What Do Strategic Marketers Do?

An entrepreneur I met at an event recently asked me "what do strategic marketers do". Now I realise a deceptively simple question like this deserves an equally straightforward answer, but later on it struck me how much the marketing world has changed over the last 20 years.

Twenty years ago you could credibly get away with saying something like "advertising" or "promotions". But today, organisations require so much more from their marketing departments - using such one-dimensional labels seems completely absurd.


The Textbook Response for a Knowledgeable Audience
The textbook response might have gone something along the lines of "the strategic marketer’s main responsibility is to identify consumers needs and influence the organisations ability to satisfy them". So their main function is to inform the company's mission, objectives and strategy by giving a voice to customers in the annual planning process, and promoting a market (or better, customer) orientation within the business.

But strategic marketers also co-ordinate and communicate the company's brand image, by attempting to develop a constellation of values and associations around their company's brand. They also gather customer, market and competitor intelligence to assist senior management in identifying attractive, profitable market opportunities. And they assess the organisation’s potential to take advantage of those opportunities.


The Strategic Response for Senior Managers
But there is an even more sophisticated view which takes strategic marketing management as its starting point and looks at the choices and decision systems that support senior management teams in realising their business goals. The main elements of these are:

1. Precipitating the consideration of strategic choices.
   What is happening externally that is creating opportunities and threats to which a timely reaction is necessary ? What strategic issues face the firm ? What options should be considered?


2. Forcing a long range view.
   The pressures to manage with a short-term focus are strong and may lead to errors.


3. Making resource allocation decisions visible.
   It is too dangerous to allow allocation of resources to be dictated by accounting systems, political strengths or inertia.


4. Aiding strategic analysis and decision making.
   Concepts, models and methodologies are available to help the business collect, analyse and address difficult strategic decisions


5. Providing a strategic management and control system.
   The focus on assets and competencies and the development of strategic thrusts provide the basis for managing a business strategically.


6. Enabling horizontal and vertical communication and co-ordination systems.
   Marketing provides a way to communicate problems and proposed strategies within the organisation. Its vocabulary adds precision.


7. Helping the business cope with change.
   Organisations operate in a rapidly changing and increasingly unpredictable environment and need approaches for coping strategically.

If you need any help or advice putting strategic marketing management into action, call us on 07867 543 296 or email us at by clicking here, we'd be happy to talk through the strategic challenges your company faces.

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7 Signs Your Strategy Lacks Clarity

Strategic clarity is essential if an organisation is to use its resources wisely to drive superior performance, with higher revenues and profits and a happier workforce the principal beneficiaries.

Below are 7 indicators which suggest a strategy is lacking a clear sense of purpose. How many of these affect you, or the people around you?

1. Priorities and goals seem to jump around at a moment’s notice
2. Urgency wins over importance
3. Many cannot confidently articulate their top priorities, let alone those of the company
4. The tail is wagging the dog; new ideas and events derail current plans
5. Cynicism and resignation are more common than enthusiasm
6. There are too many priorities (which means there really are no priorities)
7. The organisation invests significant time and money in projects that produce little in the way of tangible results

If you see any of these signs, either your company’s strategic direction is too fuzzy, fleeting, unstable or broad. Or your organisation has not translated it sufficiently to obtain useful guidance from it. Either way, the organisation is under-prepared to make wise investment decisions.

If you need any help clarifying your strategic priorities, or support in communicating your strategy to customers and employees, give us a call on 07867 543 296 or email us by clicking here.

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Sometimes Managers Just Need a Little Outside Help

We know we want leaders who are smart, decisive, transformative, and possessed of a singular vision. But there’s an often-overlooked factor that can make the difference between success and failure: a leader’s ability to go far outside the organization - mobilizing networks of critical expertise - to get help in solving problems</ p>
Outside the organization? Why would the MD of a company with strong capabilities need to look elsewhere for assistance? If outside help is truly needed, doesn’t that say something pretty negative about the MD’s own staff and existing supply chain?</ p>
The reality today is that businesses, governments, and non-profits are so complex and often must move so quickly that in many cases, finding answers to difficult questions requires tapping experts, service providers, and innovators scattered all over the world.</ p>
As Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems, pointed out years ago, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people don’t work for you.”</ p>
Malaysian authorities’ initial failure to track and recover Flight 370 shows how a lack of outside help can impede solutions during a crisis. National and airline leaders weren’t able to adjust to the fluid and complex situation by engaging external resources in the critical first hours and days after the plane’s disappearance. Collaboration and co-ordination eventually improved, but still faltered at times.</ p>
By contrast, consider the 2010 Chilean mining disaster, which resulted in the triumphant rescue of 33 miners trapped underground. Chilean president Sebastian Piñera immediately and effectively mobilized not just the critical government ministries and industry executives but also a variety of outside experts across the globe - from an Australian mapping software company to UPS. At the mine site, project leader André Sougarret sought assistance while managing the boundaries of the rescue effort to screen out contributors who lacked expertise or workable proposals. Together the officials and engineers overcame unprecedented technical challenges and brought about a rescue that most observers hardly thought possible.</ p>
A growing number of organizations now routinely draw on timely assistance beyond their own boundaries to pursue innovation, solve business or social problems, or expand ventures.</ p>
These initiatives are quite different from MD's typical outreach to various stakeholders, people who are already invested in or connected with the company. Sometimes the experts are freelancers or employees in other businesses; sometimes they’re in governments, NGOs, or academia. If the challenge at hand is industry-wide, they might even be competitors. As a result, today’s leaders need to be good at building connections with a variety of outsiders beyond the usual value chains.</ p>
But making contacts is just the first, and often the least important, step in tapping experts. In my observations over the past several years, I’ve seen that effective MD's don’t just sign up contractors; they lead in a way that mobilizes a network. They create energy, a sense of purpose, and even something of a community among people over whom they have no control. These groups of experts blur the distinctions between insiders and outsiders. How do they do it?</ p>


