Social Media or Social Forum?

I’ve written in the past that marketers made a telling mistake by calling digital and the internet – “New Media”. By doing so they associated it with traditional one-way media such as print/TV etc. The internet is essentially a multi-dimensional exchange and probably its least effective use is as a medium for banner ads. The same people, in my view, are making the same mistake by calling Twitter and Facebook “Social Media”.

Twitter is a social forum, a big on-line conversation involving 100 million people and 65 million tweets a day (and counting – the new generation of mobile devices with Twitter as a main page app is going to make this explode). Of these Tweets 91% are people (yes – people, NOT ‘consumers’ another word that gets us into the wrong mindset). The balance comes from brands and just a tiny percentage – 0.4% – from celebrities. Celebrities are people too but the key difference, apart from their desire to make themselves a profitable brand, is that they reach, on average 300,000 followers, which is 1000 times more than the rest of us.
I have got all these stats from an excellent report by 360i published on the equally excellent Brandchannel. Definitely worth a download. Another telling stat from the report (completed in March 2010 so fairly up to date) is that 92% of all tweets are public so this is an on-line forum brands can and should tune in to. But that’s the point – people use Twitter to converse and air their views. Only 12% of the Tweets mention brands and most of these brands are technology, entertainment or other social networks. The rest are things like cars, cameras, music, restaurants – in other words brands that are a part of their lifestyle and interests. Not a lot are about Persil or Coke. Only 1% are engaging in conversations with brands which is hardly surprising since only 12% of brand tweets are conversational. The brands are talking AT them, not with them, just like they do in other ‘media’.

Here is how I think marketers and brands should think about social forums or networks. Imagine you are Coca Cola or Persil and you were sitting at a table in a pub or restaurant and on the table next to you were a big group of friends, talking loud enough for you to hear.  You would listen and learn but you would not interrupt unless there was a socially acceptable opportunity. For example one person complains that they have a stain in their favourite shirt they just can’t shift and have had to throw it away. Or someone complains that they think the draft Coke they are drinking always tastes watered down. You would pick your moment and you might say something like this:-

“Excuse me, I hope you don’t think I’m being rude but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. I am actually Persil or Coke and I’m really sorry you’ve had a problem but I think I might be able to help you”.

If they had not mentioned anything to do with you but you have gathered from who they are (by the way, quite hard to do with Twitter other than by inference) that they are people you’d like to talk to, you would take a different approach.

“Hi guys, sorry to interrupt but I’m from Coke and I just wanted to let you know we’re having a party you might like to come along to (for ‘party’ read anything you are actually doing that could be of interest to this group). Let me tell you about it and you tell me what you think”

You see the point I’m making – treat it like the social discourse it is. Don’t barge in, don’t talk at them, talk with them, be helpful, be relevant, be interesting.

And recognize that most of the time, they do not want you involved in their conversation. There is no socially acceptable moment to interrupt them and introduce yourself. That said we have to be careful with percentages. Based on 360i’s figures I reckon that even if it is only 1% of the 12% of tweets that mention brands other than technology/entertainment etc this is still close to 100,000 conversations a day you may be interested in and where the participants may be interested in you. That’s 3 million a month. How many people do you talk to in focus groups? How many effective messages from your very expensive conventional media actually get through? But please, just remember to be sociable. As 360i say in their report – Twitter is not a megaphone.

If you don’t have the patience for all of this then get hold of a few celebrities and get them to plug you but try not to make it too obvious.

Loosen Up

Regular readers (how are you both getting on?) will know about my interest in creativity. Like a lot of people I think I’ve always loved ideas – having them and hearing about them – but I can remember when I first started to take an interest in understanding creativity. I was lucky enough to be in a small group of people working on an innovation team at Unilever. JWT heard about this and offered to have Jeremy Bullmore, their Chairman, come along to talk to us about creativity. He told us the story behind the Eureka moment, he talked about creativity in scientific exploration and he explained the philosophy of creativity of JWT’s Creative VP in the 1920’s, James Webb Young (I still have his book ‘A Technique for Producing Ideas’ that Jeremy gave us).

