Category Archives: Ideas

Seeing past the problem

By Mark Di Somma

What do you see when you look at a problem?Every transformation programme I have ever worked on has been set in motion by a problem. And in every case the issue that has galvinised action and that everyone is so focused on answering is not the real problem at all.

As Simon Sinek has observed, people intuitively deal with what they know before they deal with the things they don’t know or feel less comfortable dealing with. The easiest question, and the place most people start is “what?” They deal first with the symptoms they can see and quantify. And often they address them with a “how” that is equally familiar – the methodology they always use.

But while a particular problem may have set off the trip-wire, in reality that problem is probably a symptom of what’s really happened rather than the real cause.

It’s the prompt.

And just having a way to address that problem does not guarantee any quality of answer. It simply provides a process for everyone to map to.

Do you know the lovely story of Abraham Wald? His reasoning shows why what you think you see can be so misleading. The mathematician was called in to determine how to make bombers safer during the Second World War. Everyone agreed they needed more armour. But where? Armour is heavy. If you put it everywhere, the bombers would never get off the ground. The answer seemed obvious. Put the armour where the planes were being shot the most. So Wald went to work and sketched all the places where bombers returning from their runs were most shot up.

But then, in his analysis of the situation, Wald turned everything on its head. The areas of most apparent damage were not the problem, he concluded, because they appeared on planes that made it back. The real areas of vulnerability on a bomber were those areas that weren’t marked – because planes shot there were the ones that never made it home.

Wald’s wonderful insight was to resist the temptation to ask “what am I looking at?” and to ask instead “why can I see this?” It’s a reminder to all of us. As are the words of the philosopher Karl Popper who said, “Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.”

Here’s what I got out of both men’s approaches. The next time you’re grappling with a marketing issue, don’t focus on the symptom or the approach, focus on the situation. And don’t veer towards what you understand. Set a course for what truly isn’t making sense.

Acknowledgements

Photo of man looking at us by Bryan Gosline, sourced from Flickr.

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If there’s a transformation issue I can help you with, please contact me.

Sustainability: Being good, not just doing good

Historically, corporate social responsibility has put the emphasis on how businesses are doing good. It’s become an increasingly varied checklist of “things we’ve done right”. Today though, socially aware audiences want more. They increasingly make judgments about you based on your overall likeability. They want to do business with brands that are good.

And that in turn means that, at a social level, your reputation depends less on your ability to simply highlight good works done in isolation (through community activities or sponsorships for example), and much more on your ability to show that you are inherently principled in your dealings and that you behave consistently across your organisation in ways that align with your social and commercial reputation.

That shift in the significance of social actions has a downstream effect on critical social initiatives such as sustainability. In my opinion, they should no longer be seen as nice-to-haves or even as opportunities to improve efficiencies across your supply chain. Rather, the actions you take in these areas are competitive opportunities to distinguish your company from others. Your social actions help define and demonstrate your ‘moral compass’ – and in positioning you as transparent, consistent, reliable and principled, they add value to dealing with you. They also help swing the dialogue, and therefore the consideration set, away from just price.

People like good brands. They trust them. They believe them. They see value in them. They see them as the counter to unethical behaviours. Subconciously, they look for opportunities to favour them. For those reasons, good brands carry lower “social risk”. They are less likely to draw adverse reaction, less likely to make the news for all the wrong reasons, much less likely to have their actions and motivations questioned.

But – and it’s a very important but – your social actions will only work to reinforce your standing as a business that is good to do business with if they are communicated in ways that directly link how you act with what customers can expect. With sustainability now treated virtually as a compliance matter in so many B2B exchanges, and expected by customers as part of how business is now done, the temptation, as I alluded to earlier, is to rattle off a list of “social” achievements and consider the boxes ticked. That in my view is an opportunity wasted. Rather than treating your sustainability actions as a list of initiatives, I suggest you look to present what you are doing as intrinsic social proof for why you deserve preference; for why you’ve earned the status of “a good brand” amongst the people who buy from you.