Greater humility</ p>
It often starts with greater humility. Compared with internally focused leaders, mobilizers simply have to be more humble. Even paid outsiders usually have plenty of other projects to work on, so mobilizers can’t just issue demands. They need to show much more respect and at times even deference toward these outsiders. But they can’t be shrinking violets either; they must have a confident, positive outlook and provide a strong sense of purpose and direction. Take NASA’s Mike Ryschkewitsch, who headed NASA’s Flight Readiness Review for Space Shuttle missions. He had the critical but delicate leadership role of facilitating networks of internal and external technicians, specialists, and managers to address final technical problems and approve launches in the wake of the Columbia disaster in 2003. An accomplished NASA leader, he gained the respect of all constituencies by deferring to superior expertise in the room (but he also moved decisively to close off debate when he sensed the collective was ready for a decision).</ p>


More Imaginative </ p>
This humility often leads mobilizers to be more imaginative about what’s possible, and who can help. During the Chilean mine rescue, a key breakthrough came from a 24-year-old field engineer who showed up at the site on his own. To take a corporate example, Alan Mulally’s pioneering transformation of the fortress-like Ford organization was fuelled in part collaborating with outsiders, seeking insights from regulators, investment bankers, and consumer automotive researchers, as well as major customers and car dealers. The overhaul even benefited from occasional conversations with Mulally’s counterpart at General Motors.</ p>


Networks of networks</ p>
Finally, they tend to have an eye for networks of networks. Like good chess players, mobilizers think a few moves ahead. That means not just identifying network contributors who might help a project, but also looking to see what networks each network might bring along.</ p>
The importance of these skills in recruiting outsiders and keeping them engaged will become increasingly critical in organizations as advancing technology makes business ever more complex, global, and interdependent.</ p>
If you could do with some outside help, just click this link here and get in contact with us at Lucidity London.</ p>

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Marketing Tips for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners for 2019

If you’re a small or medium-sized business, you don’t have the money to waste on large-scale marketing programmes like your bigger competitors. Neither will you have time to waste on the kind of activities vigourously promoted by hype communities on the web. No, to compete on the same level as larger rivals but on a smaller budget, you have to be smarter with your marketing.
Whatever programmes you put in place, we'd recommend you consider the following:



1. Consistency
Consistency is the most important concept when marketing a small and medium sized enterprise (SME), mainly because it is ignored by so many businesses. I’ve worked with clients, big and small, that are extremely inconsistent in all areas of marketing. Consistency helps lower the cost of marketing and increases the effectiveness of branding.

2. Planning
Once SME’s have committed to consistency in their marketing, the next major concept is planning. Planning is the most vital part of marketing, and many SME owners and marketing managers plan poorly. Put the time into planning your marketing strategy, budget, and other concepts presented here to ensure success.

3. Strategy
Strategy immediately follows planning because your strategy is the foundation for the rest of your marketing activities. Marketing strategy is the process by which SME’s concentrate their resources on the greatest opportunities to increase sales and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. In the planning process, you must develop your strategy: who you will target, how you will target them, and how will you keep them as a customer.

4. Target Market
Target market is also another key concept for SME’s. Defining exactly who you are targeting allows owners and managers to focus scarce resources on specific customer groups and reduce marketing waste. A well-defined target market will make every other marketing concept much easier to implement successfully.

5. Budget
Although listed at number 5, budgeting is important throughout the entire process. Creating a marketing budget is often the hardest and most inaccurate part of marketing for an SME. Most lack experience in marketing, so their budgets often end up skewed. The most important part of this concept is to actually establish a marketing budget - then you can worry about how to distribute your funds. A useful rule of thumb for established businesses is to dedicate between 3-5% of revenues to marketing, however this depends to a large extent on your marketing objectives.

6. Marketing Mix
The marketing mix (also known as the 4 P’s) is defined as product, price, place, and promotion. As an owner or marketer of an SME, you must specifically decide on the products (or services) you will be offering to the market, the appropriate pricing, where and how you will distribute your products, and how will you let everyone know about you and your products.

7. Website
Today, all businesses must have a website which is also accessible on mobile devices regardless of size. Not just a one page website with out-of-date information. Customers, be they business or consumer, frequently search the web for information before making purchasing decisions. This concept contains a myriad of additional components but, at the very least, you must develop a web presence of some kind and keep it updated.

8. Branding
Many SME’s neglect this concept. People responsible for marketing must focus on this concept just as much as large organisations do. Branding consists of the pictures, logo, visual design, layout, make up, and image of your company and its product/service range. Branding is how your customers perceive (‘perception is reality’) your products and company. Make sure to pay special attention to what kind of brand you are building through each step in planning and implementation.

9. Promotion and Advertising
Promotion and advertising can be a complex marketing concept, but must be considered for any type of business and its products and services. Once you’ve engaged the previous 8 marketing concepts, you must let your target market know about your business and your products. Proper promotion and advertising will result in effective brand recognition, and, ultimately, increased sales.