This started a journey for me, one with no final destination I suspect, to understand creativity in all its aspects, but most especially in business. The difference between art and business is that in the latter creativity is applied, it has a commercial purpose. Or perhaps more accurately it has a commercial context so it is forced to have a commercial purpose. Artists create for the sake of creation irrespective of whether it has commercial value. They seek to evoke an enduring emotional response. In business we seek to want to get a commercial response.

There are commonalities. Creativity in ones’ endeavours is a disposition – it is not something that can be switched on and off or compartmentalized. You are creative because you think creatively and because you get excited by ideas.

“The difference between that which is constructed and that which is created is that the former is loved only after it is constructed, whereas the latter is loved before it ever exists” Chesterton

At the risk of compartmentalizing I see 3 kinds of creativity, whether in art or business:-

New connections – where different elements are brought together in fresh and original combinations to create a new idea.

Distillation – where the creativity takes us to the heart or essence of something, to some pure idea (like chipping away at a block of stone, removing all the unnecessary bits, to find the sculpture)

Inspirational – the idea just comes whether from divine intervention (unlikely) or some unconscious version of connectivity and distillation (more likely). The idea just comes like an epiphany. Another variation of this is spotting the idea – looking at what everyone looks at but seeing what they do not see – a penetrating and discerning insight.

I’ve always felt the first two can be facilitated. James Webb Young’s book talks of how he always kept notes of random thoughts and then used them like a roller deck when he tried to solve a creative advertising problem. He very deliberately collected eclectic stimulus to enable him to make fresh connections. Ideation workshop techniques make a lot of use of this – they force participants to free up their thinking and introduce lots of ways to reframe the problem and apply new stimulus to allow new ideas to be formed. We can use a variety of techniques to increase the chance of seeing the essence of an idea – we can immerse ourselves, we can experience and we can stand back and look from fresh angles.

But inspiration and the ability to spot and develop an idea seems to me to be an innate talent. However, you still need to give people the incentive and/or the permission to be inspired.

Perhaps the central point is that we can improve the environment for creativity. I enjoyed this blog from Neil Perkin. It talks about the need in business to create some space – some air is how I have also heard it described by my much missed friend Robyn Putter – for ideas to come. We have to loosen up and this can be a challenge in business. There is a tension – but is it a creative tension? – between managing the business efficiently, clear targets, clear roles and responsibilities, and yet being loose enough to allow ideas to surface. We need to organize everyone but, as Neil points out, we need to let diverse groups swarm on problems, to create fresh solutions.

Jeremy Bullmore has always identified the power of a tight brief to unlock creativity. We need to be clear about what problem we are solving and, importantly, by when, but loose about how we solve it. Maybe that is how we resolve the tension – we need to be serious about what we are trying to achieve but passionate about the creativity needed to achieve it.

But we cannot, must not, try to limit creative thinking to just product innovation, marketing, the ideation room, the 20% of your time you are allowed to work on ‘new projects’ or whatever. Creative thinking approaches everything creatively, all the time.

We have been talking a lot about this at Quirk recently and we have concluded that creativity in digital applies to everything:-

•    The strategy
•    The ideas
•    The creative use of technology
•    The creative application of all the tactics at our disposal
•    The aesthetics (because aesthetics or ‘eye-candy’ have a purpose – they demonstrate values, they engage and they are viral)

We have defined good creative – great creative – as being:-
•    Strategically relevant
•    Measurable (or else we don’t learn and if we don’t learn we don’t improve)
•    Able to generate response/action that far outweighs the cost – ROI

We recognize that this poses tough choices in terms of tight/loose management style but trust that a love of creativity balanced with a need for commercial growth will guide the choices.

