My mate, Robyn Putter (1950-2010)

I got back to my room in the Holiday Inn in Durban knackered. It was 1996, my first ever trip to South Africa and I’d just finished my second all day session with Unilever’s brightest and best who were on a training course I was running. Reception rang – there was a Mr. Derek Carstens in the lobby who wanted to come up and see me. I vaguely remember my mate Gavin Neath, chairman of Unilever in SA at the time, saying something about giving my name to some agency guy. Derek was MD and Robyn Putter was chairman of Ogilvy SA. The agency had a much longer name involving several other surnames none of which I recognized and none of which was Putter. Robyn should have had his name there since under his leadership – I soon discovered – Ogilvy dominated SA. They were more than double the size of their nearest rival and had pretty much run out of new clients they could target. So they were planning on broadening their ‘service offering’ and Derek was there to see if I wanted to open up an office of Added Value, the brand marketing consultancy I had co-founded.

Derek was a whirlwind – he wasn’t actually there to ask me, he was there to tell me we were going to set up Added Value together in the Rainbow Nation. Like I say, I was knackered and it was my first ever trip to a country I knew very little about (my student bar at Bristol was called the Mandela Bar, some guy called Pienaar had captained the Springboks to Rugby World Cup victory, Mandela had worn his shirt, Wilbur Smith, cheap wine – that was about it). But Derek was very persuasive and Ogilvy SA sounded like a force to be reckoned with. I thought to myself, if this is the MD, I can’t wait to meet this Robyn Putter guy, but I did not commit myself. Maybe, let me think about it. I finished the course and ended the trip with a couple of days in Cape Town, which blew me away. I flew back to the UK and thought little more about Derek and the mysterious Robyn Putter.

A couple of months later my secretary informed me that Messers Putter and Carstens were in London and keen to pursue our discussion. Would I like to meet them at their hotel in the West End? No I would not – I was up to my eyes in client work, we had a new office in Paris and were just about to open in Sydney. It was a good time at Added Value but I was taking strain. “Tell them if they are prepared to come down to Hampton (20 miles outside London) I’ll have a beer in the pub with them and maybe a curry afterwards”. They were, so we met in a truly grotty pub near my house. Derek was again very impressive but the two of them together were unplayable. They were keen to progress things and had found exactly the right person to run AVG in South Africa – Charles Broome. We drank a lot of beer, we went to the curry house next door, we laughed and we schemed. By the end of the evening we shook hands – AVG Cape Town was born and I had met two people who were to become much more than business partners, they were to become lifelong friends.

Sadly Robyn’s life was not as long as it should have been and he lost his fight with cancer on 1st March 2010. For posterity, this is my experience of one of the most impressive men I have known.

Launching AVG gave me the excuse to visit South Africa often. I soon realized that in Robyn’s backyard he was something of a legend. Not just his backyard – at the time the majority of the ads on Ogilvy Worldwide’s showreel were from Ogilvy SA, created either by or under the watchful eye of Robyn. He had taken an agency with good foundations and turned it into the only game in town.

By the nature of my client work I got to know the senior people in companies like SAB and Old Mutual. I quickly learned that Robyn was one of their most trusted advisers. He had much more than a creative advertising brain, he had business insight and CEO’s and Marketing Directors valued this rare quality.

We always got together for a beer or three on my many trips to Cape Town and Jo’burg. He was very warm, very sharp and very naughty. We were in a fair few client meetings together as well and I learned the hard way that if you took him on in an argument you better have your shit together. He made his points with conviction, with passion and always with sincerity. He was saying what he truly believed, not what was expedient or what the client wanted to hear – were you? He had a very big presence in meetings. He spoke quietly and everyone listened. He was passionate but he was also very, very cool. He had this Apache Indian look going – dark hair slicked back in a ponytail. Cool and a bit intimidating at times.

There was an occasion when I called to tip him off that SAB were less than impressed with Ogilvy in India. I thought he should know since he clearly had the clout in Ogilvy to sort this out (he was on the worldwide board and would go on to become their longest serving director). His response was not friendly. I can’t remember whether he actually said “Mind your own fucking business” but he might as well have done. I was a bit miffed, I was only trying to be helpful. I misconstrued his reaction. I thought it was typical agency hubris on his part and was a bit cool with him on my next visit to Cape Town. It did not last long. At a client conference we hooked up and got drunker than is sensible for someone – me – who was due to speak at the conference the following day. (The client was SAB). My head hurt but it was ok – I muddled through and our friendship became stronger. We had had a small run in and everything was sorted out over several Castles (several being a number with two digits).

But why had he reacted so sharply to my well-intended criticism of his precious Ogilvy? It was because Ogilvy was very precious to him. The agency, its founder, David Ogilvy, its CEO Shelly Lazerus, Mike Walsh, his team in South Africa – they all really mattered to him. They commanded his loyalty, his respect – and if Robyn respected you he was fiercely loyal. It’s a family kind of loyalty, “I can criticize them but I will defend them robustly against anyone else who does”. Robyn’s loyalty and his generosity to those he loved and respected was something I would learn more about – something I would experience even more personally a few years later.

