Success in business has always been a case of survival of the fittest, fastest, and strongest…and never has this been more true than in today’s evolutionary market.
However, we are observing a concerning trend in solution driven strategy. This is resulting in the creation of, for example, an application or a Facebook campaign as a false substitute for a communications strategy. Or alternatively, a purchase of new technology as a feasible business strategy. These are a few of many examples – you probably know several too!
In reality, what matters today is what has always mattered. Factors such as, the attitude you have to business and risk taking, the corporate culture you foster amongst your team, department and organisation, the way you communicate with citizens, who you work with and what you value.
We discuss this a lot amongst ourselves (and with our clients at this fluid world), and we regularly observe these challenges. However, we rarely see the realisation, let alone the action in these areas, which would ensure a healthy prosperous future for an organisation.
We felt it valuable to create a white paper which contains ten do’s and don’ts that could act as a survival guide in today’s business and communications world.
Our hope is that this document will inspire people to get the basics right, because it’s only upon these foundations that excellent business can be created and nurtured.
I love when I meet an advertising or media person who answers the question “What’s the purpose of your job” with “Flog products”. We all know that that is the end goal – but most people in our industry tend to have a more philosophical answer involving hearts and minds…
But since I had dinner with Tim Forrest, Head of Communications Planning at OMDUK, I have changed my mind about the ‘flogging theory’.
Let me explain.
If the end goal of traditional comms is to get people to purchase something, then the point of media planning is also to get a bunch of people to buy stuff. The impact of the communications used to achieve this is measured through impressions. More sophisticated studies establish effect of advocacy, where buy = potential recommendation (Net Promoter Score).
Tim however made a very interesting observation over dinner “We should not plan for people to buy, but for people to sell”.
“It’s pure mathematics. The sum total of the impact of media the way it’s planned today can never be one sale, it will always be less than 1 because everyone you reach won’t end up buying your product. This means we are essentially planning for less than 1.
What planning should focus on is getting people to become advocates. In this paradigm we would no longer plan to get people to buy, we would plan to get people to sell! The starting point would be 1 since an advocate has in principle already bought your product. We would now be planning for greater than 1 (the advocate plus everyone he convinces to buy)”.
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Don’t get me wrong, I have always bought into the idea of loyalty (and therefore advocacy), so this is not what this post is about. What it’s about is if we accept that the goal is to create a sales force through advocates then we need to change:
1. the language we use in comms and offer the right tools
2. what we measure
3. our understanding of risk
1. Language and tools
Ask yourself what you would do to get people to buy your product.
You could decrease price, offer bogoffs, negotiate shelf space etc. You could also use marcomms, such as TV ads, to convey product benefits (if you use this cream you will look like Claudia Schiffer).
Now ask yourself what you would do to get people to sell your product through personal recommendation.
Think about it, the activities, the creative and language would have to be different… When was the last time someone recommended a product to you using the words “it will make you look like Claudia Schiffer”, or “it will bring you to an Alpine forest”?
In this reality you need to, as a marketer, arm people with the necessary language and tools to sell your product (not give them reasons to buy it).
2. Measurement
There would no longer be any point in measuring impression. What would need to be measured is how effective your advocates are at selling your product, basically how many sales you get from each advocate. The answer could be 5, 100, 1000, it could be infinite, and this is the point – no more planning around ‘less than 1’.
Sidebar. Jonathan MacDonald, my business partner in this fluid world, is the father of an interesting concept ‘Advocurrency’, what links those who advocate with the value of a purchase that has directly resulted from that advocacy. (check it out in the following brilliant blog post Involvism – Method 2: Conversion).
3. Risk
In this paradigm risk changes too.
Buying = limited risk
Personal recommendation = great risk
This means that transparency and quality would become much more important than it has ever been before!
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I totally believe in Tim’s idea of media planning where we aim to get people to sell. If this would become a client requirement (appear in briefs) our job would be about “getting people to flog our products”. This means we would have to offer them the language, framework, tools, and channels to do so. It would also require that we do everything in our power to reduce the risk involved in recommending our products (from quality, to service to how we run our organisations)!
We are all well aware of the importance of advocates and of the power of influencers, we know that marketers do their best to get them on board in the hope that they will promote their products, and that encouraging WOM is already being used as a sales tool.