Take a food company with a sincere commitment to deep traceability in its supply chain. The temptation is to report on where ingredients were sourced and perhaps to elaborate on what standards were met. Such a description explains how the company approaches sustainability but does not do full justice to its actions. The real opportunity lies in explaining why the business went looking for such alternative sourcing in the first place and how that commitment aligns with their wider motivations to do the right thing. In other words, if you are that food company, don’t just tell your customers that you buy ethically. Tell them why you buy ethically, why your ethical stance is unique, how that aligns with the real actions that need to be taken, and what that says about your brand more broadly. Traceability should be aligned with the business’s worldview.

Two thoughts to close:

1. If you are investing in social actions such as traceability, diversity and sustainability, do so because they fit with who you are, and be proud of that. Make them an intrinsic expression of your DNA, not just something you do to fit in alongside everyone else.

2. If you’re concerned that you haven’t taken full competitive advantage of these actions, try testing the market effectiveness of your actions with some searching lines of enquiry. In the case of your sustainability story, consider this question, asked from the point of view of your customers: “When we bought from you – what changed in the world, how did you make that happen, why does that matter to me, and why will buying from you ensure things continue to improve?”

Your responses, told well, can certainly form part of the proof that you are better, in every sense, than your competitors.

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Anzac Day

Red poppy

Red poppy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I posted this four years ago. I think it will always be true.

All the anger, bitterness, atrocity, outrage, anticipation, pain, grief, triumph, pride, disfigurement, panic, hatred, death, injustice, comradeship, loss, desperation, disease, mud, stench and utter, utter waste – captured, symbolised, in a simple, single red poppy.

Why women are driving the rethinking of the sales model (amongst other things)

Image by david_shankbone (flickr)

It’s extraordinary how so much has been made of the emergence of China and India and of the impact of new technology on the world’s economic wellbeing – and yet a factor bigger than either of these dynamics has been largely ignored.

The rise in the participation of women in the economy through full-time work – an economic force I refer to as “femonomics” – has contributed more to economic growth than either Asia or online globally, and yet the attention this has received pales in comparison to the space devoted to Silicon Valley and the rise of the subcontinent and the Red Dragon.

In the US, the input of women in the paid workforce has risen from just 20 percent in the early 20th century to close to 50 percent today, and it is still rising. According to Gerry Myers, American women now earn, control, and spend trillions of dollars annually. In fact, they are responsible for a whopping 80 – 85 percent of all purchasing decisions.

So it’s amazing that so many marketers still regard marketing to women as akin to catering to a niche market. As Fara Warner, author of The Power of the Purse, points out, when you recognise that women are not just the majority but actually the vast majority of consumers, and that their power is only going to increase, it completely changes the commercial urgency of getting to grips with women buyers.

Here are just some of the changes we’ve seen so far:

A shift in relationships. Femonomics demands not just products that address women’s priorities but also a complete rewrite of the sales process. Forget the old direct marketer’s catchcry of lifetime value. Valuable relationships are going to be increasingly derived from their women-time value. In other words, a level of relationship around the sale that women feel comfortable giving their in-demand time to (before, during and after they part with their cash).

A remix of the sales pitch. According to Michael Silverstein of Boston Consulting Group, women shop very differently from men. They research more extensively and are less likely to be influenced by ads. All of which makes for a very different marketing style. And a very different sense of what’s valuable.

Heavy media campaigns alone won’t cut it, because women increasingly look for endorsement of the products they prefer through the magazines they read and the sites they visit rather than just awareness. They want detail before committing. And they are more interested in the indirect selling style of product placement, sponsorships, and editorial.

To sell successfully to women, companies need to look at more careful building of their brand equity, a greater degree of emotional intelligence in the way they position their products, greater reliance on diverse media to lift awareness and much more thought through, holistic and engaging shopping experiences generally.

More emphasis on older consumers and ethical issues. While many marketers still seem obsessed with talking to Gen X and Y consumers, the most powerful women financially are baby boomers.