10. Customer Relationship Management
The concept of customer relationship management has become a huge industry in the marketing world. There are many types of software and services offered to help businesses of any size handle their customer relationship management. Since there is so much available, usually for a large sum of money, SME’s usually look at this concept as something they are not big enough for or have enough money to implement. Don’t be fooled by the massive industry that has evolved from this concept. Maintaining proper customer relationships is essential to creating loyal customers.

If you need help in any of these areas, or simply want to talk to an expert about the best way to deal with a marketing or customer problem you routinely experience, call us on 0208 241 3730 or drop us an email by clicking here

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Why You Should Consider Outsourcing Your Marketing for 2019

Most companies have been outsourcing a portion of their marketing function for many years - advertising.

But increasingly, expertise in marketing lies outside the walls of the traditional firm. In research, strategy optimization, multi-channel digital development, customer management and many more disciplines, project work is outsourced to experts. And that’s why more and more companies are turning to marketing partners like Lucidity London.

When we’re asked “when should I outsource my marketing?” our response is clear and simple: when it’s not a core competency.

Of course, it’s often a more complicated decision than that. But in our experience of working with clients over the past 10 years, the main reasons which prompt our clients to work with us include:

#	Reason	Scenarios Given
1	Access to expertise	gain access to the expertise and skills needed to perform key marketing tasks, and hook up with talent that may not be attracted working in-house
2	Expert point of view	get unbiased insights and a fresh perspective on the development of a realistic but high performing marketing strategy, and then implement it
3	Safe pair of hands	experienced, qualified project management with links to high quality suppliers e.g. researchers, web designers, photographers, printers and event organisers
4	Up-to-date tools	modern tools and techniques for defining the marketing strategy, reaching the target market and meeting objectives
5	Release time	tick marketing details off the to-do list, reduce time consuming liaison between suppliers and free up precious management time
6	Increase flexibility	options for support in executing a one-off project or for two days a week implementing the marketing strategy
7	Keep costs down	marketing expertise without the commitment and cost of employing full-time employees while maintaining high standards of execution
8	Bring new ideas and thinking	develop new services and campaigns required to get, keep and grow customers
9	Mentoring and training	provide direction to an inexperienced employee, junior marketing team or executive team on an specific topic e.g. multi-channel retail
10	Boost quality	improve the quality of marketing as the business grows while professionalizing the marketing competency

 

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Extraordinary Bosses and their Core Beliefs

I’ve been working with a new client recently and I couldn’t help notice how, compared to the average boss, their management style was so extraordinarily effective.

It got me thinking about all the different traits that my more ‘successful’ managers had demonstrated over the years, and what I could learn from them. When I boiled it all down, I found that the best managers have a fundamentally different understanding of the workplace, company and team dynamics and they tend towards the following eight core beliefs:


1. Business is an ecosystem, not a battlefield

Average bosses see business as a conflict between companies, departments and groups. They build huge armies of "troops" to order about, demonize competitors as "enemies," and treat customers as "territory" to be conquered.

Extraordinary bosses see business as a symbiosis where the most diverse firm is most likely to survive and thrive. They naturally create teams that adapt easily and can quickly form partnerships with other companies, customers ... and even competitors.


2. A company is a community, not a machine

Average bosses consider their company to be a machine with employees as cogs. They create rigid structures with rigid rules and then try to maintain control by "pulling levers" and "steering the ship."

Extraordinary bosses see their company as a collection of individual hopes and dreams, all connected to a higher purpose. They inspire employees to dedicate themselves to the success of their peers and therefore to the community - and company - at large.


3. Management is service, not control

Average bosses want employees to do exactly what they're told. They're hyper-aware of anything that smacks of insubordination and create environments where individual initiative is squelched by the "wait and see what the boss says" mentality.

Extraordinary bosses set a general direction and then commit themselves to obtaining the resources that their employees need to get the job done. They push decision making downward, allowing teams to form their own rules and intervening only in emergencies.


4. My employees are my peers, not my children

Average bosses see employees as inferior, immature beings who simply can't be trusted if not overseen by a patriarchal management. Employees take their cues from this attitude, expend energy on looking busy and covering their behinds.

Extraordinary bosses treat every employee as if he or she were the most important person in the firm. Excellence is expected everywhere, from the loading bay to the boardroom. As a result, employees at all levels take charge of their own destinies.


5. Motivation comes from vision, not from fear

Average bosses see fear - of getting fired, of ridicule, of loss of privilege - as a crucial way to motivate people. As a result, employees and managers become paralyzed and unable to make risky decisions.

Extraordinary bosses inspire people to see a better future and how they'll be a part of it. As a result, employees work harder because they believe in the organisation's goals, truly enjoy what they're doing and know that they'll share in the rewards.


6. Change equals growth, not pain

Average bosses see change as both complicated and threatening, something to be endured only when a firm is in desperate shape. They subconsciously torpedo change ... until it's too late.

Extraordinary bosses see change as an inevitable part of life. While they don't value change for its own sake, they know that success is only possible if employees and organization embrace new ideas and new ways of doing business.


7. Technology offers empowerment, not automation

Average bosses adhere to the old IT-centric view that technology is a way to strengthen management control and increase predictability. They install centralized computer systems that dehumanize and antagonize employees.

Extraordinary bosses see technology as a way to free human beings to be creative and to build better relationships. They adapt their back-office systems to the tools, like smartphones and tablets, which people actually want to use.