This is however not how briefs are written today, and therefore not how media planning and buying is done, nor is creative work produced based on this principle.
It’s a shame as I can’t think of a better way to recruit what I think would be a second to none sales force.
Social media being such a hot topic it would be irresponsible of me not to tell you about my business partner Jonathan MacDonald’s recent experience with the power of social media!
In this post I’m particularly interested in sharing with you Jonathan’s learning/advice after his experience with a TFL worker insulting a passenger (which he caught on camera) on Friday. He eloquently put the story in a blog a few days ago, and the outcome was pretty extraordinary! To focus on the learnings I have taken the liberty to do some editing of Jonathan’s recent blog (only shortening it, there is no change to the content, and have only done so to emphasise the take aways).
However, the link to the full blog is provided at the end and it’s well worth reading through the entire blog as it’s rich with data and interesting information.
At this stage it’s worth noting that Jonathan has been involved in social media for well over a decade, and does not just understand the topic, but lives it, every day, actually if you worked with him you would realise it’s closer to every minute (truly fascinating). It basically is who he is.
It’s his passion for the topic, and our belief in it as a key factor of communication in the future, that has made social media a key part of what we do at this fluid world.
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Yesterday I (Jonathan) wrote a blog post about something I had witnessed in an underground station – a guard being verbally abusive to a traveller and eventually suggesting to “sling him under a train”.
Fast forward 24 hours and the story has run as the leader on Sky, BBC, LBC, ITN and on the front page of the Evening Standard. This followed thousands of Tweets and Re-Tweets (including the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, getting involved), 65,000 video views yesterday alone on YouTube and hundreds of comments on this and many other blogs. Plus, the guard has been suspended and is under investigation.
All I did was see something that shouldn’t be tolerated and used the ammunition we have in our hands – video/blogs/network.
This is an example of the incredible power of social media and the reason the story played out the way it did is because of how the social environment works.
Through this post I will cover exactly what steps I took to make this happen and look at ways that TFL could have done things differently.
Understanding the power of social media means that anyone can do what I did – but more importantly, companies and organisations would be able to better prepare for good and bad outcomes – in this case, the latter for TFL (Transport for London).
My original blog post outlined what happened, but here I will give some options of what TFL could have done – most certainly for a more positive outcome. This is non-exhaustive but gives you an idea:
1. They should have been prepared. Without sounding funny, the best way to avoid these things is to be prepared – staff and company alike. But they weren’t – and I hereby extend a public offer of help in this preparation to them – you can contact me from my contact page. Even though the staff members have a tough job, there are probably more productive ways of dealing with the nasty bits – without shouting and swearing
2. They should have been monitoring, in real time, any mention of words on the web such as ‘underground’, ‘abuse’, ‘passengers’, ‘staff’, ‘TFL’, ‘tube’, etc and noticed that an article had been written. It took Google 40 minutes to show my blog in related search terms and the post was written early evening yesterday, so actually, TFL had a 12 hour head start on the Twitter/Blog/Press people
3. They should have instantly suspended the staff member an implemented a pre-arranged procedure where they get someone (maybe even the original blogger – in this case me), to speak with a number of other staff to get a balanced view of what staff can really be like. I would have happily liaised with TFL
4. They should have prepared a circulation for the entire company staff, highlighting this incident and used it as a real time training manual – announcing this method to all press and bloggers to highlight that they not only are aware but are using this constructively
5. They should have joined the digital conversation and pointed out other feedback received, for the world to see the balance in place. Offline, they should have called the press first and invited themselves to speak alongside me at every press call throughout the day – but they didn’t
6. They should have built a campaign around the perpetrator showing the exact steps taken to ensure it never happens again – including posting it on the front page of their site immediately
The Twitterers, Bloggers and commentators were the only people who played this right. The stories were shared and eventually the press picked it up.
What we need is for Industry to learn the key techniques of Involvism that the Twitterers, Bloggers and commentators already implement.
Yes, this means that we need new rules in company staffing, training, strategy and delivery and yes, if we work with people, we have to assume that anything can be caught on camera and distributed.
Like it or not, the only people who should have a problem with that are those who don’t want their quality of work highlighted.
It’s unstoppable and its here, now.
Welcome to the age of Social Media.
