Archives for category: Marketing
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Hindsight Schmindsight

November 30, 2015 //
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Hindsight is a wonderful thing, or so they say. What seemed so unfathomable before it happened is the blindingly obvious conclusion now that it’s happened. And don’t we just love it when people say ‘well I could have told you that would happen.’?

Here’s my take on this. When we look at what happened with the benefit of hindsight, we see a linear connection of causal events. It’s a straight line going backwards.

When we’re faced with what’s about to happen, it’s not linear. It’s multi-linear. It can go a number of ways, and it’s unclear which way will turn out best for us. Maybe all of them will, maybe some, maybe even none. The multiplicity of choices we face with every passing second is the constant. We’re lucky we have the freedom and the intelligence to make them.

We’ll always have hindsight, and sometimes we feel like we have insight and even a bit of foresight. But you can’t turn time back and give it another go. With every fresh project you have to keep moving forward. Consider the information, make your best decision, and go.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Warts and All

November 25, 2015 //
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No company is perfect. When you work for an organisation you know about – or tend to hear about – its issues, problems, flaws and so on. You know what it’s really like under the hood.

All organisations are plagued with a lack of resources necessary to do a perfect job, which is why the perfect job doesn’t exist. The more resources you hire, the more you need.

It’s easy for us to get consumed by the things that our product doesn’t do well, or at all. We know the full story in most cases. It’s us who have to deal with the internal horror shows, and patch things up behind the scenes.

I used to know a lady whose husband worked for an aircraft manufacturers. He wouldn’t fly on the planes his team had built. He had seen the compromises, the short cuts they had made.

It’s our perspective on the warts and all, after all, because we have to work on the warts. We don’t see the full picture. We don’t appreciate the checks and balances being performed in other parts of the business.

Our customers certainly don’t see the warts, until they buy and start to use the product. And even then they might not see them, because they may only use part of the product. No product is perfect, but if your product does all the key things well, then that’s what makes your product successful.

You see, warts and all ain’t so bad. Only from your perspective.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Too Much Safety is Bad for You

November 23, 2015 //
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I’m all for proceeding cautiously, in business or in life. Some of us are more circumspect than others. It’s question of degree.

Too much caution, however, too much safety is bad for you, and can kill you. You can only take so many precautions, otherwise you’re wracked by indecision, the opportunity is gone, and you’re too late.

How many times have our children – or we see children – spend an afternoon plucking up the courage to do something like dive or jump off something high, only to lose their bottle and spend the journey home lamenting the fact that they didn’t do it.

I was reminded of too much safety in a rather humorous way the other day. I arrived at the local pool to pick up my daughter and her friend from swimming and there was a young boy having the time of his life. He had found the pool’s stash of arm bands and had put 3 on each arm and 4 on each leg. He was a mini orange Michelin Man.

As as the pool attendant saw him waddling around on the pool side, however, she told him sternly that no arm bands were allowed on the legs, it was dangerous. I guess if you had them on your legs and not your arms they might tip you up, but the irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me.

Too much safety young man! A lesson for all of us, for all our lives.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Write What You Know

November 16, 2015 //
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Here’s a pretty obvious thought for you: write about what you know.

It’s the advice that would be novelists always receive, and in fact it applies to anyone in the creative space.

Once in a while you get insights from the really good writers into how this applies to them. I remember Ricky Gervais giving the perfect illustration of this from when he was a budding writer at school, and clearly it has served him well from that moment on.

I recently finished reading an early crime thriller by American author Michael Connelly. It was his first book featuring the detective Harry Bosch. The Bosch series is now at about 20-plus and growing. At the end of the book, Connelly explained how his eponymous character came about, and it was essentially the melding of 3 or 4 important influences on him when he was growing up. As simple as that.

It’s the same for business of course. Write about you know. Otherwise, you’ll be found out. If you don’t know, find out and get the facts, so you do know what you’re talking about.

I find that when I’m researching something that’s new to me, so that I can write compellingly about it, the more people I speak to the better, up to a point. It’s like a reverse onion. With every new person you talk to, you get a new layer, a fresh perspective, a different angle on what you thought you knew, until you have as full a picture as you’re going to get without the decreasing marginal returns of going to more people.

Then you can write, because you know.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language, Marketing, Strategy

Delegating to Busy People

November 11, 2015 //
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In the olden days, by which I mean in the last century when I was learning my managerial trade, the received wisdom amongst managers was that if you wanted to get something done, you gave it to the person who was the busiest.

The theory goes, I suppose, that the person with more on their plate who is better at getting things done will have more chance of completing the additional task. This assumes, of course, that busy is directly proportional to productive. It also sends a signal to the less able or less committed member of staff that by appearing to be doing less they will continue to see other people’s workload increase to a greater extent than theirs.

It is a short-term approach that has the medium-to-long term effect of alienating and burning out the very people who you want to keep in the business if at all possible. It also does not address the problem of the less able or less committed, who are clearly in need of more training, coaching, and dialogue to help them improve.

As someone who prides himself on getting things done, on executing a high volume of important projects, I can see both sides to the argument. But, as I argued earlier, it is a question of time, that most precious of commodities. Short-term gain, at the expense of long term benefit, is simply a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s not sustainable. It’s not good management either.

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Categories General, Marketing, Planning, Sales

In Praise of Arthur Ashe

November 6, 2015 //
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The late, great Arthur Ashe was by all accounts a legend, having overcome a heap of disadvantages to reach the peak of global tennis, only to succumb a couple of decades later to a demise as a result of the cruellest luck.

He is still a role model for many people, and as a native of Richmond, VA in the USA, where I spent a few great months in 2001, he is for me an important figurehead.

He is famous for many things, not least of which are a few quotations which I think apply to work as well as they do to sport. Here are two of my favourites:

“You are never really playing an opponent. You are playing yourself, and when you reach your limits, that is real joy.”