This is a group who, trendspotters say, will continue to travel more and more, which is highly motived to continue working and therefore earning after retirement, that is amongst the highest proportion of internet users, and who are likely to be in charge of unprecedented wealth. All of this makes them a substantial force to be reckoned with, and an audience that marketers need to be talking to with enthusiasm and intelligence.

This is also a group with strong community motivations and a much more ethical take on what they will purchase. Corporate social responsibility is a rising influence in the femonomics age, as consumers become increasingly aware and politicised around their spending dollar and look to spend money with brands that express points of view that they concur with.

Marketers need to rethink their definitions of age, and look to include a wider range of consideration factors, including aspects like fair trade and environmental impact, if they are to capitalise on this young-at-heart, wealthy-in-pocket market.

Time for a rethink

The influence of women on almost all aspects of branding is there for those that care to look. There’s nothing to suggest it won’t continue at a pace. That’s why organisations in my view need to address the economic power of women astutely and smartly, and respond to femonomics with even more enthusiasm and resource commitment than they have thrown at globalisation.

Susan Gunelius’ comment about how to appeal better to women online seems to me to have a wider application that all marketers should be listening to. “Building brand trust is critical to brand success, and social media gives companies the ability to do exactly that. It’s an opportunity that can also drive sales that still has room to grow. Brand managers should focus on creating diverse content that’s useful, trustworthy, transparent, and visual …”

That’s about a whole lot more than adding a new range of pretty colours to the product lines.

Discover more about the dynamics of the world’s biggest market.

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New article: 5 things to do when social media reacts to you

Imagine being flashmobbed. Suddenly hundreds of people run into your reception area with chocolates and flowers and sing a song in your honour. What would you do? Or a crowd appears at your company’s gate and each person there shakes their fist and jeers everyone entering the building. Then, just as quickly, they’re gone.

It happens a lot. To firms all over the world. Not literally of course. On Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube. Brands are hit by a wave of emotion, good or bad, that rolls in, and then recedes, leaving everyone affected breathless and confused.

What the hell just happened?

The force at work is “critical mass”: the impact that many, many people can have when moving together, with purpose, towards a singular point. It can last minutes, hours, days. It can generate smiles and business, or scandal and significant losses. It can transform people and brands into heroes or villains, celebrities or scandals.

Whilst I think a lot of us continue to search for a credible return on investment model for brands employing social media, there is no denying the ability of social media, on occasions, to galvanise people – and there is no denying the huge effects that such gatherings can generate. These channels can bring together consumers from many places to form a significant mass of opinion, in support or against, based around an issue they consider important to them. And they can do so like no other communication means before them. Hence the “mass”. The “critical” components are that participation usually comes with some strong opinions, and your reaction to that influx can be make-or-break. Continue reading to find out whether to step up or step back.

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Know thy enemy

I’m a great believer in brands having enemies. Here’s why. Enemies draw people of a common mind together. Enemies activate people to want to do something. Enemies provide a clear and present focus.

Your enemies are not competing brands. Well, not directly anyway. Your enemies are the ideas that compete with, or conflict with, your purpose – specifically, they are ideas that run contrary to what your brand believes in and aspires to.

An enemy could be another belief or an assumption. It could be an action or a way of working. It could be a state of the world. It could be a system. It could be an injustice or an intolerance. Whatever it is, it is something that your brand fundamentally opposes and want to change because your values dictate that it is necessary for you to do so.

Tom’s has an enemy: bare feet. A fundamental tenet of the Tom’s brand is that it is unacceptable for children not to have shoes. Apple has an enemy: mass produced boredom. As a brand that lauds individualism, Apple is appalled by anything that is unexciting enough to appeal to anyone. Google has an enemy: things that can’t be found. It runs against everything they are striving to achieve.

If you are clear about what you believe as a brand, you must also be clear about what you don’t believe and what you find unacceptable. The thing you as a branded culture collectively hate the most, and that everyone else around you seems to accept or even encourage, that’s your enemy. If you and all your competitors agree that something is unacceptable, that’s not an enemy, that’s a standard or a consensus or an industry opinion.