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Thank you Jonathan for turning this experience into a opportunity for all of us to learn. Click on the below picture for Jonathan’s entire blog post.
Jonathan MacDonald, co-founder of this fluid world, has over the last couple of weeks published some insightful macro trends of the 21st century on his blog. They are a summary of his observations over a period of time and are some the key things that we take into consideration when we help companies understand the evolving communications environment, when assisting these organisations in adding value to their products and services and achieve competitive advantage. None of these ‘Macro Trends’ are exclusive to the 21st Century but all of them are critical to it.
I will say farewell here as I think the trends speak for themselves!
Below is a list of the first 6 macro trends, click on each link to read about them in more detail (enjoy, I know I did, thanks Jonathan! )
I spend quite a lot of time talking and writing about how companies are letting consumers and citizens down! And as far as I’m concerned there is no excuse for that! There is no excuse for products that don’t fulfill a need, there is no excuse for bad customer service, there is no excuse for intrusive and annoying communication…basically there is no excuse for a company not trying to excel in everything they do!
Well actually, there may be one excuse…the feeling of ‘why bother’ as nothing you do will make a real difference since there is no such things as customer loyalty any more (well almost no such thing)!
In today’s world consumers are prepared to give up their loyalty at a very cheap price! Basically we are promiscuous… to a fault!!!
I have been a BT customer for a year. During this time they have been truly amazing…from not charging me for connecting the phone line because of a small confusion that happened, to putting up with me being late with paying my bills, as in every month, for the last 12 months! (I never seem to get around to setting up a standing order….nor to opening my bills for that matter as a dear friend of miner pointed out today!).
Yesterday I found out how much my relationship with BT is worth to me, how much I would have to be paid to walk away from what has been a really positive customer experience!
The answer is £1!!!! One tiny little pound!
Let me explain. In addition to being a BT customer I’m also a Sky customer. Although I don’t have anything major to complain about Sky, they have certainly not, over the last year, performed as well as BT (not even close).
And still…
A year has now passed and I’m allowed to cancel my contract with BT and get one with Sky. I was nano seconds away from doing just that…Why? Because my monthly bill would decrease with 1 pound! Basically the single price of a bus journey in central London (paid with an Oyster card)!
This is apparently what it would take for me to switch from a company that has supplied me with great customer service to one having delivered average customer service.
Shame on me! What I should be doing is writing letters to BT thanking them. What I should be doing is telling all my friends and family about how happy I am with their level of service. What I should be doing is blogging about it. But am I? No!
No wonder some companies give up (they are made up of human beings after all), and no wonder some of them treat their transactions with us as just that, transactions (let’s face it we don’t always treat them as human, not even the ones who deserve it).
So let’s all take a minute and think of the brands that have delighted us over the last couple of months…
• Waitrose
• Virgin
• Pete’s Coffee
• Apple
• Natural Kitchen
• Rochester Ginger
• La Fromagerie
…and let’s put pen to paper…or finger to keyboard, and thank them for their efforts! Go on, I’m sure you will be rewarded not only in this lifetime but in brand heaven!
A few days ago I had lunch with the very lovely and smart Mike Nutley, Editor-in-chief of New Media Age. Taking a break from his pasta, Mike made a very true statement.
“Most MD’s don’t want to hear that the world is in flux, they don’t want to plan around ‘not knowing’, or around ‘not being sure’.”
I hate to say this… but can you blame them? ‘I’m not sure’ and ‘I don’t know’ is not very helpful when you try to forecast, resource, be profitable, monitor competition and keep The City happy… and it’s really not helpful when you try to write a three, five, seven or ten year plan!
This fragmented and confusing world is even more frightening for anyone running an advertising or media agency. They’ve had it relatively easy for quite some time. If you think about it, any agency that figured out how to do a descent TV ad when TV moved into our living rooms has been able to dine out on that learning for almost half a century! Listening to many of these agencies today it’s clear that they are hoping for a repeat of that performance by taking one giant (digital) leap into the future, and subsequently reap the benefits of that one-off learning and understanding of digital for some time to come.
And again, can you blame them? It sure would make working life easier for a lot of people if that was a possibility!
The truth however is that a company can no longer be in the business of forecasting, of committing to certain results, of ensuring specific ROI’s, monitoring competition or of recycling solutions, and it can most definitely no longer be in the business of creating three, five, seven or ten year plans (or 30 second ads).