This for me is especially true in the cut and thrust of competitive business. If we can do the best we can for our company, and not worry too much about what the competition are doing, then we can do no more. This, of course, is linked to how well we execute.

“The ideal attitude is to be physically loose and mentally tight.”

Have there ever been better words of advice for how to conduct yourself in an organisation?

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

Feeding Back on New Software

November 4, 2015 //
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When you download a new operating system, or a major upgrade to software, or even a minor update, do you ever participate in feedback? Do you ever send the coding report back to the software originators when one of your applications crashes?

Who has time to do this?

Software gets released. It has bugs in it. You, as a software originator, can’t legislate for every combination of systems and applications running together with your code on every piece of hardware. You’d be testing until Domesday.

So you either upgrade early and put up with the glitches, going onto Google to search a problem and download a patch. Or, you wait a while until the major problems have been patched and you take the release late, or a skip it and take a later point release. You’ve relied on a bunch of people who’ve had the time and inclination to contribute their feedback to make a new piece of software better for everyone.

But who has the time to do this?

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing

All or Nothing

November 2, 2015 //
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If you’re going to do something, you have to give it 100% or your investment won’t get the benefit you hope for.

Sport is a good example of this in many ways. If you’re going to tackle someone, commit to the tackle otherwise you’ll end up not committing and getting yourself hurt.

Compromising, hedging your bets, trying it and seeing what happens. These are really ways of avoiding a decision. They are succumbing to the fear, uncertainty and dread, rather than making the effort, doing the homework and studying the research. And then committing.

I was reminded of this recently while on holiday. There was a ‘bouncy island’ as a guest attraction in the hotel pool. Think of a bouncy castle, but with bouncy palm trees and bouncy treasure chests. The kids and some of the parents were getting stuck in, pushing each other off the island into the pool and generally having great fun. I was happy to read and enjoy it as a spectator sport.

Finally, after about 2 hours of being encouraged to join in, I gave it a try. After about 60 seconds of being Mr Nice Guy, a child – with sharp nails, it transpired – got pushed into me in the kerfuffle and scratched off the top of my nose.

My own fault. I was patched up and got stuck in after that. It was great fun.

One footnote to add: there’s always an exception to every blog post rule. One of the dads decided it would be great fun to dive off the top of the slide at the end of the island, rather than sliding down the slide – which is why, he now realises, it’s called a slide – and cracked his head open on the floor of the shallower-than-thought pool. Off to hospital he went for 5 stitches, but it could have been a lot worse.

The commitment was there, but not the planning.

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Categories Communication, General, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Making the Departure the Destination

September 30, 2015 //
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The other day I was celebrating a long weekend with my good lady, and we were in the process of using up our last day before an evening departure from the airport to get back home. We went to a cinema to see a film before driving back to the airport, filling up the hire car with fuel, returning it, and getting our flight home.

I realised after buying the tickets that the film was long, half an hour longer than I had planned. We had an hour’s journey back to the airport, in no traffic at normal speeds, except that this was going to be rush hour, in the driving rain, and on the London orbital motorway which is a complete lottery most times of the day. I like to check in for flights in good time. My wife likes to leave things to the last minute, I don’t know why. Hence the ensuing conflict. We got a refund for our tickets and got to the airport with loads of time to spare and no inclination to spend it in airy conversation.

For the record, I don’t think we would have made the flight if we’d stayed for the film. We might have, but it would have been an unpleasant journey for the guts of 2 hours. If we’d missed the flight, our kids would have had to stay another night with different families, and we would have had to take a hotel room and new flights for the following day, which were working days for us both.

Anyway, this is a recurrent marital theme that I don’t mean to bore you with, but out of this conflict emerged the following thought: why don’t airports make themselves a destination even when they’re a departure? Why don’t they market that we make a day of our departure? Why recommend we get there 2 hours before a flight when we could get their 6 hours before, take in a movie at the airport, or some bowling, or a water park, safe in the knowledge we’re already there, the car is jettisoned, the bags are checked, and we can have the holiday experience?

It’s OK to have a few shops at an airport, but surely a cinema or two or a gym wouldn’t hurt.

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Categories Customers, Marketing

My Kind of Banner Ad

September 23, 2015 //
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Screen Shot 2015-08-14 at 08.24.46As a consumer, I’m bombarded by advertising, both targeted or 1:1 and mass or ‘above the line’.

As a marketer, I pay attention to advertising and imagine that I’m subconsciously judging it as well as responding to it as a consumer. You know the metrics; I’m no different and 98% or so of them pass me by for a variety of reasons, some good, some bad.

These days, we’re all conditioned to understand that when an ad for a site we recently visited is presented to us online, this is simply retargeting. Those of us who use webmail are also subjected to a barrage of ads, which is only fair – in my view – for a free app or service.

I use hotmail, amongst others, and see a ton of skyscraper ads to the right of my inbox and emails. I notice them all, but act on almost none.

I do, however, like the one here, that was presented to me a couple of weeks ago. I’m not really in the target demographic, so it won’t have been a retargeting effort, but I liked it all the same. I’ll tell you why:

  •  Squeeze the Day is a fab line! It’s a call to action in its own right, a play on the famous carpe diem phrase, but most importantly it reinforces one of the brand’s key differentiators, namely that kids squeeze the packs to get all the drink out
  • It suggests action, energy, getting important things off your bucket list – and satisfaction, either thirst-quenching or completing something worth doing
  • It’s visually arresting, fun and it’s clear what they’re asking you to do

All in all then, in the opinion of this writer it ticks all the boxes. All the boxes except one – the only critical one – which is whether or not it’s received a successful number of click throughs. That I don’t know.

 

 

 

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing
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