Differentiated brands have distinct enemies. Enemies that galvinise consumers because they too want to see an end to the thing you’ve declared war on. No other shoe company is as adamant about bare feet as Tom’s. No other computer company is as appalled by boring technology as Apple …

Give your people something exciting and inspiring to come to work for. And at the same time, give them something unforgiveable to work against.

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Sense and Serotonin

Recently in response to a post by David Meerman Scott about the need to apply left and right brain thinking to content creation, I suggested in the comments that brands should apply that same approach to most aspects of marketing. As I pointed out at the time, blending right and left brain signals is critical to how brands engage with prospects and buyers because it ensures that people remain fascinated and justified as they make their way through the sales funnel.

Logic and magic.

I think most of us accept that consumers generally buy emotively and explain logically, so the ability to provide them with experiences that they enjoy and talk about, and at the same time to arm them with reasons that help them explain, to themselves and to others, what they are doing is critical.

It’s easy and tempting though to treat each hemisphere as separate: to apportion logical arguments for those who think that way or for times when they are needing to rationalise; and to ramp up the emotions and associatives for those who are more inclined to follow their hearts. We’ve tended to see them, in other words, as ideas that sit alongside each other, that co-exist, and that are accessed separately at different times, rather than as ways of thinking that are integrated.

Personally I think such a divide is too simplistic. I think the dichotomy is a construct that is convenient for marketers to believe because it allows us to build left and right-column strategies but it doesn’t actually address honestly how consumers make decisions.

Every marketer should thrive to inspire consumers to like their brand, rather than battering them with facts. At the same time, they need to qualify that emotive drive with this filter: Does it make sense for consumers to feel what the brand is asking them to feel?

The facts should exist as proof for the emotions – on the consumer’s terms. Because while the data may speak for itself to those who made the product, it cannot feel for others.

Increasingly I’m using two very simple questions to try and bridge what I’ve memed as Sense and Serotonin – and the way those questions are sequenced is critical.

The first question is one that regular readers wil know:

1. What is the most wonderful thing we want people to feel (that they don’t feel already from any of our competitors)?

It’s focused on finding what I often refer as the “unexpected value” – the thrill that the brand provides that takes people by surprise and has them coming back for more.

The second question is new – but just as interesting:

2. Where is the deepest proof that they should feel that (that they haven’t heard already from any of our competitors)?

That’s a hard one. It is about finding the “unexpected truth”, so it’s about formulating the sequence of fresh and compelling arguments that rationalises why consumers should allow themselves to feel the specific way the brand is asking them to feel.

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The future of brands: 7 takes from Jim Stengel

Recently, Jim Stengel, the former global marketing officer at P&G, opened up on his blog on what he perceives as the future of marketing. I very much liked what he had to say. My takes and comments.

1. Brands are becoming more important not just as identifiers in crowded markets but also as valuation mechanisms. As Stengel points out, 30 years ago, “almost none of the market capitalization of the S&P 500 could be attributed to brand equity; today it is above 30%.” Stengel sees that as a sign that marketing has become more important. I agree – certainly in the sense that brand can now be visibly seen to add value on the bottom line. I wonder though whether marketing itself has gotten more important or whether it has become increasingly important for marketers (with their heritage involvement in communications) to evolve their understanding of the value, performance and application of brands.

2. Marketing will be more and more about the behavior of the people behind the brand, not what the brand says. Absolutely. Last week’s post about “human marketing” centred entirely on this point. Increasingly brands are judged not just by what they deliver, but how they deliver it – and people are the key component in delivery. If your human marketing doesn’t cut it, nothing else will compensate.

3. Marketing will integrate and synthesize with other disciplines. And vice versa in my view. The globalisation of markets is being clearly mirrored by the globalization, convergence and integration of functions. Delivering “on brand” now involves not just everyone – human marketing again – but almost every aspect of the organisation’s intellectual and operational arsenal.

4. Competitiveness will increasingly be right-brained in its orientation. Stengel’s own words: “Empathy and artistry will get more important. Empathy is at the heart of marketing because it is the ability to see and feel through someone else’s perspective. Artistry is the intuition and creativity to invent something that offers something new and important for a customer” Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes.

