Category: Marketing

Why Community is the Answer

Zapnito asked me to speak at their annual Community Insights event on the Changing Landscape of Media and Marketing – and the Growing Power of Community within That. I explained that today’s landscape has been fundamentally shaped by 10 things that came out of the dot.com boom and bust. Publishers, associations and commercial event businesses can harness the power of community to drive their marketing ROI – but only if they stop mixing up product with promoters, get their pricing models in order and think strategically about the content they produce and share.

I was asked to speak at the Zapnito Community Insights Annual Event on the Changing Landscape of Media and Marketing – and the Growing Power of Community within That. Here’s what I said:

Thanks Charles. Good evening everyone.

As I was doing my research for putting this speech together (or to be more accurate, procrastinating putting it together), I was reading Ashley’s excellent article on the return of community in B2B publishing. If you haven’t read it yet, you can find it here https://community.zapnito.com/users/206116-ashley-friedlein/posts/53806-the-return-of-community-in-b2b-publishing-media-part-2 on the Zapnito site and on the Guild website (lesson one in the changing landscape of media and marketing – SEO is so important that we multiple place to improve our discoverability). Back to the blog though, it begins with saying, “if you’re old enough to have been around in the dot.com area of the late 90s then you may remember the famous “3Cs” that were meant to characterise the web: Content, Commerce, Community.

This made me wince. For two reasons. Partly, because not only am I old enough to remember the late 90s, when I first worked with Charles, I actually started my marketing career at the end of the 80s, a time of shoulder pads and mobile phones like bricks.

Mainly though, I winced because that time frame and mantra was peak internet bubble and a disastrous mix of belief in, and misunderstanding of, the 3Cs fundamentally changed both the media industry and how we market today – making it, frankly, a whole lot harder.

At the height of the boom, everyone was so in love with dot.coms that the Wall Street Journal suggested that investors ‘re-think” the “quaint concept” of profits.

These were the companies who were spending a fortune on marketing, offering their services for free with the expectation they could build sufficient brand awareness to charge profitable rates for their services in the future.

In January 2000, there were 16 dot.com commercials during Super Bowl XXXIV, each costing $2 million for a 30-second spot.

The Nasdaq Composite stock market index peaked in value at 5,048.62on March 10, 2000 before crashing. In its trough on October 9, 2002, it had lost 80% of its value. Trillions of dollars in wealth vanished almost overnight. It took until March 2015 for the Nasdaq to reach its 2000 peak. In Silcion Valley alone over 200,000 people lost their jobs.

I share this with you not just so you can bask in how young and fabulous you are (and perhaps think carefully about investing in WeWorks) but because…

the stonking hangover from that time wasn’t just financial. It fundamentally changed the media landscape and how we market in 10 ways:

In its obsession with the first of those 3 Cs, content, the dot.com boom turned everyone into a publisher, creating a blurring of the lines between authoritative content and UGC. If anyone can publish their version of the truth, how do people know what is fact? It seems that it depends on whether you are part of that tribe or community or not. Because whatever you think of Donald Trump (and I am firmly in the Dear God how is this possible, camp) his followers – “his community” believe everything he says and unsays. Because that is the other thing that digital content enabled – a blithe changing of the story. The more reputable papers note on their websites if a story has changed but even blogs that should know better, like the media industry’s Flashes and Flames, have been known to completely change, for example, acquisition prices, without noting it. So your understanding of a deal outcome is completely different based on the day you read the blog.

The other thing that became blurred was the difference between content which was a marketing tool, and content which was the product / service. If McKinsey is going to give a 100 page report away for free, why should a reader pay £1k for a report by a professional publisher?

People’s perception of the value of content has changed irrevocably.

Google is now 21 years old. When free information is everywhere, and Google has become a verb, then we have trained a whole generation to believe that information is not something you need to pay for.

So started the slow tortuous death spiral of print publications. Marie Claire just announced it would be going digital only after 30 years in print.

A few years ago Lloyds List (one half of the Lloyds List and IBC merger which formed the now mighty Informa plc) which had been published since 1734, became digital only. Good for the trees. Not so good for the printing industry and for the designers and sales teams at magazines.

To add insult to injury. Not only have (a worryingly large number of) people stopped paying for content but advertisers have changed the way they buy too. Value and pricing models for both the consumption of digital media and for advertising on and in it has changed dramatically and publishers are still finding their way.
Unlike the FT and the Economist who were early defenders of the value of their intelligence, and put in place firewalls, the Guardian landed itself in a terrible muddle.

Because Google and other media disrupters were wooing advertisers with the concept of eyeballs – not based on the value of their readership (of their community), but just on volume and a sprinkling of psychographics (behavioural preferences) they made their content free in a desperate play to increase circulation and at the same time lost their advertiser pricing power by moving from per page print pricing to CPM digital pricing, creating a double whammy of disastrous financials which only thanks to the munificence of the Scott Trust prevented them from going bust.

