The other day I was driving somewhere and I switched on the radio to catch the end of the evening news show on Radio 4, PM. I came in halfway through a piece and heard the distinctive Barking twang of Dave Trott. Most of you I’m sure will know of Dave, he was my creative Director at Gold Greenlees Trott and was then, and no doubt still is, one of the most influential and original people working on the UK advertising scene.
Hearing Dave’s voice – I think he was talking about nostalgia not being what it used to be – reminded me of a conversation I once had with him about why planners are called planners. As I remember it his view was that planning was a rather boring name that conjured up town planning, a grey and dismal calling responsible for destroying the fabric of most British urban centres with soulless tower blocks, dangerous shopping malls and community-splitting dual-carriageways. He argued that researcher would be a better title as research was concerned with exciting discovery, I guess he had in mind the sort of research that Albert Einstein and Marie Curie did.
There are two problems, however, with the name “researcher” in the agency context. The first is that “account planning” and the name account planner was a conscious reaction against the sort of market research that was done in the 50s and 60s; the sort that David Ogilvy said is a lamppost used by clients, like drunks, for support rather than for illumination. And remember that Ogilvy started life as a researcher!
The second reason is more philosophical, and it is that research is necessarily backward looking; it tells you what people think is, not what could be. It seems to me that the key skill of a great planner is to be able to imagine a glorious future and to be able to show his or her creative colleagues and clients how to get to that future. This is what town planners do, but no matter how baleful the results, it doesn’t gainsay the need for the activity. Science tells us that one of the defining characteristics of human being is this ability to imagine the future and plan accordingly, and without it nothing coherent or new ever happens. Of course in that sense creatives are also planners, and planners are also creative!
It is a testament to the rightness of the initial insight about account planning, by Stephen King and Stanley Pollitt, that the concept has metastasized, there are Media Planners and Communication Planners, some agencies have Creative Planners and clients have Brand Planners. If you look at my CV you will see that I have been called a Strategic Planner, which is the preferred term in the US, and a Brand Architect. Well an architect is a step up from a town planner, but in essence it’s the same job, imagining the future and constructing a plan. So, no Dave, I should have said, account planner is the right title.
Tuesday, 26 May 2009
Tuesday, 19 May 2009
Why don't more marketing people get on the board?
Recently I was presenting to the Finance Director of a big public company and he said that he had been very interested in the presentation because, and these are his words, he was “a closet marketing person”. He had started his career as a brand manager and I asked him why he had gone into the closet. He said he had looked at the board directors of his company and seen that none of them were from a marketing background. He was ambitious and figured that if he wanted to get into general management he would have to take a different route, and so he switched to finance. Why, I said, do boards not have more marketing people? He thought for a moment, “I don’t think that they’re taken seriously at board level.”
When I was starting out in the advertising world I was invited to a training course at one of my clients. It was a general management course given to young high-fliers in the company and I was the first outsider that had ever been invited to it. What struck me most forcibly during the time I was there was the contempt shown to the marketing function, my clients, by other people in the company. The most common gibe was that marketing people spent all their time being wined and dined by the agencies and worrying about “pretty pictures”, while everyone else got on with the real, and rather more boring, business of making and selling things.
I am sure this was partly jealousy, but looking back, what is more worrying was the ignorance of what marketing people do and why it matters. I think that this ignorance extends to the boards of most companies, and of course it is to some extent fostered by marketing people themselves. Locked in ivory towers, somewhat removed from the day to day realities of the business, marketing people are free to “do marketing”, but equally not free to take a wider role in the management of the business.
There seems to me to be an almost wilful disregard in most boardrooms of the fact that a high proportion of the value of their company, 40% on average according to recent studies, is made up of intangibles, the very thing with which marketing people are most concerned. Senior company managers are almost exclusively financial engineers, and look where that’s got us. Few companies position themselves to the markets as experts in the management and exploitation of brands, I can think of a few - Diageo, P&G, Unilever, Virgin, LVMH - yet in truth all companies are to a greater or lesser extent in the brand management business.
There is no easy way to get marketing Directors onto the board of big companies, but here are a few thoughts for budding marketing directors:
1. Talk to your board in strategic, even visionary terms, and back this up with thorough analysis of the real business issues.
2. Demonstrate and promote the strategic value of marketing and the link between good marketing and underlying revenue growth and show how marketing innovation is a vital component of success.
3. Once you are on the board bully business schools to stop presenting marketing as simply the “4 Ps”, and start teaching it in more strategic terms. More Porter and less Pooter.
Perhaps if we can all preach the strategic value of marketing then in the future talented marketing people won’t have to go into the closet to get ahead.