8. Work should be fun, not mere toil

Average bosses buy into the notion that work is, at best, a necessary evil. They fully expect employees to resent having to work, and therefore tend to subconsciously define themselves as oppressors and their employees as victims. Everyone then behaves accordingly.

Extraordinary bosses see work as something that should be inherently enjoyable–and believe therefore that the most important job of manager is, as far as possible, to put people in jobs that can and will make them truly happy.


If you're lucky enough to have a boss that shares these core beliefs, stick around you'll learn loads.

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Uh-oh, Budget-Setting Time's Coming !

Some marketers let their finance people set their budget and faff about with tactical stuff until mid-September, when they are issued with the expectations for 2015.
So, for example, the head of finance might instruct their marketers that next year they're expected to grow top-line revenues by 7% and achieve sales of £8m. They are also told that their marketing budget for the year ahead will be £320k based on the 4% advertising-to-sales ratios that the company uses to derive marketing budgets.
It can look deceptively logical until you look at where these numbers come from. As one of my favourite clients likes to put it – they all derive from the SOOMA Database – SOOMA standing for Straight Out Of My Arse.
The 7 per cent growth rate isn’t based on strategy or research. It comes from arbitrary growth expectations that your board or global team have applied to your business, irrespective of the fact that they have seen no data and probably not even visited your market in years.
The 4 per cent ratio of revenue to marketing spend is doubly stupid. First, because it is another completely arbitrary number (why not 10 per cent, or 2 per cent?) that senior managers deem acceptable. Second, because this ratio is applied after the £8m revenue expectation has already been set, it is clearly derived from a belief that marketing is not an investment that can increase revenues but rather a cost that we must pay each year, irrespective of sales.
The serious point about all this is that when a company sets a budget for 2015 this way, all strategy dies. Any serious marketer will realise that if the numbers and the investment levels are already in place long before they have even looked at research or strategy for the year ahead, he or she is literally pointless. The joke is on any and every marketer that accepts these bullshit budgets and works within their parameters for a whole year of their life.
It does not have to be this way. The smart way to build a marketing budget does not start top-down with the senior finance team but rather begins bottom-up with the marketing department.
The financial plan for a calendar year will always be set between September and October, so it’s crucial that marketers don’t wait for a moronic number but rather start working on their proposed 2015 strategy now.
That might sound early, because it is. But if you don’t get the strategy in before the budgets are set in September, you will be lost in stupid-land like everybody else.
A smart marketer collects research in July and August. They build and populate their segmentation. They decide on their targets for 2015 and then, crucially, decide on their objectives for each segment. Here you will note that I am not talking about the flaccid, open-ended objectives that populate most firms. You know the type – “Improve brand sentiment among young adults”. I am talking about SMART objectives you can hang your hat on and pay bonuses on – “Increase brand preference among the ‘Out to Lunch’ segment from 29 per cent to 65 per cent by 1 December 2015”.
Once you set a real objective, you can work out what it’s worth. Annualise the figure for 2015 and go and brief your agencies. Share the objectives with them and ask them to come back with tactics and associated costs. Put all that together and you have a bottom-up, strategic budget to propose to top management. You can propose how much money you need and how much money you can generate in the year ahead.
Or you can sit about monitoring how many followers you have on Twitter for another four months until some guy from finance looks at a line chart for 10 minutes and tells you what to achieve.
If you need any help or advice getting your marketing budget straight for your next meeting with the FD, give us a call on 0208 241 3730 or email us at info@luciditylondon.com

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The No 1 Reason Talented Young Employees Quit Their Jobs

The biggest reason young, talented workers leave for new jobs? They’re not learning enough.

Employers often complain that their young workers jump ship quickly. A study published this summer in the Harvard Business Review confirmed that young top performers - the workers that organizations would most like to stick around - are leaving in droves.

Researchers found that high achievers, who are 30 years old on average with great school and work credentials, are leaving their employers after an average of 28 months. Furthermore, three-quarters admit to sending out CV’s, contacting recruitment firms and interviewing for jobs at least once a year during their first employment. And 95% said they regularly watch for potential employers.

Multiple studies find that today’s younger workers have absolutely no intention of sticking around if they don’t feel like they’re learning, growing and being valued. Beth Carver, a consultant who has 12 years’ experience researching exit interviews, finds that a loss of training opportunities and a lack of mentors in the workplace are two of the biggest reasons why young workers leave.

“Companies need to recognize that young workers are very mobile,” Carver said. “They have to understand that they want a personal and clearly articulated career path." With their social media skills and easy access to job postings on the internet, they don’t have to work hard at all to find new opportunities. Carver said. “Sometimes changing jobs is about money,” her exit interview research reveals. ‘Sometimes it’s because the job isn’t what they thought it was going to be. More often, they weren’t getting the personal attention, the mentoring, the coaching and the training they wanted.”

Learning new skills is what people want and expect from work these days, and employers who would like to hire and retain the best talent would be wise to create an environment in which learning is fostered.

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How Your Business Could Be Using Social Media - But Probably Isn't

Entrepreneurs, business owners and marketers can do a lot with the social media tools that have emerged over the past 5 years. To help you get started, here's a few ideas about what you could do, with some example of exactly how some organisations are maximising the return on their effort.

How your business could use social media by Guy Steele-Perkins

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The Mark of a Great Leader

Years ago, when most organizations were based on the hierarchical business model of the Industrial Age, great leaders were those who were unemotional, rational, even mechanistic. Those days are gone. Today's leader, especially one who is in charge of a dynamic, global organization, finds himself or herself in desperate need of one key trait — self-awareness.