They of course, like a slew of media owners then sought other revenue streams and diversified into formats in which they were, to be blunt, amateurs. Since these were non-core revenue streams, they hopelessly under-priced them, creating (frankly infuriating and wholly unnecessarily) downward pricing pressures for the expert incumbents. As their delivery was also often poor, it tarnished the format in the consumer’s mind. Hard to know why one event will be fabulous, when the last one you attended was shoddy, unless of course you have built a community which is loyal to you.

 

LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter were all founded shortly post the boom. Marketers already struggling with how to include email and their own websites into their marketing mix then had to decide how much of their time, spend and brand authority, to give to these new apps. This explosion of marketing channels created existential angst for marketers, did they simply go to where hordes of other people were and try to use content and messaging to break through the noise and attract the tiny proportion of people who might be right for their target audience (their potential community) and hope that they would then follow them and not be distracted by other people’s content or did they simply use their databases (their pre-built communities) to email people directly. In some ways, it was like the difference between an insert in a magazine and a direct mail shot. The latter of course always outperformed, but in the excitement of the new, far too many marketers forgot this.

And what no one really paid attention to was that it turned people into the product As individuals and businesses we have fallen into a trap of convenience and ubiquity winning over performance and ethics. I was talking to a super smart millennial the other day whose first reaction to my saying that the Laidlaw Foundation is going to move off of Facebook and that we want to encourage others to do so, was “but they have 15 years worth of my photos…” We have handed over our IP. In case you were wondering why we are moving away from them, the answer is that we don’t believe that they have shown the moral leadership they should. Happily, our Scholars Network already has more traction than we ever did on Facebook so the sacrifice isn’t large. Individually, I am doing the same too though and not seeing the posts and pictures of friends and family does feel like a wrench.

 

No one reads the T&Cs carefully enough. Even after Facebook admitted that they breached their own data privacy rules, they continued to add users.
We have given up our privacy and no one seems to care that much.
The Guardian who are finally in profit partly in thanks to their examination of this (and partly to their new begging pop up notices model), still weirdly and unashamedly promote their exclusives on Facebook.

 

Two final points: The dot.com boom and bust made people talk absolute nonsense about community for decades – mixing up target audience, leads, and customers with people who might love you but have no intention of buying from you ever. Equally, not realising that people could buy from you without feeling any community allegiance whatsoever. Not to mention forgetting that different groups within the community have different motivators. It is one of the reasons why Forums were so hard to monetise.

 

It also made people forget that marketing was ultimately about generating profits through optimising our ROI. Today’s media channels and marketing opportunities are set in the context of what happened 20 years ago.

It has all got a ton more crowded, complex, difficult and, in a happy offset, cheaper.  In response we have a plethora of exceptional marketing tools from out of the box CRM and marketing automation to community platforms like the wonderous Zapnito.

When I started marketing conferences and training courses, we printed a brochure, sent it out to the 30,000  most relevant people on our database, put a few inserts into partner magazines (where we bartered a deal so that the low response rate was off-set by the equally low cost) and then did a re-mail to the best performing selections. We spent 25% of our projected revenue on the marketing. Lord Laidlaw grew IIR into the largest conference company in the world and, fast forward to 2005, became a billionaire when we sold the business to Informa.

Now I would not sign off a campaign plan that didn’t include social media, email, web, telesales, print etc; that didn’t have at least 100 different selection segments and trigger trees. And a good 30 partnerships. Yet for an established event I wouldn’t expect to have to spend more than 15% of revenue. Today, it is all about targeting the micro communities, with what is important to them.

In 2000 there were approximately 17 million websites only. Today there are over a billion websites. More sites are visited from mobiles than desktops.

To stand out in the midst of all the noise, and the bombardment of messaging, our prospects will only yes if we:

  • Make them notice us (hence re-targeting and re-marketing)
  • Make them connect with us
  • Make them an offer that they can’t refuse
  • Make it incredibly easy for them
  • Make them feel smart, recognised and rewarded for doing so.

Communities are the most powerful tool in enabling each one of these.

In essence because the model is flipped on its head. We’re not having to shout and produce content-value destroying clickbait so that people notice us, they are are already coming to us. As contributing members of the community, the connection already exists. If we are properly mining the data on their contributions, collaborations and time spent where within the network, we know what to offer them. We can add easy buy-now buttons at the appropriate spots on their user journey and depending on where they are in the marketing funnel.  They become partners in product development and promotion, and we reward them for being such.

B2C media businesses have always had communities, avid brand followers, loyal readers, the trouble was they didn’t know who they were or how to reach them. Which is why of course Facebook etc – where they could see who their fans were, was terribly exciting. It meant that instead of creating half a dozen broad based personas, we could actually personalise, create hordes of micro campaigns. And thanks to Google Analytics and the like measure the effectiveness of messaging to each of them. Cambridge Analytica, appear throughout the Great Hack as the most appallingly, ethically challenged company imaginable, but also as being absolutely phenomenal marketers, micro-targeting and custom messaging to the nth degree.

