08 November 2011
Executive Pay Addiction
05 November 2011
Going Social
As technology evolves, so do the communication tools we can use, but our behaviour remains the same. Consider the introduction and the role today of the pager, fax machine, text messaging and email.
01 November 2011
Being Social
29 October 2011
Doing Social
I was fortunate enough to catch up with the Martha Lane-Fox of pensions for coffee this week; the brilliant Mackenzie Nordal. After swapping photos and stories of our babies, we reflected on how much the asset management industry has achieved in the two years since her and I first met and mallowstreet was launched.
Mackenzie and Co’s launch of mallowstreet coincided with my own efforts to convince colleagues that social media has a role in client engagement. So it made perfect sense for us to combine intellect to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.
Doing social is not being social; that’s the next bunch of fun we’re going to have together.
08 September 2011
Economists should come with a health warning
03 September 2011
Play Nicely
The kind of behaviours described in the article are what we would expect a new line manager or a junior operational team leader under immense pressure to exhibit; not in a team led by someone that has been in the executive team of successive public companies
18 July 2011
A tale of marketing without thinking.
Marketing activity without strategy is like intrusive surgery without a diagnosis. Strategy without insight is like a diagnosis without asking the patient what the symptoms are.
Picture the situation; your strategy team has identified a discrete European market that consumes your product in a way almost identical to your principal domestic market at a similar price point. Your sales division is investing in feet on the ground in the form of a sales person with dedicated pre and post sales support.
The total addressable market is 1,500 business clients. Prospects that match your target profile in terms of size and ability to influence is about a sixth of this. The customers that are most susceptible to the product to the product you have already had success with in this market is a fifth again. Therefore you have a target prospect list of around 50 clients to sell to over the next 12 to 18 months.
It goes without saying you won’t ignore sales opportunities outside this target list, but they will have to be qualified as winnable in order to justify spending scarce sales resource on them. The point of the target list is focus those limited resources firstly where you are most likely to win and secondly where you can and grow your business profitably over a defined time period.
Metrics and sales targets can be aligned to ensure every part of the business focuses on closing as much business as possible with this target market. The strategy team could even be more precise about those targets by researching average order value compared to the organisations average order value. Even a half decent B2B marketing team can turn a market entry strategy such as this into an effective campaign almost regardless of budget.
All sound, all rationale. So why the blog? Well a friend in a technology services business presented with just this scenario has been instructed by his Marketing Director to plan a €100k campaign featuring above the line for print and radio. Why? The local new sales guy says the brand is unknown and a massive brand awareness campaign is essential before he can do his work.
This approach is so counter to an intelligent led campaign I have been bursting to write about it. In fact I could write a book on why this is wrong, but to hone in on just one issue, it’s leadership.
Sales success comes from identifying your target market, developing a proposition that is better than your competitors and going after it. In order to do this harness every skill in your business sales, marketing, product, strategy etc., you must start with leadership. Leaders that can combine an ability to listen to those on the ground and knowledge of what good looks like.
Don’t ask a marker to sell, and don’t ask a sales person to see the whole picture, get all the skills in the business to collaborate, and certainly don’t ask him to plan a campaign.
12 July 2011
Retailers: We’re worried about our jobs, give us a warm feeling please
A few weeks ago, the current Mrs Ryan finally wore me down on yet another of agenda priorities. We started planning and procuring a replacement for the dark and dingy chip board panels that represent our kitchen.
As excited as I am about the prospect of having a nice new kitchen, like over half of full time employees in the UK, and an even higher percentage in financial services I would wager, I have concerns about my medium term job prospects. I have held back on all large purchases quite simply due to fear of redundancy.
So parting with my rainy day funds meant I needed a supplier that could assure me I was getting the best deal, could show me a durable product and above all would give me a warm feeling from their service.
So as soon as the credits began to roll on Saturday’s Glee rerun I reached for the phone to call the safest pair of hands of all, John Lewis Partnership. Sadly, there kitchen team were too busy to take my call, so the switchboard operator took my details and promised me a call that day. I am still waiting.
