Archives for the month of: March, 2017
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Semi State Stuffiness

March 31, 2017 //
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Try as it might, the public sector struggles to shrug off that kind of stuffiness, that misplaced and outmoded sense of entitlement and dogma that pervades the administration of the local and national body politic.

Even those sections of the public sector, the NGOs and the semi states as they call them in Ireland, which are more enterprise- and business-oriented than the others, stand out for the wrong reasons. Despite their remit to be business- and entrepreneur-focused, they’re still tied to their bureaucracy and exude a sort of semi state stuffiness that masquerades as public accountability but which is really a difficulty with change.

Take emails for instance. Trivial and everyday though they are, emails have replaced much of our daily communications and interactions and so they’re critically important for establishing rapport and sending the right messages – literally or figuratively – and picking up on the right cues.

The vast majority of emails come into your inbox from ‘first name’ or first name second name’, because that’s who they are and that’s the way the IT admin or the people themselves have set them up. Yet I frequently get emails from public sector bodies and people in the format ‘Second name comma first name.’

What kind of a name is Smith, John? Its nobody’s name. I doubt John Smith has ever been referred to as Smith, John, except in his public sector work email.

That’s the way it was set up, and that’s the way it comes across. Formal, bureaucratic, out of date, stuffy. It sends out the wrong signals.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

A Day Off

March 29, 2017 //
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I took a day off the other day. What I would describe as a proper day off. It wasn’t a holiday, and I wasn’t going on holiday. It wasn’t a weekend. I simply didn’t work that day.

I had a bunch of fiddly things to get done, and some errands to run. The kinds of things that I would normally try to wedge into the cracks of a normal working day. Stolen minutes at lunchtime or on a break, going a at breakneck speed to check a couple of pesky items off the list.

What a joyful day it was. I had forgotten what it was like to enjoy your spare time. Ambling around like I had all the time in the world to get my stuff done. No more cursing my bad luck at the traffic or at other people conspiring to to delay me in my rush to get from A to B.

I’ve always been a bit precious about taking the odd day off. This is probably a throw-back to my time as an employee when I had a finite amount of holidays to take and I didn’t want to waste any on needless frippery.

But there’s something to be said for simply taking a day off to slip into the slower part of the stream for a while, to enjoy the journey, rather than the destination.

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Categories General

Check!

March 27, 2017 //
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Check! That’s the one thing I advise you to make part of your life and work DNA, if at all possible.

In this crazy busy, speed-of-now world in which we inhabit, many of us are publishing things the moment we’ve created them. we’re getting things out the door almost as fast as they’re coming into us. In this chaotic, hectic environment it’s easy to forget about the detail.

But consider all the possible instances in your work and home lives when attention to the small things matter:

  • That typo you asked the designer to change in the final proof before you go to print
  • That email someone offered to draft for you to go out to your customer
  • The final touches to the room your painter-decorator promised to do
  • The locking wheel-nut your mechanics said they would put back under the spare tyre in the boot of your car
  • The read-through of your blog post to check for mistakes, before someone else finds them
  • Any work you’re paying for

You’re not micro-managing people when you do this. You’re professionally closing the loop on something you’ve asked to be done, or something you’re doing yourself. No sense in messing up the landing when you’ve flown all this way.

Always check if you can. A second spent now will save you minutes or even hours and money later.

Check!

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Categories Customers

Work Back

March 24, 2017 //
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You’re busy. Super busy. We get that, we all are, or most of us anyway. You work in a business large enough where there are teams, cross-department projects, interdependencies, contingencies, the usual array of complex, human interactions.

You have a full plate of things to do, stuff is coming at coming at you from all sides, and is continuing to do so. Some of it can’t be both urgent and important. You simply can’t get to it all, can you?

Although it’s tempting to put the blinkers on and focus on one thing at a time, you can’t let people down and you can’t leave everything until the last minute, or it won’t get done. So what do you do?