B2B has always had the benefit of knowing who its customers were, and then being able to extrapolate out to similar target markets, looking at job title, function, company size, SIC etc. We captured all of this on databases. And added interest codes and other psychographic indicators. The biggest danger for marketers today, is that in the excitement of so many easy to use channels, they forget to measure what is and isn’t working and respond quickly enough.

Community takes target markets a huge leap forward. Here at the intersection of interests, shared emotions and experience – target groups self-identify and, more importantly, forge a brand loyalty and momentum that makes them more likely to say yes, to spend more and to encourage others to do so too.

It is why it is so important, that you and your members are clear about the values you share. What it is that you believe in. You need to be specific. Events, Associations and Publishers can all do this easily. Be clear about your purpose and your values.

Look at how successful Nike was with their Colin Kaepernick campaign. It didn’t matter that some people stepped away from Nike, because the sales from the community who did identify with the campaign went through the roof.

Your community members should be your promoters. These are your brand Life Time Value heroes.

Effective marketing then comes from building and monetising those communities.
It helps then to be clear about who those communities and micro communities within them are. One of the biggest mistakes that marketers make is to assume that a community centres around their product. Conference companies are some of the worst offenders here.  An event is not a community – although it may be the physical manifestation of one or the annual meeting place for everyone in it.

To create that 365 day community, you have to think about each of the micro communities within your event world, your sponsors, exhibitors, advisory board, speakers and delegates, and how you can fuse their interests and needs in an on-line community so that they all feel engaged, committed, recognised and rewarded.

This is true for association sub groups, business information and so on.

It is particularly important if you are using content to build your place in the community and eventually own it and be seen as the voice and champion of it. Before all the marketers start throwing things at me, I am not suggesting that you create a ton more material, you can absolutely re-use and re-purpose assets. The key is to think about what are you trying to achieve and match the output to the objective.

And back to our original 3 Cs, to know which content to give away for free, which content requires commitment from the recipient and which is paid for.

You can them move content between those categories when necessary in order to reward and grow your community. So the FT yesterday made its premium content open to all, in a shameless tease to grow their subs and their average order value.

They made me, a long term subscriber and active user, pay attention to an offer upgrade that I have ignored for years. I also went to their FT Weekend Festival last year. They really don’t know how to run events properly so I ended up with a 20 point snagging list that I sent to a friend of mine there (who said he was super grateful although…) but they got the content right and I still felt part of the community. This is in marked contrast to the Economist who sent me a “special” renewal offer which was the same 12 for 12 offer that they have been handing out at every station all year. The Economist has a great brand legacy, but its profit margin has been shrinking at speed because it doesn’t get community or ROI based marketing.

The best marketers today – know how to make community the driver of campaign-based, highly profitable, marketing.

Thank you and good luck.

​

So You Want to Speak at a Conference?

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone had asked me which events their boss or client should speak at. The beginning of the year is peak absurd question season. As every comms agency is dusting off their client’s thought leadership strategy prior to their new year kick-off meeting, some poor minion is dispatched to pull together a list of conferences at which the CEO or her successor should be speaking. And yet so few have bothered to ask the fundamental question of what is he or she tying to achieve.

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone had asked me which events their boss or client should speak at. The beginning of the year is peak absurd question season. As every comms agency is dusting off their client’s thought leadership strategy prior to their new year kick-off meeting, some poor minion is dispatched to pull together a list of conferences at which the CEO or her successor should be speaking.

The answer is classic It Depends.

It depends on your marketing and communications strategy. Are you looking to raise the profile of your leadership? If so, with whom? Are you launching a new corporate narrative? If so, why? Are you trying to make your overall brand better known? If so, for what? Are you looking to develop new business or cement your relationship with existing customers? Depending on the answer, one event will be better than another.

There is no point speaking at the largest Internet of Things event in the world (unless you are being paid a lot of money to do so) if the audience you are trying to impress are bee keepers.

The events sector is a $1 trillion + global industry with more than 10 premier B2B events held daily. There is plenty of choice.

Events change ownership though, lose or gain traction and punch above or below their true weight. Carefully auditing an event’s current status is vital before raising your hand and saying you’d like to be on the stage.

You really want to be sure that their brand values mesh with yours. Who else will be speaking there? Are you happy to share even the green room, let alone the platform, with e.g. Nigel Farage or other controversial keynotes? Who is chairing the event? Is his or her tacit endorsement of your brilliance a good thing? Who will be in the audience? Most critically, when and where will you be speaking? Are you on the main stage or tucked away in a breakout session in the dead zone after lunch while your biggest competitor has their own standing room only unplugged session in the auditorium?

Finding the perfect event is only half the battle of course.  It is sometimes hard to hear, or tell your client, but the organiser might not be as convinced as you are, that giving you a keynote or putting you on a panel, is the way forward. Particularly if you have something to sell.

Event producers are looking for two things: speakers who will attract others (whether it is delegates, sponsors, media coverage or other speakers) or who will dazzle on the day (creating happy delegates who will therefore return next year and recommend the event to other people, and lots of media coverage) – ideally both.