When I was starting out in the advertising world I was invited to a training course at one of my clients. It was a general management course given to young high-fliers in the company and I was the first outsider that had ever been invited to it. What struck me most forcibly during the time I was there was the contempt shown to the marketing function, my clients, by other people in the company. The most common gibe was that marketing people spent all their time being wined and dined by the agencies and worrying about “pretty pictures”, while everyone else got on with the real, and rather more boring, business of making and selling things.
I am sure this was partly jealousy, but looking back, what is more worrying was the ignorance of what marketing people do and why it matters. I think that this ignorance extends to the boards of most companies, and of course it is to some extent fostered by marketing people themselves. Locked in ivory towers, somewhat removed from the day to day realities of the business, marketing people are free to “do marketing”, but equally not free to take a wider role in the management of the business.
There seems to me to be an almost wilful disregard in most boardrooms of the fact that a high proportion of the value of their company, 40% on average according to recent studies, is made up of intangibles, the very thing with which marketing people are most concerned. Senior company managers are almost exclusively financial engineers, and look where that’s got us. Few companies position themselves to the markets as experts in the management and exploitation of brands, I can think of a few - Diageo, P&G, Unilever, Virgin, LVMH - yet in truth all companies are to a greater or lesser extent in the brand management business.
There is no easy way to get marketing Directors onto the board of big companies, but here are a few thoughts for budding marketing directors:
1. Talk to your board in strategic, even visionary terms, and back this up with thorough analysis of the real business issues.
2. Demonstrate and promote the strategic value of marketing and the link between good marketing and underlying revenue growth and show how marketing innovation is a vital component of success.
3. Once you are on the board bully business schools to stop presenting marketing as simply the “4 Ps”, and start teaching it in more strategic terms. More Porter and less Pooter.
Perhaps if we can all preach the strategic value of marketing then in the future talented marketing people won’t have to go into the closet to get ahead.
Thursday, 14 May 2009
When bad things happen to good brands
“Behaviour that’s admired is the path to power among people everywhere.”
Beowulf tr. by Seamus Heaney
I travel frequently to Ireland. When possible I prefer to fly with Aer Lingus, the Irish flag carrier. In recent years Aer Lingus has re-invented itself as a low-cost airline, though one not completely without frills. It did this in response to RyanAir of course, and there is much to admire about RyanAir, at least from the safe comfort of my office.
One of frills it seems to manage without is the milk of human kindness, or even civility, generally considered essential in a service business. It is possible to complete a journey with RyanAir without a single member of its staff looking at you or acknowledging your presence. All this may be unremarkable to people who fly once or twice a year, but it isn’t acceptable to me. I prefer Aer Lingus, which, as I said, still has a few frills like airport lounges, frequent flyer programmes, accurate timetables and pleasant staff.
So imagine my recent discomfiture when I had a big row with an Aer Lingus check in guy at Heathrow about the weight of my carry-on bag. At that time Aer Lingus had a rule restricting the weight of carry-on luggage to 5 Kilos. My briefcase weighed 10 Kilos, but I couldn’t check it because it contained my computer. A typical Aer Lingus employee would have looked at my frequent flyer card and winked me through, I know because they had done it lots of time. This guy, however, had “jobsworth” written all over his smug, estuary face.
This is what I mean by a bad thing happening to a good brand. If he had worked for RyanAir I would probably have handed my bag over with meek resignation, insisting, perhaps, that they put a “fragile” sticker on it. But he didn’t work for RyanAir, he worked for AerLingus the brand I give my loyalty to, and so I fought back vigorously.
There’s a seeming paradox here, the airline that normally treats me badly I put up with, whereas I complain to the airline that normally treats me well when I perceive that they are treating me badly. But if we think of a brand, from the customer’s point of view, as a set of expectations then, of course this is not a paradox at all. I expect RyanAir to behave badly and so I am not perturbed when they do, in fact it merely reinforces my poor expectations. On the other hand I expect Aer Lingus to behave well and it upsets me when they do not.
In this interpretation, then, a brand is an expectation of future satisfaction based on a string of positive experiences. One bad experience won’t destroy the equity of a good brand, particularly if the customer regards the experience as an aberration or atypical. A string of bad experiences, however, forces the customer to revise their expectations.
In the case of my Aer Lingus experience I was inclined to regard my antagonist as one bad apple in the barrel, there’s always one. In fact I thought that Aer Lingus staff had coped superbly with their near death experience at hands of RyanAir. Aer Lingus’s survival plan meant that 50% of staff were laid off, but that never affected how I was treated, the smile never slipped. On the other hand they started to introduce extra charges, golf clubs had to be paid for, coffee on board had to be paid for, and now new rules about carry on baggage. Was my brush with the Heathrow jobsworth a sign of things to come? Were passengers being progressively reduced from human beings to marks if not, in the RyanAir worldview, mugs and nuisances?