Time moved on and we saw each other fairly often. Sometimes mutual clients would bring us together, sometimes just a casual beer when he was in London or I was in South Africa, sometimes both. Ally Hewitt at SAB would use any excuse to organize a get together at some bar or rugby game. Derek Carstens had moved on from Ogilvy to be CMO at RMB/FNB bank. Robyn loved Derek and missed him as a business partner when he left but their friendship went much deeper than business. So when I took Derek to the 1999 Rugby World Cup final it was inevitable that the 3 of us would meet up after the game in a bar in Cardiff. As Derek and I limped back to London the following day I had to remind him that neither of our teams had actually been in the final even though we’d partied as if they’d won!

The common strands of rugby, beer and SAB brought Robyn and me together more and more. When SAB provided the tickets to the autumn international between England and South Africa, I was with Robyn to see his team get a good thrashing. Graham Fuel, his best pal was with him on one of those game days and we all ended up back at my favourite pub in Twickenham.  Everything else about that evening is a haze too.

In business we crossed paths in some big meetings to discuss Castle beer. Robyn had a lifelong passion for both the brew and the brand. I was a more recent convert but was no less passionate about either. What neither of us could agree on was the solution needed to arrest its alarming decline in sales in South Africa. I thought it was a brand strategy and positioning issue. Robyn thought the positioning was just fine, what was needed was some magic in terms of an idea to rally round. He also believed the brand should be allowed to decline in order to get back to a smaller but more solid base of true loyal users (people like him). I was convinced he was wrong, he was convinced he was right. We never agreed. On this, as on so many other issues we ‘debated’ over the years, I came to realize much later that he was in fact right and I was in fact wrong.

In late 2001 my business (now merged with Tempus Plc) was acquired by WPP (the owners of Ogilvy). In 2002 I took my opportunity to leave Added Value and its new owners, WPP, when Graham Mackay offered me the job of Global Marketing Director of SABMiller Plc. Graham Mackay is the most impressive CEO I have ever met and I jumped at the chance to work for him. He was also a very old friend and big admirer of Robyn. So much so that when I took up my new job he told me that he had had a chat with Robyn and decided it would be a good idea to have him provide a second opinion on the quality of the marketing leadership I gave. This is not what you want to hear in your first week in a new job, even if your new mentor is as smart as Robyn – especially if your new mentor is as smart as Robyn. I told Graham I thought this was a great idea but, in a neat side step, suggested we set up a kind of non-executive marketing board including not just Robyn but a few others (that I chose). Graham and I could then jointly use them to get a second opinion on not just what I was doing but what all the operating company marketing directors were doing. As I say, a neat side step. Make sure Robyn is just one of several advisors and position it so that it was Graham and I taking the advice, not just me. I did choose some really good people including Shelly Lazerus, Worldwide head of Ogilvy, the two best people I knew in Unilever, Ralph Kugler and Keith Weed, my mate Chris Satterthwaite from Chime and my other mate, Professor Kevin Keller.  We did indeed get great advice from this hugely talented and experienced group of marketing gurus. But my next move was even smarter. I made sure that I personally got time alone with Robyn so I could take his advice off the record – advice I knew I needed and advice I came to rely on. As always we sometimes disagreed on brand issues but the debate sharpened my thinking, helped me rehearse my arguments and allowed me discreetly to change tack on occasions.

Some time towards the end of my tenure at SABMiller Robyn took on a similar role for WPP. They had lost their ‘Worldwide Creative Head’ Neil French in somewhat controversial circumstances. Martin Sorrell had to act quickly – there was only one choice of successor, only one guy who could restore their credibility – Robyn Putter. The problem was that Robyn lived in Cape Town and was a key member of the Ogilvy Worldwide Board. Sorrell did a deal with Shelly whereby Robyn remained 50% Ogilvy and a deal with Robyn whereby he could do the job from his beloved Cape Town.

Looking back it has a feeling of inevitability about it. From a meeting with Derek Carstens in Durban in 1996, a few beers in the pub with Robyn and Derek a few months later to agree the JV with AVG and Ogilvy in South Africa, (whose big client was SAB) to Robyn ending up as Worldwide Creative Head of WPP and me ending up Group Marketing Director for SABMiller.

Our one-on-one sessions took on a new dimension. Me asking his advice on SAB brands but both of us now trying to make sense of a couple of really tough staff jobs we had ended up in. How do you go about running a central marketing team in a highly decentralized organization like SAB? How do you go about providing creative leadership in a financially driven business like WPP, and to creative heads in disparate – often competing -  agencies around the world? Robyn and I had slowly but surely bonded over the years – now we were brothers in arms.

But there were some big differences between him and me, between brand marketing and creativity, and between SABMiller and WPP. In reverse order – in brand marketing much of my job was to provide process and systems that brought out the best in our front-line marketers. With creativity you are dealing with ‘magic’ (I will explain this later in the words of Robyn) that cannot be systemized, it can only be recognized, encouraged and inspired. In SABMiller I had a boss who understood what I needed to do, respected it and was generous with his time and support to help me achieve it. In WPP Robyn had a boss (so he felt) who was the polar opposite. Finally, Robyn was a lot smarter than me. He also had more humility and patience – important qualities in a “Group” director if they are also clever (the less gifted need to be arrogant in order to compensate). Whether this is fair or not, I feel I got more praise for doing less and Robyn got less praise for doing much more.