The perfect event faculty is made up of legends (political, financial, business, social), thought leaders, best in class practitioners, inspirers and disrupters (the innovators, commentators and technologists). Positioning where you fit within that mix will ensure that when you raise your hand to speak, the event organiser bites your arm off.

The deck attached takes you through step by step how to choose the right platform, how to be invited to keynote at the world’s leading events and how to make the most of it when you do.

Happy speaking.

What Do We Do Again?

One of my favourite passages in David Gilbertson’s Wine Bar Theory is when he says “Make sure you can describe your business simply. Then you can explain it to someone attractive you just met and are sitting next to at a dinner party or on a park bench. By the time you finish telling them what you do they need to be looking deeply into your eyes. Not lying face down in their soup. Or wandering off to find another bench.” Yet very often when I meet with clients and ask what they do I get a dozen different answers from a dozen different people. Some of the feistiest client board meetings I have been in involve the senior team arguing about what their business proposition is. So many things get in the way of nailing it down: egos, dreams, cash-flow, departmental rivalries. Yet, unless everyone is clear internally about what they do, why that is special and how it will continue, it is quite hard for their customers to appreciate it. Two facilitated exercises for helping everyone get on the same page are the Client Value Matrix and Stakeholder Perceptions. Download them here.

Marketing Power

A friend of mine (ex Telegraph and Cannes Lions to name but a couple powerhouse brands she has led) who is doing her masters in socio-linguistics, told me recently that she’s observed that the word marketing is normally used with a reductive qualifier or negative conjoin. Think “just marketing” or “marketing cost”.

David Gilbertson, co-founder of the FTSE top 50, B2B media empire Informa wrote in his best seller Wine Bar Theory, 28 rules for succeeding in business, that many people are suspicious of marketing, or scared of it, or, because they don’t really know how to do it, or simply see it as a cost.

David imagines a man putting $5 into a slot machine, pulling the handle and getting $10 out. If that is what happens when you invest in marketing, why wouldn’t you do more of it? And done right, it isn’t about gambling of course, or taking a chance, it is about a deliberate, planned ROI which doesn’t just double your money but gives you 4, 5 or 10 times a return.

So why the negativity? Why are too many marketing teams seen as the colouring in department or my personal bête noir, the party planning or premium department? Partly I suspect because when non marketers in a company come into contact with marketing it is at a customer party they planned or because they have committed some brand sin and are being reprimanded for getting the corporate colour wrong; partly it is because executive boards when they have run out of all other ideas think tinkering with the company logo will fix their ills and partly it is I think because too many marketing departments have the wrong conversations with non-marketers. We might think fonts are fascinating – everyone else glazes over. Marketing is the power that drives your business. If you don’t believe that, either your marketing department needs improvement or you are giving them poor direction.

Philip Kotler calls marketing the art and science of exploring, creating and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. You will notice that nowhere does he mention anything about party planning. Or premiums. Especially edible ones. Or trash can magnetic ones. Why would you ever waste money putting your logo on something that people are going to eat or throw away or indeed some combination of the two?

Marketing is about having something of value – let’s call that our proposition, which delivers something of benefit – let’s call that our brand promise – to a group of people, let’s call that our target market, which they will happily pay more for then it cost you to create and tell them about it.  That is the essence of marketing.

There are 10 core areas every competent marketer should obsess about:

Being crystal clear about what makes you special
How people instantly recognise that, and you stay true to it
Where your market is and where you sit within that market
Who specifically is in it
How you are going to reach them
Which media you are going to use to do so
What will persuade them to say yes, individually and collectively
How you know whether it is working or not
And who should be helping you do it

In corporate speak, marketing is about:

  1. Purpose and proposition
  2. Brand
  3. Market mapping
  4. Target audiences and segmentation
  5. GTM strategy
  6. Media
  7. Content and campaigns
  8. Copy and personalisation
  9. Measurement
  10. The team

It all begins with purpose. What is the very essence of you? Apple’s purpose is to Unlock Creativity. The Economists is to spread Reason and Rationality. The BBC’s is to inform, educate and entertain. These all have the great merit of being both very simple and very measurable. In the latest Steve Jobs movie, his daughter draws a picture on the Mac using the mouse without instruction. Creativity Unlocked, check.

If someone has persuaded you to write a complicated mission statement which includes how you are going to save the world, unless you are a working on a solution to global warming or the middle east peace process, you would probably do well to tear it up and re-think it.

Your proposition is ultimately very straight forward:

What is it that we do?
For whom?
Why is what we do / the way in which we do it special?
How do our clients benefit?

If you can answer those four questions your proposition – what it is that you are delivering of value – is clear, and you can summarise that into a pithy purpose statement.

Of course, before you put out the bunting and tattoo your purpose across your back a la David Beckham, just double check if those customer needs are currently being met, and if so, by whom? And are we better?