Next to Homebase, a large DIY retailer with a reputation for discounting. But they were too busy to even answer the phone, not once, but twice.
So to the market leader DIY retailer, B and Q, who according to the newspaper had a sale on. The guy answering the phone affirmed he could help us with our enquiry and there was no need for me to speak to a kitchen specialist. I thought we had hit gold. However, he wouldn’t arrange a site visit for measurements to be taken and a plan to be drawn up.
“Why would we do that when you haven’t been into the store to choose a style?” he quizzed.
“Why would I drive to your store to choose a style when you don’t even have my measurements?” I retorted.
“Well go online then.” He suggested. So I moved on.
And to Wickes. The builder’s pal and the first port of call for my seriously DIY capable family and friends. And what a surprise; the young lady that took the call new exactly what to do and what to ask. Within minutes she had booked and confirmed an appointment for a trained consultant to visit to measure up after the school run on Monday and a provisional visit the store to discuss the design.
07 June 2011
My wife is the typical Facebook user
Yet from my experience, everyone perceives this evolution towards forming online communities differently according to who they perceive to be the typical user of Facebook.
The current social media generation gap among my colleagues generally looks something like this:
• Those that conjure a picture of their teenage children tend to see Facebook as no more relevant to their daily lives as a Playstation.
• Those with older children (post or at university) while not appreciating that social media is becoming ubiquitous, at least see some value in sharing content such as updates and photos.
• Those with children under high school age are most likely to be already users of social media in their own personal, albeit passively.
• Those without children are probably the only people to actually have time to use it and cross multiple channels, probably including gaming and dating.
My typical Facebook user is my wife. Not just because women make up more active users than men, but because she is the best example of using social media to speak with and listen to her community that avidly checks in wherever we go.
The best example of this is using one of her iPhone nappy apps. (Nappies are diapers for my North American chums). When we recently had dinner with another family at the Pizza Express in Rochester, (again for my friends on the west side of the Atlantic, that’s Kent, not up state New York) I was so impressed with the baby changing facilities that she mandated me to post an entry for every other parent visiting the Medway towns and stranded for somewhere to change their baby.
This is community at its best. Sharing something that is good, not simply for our own benefit, but for the community to prosper. We all belong to different communities and therefore find different uses for the medium.
My communities include people I train with, friends I drink with, friends that live too far away to drink with, people I meet to talk about local politics, the people I speak to when I walk the dog (and a further subset that don’t just look at me strange and speak to me back).
It may seem to my colleagues that all this Facebook stuff is just for teenagers to gossip and parents to share photos, however, over the next ten years these tools will become central to how we live and do business, just as email and mobile telephones have.
Whether they are on Facebook or a iPhone apps, the typical social media user by 2020 will be however we percieve ourselves.
31 May 2011
Cheap social media makes marketers lazy
Let me paraphrase the premise, junior marketers are over using social media because it is perceived as low cost and that finance managers care more about return on investment than cost and are by default encouraging this. We kicked it around and although we had some sympathy for the sentiment, I don’t buy any of it.
So as the charge came from with our profession here is my response. The basis of successful marketing stands, and indeed underpins all successful campaigns. I.e. target messages of a well researched proposition at a target audience you understand and will perceive the value they can extract from your proposition - that it is greater than any alternative.
The channel we choose to use to deliver the messages is informed more by our knowledge of the customer not just the cost of delivering the message. Social, and digital media more generally, are just some of the possible channels. A practicing marketer that ignores all possible ways of effectively engaging their client is lazy full stop. Not just lazy because they are using social media at the expense of the alternatives/compliments.Just an aside to this, one of the largest growth areas for use of social media is a s a second screen to TV activity.