Life – and my friendship with Robyn – was to take one more twist. I had always intended to leave SABMiller after a few years – I wasn’t so dumb as to think it was a job I could do forever. As my leaving date approached my wife, Liz, and I decided we would move as a family to Cape Town. We had a few friends there, Robyn and Margarita among them, and we had UK friends who had friends and family there. It would be a glorious adventure and a great place to raise our two young sons. I recall telling Graham Mackay of our plans. He thoroughly endorsed our view of Cape Town as a great place to live as a family but warned me that it could be a bit cliquey socially.

We arrived in Cape Town in October 2006 to a rented house while we built our dream home round the corner. The rented house proved to be a nightmare – we spent weeks trying to get everything to work – not easy when you have the landlord from hell and you are new in town.  Most of the friends and contacts were busy or out of town. It was a difficult time and one that could have been very lonely but for one or two people. Robyn was one of those people. From the first week we arrived, and every week thereafter, he called – how are things, fancy a beer or round of golf, Margarita and I are having a party for you so you can meet some people. The fierce loyalty and support I had encountered early on in our relationship was now firmly pointed in our direction. He was the best friend you could possibly hope for.

It now became a 4 way friendship. I had never really got to know “My Sweetheart” as Robyn always referred to Margarita until we moved to Cape Town and neither Robyn nor Margarita knew Lizzie very well. That changed very fast and several top restaurants in Cape Town benefitted from our nights out as a foursome. Robyn and I especially spent a lot of time together. There were the longstanding bonds of beer, rugby, rude jokes, marketing and mutual business friends but now we had something new to cement us as blood brothers. We both loved golf and were both pretty terrible at it (me rather more so). At every available opportunity we were on the golf course – any golf course, every golf course. When we got bored of the Cape Town golf courses we took road trips to play golf courses up the coast. We seized on and shared every new revelation about the latest techniques that would change our swing and get us below 90. They rarely did. We shared these times with other mutual friends and old friends of Robyn’s. We laughed, we lost sack full’s of golf balls and between us I reckon we revived Castle’s sales figures in the Western Cape.

Initially I had more time on my hands than Robyn to indulge our shared pursuits but Martin Sorrell changed that. Some of the facts of Robyn’s departure from WPP are indisputable – Robyn found out that WPP had appointed another ‘Creative head’ when friends rang him to say they had read about it in an article in Campaign Magazine. But I confess most of what I know is based on what Robyn told me. I know that Robyn had been frustrated that he could not get any clear direction from Sorrell on what he expected from his role and little time with him to discuss it. I know that Robyn was given no warning that Sorrell planned either to replace him or put someone else alongside him. I know that he was deeply, deeply hurt by what happened. I am old enough to know there are always two sides to a story and I have never heard the WPP version directly. Until I do I will regard this episode as a despicable way to treat someone of Robyn’s talent, loyalty and integrity – an act totally without class.

Robyn on the other hand acted with great class and dignity. His position being untenable, he agreed the arrangements for his retirement from WPP, respected their contract and busied himself with new projects that ranged from ideas for TV shows to a new internet based music maker. He was in fact more energized and alive with ideas than I had ever seen him – and that’s saying something.

There is one thing I have made little mention of until now. It was always there even if my awareness of it grew only gradually. It is something I have seen very clearly over the last few years when I had the privilege of spending lots of quality time with Robyn.

Robyn had the most amazing human spirit. More than just his raw intelligence, which was formidable, more than his creative instinct, his ability to look at what everyone else looked at but see what they did not see, more than his intellectual integrity – Robyn had a very strong, positive spirit. I saw it in our many debates and arguments. I am quick to criticize, even those close to me. Robyn always looked for positive intent, he empathized, he searched for a deeper insight on what was really going on. He did once criticize me because I was laying in to a group of people we both knew and who I had crossed swords with. “But look at the good they have done, it’s incredible. You are being mean spirited”. Because he was right – as usual – and because this came from one of the most generous spirits I know, the words really hurt. Robyn could be tough, especially I gather in his younger years. People who tell you it straight will sometimes offend – the truth can hurt. But throughout – I’d say increasingly – there was always his evident love of life, people and ideas, especially ideas. Robyn was an ideas man – a true believer in the power of ideas to change the world (and certainly to change the fortunes of a company or brand).

Where did this come from? I had learned various things about Robyn’s life and career from our many chats. I knew, because he often spoke of it, that as a young child he had been sent to a Boys Home. I won’t go into details but it was clear that early family life had been tough and the path to the top of Ogilvy had not been smooth either. He spoke about these things in a matter of fact way. There was no hint of recrimination or self-pity. Quite the opposite. He appreciated what these life events had taught him. A creative mind has to be fed by a wide range of experiences.

On the way back to Cape Town from one of our ‘golf safaris’ with 5 hours driving ahead of us I asked him to tell me his whole life story from the beginning. I had heard various bits on various occasions but I wanted to hear the full story in sequence. It was quite a story. Lots of people have had it tough, that was not the amazing thing. What was special was that Robyn had taken so many positives out it. To give one example, he had gone to the Boys Home out of circumstance not choice but when he was older he had the opportunity to leave and return to a more normal family life. He chose to stay because he had by then made the boys home his family, with friendships that would last a lifetime. Rather than feel sorry for himself for what he had lost out on he had thrown himself in to what he could uniquely get out of his situation. So by the time he had the opportunity to escape he had learned to enjoy it so much he wanted to stay.