5. We’ll all know more, so we better make sure that, as brands, we understand more. Hadn’t really seen the full implications of this one I have to say, but Mr Stengel’s absolutely right. “Big data and advanced analytics will profoundly impact how well we understand our business.” We tend to hear so much about the privacy concerns of big data, but this marketer’s point that it will also yield big insights is very true. The key seems to lie in what brands do with all the information that will flood their way. Those who percept and act will swim and win. Those who try to filter and wait will drown or be swept away.

6. Great brands will continue to “[upend] the business model”, questioning and reframing the frameworks, zones and channels within which they do their business. And they will do so, not for innovation’s sake, but because the changes they make to the ways they are organised will bring them closer to consumers. Great point, well made.

7. Finally, marketers will need to become more nimble and adaptive in how they present their brands and associated messages to communities of consumers who are no longer at their desktop. Instead those people will, in time, be moving rapidly, impatiently and individually, through areas of a city or town that they are highly familiar with. Getting their attention, remaining part of their conversation and attracting them to engage will require new approaches and new ways of thinking about media. Stengel quotes Eric Schmidt in saying that the future for brands will be “social, local and mobile”.

Plenty for all of us to think about here as we power into 2012.

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Transformation secrets: Please don’t try to change your brand

Change is on everyone’s mind at this time of year – or more particularly people are preoccupied with resolutions of change. Hopes of transformation fly high. But most of us will lapse from whatever pledges we make, not because we don’t really want to change necessarily but because the habit of what we have done or know well is too comfortable for change to endure.

Companies are no different. As Professor Robert Sull put it so well back in 1999 in a paper titled “Why Good Companies Go Bad”, organisations, just like individuals, tend to snub the transformation they really need to decisively shift their reputation or market share in favour of persisting with established patterns of behaviour that they are comfortable with.

Sull dubbed this phenomenon not just as inertia but as “active inertia”, because companies keep themselves busy with activities that, conciously or not, are often directed away from the transformation they claim to want and towards variations of business as usual.

Professor Sull’s point was that such sustained patterns of behaviour degrade in their value and contribution to the business over time. Ironically, the very pillars that are meant to drive progress and support reputation come to act as anchors to innovation and business change as organisations turn inward. Strategic frames, he pointed out, become blinders; processes turn into routines; relationships devolve into shackles; and values transform into dogmas.

As a result, business change programmes become the corporate equivalent of a fight in a paper bag. Everyone’s told they need to change, but most people are left guessing as to what difference these upheavals will make to the brand’s reputation and/or what they are going to get out of all this change. Preferring the devil they know to the transformation they don’t, they opt for inertia.

You can of course try and fight this tendency to look inward (good luck!) or you can draw on it. One very effective way to do that is to take a serious look at the purpose flag under which you sail. In other words, channel the intense internal energy that most companies generate to reset your aspirations as a brand. Reframe your thinking so that the focus is less on ‘what we’re doing’ and more on ‘why would we want to do that’. Taking the cue from Sull, the key issue for most organisations who recognise a need to move on from where they are competitively is not what they are doing or even what they are changing but what they need to become.

After reading Blue Ocean Strategy many years ago, I made this note: “Uncompetitive companies can sell out, tough it out or invent their way out of where they are.”

The last option daunts many, but it’s really not that difficult. It starts with this sentence: “What if we were …?”

Here are my five simple questions to help overcome active inertia and guide effective transformation.

1.  Who do we most aim to be as a company? (What reputation would most excite us as a culture?)

2.  As a consequence of that, what do we most need to do to gain that reputation? (irrespective of what others are doing or what we ourselves have been doing)

3.  As a consequence of pursuing those actions, what will need to change?

And then the simplest but for many people the most telling questions of all:

4. Of all the major projects the brand has running at the moment, how many of them are helping that transformation?

5. Of all the work that our teams have on their desks at the moment, how much of that is helping that transformation?

So many change programmes start with the need to admit failure or defeat. The intention is to make the case for not doing more of the same. But I have watched such sessions quickly descend into a self-absorbing blame game that stirs those concerned to make bold commitments by way of redemption that, subsequently, wither and die under a number of guises.

