The cigarette brand Windsor Blue is modernising their packaging. They’re “now the number one choice for above king size length adult smokers downtrading into the economy priced cigarette sector. The new pack design will build on this success,” says Rachel Smith, brand manager.
Compare this to the comments Seth had for Madecasse chocolate and their packaging of ethical African chocolate.
Both products demand a growth in sales to justify the cost of the design and reprinting. Given that cigarette and chocolate sales have proven buoyant in times of recession, which design gig would you rather boot up Photoshop for?
At first look ethical farming versus death is a no-brainer. Yet perversely, imagine how seriously you’d take the flair of the girl who lifted Windsor’s sales by another 15 points thanks to a redesign.
At their best, blogs offer insight and intelligence, none moreso than Seth Godin’s daily brain dumps. Seth goes futher than most in that he often throws out free business ideas and free ebooks.
I’ve not had a chance to digest all of his latest offering but it looks similar to his usual fare: short, digestable, direct and thought provoking. Even better is the fact he got 70 odd important people to contribute “important ideas… including Tom Peters, Jackie Huba and Jason Fried…”
The preeminent Seth Godin commented on a Charles Blow report in the NY Times, pointing out that the internet’s low barrier of entry had led to the markets flooding. He said, “If you can’t sell to 1 in 1000, why market to a million?”
The numbers from Blow’s piece were, “…of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.”
This tells us the long tail of the Web makes Pareto’s 80-20 principle defunct. (Perhaps poor salespeople might stop overly quoting it?) The Amazons and the Play.coms of the world are now playing to different laws.
Wouldn’t you just love to get your hands on their analytics to see it with your own eyes?
Photo: Chris Anderson (from Wikipedia), who coined the phrase Long Tail in his Wired magazine article October 2004
Seth Godin is giving his only UK talk on Tuesday. Yep, yours truly has booked a day off and got a ticket to the Big Smoke to see my man Seth.
He’s not a ground-breaking intellectual – academia would never cite him like they do Philip Kotler et al (and we wouldn’t read him either). But he’s superb at taking ideas and formatting them into cohesive thoughts that spread via his stories. He is a visionary and he’s dialled into leveraging the web 100%.
He’s most captivating because his ideas are top-notch and he shares absolutely loads of them. This, coupled with his style and honesty, make him unmissable.
My wife thinks I’ll meet him in the corridor. She also reckons I’ll dribble and soil myself at the mere presence of a [my] marketing god. Let’s hope she’s 50% right.
The main man, Tom Peters points us to the FT for a reading assignment with “wall-to-wall great material about the financial markets madness”.
All very well and apt, but get over to my even-more-main-man, Seth Godin for a quick fix of inspiration. As ever he’s got an upbeat take on things for the entrepreneur.
[Don’t you think that if Obama had put Godin on the ticket as VP, McCain wouldn’t stand a chance? Or should it be Godin for President?]
Collective wisdom has it that SMEs don’t plan. If they do it’s likely to be more back-of-the-napkin stuff; or perhaps it’s all kept in the grey matter. Even then it’s unlikely that the boss will actually have told anybody and ‘created a vision’.
But large companies often don’t either. Some have large teams dedicated to planning and you’ve got to ask how accurate they’ve been at forecasting their future (think RBS losses for example). Studying for my MBA in 2004 we looked at the over-50s business, Saga, whose pre-tax profits where £48 million at the time. I was certainly surprised that they claimed not to possess a ten, five, three or even a one year plan.
Although a 15,000-word document may have not existed, a vision for their future and a strong company ethos certainly did. Backed by private equity firm Charterhouse, a MBO buyout from the founding de Haan family valued at £1.35 billion went through soon afterward.
Of course, there’s a contradiction to this. It would be easy for start-ups to fall into planning paralysis, stuck in the drawing of a plan and never actually launching into work. Some banks – even seed investors – may initiate the problem and there will be plenty of ‘experts’ who’ll ask for the Business Plan in a low and officious voice. Something is needed then, but what?
As ever, [His Highness] Seth Godin says it more succinctly than anyone:
…do your best to pick a direction (hopefully an unusual one, hopefully one you have resources to complete, hopefully one you can do authentically and hopefully one you enjoy) and then do it. Loudly. With patience and passion. (Loud doesn’t mean boorish. Loud means proud and joyful and with confidence.)
No flitting, no waiting for proof. Just consistent, overwhelming performance in pursuit of a vision you believe in. That’s far more important than which direction you chose in the first place…
Heading off aimlessly on your own (even with your 800 employees) is like building a skyscraper without the architect’s drawings – destined to fail. Pick that direction and tell your stakeholders, every one of them. Tune your message as clear as words allow. Repeat your ‘clear’ message often. Tell them again in a month, and again in another. Clear and often. And so on.
The preeminent Seth Godin 
Obama was thought to be too busy, so they sent the next best thing.