2 things. First, you need to quickly triage every project in which you have a part to play, or where you need something to happen, or where people are relying on you for something. Second, you need to work back.

Yes, work back. Think about the end point, then figure out how long it’s going to take to get to the end point, then work back and figure out when you need to start something, or ask someone to start something. It’s no use putting off the creation of an important piece of collateral for an event until 2 days before the event. It probably takes a week to produce this kind of thing, so delegate it out and brief somebody now, so that they’ve the time to get it done for you. Failing to work back means that you have to ask someone to do the impossible, to pull something out of the fire for you because you didn’t triage – or quick plan – properly.

Get into the knack of working back. It will help you go forward.

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Categories Communication, General, Planning

Frostbite

March 22, 2017 //
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On a Monday evening, if I’m in my hometown, I like to play some 5-a-side footie with my fellow middle-aged men, sans lycra of course.

Recently, I went out for a game. I had a sore calf – again – so I didn’t want to let the lads down and decided I’d play in goal. It was unseasonably cold, snowing and sleeting in fact, and I had a very thin, porous set of gloves on. They got wet very early on, and so did my hands.

An hour later, the pain was unrelenting. I can’t remember having colder hands. So much so that I went grey and felt nauseous. I made it home, but my fingers were so cold they felt solid. I had to gradually warm them up, in agony, for about half an hour before I realised I was, in fact, not going to have a heart attack, stroke, or die.

I probably wasn’t that close to having frostbite, and my fingers were 90% fine the next day. I can’t begin to imagine, however, what it must be like to be genuinely very cold indeed for a long period of time. I think the body and organs must shut down and you must literally want to crawl into a ball and die.

I also know now why scaling Everest or Arctic trekking isn’t on my bucket list. Sawing off frost-bitten fingers is not on my top-1000 list of things I’d like to do.

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Categories General

Selling Ciggies

March 20, 2017 //
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I don’t know too much about business-to-consumer products sales and marketing, except as a lifelong consumer of them myself. I’ve also never smoked. I took a look at a cigarette box the other day, as I hadn’t seen one up close for a while.

It’s an odd existence marketing and selling cigarettes isn’t it? Even if you smoke them yourself. Working for a cigarette manufacturer must  feel like being a social pariah.

The packaging on fast-moving consumer goods is one of the traditional 4 P’s of marketing, along with product, price and promotion. Yet when you look at cigarette packaging, everything on there is advising you not to buy it. The cigarettes are also behind the shop counter hidden in a cupboard where you can’t even peruse the packaging.

You can’t advertise them through most media, thanks to the regulations of elected government officials, a good proportion of whom must be smokers too. If you work for a cigarette manufacturer you can’t get life insurance benefits or an occupational pension, so the manufacturer has to provide its own.

It’s flippin’ expensive too, at least if you pay your country’s duty on them.

Against all of this, people still buy a lot of cigarettes. Why is that? For one thing, cigarette smoking is still portrayed as being cool in TV and film, almost something to be aspired to.

Front and centre, of course, is the obvious physiological pull of the nicotine, as well as the behavioural comfort that comes with smoking too.

Without those addictive and behavioural factors, I wonder how successfully other things would sell if this amount of sales and marketing restraints were placed on it.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Fake News

March 17, 2017 //
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Fake news has to be the word – or words, if you’re pedantic – of 2017 so far. You have your ‘proper’ news, and then you have your fake news. It’s either true, or fake, isn’t it?

Well, not really. News is really the current form of history. And history is not the truth, it’s simply someone’s account of what happened. A lot of that depends on your perspective. After all, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, right?

News is not black or white, true or fake. There are degrees of it, all the shades in between black and white. It’s one account over another. Or, in today’s world, it’s one person’s edit over another’s. Even in real-time streaming or television it’s one person’s camera angle over another, what they choose to frame in the shot, rather than what another does. Even if you’re in the thick of news or history being made, your view on what’s happening depends on where you are, and your perspective, both literal and otherwise.