Listening to his life story I could see where his fierce loyalty to people came from, how he had come to be so mentally tough and why he was so positive. He had learned the hard way that all these things are better than their opposites. Being positive is the best choice – it allows you to get the most out of life whatever comes your way. Combine this sense of possibility with a fine mind and you get a creative business genius.

It was only when I moved to Cape Town that I got the chance to meet all Robyn’s ‘old mates’ at the many parties he and Margarita threw. They come from all walks of life but they have one thing in common – they loved Robyn and they have done for many years. They went way back. I realized that having been his mate for a mere 14 years I was just a Johnny-come-lately. If you know nothing else about a person other than they have strong friendships with interesting people that have lasted many years, then you know that person is special.

I have referred to the fact that Robyn and I debated a lot and very rarely agreed on things. I must stress this was all very good natured. We both like robust argument where you take up extreme positions in order to test the other person and challenge your own thinking. As Oscar Wilde once said “I don’t know what I think until I hear myself say it” (this probably applies more to me than it did to Robyn).

At the heart of many of our debates was some disagreement about magic and logic. I always felt he over-emphasized the magic and he felt I did the same with logic. Here’s an example. I spent a career perfecting the art of the well-crafted brand positioning statement. I remember explaining to him the value of this in reviving an ailing brand (yes, it was Castle). With one question he destroyed my argument. “Give me just one reason you love your wife”. He knew I couldn’t. He knew that like him there are many reasons I love my wife, they are complex, subtle, even contradictory. It’s the same with brands and if you try to bottle all this up with a well-turned phrase, worse still if you try to portion it all out in some ‘brand wheel’, you lose the magic and with it the chance of an idea. On the other hand he appreciated the power of a clear idea. He invented the notion of a brand ideal – the big but simple ideal that a brand could live by (but would not summarize it). He explained that this could be something like “sharing’ for a brand such as KFC. Smart thinking with no real logic but lots of magic to inspire innovation and communications.

He once came to see me in London to discuss a project he was doing for Shelly to see how Ogilvy could reinvent itself. My view was that agencies needed more logic. In no other profession are clients allowed to think they can get what they want precisely how they want. You can’t do that with doctors, lawyers, accountants or even the more arty architects. There is method, protocol, systems that may not guarantee success but they can significantly improve its chances and at the very least they stop you making a complete stuff up. Too many ad agencies (Ogilvy excepted) just roll over to clients because they have no principles that they defend as ‘their way of doing things’. He didn’t buy this but on that occasion I have to say he did not convince me he was right – in fact I still think he was wrong to dismiss what I was saying. But I came to understand what he was so worried about every time I made a case for more logic. In fact I have it captured in a film I made a few years back – Robyn sitting on a chair in the garden of Ogilvy’s beautiful offices in Johannesburg and talking about where great ideas come from.

In Robyn’s words – life is magic and logic. But while logic can come from magic, magic never comes from logic.
You can rationalize afterwards why ‘sharing’ might be a great idea/ideal for KFC but logic would not have got you there in the first place.

I was right in the sense that business and clients do not always need or even want magic. Consistently pretty good is good enough to build a profitable and sustainable business. That’s why big corporates are so logical and systematized.

Pretty good was never good enough for Robyn. That was part of his magic.

We all lose people and I suppose I should take a lead from Robyn’s outlook on life and focus on the positives I gained from my friendship with him. I am a lot wiser about the magic of marketing, I love living in his Cape Town, I count his family and many of his friends as my friends now and my handicap is down to 17 (for now at least, I may not play quite as often without my most loyal golfing buddy). On the other hand my liver has taken a beating. I was debating the relative merits of beer brands with Robyn once and he smiled and said “I’ve never met a cold beer I didn’t like”. Good point – so no regrets about all the beers either.

The fact is that some people leave a big hole in your life when they go. At just short of 60 years old I feel we have all been cheated out of a few more years with this most dear friend. What would Robyn say to this? I think he might point out that while he may have died a bit too young at least he died having never got old. Despite a very brave fight his body gave out right at the end but the mind was still magically fresh.
Give me one reason why we all loved Robyn Putter – no, I can’t do it. These are just some.

Post Script

Any of his other friends would be surprised that I have made no mention of the other BIG love of Robyn’s life – West Ham Football Club. An interest in soccer is one thing we did not share. However, I do know that “I’m forever blowing bubbles” is the ‘ammers theme song. It is a song about thwarted ambition reflecting the clubs great potential but lack of much silverware over recent years (so I am told). I looked it up and was interested to see that there are some verses to go with the more familiar chorus that is sung on the terraces.

For a man that achieved so much, “I’m forever blowing bubbles” is wholly inappropriate. But the verses struck a chord with me. I wonder if he knew them?

I’m forever blowing bubbles
Verses
I’m dreaming dreams,
I’m scheming schemes,
I’m building castles high,
They’re born anew,
Their days are few,
Just like a sweet butterfly,
And as daylight is dawning,
They come again in the morning.

When cattle creep,
When I’m asleep,
To lands of hope I stray,
Than at daybreak,
When I awake,
My bluebird flutters away.
Happiness new seemed so near me,
Happiness come forth and heal me

Chorus
I’m forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air,
They fly so high,
Nearly reach the sky,
Then like my dreams they fade and die,
Fortune’s always hiding,
I’ve looked everywhere,
I’m forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air

Do Marketers Understand What Makes People Tick?

