Aim Higher
Great article from the Financial Times…. They are right… marketing teams must aim higher…
… in a downturn the real difficulty lies simply in selling anything to world-weary customers who may be satisfied with good-enough but unexciting products.…Prof Kotler has chosen this moment of crisis to ask some big questions about what marketing actually does. “Is marketing the enemy of sustainability?” was one of them. For years the task for marketers was to persuade customers that the latest upgrade, the newer model, was a must-buy. But it is time to challenge that orthodoxy, he said.
In a resource-deprived world, businesses cannot hurl more and more product at customers, supported by extravagant marketing budgets. Prof Kotler recalled the message of a book published three years ago, Firms of Endearment, written by Rajendra Sisodia, David Wolfe and Jagdish Sheth.
The authors found that some of the most successful companies in fact spent much less on marketing than their weaker rivals. But they used the word-of-mouth effect of unpaid advocates – loyal customers – to boost their reputation.
… Another challenge for marketing is to assert itself at the heart of the company’s strategic thinking (an idea also suggested by London Business School’s Nirmalya Kumar in his book Marketing as Strategy). “If you have the right people in marketing it could become your engine for growth,” Prof Kotler told me. But while they might be quite creative on tactics, he added, not so many marketing professionals can do the strategic work.
So why not split the department in two? A larger, downstream marketing team working on current products, with a much smaller, strategic team looking at new markets and new ideas for the coming two to three years.
This could work – as long as the interests of customers do not fall between the cracks of organisational silos. As Harvard Business School’s Ranjay Gulati has shown, for all that businesses talk about being “customer-centric” (and marketing is supposed to represent “the voice of the customer”), many simply are not. “They look at customers only through the lens of existing products,” Prof Gulati says.
Right now marketing needs to aim high. That is what Prof Kotler is urging people to do. And he was happy to concede that, as so often, Peter Drucker was ahead of everyone on this topic, too. He even provided a handy mission statement. “The aim of marketing,” Drucker once said, “is to make selling unnecessary.”
Starbucks 2.0
I’m a coffee fanatic. Anyone that calls for recommendations on New Zealand gets the A-List. And in the top 10 is any of the hot kiwi coffee houses – AllPress, Mecca, Atomic. There are too many to name.
In the US though, it’s much more of a hit or miss affair. That’s why Starbucks remains attractive. Ok, the coffee isn’t off the charts great. But it’s so much better than the alternatives. And as a loyal customer, Howard Schultz seems to be doing a better job of getting it back into shape.
Their efforts to innovate – some of which are driven by listening to customers – occasionally get hammered. Take their new 15th Ave Coffee & Tea. Call it healthy skepticism and cynicism. Or call it brand extremism. Really.
Why cant a corporation create a unique brand experience? “There’s no way a corporate coffee chain can create an authentic neighborhood coffeehouse experience” they say. Lets see. The idea they can’t is not more limiting than suggesting you need to be small do it.
Look at what Toyota did with Lexus. BMW with the mini. McDonalds with it’s coffee houses (invented in NZ). Honda with super light jets. Anheuser Busch with micro beers.
Ok – maybe those that regard themselves as “more authentically tuned” than the rest of us common folks will be repelled by these experiments. But for the mainstream they hold the potential to offer a refreshing and exciting alternative.
Often, attempts to improve the core of a business needs to start at the edge. In a new place. They shouldn’t be viewed as a diversion. One of the great things about achieving scale is the ability to innovate and experiment in ways a single proprietor business might not. And then to take that learning and use it to inform the core.
The Perfect Pitch
Put the Perfect Pitch on your “Marketers Must Read” list. Whether you’re on the Agency or Client side, you’ll get a ton from Jon’s ideas on giving the Perfect Pitch. The run-down on how London won the Olympics is worth it alone.
There are weeks when I seem to motor from one set of PowerPoint to another. Not all of Jon’s ideas will work so well inside the large corporation where it is less about winning via the perfect pitch. But the principles still apply and could make those weeks more effective and enjoyable.