An organization's success today depends on such a variety of talents and skills that no one leader could possibly be gifted in simultaneously. There are technological issues, global issues, financial issues, human resource issues, leadership issues, employee issues, legal issues, and more. A leader who is self-aware enough to know that he or she is not adept at everything is one who has taken the first step toward being a great leader.

This sort of personal mastery entails having a heightened understanding of one's own behavior, motivators, and competencies — and having "emotional intelligence" — to monitor and manage one's emotional responses in a variety of situations. This variety of situations is not limited to the home office, or the boardroom. It is of a global nature, across cultures which are very different and can be difficult to navigate, especially for those who are not comfortable, knowledgeable, or willing to admit their individual strengths and weaknesses. Everyone has a shortcoming or two — leaders who are willing to admit these, who strive to improve, and who seek out a consulting team to fill in the gaps will 1) encourage followers to do the same and 2) make room for others whose talents lie where theirs don't.

Have you ever worked with a micro-manager? This is someone who thinks he or she needs to be involved in everything that happens within the company. These leaders are closing out the talents of others by not divesting themselves from the day-to-day problem-solving activities of the company. Great leaders let go of the day-to-day, problem-solving activities of the company. Rather, they choose to maximize strategic and relationship-building efforts. These contribute to the forward momentum of the company rather than causing a "bottleneck" at the leader's desk. No one person should do it all — and if they are self-aware, most people will realize that they really aren't capable nor knowledgeable enough to do it all.

Do you recognize the difference between what you need to do versus what you should pass along to your team? Does your boss?

Following is a short list of things you can do to achieve self-awareness and personal mastery in leadership.

- Monitor your performance. Note areas in which you excel and need improvement. Communicate these to your team.
- Realize that failures and mistakes are just one step on the road to success.
- Recognize that being aware of the impact that your behavior has on other people is a critical leadership skill.
- Remember that when criticism is difficult to accept, there is probably some truth to it.
- And, finally, learn to give yourself and others credit for improving.

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How it Works: Building Strategic Alliances

A strategic alliance is a relationship between two or more organisations that falls somewhere between the extremes of an arm’s-length sourcing arrangement on the one hand, and a full-blown acquisition on the other. It embraces things such as franchising, licensing and joint ventures.

Booz Allen & Hamilton, a firm of management consultants and an acknowledged expert in the field, defines a strategic alliance as:
A cooperative arrangement between two or more companies in which:
• a common strategy is developed in unison and a win-win attitude is adopted by all parties;
• the relationship is reciprocal, with each partner prepared to share specific strengths with the other, thus lending power to the enterprise;
• a pooling of resources, investment and risks occurs for mutual gain.

In general, there are two types of strategic alliance: a bilateral alliance (between two organisations) and a network alliance (between several organisations). The alliance between Royal Bank of Scotland and Tesco, whereby the British supermarket chain provided the Scottish bank’s services throughout its stores, is an example of the former; the Airbus consortium and the Visa card network are examples of the latter.

Strategic alliances have many advantages: they require little immediate financial commitment; they allow companies to put their toes into new markets before they get soaked; and they offer a quiet retreat should a venture not work out as the partners had hoped. However, going into something knowing that it is (literally) not a big deal, and that there is a face-saving exit route, may not be the best way to make those charged with running it hungry for success.

The most popular use for alliances is as a means to try out a foreign market. Not surprisingly, therefore, there are more alliances in Europe and Asia (where there are more foreign markets nearby) than in the United States. In some cases, alliances are used by companies because other means of entering a market are closed to them. Hence there have been many in the airline industry, where governments are sensitive about domestic carriers falling into foreign hands.

One thing crucial to a successful alliance is a degree of cultural compatibility. Companies are advised, for example, to pick on someone their own size. Alliances between the very big and the very small are hard to operate not least because of the different significance that the alliance assumes in each organisation’s scale of things.

Alliances are often said to be like marriages. The partners have to understand each other’s expectations, be sensitive to each other’s changes of mood and not be too surprised if their partnership ends in divorce. Indeed, many companies build into their alliances a sort of prenuptial contract, an agreement as to what is to happen to their joint property in the event of a subsequent divorce.

Strategic alliances grew at a phenomenal rate in the 1990s. Some companies, such as General Electric and AT&T, set up several hundred. On one estimate, IBM cemented almost 1,000 strategic alliances during the decade. Booz Allen & Hamilton reckons that more than 20,000 were formed worldwide in the period 1996–98. Accenture says that Fortune 500 companies have an average of 50–70 alliances each.

Alliances have not always been successful. In 1998 BT and AT&T agreed to bundle their international assets into a single joint venture that started off with annual revenues of $11 billion, annual operating profits of $1 billion and some 5,000 employees. In 2001 the two companies agreed to unwind the alliance—at considerable cost.

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The No 1 Enemy of Creativity: Fear of Failure

Never once in my life until my mid 30s did anyone ever (to the best of my recollection) call me "creative." But now, I hear it all the time.

So what happened?

Well, after a traditional education, business school, and nearly ten years working as a marketing consultant, I've only just discovered the basic methods used by designers for thinking (strange as we live in a world where the leading company, Apple, has a culture built around design thinking).