No longer do we have to wait until the next day to have a conversation beside the water cooler about what was on the box – we can share it with our network through Facebook and Twitter as it happens. Link this new trend of dual screens (the TV and your social media device) and we could see a major resurgence in big ticket above the line TV advertising. The pursuit of which is anything but lazy.
17 May 2011
Just because it's difficult, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it
In spite of this effort, she just couldn’t seem to get her business behind the channel. In particular, her firm consistently failed to input to the topics the community were most engaged about as effectively as her competitors.
Despite the success of her company’s competitors had shown in increased engagement and sales, despite the investment already made and the apparent opportunity the growing community presented; A committee of recently appointed managers cancelled the initiative's budget, because changing the way her organisation operated was seen to be 'just too hard.'
I learned early in my career as a marketing manager at one of the largest organisations in the world that just because something was hard to do, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. This wasn’t the mantra of the business, but my line manager. A man in his late thirties that had risen rapidly to run a pan European US$200 million turnover division and was perceived by his peers to have the alchemist's touch. How had he done this, he changed the businesses he ran to be responsive to whatever clients valued. Even if that meant finding new ways of working.
So often in marketing we look to external solutions to achieve our commercial objectives. A different place to advertise, a new event, a bigger or better web site to push our products and services. When in fact, we should simply address the hardest challenge of them all first; Create an effective business that engages in and responds to what our communities are really interested in.
5 things to tell your colleagues that still don’t get social media
Even if you or your business is not actively listening or engaging with your customers in social media, your business, product, industry, advocates, detractors are being talked about. My own firm is talked about with mainly positive and neutral sentiment hundreds of times a month on Twitter alone. Our products and industry is mentioned hundreds of times an hour.
2/ Social media is principally an online representation of what happens in the real world
In the real world we share news, photos of our children, birthday wishes and invitations, just as at work we invite clients to events, talk about products and share results. I appreciate that not everyone we work with has friends or anything interesting to say. For those that do, social media has proven itself as the easiest and most immediate way to share.
3/ What we do online stays online
I am not convinced privacy is dead, but the super injunction nonsense of the past few weeks illustrates that it is probably on its last legs. So be careful, by all means. Contrary to point 2, don’t do everything online that you would do offline, it sticks.
4/ If you don’t engage in social media, your competitors will
Social media is by no means ubiquitous, certainly not in the developed world. But it will be. Orkut, a Facebook me too in Brazil has 84% penetration and continues to grow. Similarly renren and 51 in China, Vkontakte in Russia and Bharatstudent in India all have following on a scale that would dwarf the populations of some small European states.
5/ The big numbers aren’t the true story
Facebook is predicted to have a billion users by the end of 2012, and social media will reach 90% penetration of all internet users in 2013. By the summer of 2012, half of all mobile phone users in Europe will use smart phones. In the UK, nearly 26 million adults have Facebook accounts. Of all UK Facebook users, 50% are over 36.
09 May 2011
Get off my business case
Continuation of my look below the surface on B2B social media…
Let’s kick off with some controversy ;-).
I am a ‘value based’ marketer. In fact, it was reading Peter Doyle’s book of the same title when I was studying my Post Graduate Diploma in Marketing that I decided that I needed to go further and get an MBA so that I could one day influence a whole organisation to the concept. (Even Kotler said the book could spark Mareting revolution).
If you are new to the approach, I recommend you look into how it can work for you. In the meantime, value based marketing is based on delivering shareholder value (in the form of return on investment/equity) based on delivering greater value to your customers (according to what they are prepared to pay) relative to your competition. There are countless examples of business that have consistently achieved this, First Direct Bank, Apple, Volkswagen and Starbucks.
So by extension, the concept goes that every marketing activity should be measured and reported in terms of shareholder value. Now as I said, I am a value based marketer, I think linking the sum of all marketing activity to shareholders returns is absolutely the right way to go. It drives the correct behaviours in the marketing function and delivers the right outcomes for the businesses ultimate owners.