I applaud and commend Quirk’s approach to being the best creative agency in their field. They have applied themselves to what this actually means and what it requires in terms of culture. Most agencies or businesses do not – they just pay it lip service or rely on inspiration.

Risky Business

Risk management has become a bit of a hobby-horse for me. It’s part of corporate governance for UK Plc’s and US corporates. I was exposed to it first when I was on the board of Tempus Plc and then again at SABMiller Plc. It’s fair to say that like a lot of corporate governance, company directors regard Risk Management as at best a necessary chore and at worst a pointless exercise. Business is at its heart a risk/benefit decision process and well-run businesses would claim that their normal management processes take care of risk assessment. Every time Risk Management came on the agenda at SABMiller, my old boss, Graham Mackay, would, with some irritation, point out that the origins of Risk Management lay with governance for banks and their particular needs rather than manufacturing businesses like ours. He had a point and to be fair SABMiller is an extremely well run business.

However, always the contrarian, I really enjoyed Risk Management (I was on the RM committee at Tempus and had to oversee its implementation for the marketing function at SABMiller). The arguments made sense to me:-

When businesses suffer serious calamity people with hindsight always say the risk could have been forseen. They are right more often than not. In fact, more often than not someone in the organization or a disaffected former employee claims they wrote a memo about it.

An exercise where you take a hard look at what could go wrong and then discuss ways of either avoiding, mitigating or insuring against it, is a fundamentally very strategic exercise. Of course you see risks but you can also see opportunities. At the very least you get fresh insight.

There are various ways to approach RM (good old Wiki lays them out) but it is essentially fairly straightforward. An experienced and accountable group of people look at all the potential risks for all aspects of the business and draw up a list. They then catagorize the list into how likely they are to happen (high, medium, low probability) and how serious the effect would be if they did (high, medium, low impact). This then gives a matrix and of course you start with the highest probability/highest impact and work your way through them. Can they be avoided by improved management processes and/or better monitoring? Can they be insured against? Is further work or more fundamental change required? Logical stuff.

The point is, the risk is brought out into the open – what is the worst that can happen, how likely is it, what can we do about it? It’s impossible to do this without getting some great insights about the business and identifying some sensible actions to manage the risk.

The reason I am so obsessed by this subject is that for me it lies at the heart of what triggered the Recession i.e. the failure of the banking system (ironic that isn’t it?). It is also the solution, for me, as to what we should do to prevent a future reoccurrence of the systemic failings in the financial institutions, and a preferable one to lots more regulation and red tape.

Surely if Risk Management had been effective – that is to say applied with conviction and purpose – at Lehman Brothers (and the rest of the banks) they would have realized that they were massively exposed if house prices turned down? Does anyone now believe that Risk Management (forget the ethical questions just focus on the good business sense argument) was alive and well under Lord Browne at BP?

We don’t need loads more legislation. We have Risk Management – we just need to ensure that it is taken entirely seriously. And whom do we rely on to do that? Non-Executive Directors, that’s who. There has been a lot of whinging and whining among that elite group NED’s on the boards of the big corporates. They complain that they carry so much accountability and responsibility for very little by way of reward as a result of all this pesky governance. How can they be held accountable, they have to rely on what the executive board tell them about a business they get involved with only 6 or 8 times a year? Bullshit.

A well chosen, vetted and experienced Non-Exec should know enough to be able to ask the tough questions and should be relied upon to see that protocols like Risk Management are taken seriously. Are you telling me an experienced banker could not have asked a few probing questions about toxic debt and the impact of a downturn in house prices (especially given how deep Lehman and others were into it)? Are you telling me an experienced oil man could not have spotted the shortcuts that BP were taking and the risk they were exposing themselves, their shareholders (which includes a lot of pensioners) and all of us to? I’m bloody sure I can in marketing which is my chosen area.