There is an article on the application of behavioral science to business written by Messrs Devine and Gibson in the Mckinsey quarterly (you’ll need to be a premium subscriber to read the whole thing). This really interests me and I give credit to Mark Earls for championing the idea that business people generally, and marketers specifically, should understand much more about human behavior and social sciences.

I mentioned in a recent post that very few companies truly understand, or even make it their mission to understand, the process of adoption (adoption of ideas or brands). We work with very partial knowledge of why people make the choices they do, and much of this knowledge is anecdotal or purely empirical. Nothing wrong with the latter. We can measure what people do and we can form conclusions based on the results but it is not scientific. Scientific discovery creates hypotheses out of observations, theory that can then be tested to form truths that can be applied.

We don’t just want to know what people do, we want to understand why they do it so we can create strategies that help us make a positive difference. Ultimately, and I know this is scary, we want to know how the human mind works. We will one day but not any day soon. However, we already know a lot and what surprises me is how little interest marketers show in this. Is this intellectual laziness or is it cynicism born of short term pressure “That’s all very interesting but I need to shift more product NOW!”.

I certainly agree that for every piece of acquired insight on human and social behavior we need to demonstrate immediate consequences in terms of improved marketing activity. So here goes. These are a few of the pieces of knowledge I have picked up and I will attempt to show their practical marketing implications. They have been gleaned from the likes of Mark Earls, Gerald Zaltman, Robin Wight and others. Some I discovered from original work we did at SABMiller. Smarter people than me may contest them, perhaps they have been superseded by superior truth. If so fine, let me know – knowledge is quest not a destination. But as marketers we need to develop the appetite to understand what makes people tick and then be inventive in how to apply it.

As social apes we are affected by what we sense (see, hear, smell) other people are doing. We copy, and not necessarily from opinion leaders, rather we copy the pack, the herd.

Implication – like amazon.com we need to build in ways that allow new customers to copy what existing customers are doing. Launches should favour activity that creates visible momentum.

Buyers of expensive durables (e.g. cars) become advocates for their choice. They seek to persuade friends to follow their lead to raise their self-esteem and vindicate their decision.

Implication – marketing programmes that arm recent buyers with sales aids e.g. VIP tickets for test drives to give to friends, sexy video of their new car that they can email to mates before it is delivered.

Memories – let’s think of this as positive associations – are reinforced by consistency. Our ability to recall something positive about a brand (literally to pull it from the file in the brain) is strengthened by the consistency with which that association arrived there from different sources over time.

Implication – consistency of message and ensuring this message touches people from different sources over time (not just the ads) needs ruthless management.

Sticky ideas like urban legends are memes that spread like viruses through a community.

Implication – brands need intriguing stories and strong icons (sensory branding devices e.g. the Intel jingle or the creamy head on a Guinness). They need to be more than just a remarkable purple cow, they need legend and mythology. The strong icons act as search engine.

In the Mckinsey article they cite the need for every service encounter to end with a strong positive experience as one example of the application of behavioral science (e.g. the chocolates you get with your bill in a restaurant) and point out that call centres have been slow to use this knowledge to end phone calls with some really strong positive for the customer to remember. An understanding of social and human behavior can help shift more product – right now.

It has always struck me as laughable that Marketers and advertisers are accused of being mind manipulators. As Machiavelli showed, in order to manipulate you have to both understand what makes people tick and apply that understanding to how you behave.

Are You Reading Me?

As a cheeky young brand manager I used to add a daft sentence to some boring brand document I’d been delegated to write (like the trade marketing plan – nobody senior could be bothered with that). So on about page 5 I’d add some line like this:-

In Cycle 10 all promotional E10 packs for Tesco Tier 5 superstores will include a dead parrot as a tribute to John Cleese and because we hate Tesco and their rather common shoppers.

I’d then sit back and wait. 9 times out of 10 there would be no comments ergo, no-one had read the document, ergo no-one gave a shit about trade marketing. (The odd occasion I was found out contributed significantly to me being passed over for promotion I believe).

These days, I worry that every time I scroll down and hit “I agree” on some software download means I have just handed over the right for some wag in Apple to smear my testicles in honey and hang me over an ant hill. They could you know – they could put all sorts of crap in the agreement and you’d never know because none of us – and I mean none of us – ever read them (Eddy Izzard is very amusing on this subject). We’d find out if someone pitched up on our doorstep with a pot of honey and a smile on their face. The first time this happened I guess the on-line community – aka social meedjah – would twitter and blog themselves into a frenzy. The guilty party in Apple would be booted out by Saint Steve and they’d then spend the rest of their miserable days trying to build a following on youtube with other tales of funny japes (like that Canadian twat FLuffee).

This line of thinking leads to me to a worrying conclusion. Although downloads of my eBooks seem to have gone very well – people even Twitter about them – no-one is reading them. Or at least no-one is reading all of them.