The key thing here is that if there are enough people – or people with power – promulgating a certain view of the news, then it becomes harder to analyse fairly, examine and resist that view. That in itself is a very solid form of control that has served governments well since the invention of, well, governments.

 

 

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Categories General, Marketing

Why The Corner Shop Will Never Die

March 15, 2017 //
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We’ve all heard the horror stories and domesday predictions about the death of the High Street, as shoppers move out of town to the malls, or into their homes to their computer, or right where they are via their mobile phones, tablets, phablets and any other form factor you can imagine. Except that is, the move away from the quaint corner shop.

In Europe we still have corner shops, loads of them.

The corner shop I’m thinking of is in the small town I live in (a village by England standards). It’s not quite on the corner, but it’s next to 2 public houses, as you would expect in Ireland. It’s a health food shop. Ironic, given its location, but there you are.

Now if we’re in the very big city we can go onto a colossal online marketplace and get the thing we need delivered within an hour, for a premium, or the next day for probably next-to-nothing extra. But most of us aren’t in the very big city.

My wife asked me to pick up something for her during my lunch break the other day, since I was doing a couple of other errands. She was in a city and the vast supermarket she visited didn’t have said item. I went into the health food store and asked for the item. It has quite a long title to it, but even before I’d finished articulating its name the lady had pulled it from the shelf next to her till and it was ready for purchase. I was out in 120 seconds, the amount of time it takes to properly pour a pint of the black stuff.

This why the corner shop will never die. They are often specialist providers. You can always find staff to ask something. They can give you a knowledgeable and immediate answer the vast majority of the time. They usually smile and are grateful for your business. And, you are done in a matter of minutes.

In certain circumstances, then, the corner shop is alive and well and still a great retail experience.

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Categories Customers, Sales, Strategy

The Seller’s Cooling Off Notice

March 13, 2017 //
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To protect the buyer, and give them a little more comfort behind the fairly toothless ‘caveat emptor’, it’s customary for the buyer to have a cooling off notice, or period, usually of 14 days.

Common in industries like financial services, it’s the 2 weeks’ grace during which we can consider our purchase, read the small print if we’re interested, and duck out of the contract if we felt unduly pressured into the sale.

The other day I was negotiating new mobile telephony contracts for my wife and I. This involved us upgrading both our package and our devices. I wanted to insure our swanky new devices – well, they are new devices and new to us, but not the latest models, as we’re perfectly happy being a release or 2 behind the bleeding edge – and was surprised to know that even though the start date of the insurance was day 1, I wasn’t covered and so wouldn’t be able to make any claim until day 15.

This is effectively the seller’s cooling off notice. It was also a major inconvenience to me as I was about to go on an international trip and didn’t want to make it, uninsured, with my new phone. I left the new phone at home.

The seller’s cooling off notice is the caveat vendor to our caveat emptor, but with more teeth I think.

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Categories Customers, Sales

Other People’s Money

March 10, 2017 //
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Return on investment is the corner stone of business. We have a number of competing projects to invest in. We can’t invest in them all, so we have to select the best ones for our circumstances and objectives. We measure success by the money we get back for the money we’ve spent.

So what better return on investment is there when your outlay is zero? Yes, I’m talking about getting value and return from other people’s money, or OPM. Not your partners’ cash, your competitors’.

For example, companies often sponsor projects like events, white papers or other publications. If you’ve carved a reputation for yourself as a thought leader in your field, or even someone whose opinion would be interesting, then there’s an opportunity for you to get a platform for your message in something that someone else has paid for.

You don’t need to prevail on your competitor for air time. Often, the event or the publication is organised by a third party, like a journalist, many of whom respond to the argument that a greater breadth of views and opinions makes for more balanced output.

Leveraging other people’s money, legitimately, is always better than leveraging your own.

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Categories Marketing
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