Beowulf tr. by Seamus Heaney
I travel frequently to Ireland. When possible I prefer to fly with Aer Lingus, the Irish flag carrier. In recent years Aer Lingus has re-invented itself as a low-cost airline, though one not completely without frills. It did this in response to RyanAir of course, and there is much to admire about RyanAir, at least from the safe comfort of my office.
One of frills it seems to manage without is the milk of human kindness, or even civility, generally considered essential in a service business. It is possible to complete a journey with RyanAir without a single member of its staff looking at you or acknowledging your presence. All this may be unremarkable to people who fly once or twice a year, but it isn’t acceptable to me. I prefer Aer Lingus, which, as I said, still has a few frills like airport lounges, frequent flyer programmes, accurate timetables and pleasant staff.
So imagine my recent discomfiture when I had a big row with an Aer Lingus check in guy at Heathrow about the weight of my carry-on bag. At that time Aer Lingus had a rule restricting the weight of carry-on luggage to 5 Kilos. My briefcase weighed 10 Kilos, but I couldn’t check it because it contained my computer. A typical Aer Lingus employee would have looked at my frequent flyer card and winked me through, I know because they had done it lots of time. This guy, however, had “jobsworth” written all over his smug, estuary face.
This is what I mean by a bad thing happening to a good brand. If he had worked for RyanAir I would probably have handed my bag over with meek resignation, insisting, perhaps, that they put a “fragile” sticker on it. But he didn’t work for RyanAir, he worked for AerLingus the brand I give my loyalty to, and so I fought back vigorously.
There’s a seeming paradox here, the airline that normally treats me badly I put up with, whereas I complain to the airline that normally treats me well when I perceive that they are treating me badly. But if we think of a brand, from the customer’s point of view, as a set of expectations then, of course this is not a paradox at all. I expect RyanAir to behave badly and so I am not perturbed when they do, in fact it merely reinforces my poor expectations. On the other hand I expect Aer Lingus to behave well and it upsets me when they do not.
In this interpretation, then, a brand is an expectation of future satisfaction based on a string of positive experiences. One bad experience won’t destroy the equity of a good brand, particularly if the customer regards the experience as an aberration or atypical. A string of bad experiences, however, forces the customer to revise their expectations.
In the case of my Aer Lingus experience I was inclined to regard my antagonist as one bad apple in the barrel, there’s always one. In fact I thought that Aer Lingus staff had coped superbly with their near death experience at hands of RyanAir. Aer Lingus’s survival plan meant that 50% of staff were laid off, but that never affected how I was treated, the smile never slipped. On the other hand they started to introduce extra charges, golf clubs had to be paid for, coffee on board had to be paid for, and now new rules about carry on baggage. Was my brush with the Heathrow jobsworth a sign of things to come? Were passengers being progressively reduced from human beings to marks if not, in the RyanAir worldview, mugs and nuisances?
Wednesday, 6 May 2009
Do you read business books?
I try to, but rarely get past the index and the first chapter; the last business book I read all the way through was the insightful Good to Great by Jim Collins, which was based on a lot of original research. Most business books are magazine articles expanded to book length – literally so in the case of The Long Tail by Chris Anderson - and they don’t have enough real content to justify the several hours it takes to plough through them. I thought that The Tipping Point was good, but Blink wasn’t and I didn't bother with Outliers after I read a synopsis in The Observer. Don’t even get me started on Buy-ology, after three chapters Lindstrom had said very little except how cute he is and how much money he’d spent on brain scans. Yes and? Hall & Partners has a good scheme, they give you breakfast and present a 20 minute summary of the business book of the moment, perfect!
So why am I thinking about writing a book? Well I have a title I like, The Marketing Delusion, the main problem, apart from the actual writing, is that I can think of two ideas that fit under this title. The first idea would be to make explicit and examine the assumptions on which the marketing business is founded. I was inspired by a quote I came across in The Guardian from evolutionary biologist, Olivia Judson, “Of all the limits on expanding our knowledge, unexamined, misplaced assumptions are often the most insidious”. I could have a lot of fun with this from the narrow – e.g. what does market research really tell us, what does awareness really mean - to the very broad, e.g. what do we mean by creativity and why do marketing people never get to the top of companies, etc., etc.?
The second idea could more properly be called The Brand Delusion and there are two questions I’d like to try and answer:
1. Why and how is branding even possible, i.e. why do we assign meaning and feelings to inanimate objects and symbols?
2. What purposes do brands fulfil at the personal and societal levels?
The way I’d do this is by reviewing what scientific research, particularly psychology which was my degree subject, has revealed about these questions. I suspect that most academic research doesn’t address the brand directly, but there are several fields that could be relevant such as social psychology, psycholinguistics, evolutionary psychology, emotion psychology, neuroeconomics, and so on.