What else explains why people from Yorkshire have not been writing letters to the Times vilifying me for vilifying them in ‘10 people to watch out for in business’. Why have none of my former colleagues (who I cruelly parody in 10 Uncomfortable truths) been on the phone to complain (this is very surprising because I owe at least half of them money). Even if people can’t be bothered to read you’d think they would have spotted the photos of Elle MacPherson buck naked being licked from head to toe by an Alsatian on page 30 (I made this bit up – the lovely Elle would never do such a thing – just wanted to check you were still with me).

I deal in valuable truths (mostly). I deserve a more attentive audience.

Up yours, Stame

Dealing with R&D

I’ve always believed that good marketers are consumer focused but technically inspired. Real innovation comes in that spark between a market insight and a technical possibility. I recall a conversation with the head of R&D in Unilever – sadly one that happened so close to me leaving that nothing ever came of it. We were shooting the breeze in my office. We’d just been in a research debrief where some new detergents powder had failed to deliver much in the way of a significant consumer preference (even in a paired comparison test which normally exaggerates any differences). I asked him whether we had got to the stage where all innovation was going to be so incremental that it was not worth the effort. What could we do that would genuinely be a dramatic step forward (apart from new formats – liquids and tablets etc – which is the direction the market was going)? He gave me a wry smile and said “I could develop you a product that would give a huge improvement in washing performance and I could deliver it at a much lower price. But you’d have to do something for me. You’d have to persuade people to change their habits and use 3 separate products”. I sat up and paid attention
He explained that washing powders are a cocktail of chemicals. I knew this. “Yes, but what you don’t appreciate is how much performance we sacrifice and cost we incur keeping them all stable. A washing machine has 3 dosing compartments”. (They don’t these days but this was 20 years ago). “If you could persuade people to buy 3 separate products and use each one in a different compartment we could give them a performance improvement even an idiot would notice and we could do it at half the price of a normal powder”.

What is the point of the story? Firstly, the kind of conversation I was having is unusual for a marketer to have with the head of R&D. It was relaxed, friendly and we were exploring possibilities in a much more constructive way. Secondly, I could understand what he was saying. I am not showing off here – all the Unilever Marketers understand the technical side of their products (at least they used to). I gave up chemistry at school but nevertheless I had a good understanding of all the chemical ingredients in any of the products I marketed for Unilever. Marketers have to make it their business to understand the technology, processes and systems behind their brands. It is essential to be able to work collaboratively with R&D.

Finally I had asked him a stretch question with no constraints. How can we do something amazing? Most times this kind of question is much more conservatively put and framed with many constraints in terms of cost and deadlines. To get the best out of R&D you have to ask challenging questions and neither constrain nor allow them to double guess you. Here are some examples:-

If money was no object what would the most expensive product in the world look like?
Another way to ask the same question – what do professionals use? (this has driven most of the innovation in photography)
If we had to sell this at half the price what could we offer that would meet peoples’ basic needs?
If we designed a product that was the best for just this one occasion or that particular person what would it be? (Market Segmentation is the most reliable way to innovate).

I could go on but you get the idea. The last time I tried this was with Pilsner Urquell. Everyone knows that the fresh Pilsner you drink in bars in Prague tastes like nectar. The bottled product we drink around the world is still a fine beer – the best in the view of many experts – but not as good as fresh draught Pilsner Urquell. There were many reasons for this and I think I had a basic grasp of the technical reasons why. The question I asked the Chief Brewer was how we could deliver the same drinking experience with a packaged product that had been exported (all Pilsner Urquell is brewed only in Plizen – hence the name, Pilsner Urquell, which means the ‘Original Pilsner’). I stressed that there were no constraints in terms of cost or packaging format. Before the brewing expert could answer several of my senior colleagues, especially the boss, started to explain with patronizing patience why this was impossible. The conversation never progressed. There has been some work done I believe but to my taste the bottled Pilsner still disappoints – I have tasted the real thing and this is not it.
Simple consumer insight – everyone prefers the taste of the fresh draught Pilsner. Challenging question – we want that in a packaged product that might be 3 months old or more – but no constraints. That is where you get the best out of R&D.
You don’t often get perfection but you can force yourself to change the rules and in doing so you can take a big step forward. The next time I go to Prague I will look forward to a great big glass of draught Pilsner Urquell. At home I drink Guinness in a can – the one that has a widget because Guinness asked the right question and imposed no constraints. The first prototype of Draught Guinness in a can involved a separate syringe of beer that had to be injected into the glass after the can had been poured. Clearly crazy but people liked the end result, which was very close to fresh draught Guinness. With that encouragement they developed the in-can widget (which does what the syringe had done i.e. inject a shot of Guinness under pressure to release the nitrogen and create the creamy taste).

Understand your product in every technical detail and spend at least as much time with R&D as you do with the consumer, talking their language, asking the right questions. Or as Mark Twain said – “you can do what you always did and get what you always got”.

Thursday’s Joke

This one has a message. In the Shoulders of Giants free downloads there is an excellent paper by Howard Leigh on how to value and negotiate the sale of your business. The wisdom and knowledge contained in it could literally make millions for people if they are interested in selling their company. And of course almost everyone is, at the right price. So this weeks joke……

A nice looking guy goes up to a pretty girl in a bar. After a few pleasantries he tells her that he is multi-millionaire and asks whether she would make love with him for a million dollars. The girl blushes and says coyly, “That’s a lot of money, I suppose I’d have to think about it”.