We do not need to change much. Keep the governance and regulation we have, just make sure it is applied vigorously and hold the NED’s to account if it is not. The one change I’d make is to have a potential Non-Exec vetted and approved by an independent authority. And I don’t buy the argument that any of this will put the good Non-Execs off joining a board. It is very prestigious, very interesting and already well paid. They get circa $50 -100,000 to attend 6-8 board meetings a year (and read the papers and take an active interest in the business). This fee could be increased – surely it’s worth it – but in my view that is not the issue or the barrier to having good non-execs. Breaking up the cosy club of senior businessmen and well connected retirees and opening it up to better qualified people is the issue. No names, no pack drill but I have met some truly ineffectual and disengaged Non-Execs in my time.

Business is risky and the impact of corporate calamities affects all of us. It can be made much less risky and no less profitable with a bit of common sense.

Post Script

For those interested in the application of risk management thinking specifically to marketing you might like to read ‘Brand Risk’ by David Abrahams. You’ll see some contribution from yours truly but despite this, it is an interesting book from a smart author.

At least I think it is but then Risk Management is a hobby-horse of mine.

Has the Internet Changed Everything?

At Judie Lannon’s invitation (editor of Market Leader) Paul Feldwick and I have kicked off a debate about the impact of the internet on marketing. He is in the ‘nothing’s changed’ corner and I am arguing ‘everything has changed’. You can read his opening salvo (which picks up on comments I made in this blog) and my reply in the latest edition of Market Leader. The debate is continued on their web site.

As usual with these things, in reality, I don’t think Paul and I are that far apart. I don’t think the fundamentals of marketing will change that much, in other words the purpose and objectives of marketing, but the means by which we do marketing will change – already have in fact. More importantly business and marketing will change because people are changing. I argue this has always been the case – since the Stone Age, technology has changed society. The technology revolution we are living through is the biggest ever in terms of speed, scale and (low) cost. I am trying to focus the debate on 3 areas of change:-

1. The way we market goods and services (research, innovation, communications, pricing, distribution)
2. The goods and services (especially the latter) that we can market
3. The market itself – the internet is multi-dimensional exchange. It is BtoB, BtoC, CtoC and CtoB. What gets exchanged ranges from goods and services to ideas and the currency is money, time, information, entertainment and ideas.

Any way  - what do you think? Tune in and join the debate if not. I’ll keep you posted.

Getting Your Brand to Behave

The ever alert Jonty Fisher (follow him on Twitter) tweeted this recently, an article by Alan Mitchell for Marketing Magazine in the UK. I haven’t seen Alan for many years but remember him with respect. One of the best writers and commentators on marketing in the UK, he has always been quick on to latch on to the latest thinking, especially if it debunks popular ‘brand manager think’. This one is about ‘Behavioural Economics’ and how it debunks some of the best held tenets of marketing.

A lot of marketers (myself included until I looked it up) would not associate Behavioural Economics with brand marketing but they should because it is effectively a definition. BE integrates economic decisions and choices – like which brand to buy – with the latest insights from psychology – why people do the things they do.

Alan believes BE is ‘setting the cat among the pigeons’  by challenging all we believe about building brands. He cites three ground breaking insights that BE has delivered:-

Most brands are bought because we copy other people
There is a bias towards the familiar status quo
We rely on heuristics (little short hands) to make decisions, like which brand to buy

Well, Alan, whilst I might agree that a lot of marketers do not pay enough attention to these realities, this ain’t exactly new insight.

Jeremy Bullmore, in his seminal (I use this word very deliberately) article “Posh Spice and Persil” centered his argument on the insight that we are attracted to brands precisely because they are famous i.e. familiar, seen to be the status quo, leading etc. Mark Earls has spoken and written a great deal about how humans are the ultimate social ape and rely on copying other peoples’ behaviour based on a genetic desire to avoid unnecessary risk. He points out that amazon use this insight very successfully and give us no less than 16 opportunities on their site to see what other people are doing, and therefore to copy others.  I have never spotted all 16 – bit like spot the difference, you always miss the last couple – but I think he has in mind reader reviews and numbers of copies sold.