Why? Because the world just does not look like that anymore, and it never will again! Also, there is no one giant leap into the future, there are only a series of continuous steps.
“Then what business should we be in?” I hear you say.
Obviously you should be in the business of delivering on your core product/service, and obviously some of the activities mentioned above will continue to be part of your life for some time to come.
But at the core you should be in the business of two things, and that is:
1) creating value – as in extreme value!
and
2) evolving – as in continuously!
If you put that at the centre of everything you do, and if you put your heart and mind into doing it brilliantly, then I believe the rest will follow. You won’t need to run after competition; you’ll be creating the path everyone will want to follow, you won’t need five year plans as grabbing opportunities when they come your way will be part of your competitive advantage, you won’t need to worry about who you should hire a year in advance (and for what role) as you will have a flexible employee network at your disposal…you won’t be… sorry I won’t go on (as I frequently do when I’m passionate about something), as this is a conversation better had over a coffee.
But suffice to say that I believe this so much I existed the agency world to start this fluid world (with Jonathan MacDonald), a company who helps organisations do just this. Whether we work on creating the ideal corporate culture, building people capabilities, designing new business models and revenue streams, advising on organisational structure or on creating new products and services, our focus is always on those two things; unlocking extreme value and building in flexibility, or should I say fluidity, in all our solutions.
Take a look at our site (click on pic) it will give you an idea of how we think and also of some of the work we have done.
I know “Most MD’s don’t want to hear that the world is in flux, they don’t want to plan around ‘not knowing’, or around ‘not being sure.’”…but I can’t help but believe that it’s by doing just that that they will become more competitive, and it’s by doing just that that they will develop better (and therefore more profitable) business models!
What can I say, I definitely believe this unpredictable future is bright, I really believe it’s orange!
Go ahead pick it!
…or maybe it’s blue, yellow, red, green … who knows, but I’m looking forward to figuring it out … as we go along!
I’m often asked what trait I admire the most in a human being…to me the answer is easy, courage… basically the ability to confront fear, pain, risk, danger, or uncertainty.
It seems like one problem the marketing, advertising and communications world is facing today is lack of courage. Charles Rosen, founding partner of Amalgamated (the agency responsible for the both liked and hated Svedka Vodka ads) put it very well when he said, “Most marketers feel that if they make a bold statement, they risk not just alienating customers – but also their boss, and their boss’s boss. That fear takes the edge off of all communications”.
I look around and I’m often amazed at how little is done in the communications world that stands out, and I can’t help but feel that lack of courage has something to do with it. Think about it, how often have you done something exceptional without taking a risk, without being a little scared, without thinking it could fail or backfire, basically without showing some level of courage?
Nothing inspires me more than when someone does just that, takes a risk and shows courage! Reading The Independent on Friday I was introduced to JR, an anonymous artist who never gives his full name. Looking at his site I’m amazed as to what he has achieved (and he is only 27)!
In 2006 he posted portraits of the suburban ‘thugs’, in huge formats, in the bourgeois districts of Paris. Courage! This illegal project became “official” when the Paris City Hall wrapped its building with JR’s photos.
In 2007 he did ‘Face 2 Face’, the biggest illegal photo exhibition ever. JR posted huge portraits of Israelis and Palestinians face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities, and on the both sides of the Security fence / Separation wall. The experts said it would be impossible. Still, he did it. Courage!
And this weekend hundreds of immense pairs of eyes have started to gaze at the river boats on the Seine in Paris. The ‘eyes’ are the product of a two-year world tour called “Women are Heroes”, intended to mark the courage and suffering of women enduring poverty and violence in Brazil, India, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Kenya and Liberia. These women are not politicians, they are not freedom fighters, they are a single grandmother; a woman who helps street children; a 13-year-old single mother and victim of civil war – every day women, oozing with courage!
As for our industry… Rollo May (an American existential psychologist who passed away in 1994) once said, “There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change”.
Maybe the first thing we can change is our weekend plans! I don’t know about you but I can’t wait to get on the Eurostar to be inspired by this artist, and by these women’s courage (you have until the 2nd of November). And then how about we all cross the waters again and each do something to bring the edge back into marketing and communications!!!
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(truly fascinating). It basically is who he is.