For me, the most important insight from design thinking is that you have to make sure you've defined the right problem before you try to solve it. So, you act like an anthropologist to understand human needs and problems before jumping to solutions. Most of us in business, if we need to discover how to do something new, use PowerPoint or Excel spreadsheets to rationalize our approach. This is what some call "the illusion of rationality." Whether motivated by a lack of insight arrogance, or stupidity, the illusion of rationality is a waste of time and resources - yet one that keeps a lot of people employed in management consulting, as I learned first hand.

Instead, if you don't have the data, you have to create the data. That does not mean plugging random numbers into your spreadsheet. It means generating real insight, from nothing. Designers and bootstrapped entrepreneurs I've worked with use rapid low cost experiments to create data. These are ‘affordable losses’ in the interest of learning, creativity, and discovery as ‘little bets’.

This seems like common sense; so why is it so hard? Three words: fear of failure.

If you're an MA or MBA-trained manager or executive, the odds are you were never, at any point in your educational or professional career given permission to fail, even on a ‘little bet’. Your parents wanted you to achieve, achieve, achieve - in sports, the classroom, and work. Your teachers penalised you for having the ‘wrong’ answers, or knocked you down a grade or two if you were imperfect, according to however your adult figures defined perfection. Similarly, modern industrial management is still predicated largely on mitigating risks and preventing errors, not innovating or inventing.

But entrepreneurs and designers think of failure the way most people think of learning.

As Professor Saras Sarasvathy has shown through her research about how expert entrepreneurs make decisions, they must make lots of mistakes to discover new approaches, opportunities, or business models. She frequently refers to Howard Schultz who, when he started Il Giornale in Seattle, the company that Schultz later used to buy the original Starbucks brand and assets, the store had nonstop opera music playing, menus written in Italian, and no chairs. As Schultz has often said, "We had to make a lot of mistakes" before discovering a model that worked.

So, I ask: how do you personally define a "failure"?

If it's going bankrupt with a company you started, getting fired for doing something inconsistent with your values, or needing to break off a wedding engagement that could have been avoided if you listened to your heart originally, then, yes, that is a failure.

However, if your internalised view of failure is anything that is not perfect, then you are disempowering yourself from exercising your inherent creativity.

You're certainly not the only one shackled by these norms, and I don't blame you with the way our educational system is focused rigidly on ‘correct answers’ and standardised testing. This must change. And modern management systems must become far more adaptive.

For instance, at GE, led by Jeff Immelt and Beth Comstock, they are learning with GE's Innovation Accelerator how an organization which has long focused on Six Sigma (the antibody of innovation and entrepreneurial discovery), can help its leaders develop a discovery mindset for those situations where there are many unknowns and uncertainties.

The US Army provides a lot of insight about how a highly bureaucratic, command and control organization (the Army of the Cold War) can become more adaptive and creative (which it must when facing rapidly adaptive enemies, and when soldiers and officers can rarely predict what problems they will encounter). It starts with every individual, and unlearning many old bad habits. As Colonel Haskins, who heads up military instruction, has said, "You have to make it cool to fail." Slow as culture change may come to a behemoth like GE or the military, Comstock, Immelt, and Haskins understand the same insight.

Jeff Immelt - Chairman & CEO of General Electric

At GE, instead of focusing on completing solutions, Comstock focuses on providing tools and resources to drive a discovery mindset, to identify problems first before jumping in with solutions. And, to do so, they've got to change a bunch of internal review approaches so that it becomes cool to be imperfect and half-baked at the early stages of new projects - so long as you're learning quickly.

One little bet after the other, GE, Cisco, Procter & Gamble, General Mills and many other companies are on the path to becoming more adaptive. Amazon and Pixar are leaders already. Bill Hewlett, cofounder of Hewlett Packard, an ardent proponent of what he called "small bet" innovation, found that HP needed to make 100 small bets to find 6 breakthroughs.

Ultimately, while basic design and creative methods can be learned much like muscles, and developed and strengthened through practice, this shift in mindset requires a different kind of leadership. In my opinion, a new breed of leader is required who has developed and can use both sides of their brain - linear analysis for planning and executing when the decision-making information is known, and a discovery mindset when they must use small bets to create the data.

As the technologist Alan Kay says, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

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The Rising Importance of the Contract Worker

More and more people are choosing a contingent work style — that is, temporary work that may be project-based or time-based — over full-time or part-time work. Temporary placement service provider Adecco predicts that the rate of growth in contingent workers will be three to four times the growth rate among traditional workforces, and that they eventually will make up about 25% of the global workforce.

One reason for the increasing popularity of contingent work is involuntary: not everyone can find full-time employment. But, intriguingly, more and more people are choosing a contingent work style.

Some contingent workers say they are seeking better work/life balance; others want to create or design their own careers by choosing the kind of work or projects that create a unique set of skills, making them more desirable prospective employees. Contingent employment can expose individuals to a broad variety of challenges, demanding constant learning and new skills, which make for more interesting work.

Often, contingent workers say that their full-time employment experience convinces them to strike out on their own. Research published by Rosalind Bergemann in 2010 among workers who voluntarily chose to become independent reveals that 74% of respondents cited a lack of employer engagement as their principal reason for leaving.

New technologies and services for contingent workers make it easier and less painful to make the choice to go independent. New types of talent brokers such as YourEncore, an online network of retired scientists and engineers, or InnoCentive, which offers crowdsourcing services to companies with innovation challenges, connect free agents with project-based work in virtual marketplaces. The lack of benefits such as health and life insurance and disability benefits has been an ongoing major deterrent to contingent work, but even that situation is changing. Insurance and other benefits can be obtained from organizations at highly competitive rates.

