Some of this years’ top press ads.
HRH Prince Charles started Duchy Originals, a range of wholesome organic products, as a way of generating funds for his charity, The Prince’s Trust. The charity supports disadvantaged young entrepreneurs and is a really worthy cause. Britain needs entrepreneurs and the Trust provides seed capital and mentorship to kids who, having grown up on the wrong side of the track, would otherwise never be given a chance. It gets corporate and private sponsorship but the Prince thought it would be a good idea to create an annuity income from one of his entrepreneurial ideas.
Charles has always been convinced that original is better and environmentally friendly is essential. He prefers old style architecture and any ‘back to nature’ way of producing food. Since he feels he represents British values at their best (so I was once told by someone in his entourage) he believes that deep down we all want to be like him. So when, on his Highgrove Estate, he came across a nice biscuit made with organic ingredients to an old fashioned recipe or bacon from free range organic pigs he reckoned, given the chance, we’d all like to pay a premium for these foods. He founded Duchy Originals – or at least he had some of his people do it – and launched a range of products the best of which, in my opinion, were the biscuits and the bacon.
He put some professional managers in charge and for a while it did OK – it got to 4 million plus turnover at its best and the charity received some annual dividends. Charles was known to boast playfully that he was “a self-made millionaire” on the back of the success of his business start up. So far so good.
I met people who worked at Duchy Originals and while they tried to be discrete it was pretty clear that the business significantly under-performed because, allegedly, HRH could not stop meddling and forced on them whatever latest crackpot idea he had come up with. If he happened upon some tasty Lemon Curd or sturdy Garden Sheds, he insisted these be added to the range irrespective of whatever carefully laid business plan they were working to. Worse still he also foisted on them whichever business or marketing expert he happened to meet who showed any interest in Duchy Originals (which you would, wouldn’t you, if you met HRH and were trying to make conversation).
Nevertheless, some might say that he deserves full credit for founding the charity and having the gumption to start a business that he believed in, and that would provide some extra funds. Yes, but…… What Duchy Originals is, in effect, is a commercial application of the Royal Warrant, the special seal of approval the Queen bestows on any product she uses personally. The Royal Warrant is strictly non-commercial – if the Queen happens to patronize your brand of Waxed Shooting Jacket or Umbrella or biscuit you can apply for a Royal Warrant. If it is awarded you may feature this in your advertising or on your product but there are strict rules as to how this is done and no money changes hands. You only have to look at what the Duchess of York pocketed for her full blown endorsement of Weight Watchers (genius move on their part by the way) to see how much the Royal Warrant could be worth if you could really exploit it. Ditto Duchy Originals. How much money could you make – especially in the USA and Asia – if you could launch a company with a range of products under the HRH Prince Charles Brand? Hundreds of millions, billions even if it was well managed.
How high did HRH drive the revenues– 4 million quid at best, and this slumped last year to half that and a loss of 3.3 million pounds. So he has licensed Duchy Original to Waitrose – the upmarket grocery store that are the most enthusiastic stockists of the Duchy range – in return for a guaranteed donation to the trust of 1 million per year. Waitrose will do well with Duchy Originals and one assumes at last it will get the less fettered professional management and development of the brand it deserves, but one can’t help feeling Duchy Originals could have been a license to print money for a very worthy charity.
Mind you, if you are the heir to the throne that does print the money there are probably easier and ways to generate extra funds for the Prince’s Trust than selling biscuits one happens to enjoy with one’s tea.
God Bless him, Prince Charles is the best weapon we British republicans have
There seems to be a debate about Crowd Sourcing. I don’t understand why. I cannot believe anyone is seriously debating ‘whether’ crowd sourcing a good idea only how best to use it? Of course it is. I first came across crowd sourcing as a team building exercise we used to use with clients. You’d get a group of people and give them a scenario. The one we used was where a plane crashes in the middle of a desert and the survivors are given a choice of options in terms of what they do and what they choose to rescue from the wreckage, in order to maximize their chance of survival and rescue.