Assuming that’s all good, we can move on to the Brand. A lot of people like this part because it is fun to create logos and play around with colour palettes and fonts. Which is all fine (except that it can stop you being taken seriously) but should not be confused with the brand.

A brand is not a logo. A brand is not an identity. A brand is not a product. It is all about how other people view you. Just think about Pret right now. Their logo, colour scheme and products have not changed in the last month. But their brand has been damaged by people’s perception of how they acted.

Which is hard. And salutary. Because if you break your promise about who you are and what you stand for then people will punish you for it. So it is worth thinking carefully up front about what you want your brand identity to be and how you will deliver it.

At the centre is our purpose. Then the attributes or characteristics of our proposition. The things that make us special. Then what it says about the customers, how it makes them feel, what it delivers for them. The personality is how we go about delivering that message. The emotional component of a brand is important. Compare BA and Virgin. They have very similar attributes, the benefits of what they deliver is very similar. But what it says about you if you are loyal to Virgin vs BA, how it makes you feel and the personality is very different. Virgin is all about being cool and quirky. BA is about being classically British.

The Brand ID system follows your identity. You do need a short hand for people to recognise you. All brands have codes; graphical and symbolic devices that are associated with the company or product. A logo is a code. But as Mark Ritson argues, a “well run brand has more than just its logo. It might also have a colour. A pattern. An additional motif …. These are the things that loyal customers associate with the brand and immediately on encountering them they recognise the brand in question, even when the logo is yet to appear. Tiffany’s box. Coke’s curve. The panther of Cartier. The serpent of Bulgari. Cadbury purple. Hermès and its horses. You get the idea.”

Having this, doesn’t just make you recognisable, it will also save you considerable time and money to have templates that you re-use. Going back to the Economist. Think how straightforward the creative for their poster campaigns tend to be. It is white out text on a red background.

You need a colour palette with a primary colour or two and secondary colours, and a colour wheel to show them in proportion. You need fonts and a tone of voice and an image style. The system comes AFTER you have determined the identity. Not v.v.

If you are a Fortune 500 company or a fabulously funded dot.com business you might want to bring in a top agency to do this for you. If you are running your business from your kitchen table, don’t. Adobe has some great colour tools. Some of the most recognisable marks in the world are Word marks. Give a really tight brief to a small, local designer or even a freelancer. Bring in the genius of a branding agency like the phenomenal Pentagram when you know that your customers perceive your brand the way you envisioned and that your business is here for the long haul.

Once you have it though don’t mess with it. Unless you have a truly awful reputation or have done a dramatic U-turn in who you are or what you are selling, don’t change your brand system. Don’t hire a marketing manager who says the first thing they would do is change the logo. As a marketer, joining a new company, be wary of working for someone who says the first thing they’d like you to do is change the brand system. Either there is a problem with the business or your new boss doesn’t know what’s important. Neither of which is good.

So now you have your proposition and your brand you can map where your product and or service sits compared to others in your market. The most obvious two are quality and price. But there are hordes of other variables that will be specific to your market. They could include ease of use, service, luxury, custom, sustainability, exclusivity or % of cocoa or coolness factor. They might be the amount of packaging you use or if you have wifi.

If when you have done this, you can’t see where your clear market opportunity is you may need to go back and think about your proposition again. If it all looks good, now just double check that the attributes you put in your Brand I hold true compared to your market position. If you had FAST for instance as one of your attributes and have now discovered that there are half a dozen companies that are faster you might want to re-think it.

So now you have mapped the market successfully, you want to find your target audience. You need to be really clear of their demographic, orgagraphic and psyhographic characteristics. Otherwise, you will be wasting your marketing spend.

Some things like geography, membership and buyer type cut across both consumer and business audiences; but other characteristics are unique.

B2B audiences are defined by company size (think revenue, employees), type (think private, public, PE owned), sector (nature of business), job function and seniority.

B2C demographics, measurable externals, are things like income, gender, age, education. As with B2B though, the more specific you can be about behaviour the better. If you are opening a book store, it is much more useful to know that someone still buys hard copy books then that they live within a 1 mile radius and have blue eyes, even if you have identified that people with blue eyes who live within walking distance to the book shop are your best buyer group.

When you can tap into people’s tribal identification you have your strongest purchasing identifiers. There is no point in trying to sell Spurs scarves to an Arsenal supporter even though you have correctly identified that they will buy sports paraphernalia.

Nike’s latest campaign demonstrated a brilliant understanding of their target audience tribes. While news outlets had a field day showing Tweets of people setting their Nike’s on fire. Their core target market responded to their message and sales shot up. The idea isn’t to be something for everyone. It is to be everything for someone.

Just make sure that there are enough someone’s – that your market is big enough – to make money.

And to make sure everyone remembers who you are selling to and doesn’t suddenly decide it would be great publicity to sponsor the Royal Opera House when your target audience are sheep farmers in Wales, update your brand I with the target market.

The next thing to obsess about is how we reach that target market and how many steps do we need to go through before we can win clients, dazzle them and persuade them to win more. It could be very simple, if you have a unique offer which is sufficiently sticky, maybe all you have to do is get the brand known, drive people to download the app, use it and become addicted. Uber would be a great example of this.