Contingent workers can add to an organization's intellectual capacity and provide instant expertise as needed.

Going forward, employers should incorporate contingent workers into their talent strategies. Dr. Margaret Schweer at Tammy Erickson Associates, recently studied the impact of contingent workers on corporations, finding strong evidence that incorporating contingent talent offers several advantages, including:

• Cost flexibility: Not only can organizations derive a cost savings from adjusting staff sizes up and down based on business requirements, but they are also able to control the wages paid for particular tasks by using contingent talent on a project basis.
• Speed and agility: Talent needs can change on a dime. New technology or new competitors can expose talent gaps in any organization. Employing a contingent talent strategy enables a company to access the right talent to meet specific skill or competitive challenges quickly, without incurring longer-term costs or disrupting the organization. "Virtual talent" is much easier to find than it was even a few years ago, and can be brought onboard rapidly.
• A boost to innovation: Contingent talent brings in new knowledge and fresh ideas based on experiences outside of the company or even the industry. Companies that have programs or processes in place to facilitate knowledge and expertise transfer from contingent workers to full-time workers capture that knowledge on a permanent basis. If contingent workers' roles involve moving across the organization, they can also share best practices across organizational boundaries more easily than do internal employees.

To take full advantage of this emerging cadre of workers, employers will need to change the common perception of contingent workers as somehow less important, less skilled, or less committed than "permanent" employees, and must abandon the idea that contingent workers are simply an economic play. Contingent workers bring unique experiences, fresh thinking, and new approaches to problem-solving. Today, the growing contingent workforce provides opportunities for talent-hungry corporations.

Are you tapping the contingent workforce as part of your talent strategy?

Source: HBR, August 2012

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Marketing Strategies for SME’s in a Slow Economy

10 Ways to Attain, Retain or Maintain Customers


1) Think big and audit your time
No matter the size of your business, place a mental image in your mind as if you are the largest and most successful person in your industry. How much time is consumed by routine office work which someone else should be doing? Spend more time on more important tasks such as marketing strategies, improving relationships with customers, and implementing new strategies to expand your services.

2) Be different and stand out from the competition
To offer, or at least appear to offer, better products and/or services than your competitors, you need to innovate continually. So, keep your approach fresh by finding out what your customers need, and then find solutions to those problems. How do you make this happen? Talk to your existing customers. Conduct a survey of current major issues they face. This will give you a starting point around which to construct new ideas. Do this regularly and you will build up an ever-growing pool of new ideas. You’ll also stay at the cutting edge of your industry because you will be tackling current problems.

3) Build relationships with your customers
As each month goes by, you lose contact with up to 10% of your customers. Create a customer database and keep in contact with them on a regular basis. Send a postcard, a birthday card, a promotional flyer, a newsletter etc. to keep your name, phone number, and service at the top of their mind when they consider purchasing in your category.

4) Collect E-Mail Addresses
As part of your customer relationship process get permission from your customers to use their E-mail address. Periodically send updates and notices to your client list. As long as you have their permission and avoid overuse, e-mail can be a powerful and inexpensive marketing tool. A local pizza delivery service ran an anniversary promotion offering a pizza for the 1980’s price. To get this special price, customers had to go to their website and register their email address. A special anniversary coupon was then emailed to them. They collected 500 email addresses in just two days !

5) Avoid poisonous personalities
Negative and unfriendly employees cost you money by chasing customers away. Spend more time and money interviewing and hiring the right people, especially those who enjoy helping people. Use behaviour based interviewing and screening assessments to improve your chances for hiring success.

6) Put a shopping cart on your website
Online sales are still growing at a dramatic pace. According to IMRG/Capgemini’s e-Retail Sales Index, gross e-retail sales were estimated to be worth £4.5 billion in June 2010, up 22% compared to the same month last year. This increase is coming from people who want to save time, followed closely by avoiding crowded stores, and the ability to shop outside of store hours. Make an audit of what services and products you can offer online.

7) Pay-per-click advertising
Many business owners are cutting back on classified advertising, instead they’re using pay-per-click advertising. Pay-per-click will ensure you receive top visibility on websites driving more customers to your door. Advertisers bid on keywords and the more popular the keyword, the more expensive each click is. Prices vary between a few pence to many pounds. The most popular pay-per-click advertisers are found on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

8) Use customer service commandments to create good habits
The Ritz-Carlton hotel chain invented the use of Customer Service Commandments, outlining specific behaviours employees are to demonstrate when dealing with customers and fellow employees. They print the commandments on a small card and employees carry it with them at work. Furthermore, supervisors reinforce good customer service by quizzing employees on one commandment each day, and reward those that respond correctly.

9) Take your message to the media
Local newspapers, magazines, television and radio stations are always looking for stories and topics of interest. If you’ve got some good news, collaborate with the media and let your customers, suppliers and everyone else know how wonderful your business is. Do you have an event planned, a new service to launch or an interesting story with a regional angle to tell? If so, let the local (or even national) media know about it through a press release.

10) Take advantage of trends
For some the economic downturn is an opportunity in disguise. A recent study by leading management consultancy Bain & Company found that twice as many companies make the leap from laggards to leaders during a recession than during periods of economic calm.

No one can predict the future with any degree of certainty, but you can get a handle on trends, which is one way to take advantage of change and convert risks into opportunities. The ability to spot trends before others is, of course, extremely difficult, however if you want to get ahead of your competition you must try to understand drivers of change to discover new opportunities. For example, you could ask your best customers how to improve their level of satisfaction with your products and/or services.