First people had to complete the exercise on their own. Then they worked as a group and their collective and individual answers were compared to the advice of ‘Survival Experts’. Not quite sure who these experts were – this was long before Bear Grylls – but the results were always the same. No individual scored as highly as the group – ever. The collective views of the group were always closest to, sometimes spot on with, those of the experts.
Like most people, my appreciation of Crowd Sourcing was given a real kick with the publication in 2004 of “Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki. One of the examples he used made me realize I had been watching Crowd Sourcing in action every week on “Who wants to be a Millionaire”. The lone contestant might struggle, but ask the audience and, collectively, they always get it right.
Actually, maybe I’ve skipped a step in my journey? I seem to remember my mum telling me that, “Two heads are better than one”. Presumably several thousand heads are better than two? But I think she also told me that “Too many cooks spoil the broth”. Well how many is too many? “Two’s company, three’s a crowd” I definitely remember her telling me that. So let’s try to pull this together – more than two is a crowd, a crowd is generally better than one head, but not for making broth.
I reckon there is no debate about whether Crowd Sourcing is a good thing, a useful tool if you can get your hands on it, but perhaps not for every task or problem.
That last bit is worth a debate. When should you use crowd sourcing, how best should you use it? Hang on – what exactly do we mean by crowd sourcing? Well, for the answer to that I turned to one truly excellent, and I think by now universally approved , form of crowd sourcing – Wikipedia. With just one click I got a very useful explanation of Crowd Sourcing sourced from a crowd. Here it is:-
I could not have written this better and, more to the point, it would have taken days of research to get even close. Right away, here are two major benefits – the wisdom of the crowd and Web 2.0 enabled speed.
The Wiki definition is “the act of outsourcing tasks, normally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large community through an open call”. The term ‘Crowd Sourcing’, Wiki tells me, is a neologism (a new made up word – thanks Wiki) of crowd and outsourcing. It goes on to tell me that, as with Wikipedia itself, experts or wannabe experts enjoy helping you solve these outsourced tasks so much they often do it for free or very little reward.
So wise, fast and really cheap. Come on! Who would not use Crowd Sourcing all the time for everything? You can use it to build a living on-line encyclopedia, you can use it to source thousands of designs for, say, T-Shirts and get the same crowd to help select the best. Instead of trying to do all the development work on a piece of computer software and inevitably butting your one or two heads against problems you can’t fix (or didn’t even spot) you can get a prototype or Beta version out there and have an army of willing experts help you perfect it. Brilliant!
I have a marketing bias so let’s look at possible applications for marketing. You could build a platform where any marketer, any time anywhere could post a problem (or opportunity) they are working on and ask a crowd for ideas on how to solve it. It could be anything. Maybe you are a bank and you want ideas for how to persuade the laggards to move to on-line banking. Maybe you need an idea to unite all your disparate sponsorship properties. Maybe you need some new product ideas, a new brand name, a fresh idea for a trade conference, some ideas for on-line brand content (the internet is a hungry beast when it comes to content). Hell, you could even post your latest advertising brief – would that work? Well it’s not unknown for Ad agencies to bring in some extra free-lancers to help solve a brief – this way you could get to thousands of free-lancers, amateur or professional.
To make sure that you attracted the experts most likely to have the best ideas, the professionals or semi-professionals, you probably should offer some kind of reward, a bounty if you like, for the best ideas. Most of these people just love solving problems and get a certain personal benefit from doing so, as well as maybe some professional kudos. But it seems only fair to offer some hard cash in return for the commercial benefit you would get from a great new marketing idea. It would still be cheap and it would, of course, be the wisdom of the crowd at cyber speed.
We could call it “Idea Bounty – the best ideas get paid”. Forget focus groups and consumer workshops – if you have a marketing problem get it on our platform and we’ll guarantee that you get great ideas you can use, all for the cost, as it happens, of less than a couple of focus groups.
This Idea Bounty could be huge – I’ll just check it out on Google, see if anyone else…..Bugger!
Someone has already done it and so far every client has got ideas they both liked and have successfully used.