Or maybe it is a bit more complicated. Think of a highly competitive, premium professional services GoToMarket approach. They need to build the audience of people they want to engage with using research, social media, networking etc. They need those people to know what they stand for and offer. They then have to prove that they actually know what they are talking about so that people raise their hand and want to hear more from them. They then have to see which of those people that have raised their hand meet their target audience criteria, who are likely to have the money and inclination to buy. Then they need to hand them over to a sales person to win the mandate. You might think why bother doing all this upfront, why not just let the sales person try and pitch the client. The answer is because 60% of the sale is made before someone meets the sales person. And you have highly compensated people who shouldn’t be wasting their time with people who won’t buy or spending their time trying to convince the person of the firm’s credentials when all of that can have been done beforehand far more cost effectively.

So once know the steps in the process, you can think about the media mix that you are going to use to make it happen. The key here is that not every medium is correct for every stage in the process.

Twitter for example is great for brand awareness, for building the community and driving traffic. It isn’t good for lead generation or direct marketing.

Facebook is good for creating user-based promotions. One of the favourite ones I ever did was a competition for our WGSN (on-line global trend forecaster) advocates to demonstrate how much they loved us by taking the We Love WGSN badge and creating something fabulous from it. The entries included the team from C&A in Brazil who literally stopped traffic creating a human statue of the logo and a designer in Mexico who tattooed it on his shoulder. A swimwear design team in New Zealand created a beautiful origami piece. That was all about creating viral reach and visibility.

We also did one for Brunswick at Davos where we targeted people actually at Davos and put sponsored content in front of them. In those two days we reached more new CEOs for less money than any other campaign we did. It cost us under $500.

Which brings us to content and campaigns. Content marketing is flavour of the month at the moment. That really doesn’t mean it is suitable in all circumstances. Sometimes – like when you are promoting visitor tickets to an exhibition you can just tell them what they’ll get and why it is worth the train fare or the parking to get it. You don’t have to entice them with other sweeties along the way. That said, if you are tempted to do content marketing, be sure to think carefully where you are simply joining the conversation in order to become part of a community, where you are really adding to it and where you own it because you have genuinely brought something new to it.

I sometimes think marketers have latched on to content marketing because it seems a lot easier to do then to write hard hitting copy. Ask somebody to read something, join in a conversation, look at some lovely pictures of celebrities in gorgeous clothes, you don’t have to slave over copy the way that you do when you want someone to act in a way that involves handing over hard cold cash. David Ogilvy famously said that copywriting is selling with a typewriter. So, whether you are reviewing it or writing it yourself, here are 10 things to remember:

Know your audience
Nail the fear / greed
Use words that sell
Keep to the WSJ rules
Remember the journalists’ friends

  • Who
  • What
  • Why
  • How
  • When
  • #
  • ?

Think FAB (Feature, Advantage, Benefit)
Specificity sells
Make it all about the right me
Remember no one cares that you are proud or delighted
Take time over it
Be a ruthless editor

And if you are going to personalise your emails or your leaflets, do it right. Remember the famous Labour election piece that read Dear First Name? Don’t personalise gratuitously and do always have another set of eyes proof read anything before it goes out.

One of the many things that I love about marketing is that you can measure exactly how well something is working. You can test whether one thing works better than another and you can change as you go along. Most social media marketing services even do it for you. Any marketing automation system or half way decent email provider will let you set up splits and resend the email to the underperforming split with for instance a new header.

In today’s world, you need someone to work for you who is all over this. Don’t worry if they are a digital native. Worry that they are super high energy, deeply curious, because it is all changing so fast. They don’t have to be Picasso and have deep technical expertise and creative genius but they do need to love both bits (or you need to have a team made up of some techies, some analysts, some project managers and some creatives). And they must be passionate because they are the custodian of your dreams. Or more prosaically, your share price.

 

Creative Accountability

In a speech first given at the TexPrint1 annual dinner for its board, supporters and luminaries, Susanna Kempe argues that boards should be run by creatives, not accountants, and for that to happen, we, the creatives, must finally, fully and unequivocally, reject the false opposition between creativity and commercialism.

Thanks for the introduction and for inviting me to speak. I am delighted to be here.

When Barbara* asked me to speak she said just talk about something that you are passionate about. Fortunately she also mentioned insight, marketing, and is there any point to the runways in today’s digital, super-fast fashion world, which was a helpful nudge away from the other things that I am passionate about:  The Artesian bar at Langham’s, Preen, Homeland, Net a Porter, Daniel Craig….

To have businesses run by creatives not accountants

Instead, I am going to ask you to join a crusade which I am equally passionate about that is perhaps a tad more realistic than having cocktails with Daniel Craig at the Langham) and that is to have businesses run by creatives, not accountants, And to do that by final, fully, and unequivocally rejecting the false opposition between creativity and commercialism.

Because it is a nonsense.