However, I have had more than my fair share of exposure to management accounting at under grad, through my MBA, and from some very real experience at Honeywell. I draw the line at the minutiae of job costing including every single overhead. Firstly, because the calculation enters the realm of diminishing returns, secondly, because I don’t think the calculation adds any insight to the marketing led management decisions, and thirdly because it’s a faff.
So where’s the controversy? Well, having established I am not going to, and nor would advocate you should, measure the value of every single marketing activity, I recommend you don’t get drawn on applying some different set of metrics to social media. Yes it’s new, yes it may need an additional FTE to monitor pages or shepherd content, but that’s a marketing exec, not an administrator. A marketing exec should be adding value to every administrative task, and aligning those tasks to shareholder value (through adding value to clients).
We can’t realistically track any sale to a single brochure, single exhibition stand or video blog on our web site. It’s not even just down to the tender document we responded to. It is the sum of all these activities integrated to tell a single story that offers greater value to the client, relative to the cost of purchase and what our competitors offer.
I discussed this at the Finextra conference with another delegate from a Bank, they told me they did measure the value f every single activity, whether that be a stand at an event for thousands or an intimate event for a handful of clients, but they couldn’t tell me how they linked a sale to a specific marketing interaction, or be precise about how may pounds of revenue were returned for every pond of marketing expenditure. But they did have 3 people dedicated to generating spurious metrics that strangely enough, they always exceeded.
If you disagree, I would like to hear from you. As a committed value based marketer, I remain open to resolving this. But in the meantime, the case for B2B social media remains as and increasingly essential tool to support business developers broaden and deepen their relationships to sell more, whatever you produce. And how to measure how successful you are that? I think they call that dividends, or in other words, shareholder value…
01 May 2011
The Modern Brand Britain.
Friday 29th April was the peak of my patriotism to date. I didn’t think it would go beyond the high it experienced while I was living in the States when England won the ashes, the whole country was celebrating the bicentenary of Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar and CNN’s lead story one weekend was Routemaster buses leaving the streets of London.
Not only were 2 billion people around the world sharing the Royal Wedding experience through their TV sets, but anti monarchist parties took place across the UK. My closest friend attended one in Brighton, and some 2,000 people attended a party in London’s Red Lion Square. How many states and communities around the globe can point to such a degree of tolerance where the majority of people share in the personal delight of the Windsor family wedding, while simultaneously having celebrations of an eventual downfall of the British Monarchy. We even tolerated small Muslim protests around the UK who chose to burn the Union Flag and effigies of the happy couple.
The brand values of Britain we should be most proud of and promote to every corner of the globe were all on show. Not just the pageantry first choreographed for Queen Victoria, the use of old British brand icons like a 1960’s Aston Martin for the escape from the main wedding party, or the limos ferrying guests built by Rolls Royce when the company wasn’t owned by a German manufacturer whose brand is associated with building Hitler’s dream of automotive manufacturing. Britain’s brand is of a people coming together to celebrate as one, regardless of whether they agree with the premise of the celebration.
And let’s not underestimate the power of our brand. Quite deliberately I have followed the build up to the Royal Wedding through the foreign media. My family were among the 25% of Britons that followed the event live using a medium other than the BBC, through CNN in fact. We were all struck by how this little overcrowded island just off the north coast of Europe, with its own currency and transient climate, has held the headlines of newspapers, magazines and news channels across the world. Al Jazeera, France 24, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox, Russia Today all had special programmes on the satellite feed I had access too. Nearly all of them invested US $200k in a special studio over looking Buckingham Palace, flying in high profile anchors.
We have a brand that it is almost unique to us, not just based on the tradition of monarchy and social order; but of diversity and harmony. A brand the world values and indeed needs. A brand that we can still command interest in.
That’s why I was proud to be British on the day of the Royal Wedding in London on 29th April 2011, and would fight to retain the monarchy.
27 April 2011
Below the surface of B2B social media
I thought it might be useful if I scratched the surface on the recent social media events I have attended, and demonstrate I was listening.