Despite the promises and reassurances that many will give, if you are uncompetitive, you are where you are for a reason – and “active inertia” may well be your biggest threat. As Marshall Goldsmith so brilliantly observed about transformation, “What got you here won’t get you there”.

But, just like New Year’s resolutions, looking to just make changes, however well intentioned or sincere, won’t necessarily get you anywhere. All you are doing in many cases is entering a very long, dark tunnel at speed with your fingers crossed.

To really succeed, you need to know what, why and where “there” is for your brand, and you need to be constantly and consistently measuring your progress towards that point of purpose, financially, perceptively and culturally.

Change must be a consequence of seeking to become that brand, not the other way round.

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The Balanced Brand: some preliminary thinking

What is it with me and earthquakes? Last Christmas, I was in Christchurch for the Boxing Day shake. This year, I was there on Friday, and it happened again. They are scary – and it’s interesting how different people are scared about different aspects. For most, the fear of death and injury is prevalent as you’d expect – but almost as distressing for others are the noise, the shaking itself and of course the damage that brings silt to the surface, breaks possessions and puts everyone on edge. To all those in Christchurch, including of course my own immediate and extended family, my prayers and thoughts are with you.

We all live with fears I guess, and they come to the surface at different times. That’s as true for business as it is in our personal lives. Today’s obsession with growth has it seems to me often overshadowed the more important strategic question of what do we want our organisations and our brands to grow into – how will they evolve, and how will the benefits of that evolution be effectively and efficiently spread. How will everyone gain something from the strategic change: customers; shareholders; employers; the community?

Business is so linked these days that effects, both positive and negative, are virtually impossible to contain. So I see this as a deeply commercial question centred around holistric incentives and rewards – financial, social and cultural. One that generates tough questions in the bid to find the best answers.

I think there is an opportunity here for brands to think more sustainably and report more holistically (at least to themselves) about their overall returns – not just what they made as an organisation and/or what they gave back, but what were, are and are projected to be the beneficial returns for everyone that the organisation really cares about of the strategy that was pursued and is being pursued.

We talk a lot about intangibles and in some areas of commercial life I think we go out of our way to report them. Yet at a strategic level so often the ways we assess the wider effectiveness of brands is very narrow indeed. Either that, or the assessments are confined by discipline, which really means that one effect is siloed from another.

The conventional response to the relentless demand for growth is to piledriver pressure down supply chains, internal and external, in the name of efficiency and to look for that to blossom into returns.

But I’ve watched many organisations aggressively pursue a scale based model that has kept the people in marketing and finance very happy. Meanwhile the effects of that pursuit are reflected in cultural climate figures that are through the floor or a growing list of supplier casualties who have applied their expertise elsewhere. The true cost of those losses often goes unreported.

The reverse is also true. I have worked with brands that have such a “family feel” that no-one is prepared to bang the performance drum for fear of changing the mood. The point here though is that a workplace that is that comfortable is at risk of becoming complacent.

Either way, the true quid pro quo is lost or at best overlooked.

As the people of Christchurch have discovered, shake-ups force a re-evaluation of many different priorities – from the very personal to the abstractly international. And no one person or entity can make or direct all the changes required.

As the after-shocks of the current financial stalemate ripple through Western economies, everyone will react to what is happening in different ways. Some will indeed take to the cities and raise their fists in fury at the system. Some will look to consolidate. Some will file for bankruptcy. But some may also see this as an opportunity to re-examine the commercial agendas of their brands in a more sustained and broadly ecosystemic way; to look both closely and broadly at the benefits and dangers of the current path and to plot a path forward that generates the best possible advantages for all concerned.

My theories on this, which are still developing, are very much along the lines of Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard. The intention is to find ways to develop, monitor and stimulate what I’m calling, at this point anyway, The Balanced Brand.

Best wishes to you all this Xmas season.