Here are a couple of complimentary thoughts directly at those people inside the business:
- Answer First: Get your answer out. Then support it. This is very different to, say, an agency pitch, where you might want to build to a crescendo for effect. Internally, Execs don’t have the time. Headline your point and hammer it home. To help do this, make every .ppt slide title a headline. Focus on your headlines and let them tell the story. Good summary of Answer First over here…
- Ask in Advance: If big decisions are going to be made, get the asks in front of the decision maker in advance. I’ve sat through many a presentation to discover they want something I would have said “yes” – and in some cases “no” to over the phone.
- Control the room: The is the most common breakdown area. Folks will sit down, behind a laptop screen, and proceed to speak. It’s neither engaging or effective. Get out of your seat, command the room. Use a clicker (this is my weapon of choice). Ideally you want to position yourself at the front, in good proximity of the whiteboard. Tip – remove the pens and put them where you can get to them. When at Sun, we called this getting “whiteboarded” – you put all this effort into a presentation and some “expert” proceeds to redirect attention away from your goal to their graphic mastery on the whiteboard. I started timing meeting delays related to computer-to-projector issues. Here’s the reason – lack of preparation. Get the the room in advance and test the connection. And if you are relying on a customer’s kit, get the presentation to them in advance and have them run it from a system they know works.
- Demand that folks “be here now”. Tell them how long you need and why you need their attention. Keep the agenda, printed out, in front of them. If participants have sunk into Email or Blackberries, ask them to stop and focus. Or, ask them to leave. I reckon it’s a one in ten thousand chance that they are actually taking notes. I once sat in a keynote where a well known TV producer was speaking. he suddenly stopped mid flight and asked a lady in the front row if he was boring her – “should he leave?”he asked. “No”was the response – he then pointed out, very publically how rude she was being – that he had put a lot of effort into the presentation and being there. Damn right.
- Get away. Too often you get the sense folks have spent so much time on the presentation and data they haven’t put any time into their views and ideas of what to do about the problem or opportunity at hand. Allow enough time to get away from the data and reflect on what you want to say about it. Your biggest insights won’t happen while preparing slides. They’ll come when you take a walk around the campus to reflect on what you are doing. Or, when you hit the gymn. Get away from the slides and they’ll get better.
- Go raw. Most of the time you don’t need PowerPoint. Speak to your key points. Use Excel or whatever tool you pulled the data together. Think about other ways of bringing data to life: “PowerPoint presentations may improve 10% or 20% of all presentations by organizing inept, extremely disorganized speakers…” PowerPoint inflicts “detectable intellectual damage” on the remaining 80 to 80 percent. – Edward Tufte
- Information vs. Insights: Be clear on what you are communicating. Half the slides I see try to deliver insights but all they are doing is delivering information. Get information out in advance. Put it in back-up. Focus on the insights that support your case.
- Words Matter: Labor over the words. As Edward Tufte says, most .ppt presentations suffer from “over-generalizations, imprecise statements, slogans, lightweight evidence, abrupt and thinly veiled claims”.
- Manage Input: Jon gives a great example from a colleague of his’5/15/80 percent rule. Often you are bringing the 5 percent you know, learning the 15% you know you don’t know, and discovering (and hopefully, opening your mind) to the 80% you don’t know you don’t know. The more senior the executives, the more likely this is to be the case. So, how are you going to proactively manage input in the meeting?
- Be Clear on the Outcome: And be clear on how you plan to move the audience from A to B. “A presentation is much, much more than a message. What you a re seeking to communicate is just one of a number of factors that influence your ability to move an audience. What you say, and what they see and hear, should not be the same” – Jon Steel. In other words, make sure you aren’t reading the slides, you won’t get the outcome you desire.
I can’t recall who recommended the Perfect Pitch – it might have been Mitch – but thanks!
Branding in a Recession
Nice site with some great commentary on branding during a recession. This comment is right-on… too many people miss the point of value brands: "Value brands do not just compete on price. Although price is important, value brands also deliver a strong brand experience through customer service, quality products, and brand consistency."