“Well, then”, he asks, “do you fancy a quick shag for 50 cents?”  Outraged, she slaps his face. “What kind of girl do you think I am?”

“I know what kind of girl you are”, he replies,” I’m just negotiating the price”.

Get rich with John Maynard Keynes

I recently received a book summary from getAbstract about John Maynard Keynes. Called ‘Keynes and the Market” it is written by Justyn Ward and it reveals a side of Keynes I never knew. I remember Keynes hazily from my studies at university – micro and macro economic theory. I did quite well in those exams because I borrowed the notes for all the lectures I missed from a certain Hugh Sloane. Yes, that Hugh Sloane, founder of Hedge fund company, Sloane Robinson, 291^st on the Sunday Times rich list. He was very clever and worked incredibly hard at Bristol. He should have been at Cambridge (so should we all) but he proved it by being the only guy in the faculty to get a first class degree.

Anyway, I digress. For some reason I always assumed that Keynes was a dull Cambridge academic. Not so. Apart from being a rather liberal, bi-sexual philanderer who ran with the Bloomsbury set he was also a shrewd and successful investor. Justyn Ward presents him as the Warren Buffet of his day with a very similar approach to investing. He believed in value rather than momentum investing. In other words, rather than carrying baskets of shares and trying to make money by getting ahead of the market trends he cherry picked under-valued companies. A natural contrarian, he liked to “lean into the wind”, as he put it, and buy into “out-of-favour stocks with sustainable earnings”. He advocated that holding a fewer number of carefully selected stocks was much less risky than a diversified portfolio. I guess it is if you pick the right ones. This was easier for Kenynes than it has been for Buffet because in Kenyes’ era company assets were largely tangible which made the judgement of whether or not they were under-valued considerably easier. Buffet has had to contend with intangible assets that can be well over half the asset value of a business. In other words he has had to get to grips with brand value. As is well known he made a killing during the dot com bubble by buying heavily into a small brand called Coca Cola when it was under-valued.

A ground breaking economist who was also smart enough to make himself a small fortune through his investments and human enough to enjoy life to the full – that’s someone to look up to.

Some tips on measuring Brand Health

You’ll have gathered that I don’t blog regularly. I know I should but I don’t. I blog spasmodically, when I have something I want to share, a book I have read or some piece of business/marketing insight I’m thinking about. So, here’s something about measuring Brand Health. It was prompted by a question an old colleague asked me the other day. He works for a large global business (no hints) that wants to become even more brand-led and wants to make a regular review of the health of its brands the catalyst for this.

I wrote him quite a nice thought piece on this (no I won’t share that just yet – I may develop it a bit first and maybe write an article). It is a subject on which I have some strong views based on several years wrestling with it, although I would not claim to be the world’s expert (marketing expert is an oxymoron – marketers are a mile wide and an inch deep, sometimes not even an inch). Tell you what – I’ll give you the headlines.

Brands account for roughly half the value of a business if they have them. If not you can call it reputation and it amounts to the same thing (the value of a brand is its reputation).
Therefore, brand health (or a company’s reputation) should be reviewed by the board of a company as often as they review their financial performance. Just doing this will force the business to be more brand-led.
You have to start with inputs and outputs. The inputs are the various things you can invest behind a brand to create growth – product quality, distribution, competitive pricing, weight and quality of marketing & communications. The outputs are the market place performance results that should come from all this investment – market share, revenue, margin, ROI. Are we doing the right things, are they having the right results?

Some people look for some composite score for all of this. Some even focus on brand value using whichever methodology has caught their eye. In my view this is all pointless. It will be some form of a balanced scorecard where “apples” will have been added to “pears” and some of the fruit salad will be both arbitrary and subjective. Either way it ends up being very theoretical and not very useful – neither predictive nor diagnostic in my experience.

It is nevertheless worth focusing on what converts the inputs to the outputs in order to get some insight that is both diagnostic and predictive of future performance – surely that’s the point of the whole thing, if not then you might as well just count the cash and plot the financial graphs.

To do this properly requires some fact-based understanding about how brands work, in particular how people in the category come to adopt – or unadopt – brands. Most brand owners don’t have this understanding – they may think they do, but they don’t. They will have pieces of the story (based on some facts and a lot of speculation and prejudice) but nowhere close to the whole story of why someone chooses, this time, to buy a BMW rather than an Audi, or an Apple rather than a Dell.

There are consultancies who will tell you otherwise – there are as many models of brand health and brand conversion as there are consultancies, all sold to potential clients with total conviction that they are right. What does that tell you?

The perfect model of what drives conversion to a brand is the Holy Grail of marketing. Many claim to have found it, no-one has, at least not yet. So while we keep looking – and we should – here are the things I look at in a brand to see how healthy it is:-

Brand Price Elasticity – since the ultimate test of the strength of a brand is that people are prepared to pay a price premium for it (or a higher volume at parity price) price elasticity, how it compares versus the consideration set of competitive brands and how it improves over time, is the ultimate measure. The issues are that a) getting accurate data regularly is expensive b) very careful thought needs to given as to the competitive consideration set (it is rarely who you think) and the sample (you don’t want to know the views of everyone or the data just gets flattened). However, there are useful proxies for price elasticity that can be tracked.