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Top 10 Advertising Lessons Learned by Ipsos

Advertising tracking has several forms but the most powerful is continuous weekly tracking. Ipsos ASI has tracked over 2,500 campaigns in weekly time series to build a unique global database. From this data, they've made 10 general observations for lessons learned, which are not supposed to be ‘hard rules’ but simply act as best practice guidelines.

1) Creative is King!
When looking at advertising and promotion spend, it’s easy to assume that, because media comprises such a high proportion of overall spend, it must be the most important factor. In fact, creative has a disproportionate influence on the success or failure of an advertising campaign.

Ipsos ASI’s global advertising database shows that creative quality accounts for about three-quarters of variance when explaining differences in ad recall levels. Weak creative rarely earns good recall based on heavy media.

So, despite the high cost of buying media, the ‘creative’ is key for driving success. To ensure that creative is as strong as possible, it’s important to pre-test creative and consider the ad development process.


2) Ads do not wear-in
Although TV ads do have long-term brand equity-building potential, the most marked impact is in the short-term. A strong ad will achieve high levels of recall in the minds of consumers within the first burst of spend. A poor performing ad will not. It is wishful thinking to hope that an ad will “wear-in” on the flawed principle that “a bit more spend” will surely have an impact.

An ad that does not achieve good recall in the first burst of spend gestures towards the fact that creatively it is simply not engaging enough – whether because of its creative style or because of how its message is couched. Better to ditch it than hope that the media spend will lift it to success.


3) All media builds with diminishing returns
It’s not only TV that experiences this: all media appear to build with diminishing returns. The recommendation therefore is to focus your media plan on building reach quickly and not to drive recall too high in any one medium. Instead, if one can afford to maximise the medium, add a second to extend the reach.


4) Persuasion peaks quickly after airing
Persuasion also peaks quickly. 81% of all campaigns tracked peaked by 850 GRPs and within 12 weeks from start of airing.


5) Minimising ad recall decay is more important than building recall
If an ad is compelling in itself, and engages consumers in a dialogue with what the brand is all about, then it is almost certain to achieve high recall. However, to maximise marketing spend efficiency and brand impact, it is hugely important to sustain that level of recall in consumers’ minds so that the brand remains top of mind, driving visibility in the marketplace, and continuing to build positive associations.


6) Recency planning is best
Through modeling the data collected on thousands of campaigns around the world, with a wide variety of flighting patterns, we have seen that more continuous TV plans tend to maintain advertising presence more efficiently than ‘burst’ plans. This links closely to the theory of Recency Planning, which states that your ad should be the last ad seen prior to a purchasing decision. This has been demonstrated to be a successful strategy, particularly for FMCG products where purchasing occasions come along in quick succession. Burst-based Frequency Planning can be wasteful because of the rapid decay of advertising effects and the consequent long periods off air, allowing competitors the opportunity to become top of mind prior to the next purchase occasion. Recency planning works best once an advertising idea has been firmly established with an initial heavy up burst, followed by lower weights of infrequent but ongoing reminders.


7) Creative Pools should be aired sequentially, not concurrently
Often brands develop a “pool of creatives” they can call upon. The temptation might be to air multiple creative executions concurrently in the hope that the campaign will cut through more strongly and more brand messages can be conveyed. In reality the opposite is true. By airing concurrently a brand is asking the consumer to remember multiple executions and messages, with each receiving a diluted share of budget. As a result cut-through and message take-out tend to perform more weakly than when creative pools are aired sequentially. If a particular creative performs outstandingly, one can always re-air after the creative pool has run its course.

8) Share of voice is not so important
It is a common misconception that a brand can achieve strong levels of ad recall just by outspending its rivals and achieving a strong share of voice in market. Indeed, some brands/companies place specific targets on a minimum SOV believing it to be a pre requisite for strong ad performance. In truth, advertising standout is not achieved by spending more on media than your competitors. The quality of the creative idea is the main driver of ad recall and persuasion; not spend. It is better to spend time, effort and money on creating a strong creative that is engaging and relevant to your audience, than trying to outshout your rivals through massive spend.


9) Adding an additional media touch point is better than overspending on one medium
Spending money behind bad creative will never produce the desired results. That said, the role of which media channels a brand uses to impact consumers can not be underestimated. However, there is no golden bullet - what works for one brand / product, will not necessarily work for another. Are there any golden rules? Yes. Ensure each media channel has an objective and assess performance against these objectives. Pick your media channels based on their roles, rather than affordability – if you cannot see how a channel will add benefit, do not use it. Assume most consumers will experience more than one media channel, therefore maintain creative and message synergy across all channels. Extending the campaign to an additional media channel is more effective than over spending on one - this is especially pertinent for TV.

10) TV ad recall does not follow ‘media consumption’
While it is important to understand the media consumption habits of your target audience, it is also important that you do not jump to conclusions about how this might influence the response to your campaign. We know from our research that whilst older consumers watch more hours of TV, for example, that this does not necessarily correlate with increased advertising recognition among this group. In fact we see much higher recognition scores from younger people who watch less TV. The hypothesis is that younger consumers are more engaged with branded communications and therefore require fewer opportunities to see an ad and internalise it than their elders. With this in mind advertisers and their media agencies must make sure that they research and understand both the potential and actual impact of their brand campaigns rather than just making a leap of faith.

Source: Ipsos ASI, May 2010

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