ but he didn’t. Instead he decided to make his interaction a negative affair, grunting at me to ‘go large’ while his miserable face looked more akin to a concentration camp rather than a by-product of a great work environment.
The waitress who takes your order is also a marketer. So is the UPS driver who delivers your parcels. And yes, you can bet your backside that your sales staff, who largely think marketing is a whole separate department, are marketing all day. And when they do, your glossy literature and slick copy writing is out of the equation; Joe Public is having an honest human interaction, not obediently absorbing a slick 30-second ad.
I guess my question is: does that honest interaction match your brand and all the investment you’ve put into building it?
by nick on August 9, 2008
F1 fans will know the popular mantra well-used across the sport, ‘If you’re not going forwards, you’re actually going backwards.’ It speaks volumes for everyone’s permanent devotion to improving through innovation (and invention of course). You see, over the course of a season teams will gain a handful of seconds per lap. Therefore, if you’re lapping at 1 minute 26 seconds and coming first on day one of the season, it wont be long before the guys running at 1 minute 27, 28 or 29 catch and then over take you. Improvement is a must. Every day.
Surely the metaphor is just as appropriate in your market as it is in Bernie Ecclestone’s? Yes you’ve done well and that industry recognition was deserved but now you’ve taught others what success looks like. You’ve actually made their job a little easier by blazing that trail, by launching that product, by being number one. They’ve had a chance to calibrate their effort, probably finding more finance, stronger personnel and creating a better infrastructure. This (on right) is Mozilla’s Songbird music application. Look familiar? I hope you pushed on when it was good.
Chris Bangle, BMW’s much-maligned chief designer provides me with a worthy example. He hasn’t just sharpened his CAD pencil, he’s completely rewritten his (and everyone else’s) designs. Don’t use wasteful metal, give it skin. Don’t have one style, employ a morphing one. George Lucas couldn’t do much better. Improve every day or get left behind.
As ever: simple, yet very difficult…
by nick on August 6, 2008
Selling is as often as much about the lack of negatives as it is about the number of positives beholden to your features and benefits. That restaurant you ate in last month may have had clean cutlery and smartly dressed staff but you didn’t think better of them for it, did you? That’s because you expected it. The fact that they’re clean goes unnoticed. It’s when they’re not that such things come to your attention and you rate them negatively, perhaps walking away.
A tarmac road doesn’t score brownie points because it’s smooth
, but it quickly loses them if it’s riddled with potholes. It’s a matter of hygiene and as HR managers will tell you, you cant score points from hygiene factors – you can only maintain or lose them.
Therefore, your sales presentation (political races are the classic example) is about degrees of losing: he who loses less, wins.
My economics’ lecturer once told me that if I ever got the chance of a job with strategy in the title to open my arms wide and grab it. We’ve all read and agreed with Michael Porter’s assessment that there are just two generic strategies to choose in business, (a) be cheaper than your competitor, or (b) be different from them. As true as that remains, it’s obviously over-simplistic.
I recently suggested the sportsman’s strategy to someone looking to improve his online ecommerce business. I heard Egg’s founder, Mike Harris, talk about this and its obvious truth still strikes me today. You start at the end. Create your goal and work backwards from there. Sir Clive Woodward’s goal was simple: fly to the 2003 Rugby World Cup seeded #1 and take victory after 80 minutes in the final.
Let’s imagine for a minute that you’re a 100m sprinter who wants to win in the 2012 Olympics. What do you need to be doing, thinking and feeling as the gun goes off in the final? Think about that answer for a second. Now, what about 10 minutes before the start? What about a day before? A week, a month, and six months before? Now that you know that, what do you need to be doing this week, next month and in December? It’s all about gradual improvement toward a peak in performance for that final.
What’s your company’s three, five or 10 year goal and what needs to be happening in August 2011 for that to be achieved? Are you on a path of continual improvement right now?
Suddenly strategy doesn’t strike me as being so easy any longer.
There’s a lovely corner shop in my village. It’s completely typical, run by an Indian family where nana holds the night shift ‘till 10pm. It’s an extremely well run family business where the profits have gone back into structural renovations. You couldn’t buy a pack of mints from a more spotless mini supermarket.