Recruitment – any brand needs to be recruiting younger (than its target) users or it eventually goes into decline, a decline that can be hard or impossible to reverse. Declining uptake (and weakening attitudes) among younger users has proved to be an extremely accurate predictor of future brand performance.

Differentiation – not a lot of people know that the Y&R Brand Evaluator model was developed by MIT. Even fewer know that MIT did an exercise to look at which of the 4 key measures in the model correlated highest with actual market performance. The answer was differentiation. The more the target audience perceives a brand to be different to its competitors the stronger it is and the better it performs over time. One would assume the perceived difference would need to be relevant (one of the other scores in the Y&R model) but it doesn’t (or maybe sensible marketers ensure the difference is always relevant). But the fact is that brands that stand out as different from their consideration set perform consistently well (Apple, VW, Guinness, Nike)

Momentum – this is based on the latest from social sciences but again, like differentiation, has been to shown to reflect brand strength accurately and in the short term (unlike standard image and attribute measures, momentum scores can change in just a few months). As humans we tend to gravitate towards what we perceive to be what everyone else is doing – we follow the perceived trends like a flock of birds or shoal of fish (literally). The extent to which people think that a brand is ‘getting more popular’ is a key score.

As I say, all of these can and should be measured and tracked. But a healthy brand needs some other things to stay healthy. A healthy brand needs healthy foundations. I list my top three below but would stress that in my view these cannot be measured. They need to be assessed by people with experience:-

A Great Brand Positioning – clear, competitive and inspires great execution

Famous Brand Signifiers – strong brands are shown to have well known collaterals (can be a pack design, logo, some aspect of the product experience, music etc)

“Product Recipe” – a clearly set out technical specification that is linked to its brand positioning and its signifiers. Distinctive brands don’t just happen by chance and they don’t remain distinctive over time by chance. Someone or something is keeping them that way.

Last but not least – consistency. Healthy brands are consistent (even though their form and their messages will evolve over time albeit executed with a freshness that feels almost inconsistent). All the strongest brands adapt with the changing trends of its market and society and yet maintain a consistency of personality and identity. Now that is tough to do – about as tough as all of us find it to enjoy life, build careers, please the family and stay healthy.

Thursday’s Joke (from Stame)

For some reason Sherrington is pissed off with me. I know he has been ‘blogging spasmodically’ when he has something important he wants to share (funny how this always coincides with some new book or business he’s punting). Not true of good old Stame – I constantly have gems and pearls I want to share but Sherrington keeps spiking them. This is not so hard to do if, like me, you have no access to the BCST (bloggy content system thingy) and no idea how to use it even if you did.
He has however let me start posting some Thursday Jokes (he had to – most people disregard the rest of the blog and just read this). So here’s my latest:-

A guy staggers home from the pub late at night, happy and pissed. As he passes a bush he hears a woman’s voice.
“Hey you, yes you – I don’t normally do this kind of thing but if you give me 30 quid you can have your way with me”
He thinks to himself that he doesn’t normally do this kind of thing either, but what the hell, so he hands over the money and in he goes.

After a few minutes a policeman comes along and shines his torch on the couple in the bush.

“What the hell do you think you two are up to?” he shouts.
The man replies:
“Do you mind officer, I’m making love to my wife”
“Terribly sorry, sir” says the Policeman, “I had no idea”.
“Neither did I ‘til you shone the torch”, replied the man.

So You Wanna Know About eMarketing?

With such poor use of English you’d imagine this to be a post by Stame, but no, it’s me, the patron of this blog and this is the title of my latest eBook available here. As you may or may not know, I am non-exec Chairman of an eMarketing Agency, Quirk. They have written an excellent book that explains and educates people about eMarketing in much more detail. It is available as a free download and based on it, and other educational tools they have, they offer an on-line accreditation for aspiring digital marketers.

My eBook comes at eMarketing from a different angle – my angle. In other words it is mostly aimed at the ‘Old School’ marketer (like me a couple of years ago) who wants to understand eMarketing and what’s so different about it compared to the marketing they have grown up with. In the next two sections I give an insight on how to develop an eMarketing strategy and argue the case for having an eMarketing agency of record rather than going through your ad agency. Have a read (it’s only 50 pages) and let me know what you think.

I admit that my secondary target for the book is the ‘new school’ of digital marketers. I have learned the hard way that many of them (my Quirk colleagues being the exception, ahem) don’t understand what we ‘old school’ don’t understand. The have grown up digital and don’t get why we don’t think like they do and visa versa. As you might have guessed, I make a case for the best of both worlds – the basics of business and brand strategy still have a place in the new digital world.

So do you ‘wanna’ know about eMarketing? Well you should, so start with my eBook and then read Quirk’s so you can actually learn how to do it.

Get Your Team to Write Their Own Year-end Performance Reviews

I once had a boss who through sheer idleness and bloody mindedness asked me to write my own year-end performance review. This was a really shit brief. You can’t just write endless lists of strengths so you find yourself owning up to all sorts of flaws and failures, ones he would never have spotted given the modest amount of attention he paid anyone else but himself. I ended up getting the lowest pay rise in the department.

The best way to score the top performance review is to be a brown nosed sycophant. It is very hard for a boss to rate you poorly if you are quite clearly his biggest fan (I say ‘his’ not because of my normal chauvinism that assumes bosses are always blokes but because the minority of female bosses are not so easily duped).

Up Yours.