I’m not yet sure how to reconcile these two ideas, other than the slightly trivial one of including the brand delusion as one of the unexamined assumptions that fall into the larger set of marketing delusions. Maybe I should just write two books!
So why am I thinking about writing a book? Well I have a title I like, The Marketing Delusion, the main problem, apart from the actual writing, is that I can think of two ideas that fit under this title. The first idea would be to make explicit and examine the assumptions on which the marketing business is founded. I was inspired by a quote I came across in The Guardian from evolutionary biologist, Olivia Judson, “Of all the limits on expanding our knowledge, unexamined, misplaced assumptions are often the most insidious”. I could have a lot of fun with this from the narrow – e.g. what does market research really tell us, what does awareness really mean - to the very broad, e.g. what do we mean by creativity and why do marketing people never get to the top of companies, etc., etc.?
The second idea could more properly be called The Brand Delusion and there are two questions I’d like to try and answer:
1. Why and how is branding even possible, i.e. why do we assign meaning and feelings to inanimate objects and symbols?
2. What purposes do brands fulfil at the personal and societal levels?
The way I’d do this is by reviewing what scientific research, particularly psychology which was my degree subject, has revealed about these questions. I suspect that most academic research doesn’t address the brand directly, but there are several fields that could be relevant such as social psychology, psycholinguistics, evolutionary psychology, emotion psychology, neuroeconomics, and so on.
I’m not yet sure how to reconcile these two ideas, other than the slightly trivial one of including the brand delusion as one of the unexamined assumptions that fall into the larger set of marketing delusions. Maybe I should just write two books!
Friday, 1 May 2009
As I was saying
Agencies are getting their nuts squeezed, and guess who’s getting it in the neck (sorry, mixed anatomical metaphor). Outside the UK there’s hardly any investment in planning anyway, and even here most agencies are now seriously under-investing in strategy. I think this is a big mistake.
On the left is my model of the ways in which agencies compete. Historically agency networks competed on the basis of infrastructure and resources, dots on the map, which appealed and continues to appeal to some global clients. Infrastructure is a zero sum game for the big networks, however, and as some agencies, such as BBH, are starting to demonstrate in a digital world dots on the map are much less important.
Organisation and execution is both important and surprisingly difficult to do well, as anybody who has tried to plan in a multi-discipline environment will tell you, but in clients’ eyes it’s a low value activity. If you’ve read Maddie Baxter’s excellent Magic and Logic, then you will know what I mean. Execution is an excellent opportunity for disintermediation, even on a global scale, and companies such as Tag are starting to take execution business away from big networks.
In some senses relationships are everything, and they can be a major competitive strength - which explains the continuing success of account management as a profession - however clients do not value relationships per se and, increasingly, loyalty from the agency is not reciprocated by clients.
Which leaves, guess what, strategy and ideas, as the main ways in which agencies compete in the digital age (it could be argued that strategy and ideas are the same thing, but I will leave that argument for another day). Of course creative ideas are the raison d’être of the business, and highly valued by clients, but there is also big opportunity for agencies that position themselves as strategic powerhouses, not just creative ones, and invest accordingly. Arguably Ogilvy and JWT once had that positioning, BMP definitely did and maybe BBH does now, but come on guys, there’s room for more!
Organisation and execution is both important and surprisingly difficult to do well, as anybody who has tried to plan in a multi-discipline environment will tell you, but in clients’ eyes it’s a low value activity. If you’ve read Maddie Baxter’s excellent Magic and Logic, then you will know what I mean. Execution is an excellent opportunity for disintermediation, even on a global scale, and companies such as Tag are starting to take execution business away from big networks.
In some senses relationships are everything, and they can be a major competitive strength - which explains the continuing success of account management as a profession - however clients do not value relationships per se and, increasingly, loyalty from the agency is not reciprocated by clients.
Which leaves, guess what, strategy and ideas, as the main ways in which agencies compete in the digital age (it could be argued that strategy and ideas are the same thing, but I will leave that argument for another day). Of course creative ideas are the raison d’être of the business, and highly valued by clients, but there is also big opportunity for agencies that position themselves as strategic powerhouses, not just creative ones, and invest accordingly. Arguably Ogilvy and JWT once had that positioning, BMP definitely did and maybe BBH does now, but come on guys, there’s room for more!
Anyway here’s the thing. If you’re a young planner with an important creative brief to write and you don’t have a proper boss; or you are a Planning Director who doesn’t really know what they’re doing; or you run an agency and you want to become a strategic powerhouse; or you’re a client who’s a bit stuck with something, then get in touch with the Planning Doctor because I’m going to help you.
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