Malcolm Gladwell (who Mark Earls takes to task for introducing the idea of ‘tipping points’ whereas the reality has more to do with copying and weight of numbers than opinion leaders or market inflexions) wrote a book based on the use of heuristics called Blink. We sum up situations, people and yes, brands based on pattern recognition. Those people with amazing memories who can recall thousands of numbers base their technique on creating a visual shorthand for a set of digits (e.g. 77 = two old men bending over).

I have commented in this blog that scientists now understand more about how the brain stores and retrieves memories and associations. Sensory mnemonics and consistency of messages play an important role in reinforcing a bunch of associations (which is all a brand is).

That’s why good marketers like consistency and invent catchy jingles and distinctive logos.

So I’m not seeing much new in this Behavioural Economics but I do agree that a lot of marketers are either slow on the uptake or downright contrary (totally changing a familiar logo is a double whammy of stupidity).

I don’t know whether BE includes this thinking but as regular readers know I am very partial to momentum, the feeling that a brand is the becoming more popular. It generates future growth and is a key health measure. But it is really only a twist on familiarity. We are attracted to what everyone else seems to buy – we are even more attracted to what we believe everyone will be buying.

I’ll tell you what I do like about Behavioural Economics – it covers my two most favourite things. Understanding how to make money by better understanding what makes people tick. These are two things every marketer should focus on to get their brand to behave.

Steve Jobs – The Opposite of a Flash in the Pan

Like all captains of industry Steve Jobs polarizes opinion. No one denies his success and most admire his vision but there are some who see him as arrogant and meglomaniacal. I am squarley in the camp of the fans. I don’ t know the man, have never met him or even heard him speak, but I just marvel at his leadership and sense of mission. And I love all the Apple gear.

My favourite business quote of all time is:-

“The reasonable man adapts himself to world. The unreasonable man adapts the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man” George Bernard Shaw
There is a shorter one along the same lines (don’t know who said it):-
“In order to grow you have to have a point fo view about the future”
This about sums up Steve Jobs.

The financial boys have a view that no-one “comes twice”. In other words most successful entrepreneurs, and they are few, only manage to pull off a profitable game changer once in their career. Jobs has done it again and again…..

•    He reinvented the PC with his Mac operating system
•    He then reinvented it again with the introduction of both design and functionality.
•    He reinvented music with the iPod
•    He reinvented mobile with the iPhone
•    Currently he is kind of reinventing everything digital with a variety of crowd sourcing, cloud computing, new aggregator devices etc

….and almost always profitably (there have been a few financial mishaps). He has done all this with a clarity of purpose and a determination (despite some recent health problems) that are simply inspiring.

Yes I am a big Mac fan – once you go mac you never go back – but I am an even bigger fan of the man behind it.

So I want you to read this.

It is very teccy since it deals with Jobs’ personal response to the criticism that he is killing off Flash, the propietary Adobe software upon which much of the development of the web has been based. Apple’s new generation of devices don’t work with Flash and many people have criticized this as a typical piece of Jobs’ arrogance and myopia. Read what he says (it doesn’t matter whether you understand all the tech references). It is clear, well reasoned and explains that he is not trying to get at Adobe just trying to drive his vision of how digital should work. It is masterful.

We are witnessing an amazing battle between Microsoft, Google and Apple. My money is on Google and Apple because their motivation is not just to make money, it is to facilitate knowledge sharing and creative pursuit. The kind of stuff Maslow puts at the top of the triangle of human development. I think Microsoft will lose out since although they started with the same goals (and the Big Blue, IBM, once one of the most powerful businesses on the planet, perished as a result) they became the control freaks. In fact, they became like IBM.

And by the way Bill, you’d be better off investing in eductation in Africa rather than trying to cure malaria.