In every creative discipline we are more successful when we:

  • Have clarity of purpose and vision
  • Know best practise rules
  • Execute with discipline
  • Measure the results

Let’s take cake baking:

  • Purpose + vision – a pirate birthday cake
  • Rules – a recipe
  • Discipline of execution – all the ingredients, an eyepatch (not a tutu)
  • Measurement – does it taste yummy and look like a pirate.

This doesn’t limit the creativity: you can substitute one ingredient for another (but you need to have an idea of what the original ones were), you can have a treasure trove of jewels made of crystallised sugars or a parrot of multi-coloured icing or a whole network of islands and seas in green and blue within the sponge. What you cannot have is a box of cereal.

Great art, dance and music all start with a vision, have agreed rules (which get re-written as purpose and visions change), discipline of execution and measures of success.

Why would the business world be any different?

Effective creativity surely follows the same format of purpose, best practise, disciplined execution and measures of success. By definition, these will be commercial. There is no conflict. It is a symbiotic relationship.

Design, VM and Marketing must all combine imagination and discipline, art and science to a measurable end goal.

Let’s take marketing, because it is most entrenched in my DNA.

I sat in a Chief Marketing Officers breakfast meeting recently where the CMO of a bank had the sheer audacity to say it wasn’t realistic to expect marketers to be both numbers driven (to understand data) and creative. As if somehow in our rarefied world, we couldn’t possibly be both. The CMO of a large financial services company then went on to say that he created spurious KPIs for his board which he paid no attention to. Half the room laughed uproariously. It probably wasn’t the politest question I’ve ever asked when I queried what kind of a message he thought it gave his staff about integrity. Seriously though, if as a marketer, he couldn’t define the objectives he was trying to achieve and the key performance indicators which would tell him how he was doing against them, what on earth was the point of him? In retrospect I think I was quite polite not to mention that.

Being creative is not an excuse for lack of measurement or accountability. There has to be an objective a purpose and we have to be able to say how did we do against that. We have to know what good looks like and what are the rules that makes good most likely to happen.

A child knows this. When a child draws a picture they know who it is for, Mummy, Daddy, Auntie; they know what it is for, Birthday, Mother’s Day, to say Welcome, Thank you or I love you. They know what the rules are: even when they are tiny, that colouring in the lines are good. That they should choose a picture and colours that you will like.  I am always struck how quickly children start writing my name in purple when they realise it is my favourite colour (I have 7 godchildren and 6 nephews and a niece – I get a lot of drawings) and then remember that.  Because they know it produces the desired response.

Yet it took Cannes, the Festival of Creativity, over 50 years to introduce an effectiveness award and even then, it has all sorts of caveats around it.  Don’t blame the Cannes team, they are masters at meeting the industry where it is. It is almost as if we are afraid to stand up and be counted for what we do.

Yet creativity in isolation is at best self-indulgent and at worst dreadfully wasteful and downright damaging.

If we as creatives don’t own accountability, creativity becomes woolly and a matter of opinion. I find it infuriating when accountants, sales staff and editors expressing uniformed opinions about marketing campaigns. I don’t express an opinion about the balance sheet –  I question within given rule sets. I don’t express an opinion about sales because either the pipeline is the right shape and the numbers are being hit or they aren’t and I don’t express an opinion about the editorial because it either meets the style guidelines, is newsworthy and people are reading it or it doesn’t, isn’t and they aren’t. There is no room for lay opinions because the rules are clearly expressed.

Marketing in all its facets needs both the genius of art and the methodology of science. The wonderful Beatrice Warde, the typographer from whose fabulous This is a Printing Office, Flying Trumpets is named, wrote “vulgar ostentation is easier than discipline” – she was talking about fonts but I believe it is true of most things. It is easy to create a screamingly noticeable piece of collateral, but if it is illegible (body copy in 10 point font, reversed out on black is not cool, it is just illegible) and doesn’t sell, then it has failed. It is easy to pay a fortune to a celebrity to endorse your product, but if the brand match isn’t there, or you are looking to drive footfall and it doesn’t, then even if the PR value was through the proof, you have failed.

Neil Rackham, multi-millionaire author of SPIN selling likes to say that process allows mere mortals to behave like rock stars. In a world of creativity, I think that data and best practice discipline allows us to be scalable and credible and bold.

It doesn’t stifle creativity, rather it unleashes it. When you know what the rules are you can choose which ones to break to create a new world order. And you can quickly work out how to exploit that. And when.  Whether you want to be the first to create a digital front row to the catwalks. Or the last. Or be the Steve Jobs, and be second to market, when you have taken someone else’s idea and finessed it until it becomes totally desirable.

Innovation supported by insight trounces all dreary market research because it marries facts with vision. Henry Ford knew that a car would be a better idea not because he asked his customers about it but because he knew that they wanted to go faster. So he enabled that.

Creativity supported by analysis, means that if you are ASOS, you can optimise your marketing campaigns, you can measure which customer groups respond to your different promotions. You don’t have to alternate free delivery and product led offers, you can test which one works for whom.  And you can test the subject header and the from line and the length of the copy and where to place the links. If you are Whistles, you can measure whether your Grazia coupon outperformed your billboard spend and change your marketing mix accordingly.

Which is another way of saying that marketing needs both the art and the science. In a slightly greedy way, I like to think of it in terms of ice-cream cones: you need the cone to support the yummy ice-cream, otherwise you just have a gooey mess.

When we own CREATIVE ACCOUNTABILITY we quash wittering opinions.

Creativity needs to align to strategy and to results. Demonstrably so. If we can’t behave as grown- ups, that know those things, why should we sit at the grown ups’ table?

And we so need to be there.  For businesses to thrive they need to be led by people who get brand. Because it is everywhere. From tax havens to remuneration, what businesses do affects the brand. Not just of the business but of the executives and non-executives associated with it. The VP Marketing at a global investment bank which has become the poster child for excess told me that she had a $60m dollar budget for improving the brand image. It would be fair to say that’s not delivering a great ROI at the moment. And it won’t, until the senior team actually think beyond allocating a big fat line item into the budget and patting themselves on the head that they are doing something about the problem. Spend is not an objective. Measuring spend is not what marketing measurement is about either. It is only one data point. Be very worried about any businesses whose marketers proudly tell you they came in under budgeted spend and think that’s good.

Businesses need people who get digital. One of my favourite [name of a well-known now retired CEO of a high street retailer] stories is that after listening to a whole presentation about their social media approach asked “where is the book kept?”.  I am sure he was joking but the woman who told me the story and who had to explain to him that Facebook was not a physical book was really not 100% sure.

The world is changing at speed. David Gilbertson, former CEO of Informa and Emap, Author of Wine Bar Theory, likes to say if you are aiming to stand still when the rest of the world is moving around you, you are going backwards. Too often, financiers, lawyers and MBA theorists live in a world of looking backwards, analysing the past. It takes guts to look forwards and do something about it. To be the first one to say we’ll change the way the world works because it is changing anyway and we can cry about it or we can own the change. We’ll make everyone able to sit in the front row – because we’ll stream the runways live. We’ll offer free returns; we’ll ship internationally; we’ll pay our advertising agency on results.

Yet, of all C-suite job functions, the CMO and the CCO who live and breathe innovation are some of the most under represented on boards, and as springboards to becoming CEO. The Chief Creative Officer doesn’t even have ownership of its CCO title: as well as chief creative officers there are also now Chief Commercial Officers and my personal bête noir: Chief Customer Officers.  What kind of CMO or CCO doesn’t know its customers inside out? Doesn’t understand who they are, what they value, what will make them loyal to us, recommend us and trust us with their money?

The most likely prior role to becoming a CEO or non-exec director, is a Finance Director. Really? As my old boss Irvine Laidlaw, now the Lord Laidlaw of Rothiemay who retired with $1.4billion when we sold his company so probably worth listening to, used to say, you want the FD to count the beans, why would you ever think about putting him in charge of growing them? This is not about FD bashing I hasten to add. My late husband was a FD; brilliantly smart, hugely effective and without an innovative bone in his body.

Private Equity partners today, who sit on the boards of the retailers they have acquired, have rarely actually worked in a business that creates anything – if they have worked at all, post their MBA, it is at a consultancy preparing reams of PowerPoint slides full of four box models.

My favourite hideous moment (and there were a few) presenting to private equity was when I was asking for funding for a new digital product. The plan was to use the power of our two leading brands to create a third, new brand, to own an entire, undeveloped market space.

I had worked out who would buy it, at what price, when we would get payback on our investment, I had customers lined up to take the prototype etc. etc. the Chair asked me who had done it before that they could look at. I explained that the beauty of this was that no one had, we would have this space all to ourselves. We then had a very long debate which boiled down to the non-execs demanding case studies and “proof” that it would work because someone else had already done it and my becoming increasingly incensed that they couldn’t grasp the simple concept that since this was new I couldn’t provide that. The part that I can now see clearly is that they thought I was being as spectacularly dense as I was convinced they were. Their whole experience was in modelling case studies and looking at past data. They simply couldn’t imagine a scenario which required a new model and a new data set1.

When these sorts of people set the strategy it creates a world of timid homogeneity.

Years ago, when you walked down the stairs into Smollensky’s on the Strand, the first thing you saw was a big sign saying “life is short and uncertain, eat dessert first”.  I was thinking about that, on mothering Sunday, because it was one of my mother’s favourite sayings, and not only did she like it but she lived it. Happily ordering ice-cream or chocolate cake as a starter in five star restaurants and cafés the world over.  Sometimes it is not such a big risk to turn the world order.  To let business be run by creatives not accountants. To demand metrics with our marketing. To marry the creative and the commercial. I urge you to give it a go.

*Barbara Kennington, Honorary Chairman, Texprint

Footnote 1: I have since worked with truly brilliant PE partners who roared with laughter at this story