Social Media and Brands

Jeez there’s a lot of stuff on this. Brand Channel has a debate going but so does just about every other marketing and digital marketing blog. My colleague, Jonty Fisher is worth following on Twitter. He sifts through a lot of this and tweets the best.
I see the issue in very simple terms. PR and word of mouth have always been very important to brands ever since Julius Caesar said he personally liked the spears made by Maximus Minimus and a few Centurions on Hadrian’s wall shared their opinions on the relative merits of the different spears being sold in Rome.

In fact in Roman times – before print or mass media had been invented – I’d argue that PR and word of mouth were the most important tools of marketing and the only way to get both pulling for you was to make sure that your spears were consistently the best, which in turn meant being willing to innovate to stay ahead of the competition.

In the second half of the 20th century mass production, distribution, media and just about everything else relegated PR and word of mouth further down the list of effective marketing tools and along with them a focus on true product quality and authenticity. They did not render them redundant, just less important. A great ad, some stand-out packaging and a full listing in Tesco could trump a better product with a small but loyal following including some opinion leaders. Any marginal product deficiencies were drowned out by didactic mass and to be fair mass production based on mass distribution gave the big brands cost advantages.

The views of experts did matter and some negative word of mouth could be very damaging but who knew who the experts were and how many people could you practically share your negative experiences of such and such a brand with? National newspapers and TV told you who the experts were in their ‘unbiased’ opinion (hmmmm) and they did not give you much of a platform to share your views other than the letters page or Watchdog.

Search engines and social media platforms have changed all that. We can research in seconds and we can share our views with millions of folk all over the world in just a few seconds more. PR and word of mouth are back on top and with them the need to make consistently better spears.

My favourite comment on all of this (you can watch it in Persuasive Brand Communications here) comes from Andy Fennell, CMO at Diageo. He’s talking about Guinness when he says “ I love all this transparency and sharing – the more that people find out about us the more reasons they’ll have to love Guinness”. Well said, Andy.

I may be about to stir up a hornets nest but I think “Social Media” is misnamed and damagingly so. By calling it a media it instantly raises the idea of something that you can manipulate by throwing money at it.

Neither is ‘Social’ helpful. What defines us as the “Super Social Ape” as Mark Earls would put it, is the fact that we like to talk. The internet has allowed people to interact and converse on an unprecedented scale. The line between experts and amateurs has blurred. Everyone can have an opinion and those opinions can be shared at the speed of light. People can and will talk about your brand, they always have. The difference now is the scale, speed and measurability of the conversation

“How much of our budget should we invest in Social Media” is a question that is being asked all the time. It’s entirely the wrong question.
Here are the questions you should ask:-

“What shall we give them to talk about?”
“How can we help and encourage them to share what they think?”
“How shall we keep track of what they are saying and decide how best to act upon it?”

I am fairly sure that Maximus Minimus, Purveyor of Fine Spears would have looked out over the Forum in Rome and asked himself the same questions.

Now This is Scary

Building on my previous post about how marketers should get more interested in how the mind works, I cam across this in POPSCI.com. Professor Jack Gallant at Berkeley, California is perfecting the technology to read minds. To be more precise he has a machine that can see what the mind sees. You see a big elephant walking across a desert (an actual experiment they ran) and the machine can see the shape of this from your brain.

At the moment it is all very fuzzy, just about recognizable. But then the first phone call from Alexander Bell in 1876 was pretty ropey too. Less than a hundred years later and you could talk to anyone anywhere in the world. One suspects Professor Gallant will improve his technology much faster than Alexander Bell. Very soon we will be able to see clearly what people actually see and one has to believe, very shortly after, we will be able to know what they are thinking.

Right here, right now POPSCI.com tells us of another scary development – this time an iPhone app (these things are turbo charging invention). Just point your phone at someone across the room and take a photo. Press the button and the app will then trawl the internet, especially social media sites, and give you all the information on this person. I’ve seen this in spy movies like Bourne Identity but here is the same technology that anyone can download to their phone.

The future is here.

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.

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.