In fact, I discover, there are loads more crowd sourcing platforms for marketing, design, innovation, all manner of marketing needs.
So is Crowd Sourcing the future? Yes – in fact it is the present, the train has well and truly left the station. This is no fad. It is inconceivable that the genie will get put back in the bottle. More and more people, for more and more things, are going to use Crowd Sourcing. Get with the programme. Who says? – a bunch of geeky on-line nerds? Well the late and very great CK Prahalad based his last ever book on the prediction that crowd sourcing will become the way of doing business – N=1, R=G – and he was one of the most respected Business Strategists on the planet.
I can’t comment on whether T shirts and Computer Software will only ever be designed by a wise crowd. I suspect not. But I do believe strongly that not every marketing problem will.
There are occasions when I would not choose to use crowd sourcing. For me it has limitations and I think there are reasons why a small, closed community can on occasions be better.
1. Let’s start with the obvious. If the marketing brief (problem/opportunity) is highly confidential I don’t think I want to publicize it to a crowd.
2. What if I am not 100% sure of what the problem is? The advantage of working with a small, well motivated, closed community – let’s call it an agency/client team- is that you iterate the brief through working on it together. The brief gets honed, refined and sometimes completely changed. If I am going to give a problem to the crowd I need to be sure I can express it clearly and with confidence.
3. As a close cousin to this, briefs sometimes have nuances, subtleties, constraints, that are only truly appreciated by the small team that are working on them. The crowd needs clarity of purpose and cannot be relied on to wrestle with reams of sub-text.
4. Often you come to trust certain groups of problem solvers. You’ve worked with them before, they have a great track record. If I have a winning team, why do I want to expand it by inviting in the crowd? Would I run the risk of undermining confidence? I like working with people I can see and touch and – as noted above – debate with. Teams perform better with shared purpose built on like and trust that can only come through physical interaction.
5. Last on my list is a back-handed compliment to crowd sourcing. I accept I am going to get hundreds maybe thousands of ideas but how am I going to choose the right one? Out of respect to the community – which is important – every idea has to be given proper consideration. Too much choice is not always a good thing.
These, surely, are valid reasons for not using Crowd Sourcing? Maybe, maybe not.
1. If you are worried about confidentiality you can disguise the brief.
2. A great way to get insight on a problem is to throw it out there – use the crowd to help you understand the problem. It’s a lot better than a few focus groups.
3. Yes there are nuances but at some point there must be clarity – when you can summarize it in 100 words or less then throw it out there. If you can’t, keep working until you can
4. Teams are very important – it should ideally be a team decision when and how to use crowd sourcing. But if the team are so motivated why would they pass up an opportunity to check whether there might be a better solution?
5. There is something to the “Paradox of Choice” argument but it is possible to put in place a process to screen and select ideas (Idea Bounty has a range of levels of support for this). Get the team to help, employ some experts. Ask the crowd to help make the selection. Just roll your sleeves up – this is a high quality problem, too many good ideas!
I still conclude that there are reasons and occasions why/when Crowd Sourcing is not optimal. I just think they appear few and far between, or at least I think there are few occasions where at no point in the process of cracking a marketing brief would crowd sourcing not be a useful additional tool.
Too many cooks spoil the making of the broth but the more cooks you have access to, the better the broth recipes you can choose from.
I have been involved in a debate about whether the internet has changed marketing. It began in an exchange between myself and Paul Feldwick in Market Leader, the UK Marketing Society’s journal, and then moved on-line. There have been, as we hoped, some great contributions, including one from Elen Lewis who referenced an article in The Guardian that features several very eminent scientists (and a novelist) debating whether and how the internet has changed our very brains. I was interested in this since a big part of my argument that marketing has fundamentally changed as a result of the internet is based on the fact that society and people have changed. To be able to show that our brains have changed is therefore a killer point.
The article is worth reading in its entirety and being given some quiet consideration rather than surfing this short post to get the gist – you will realize the relevance/irony of this recommendation if you do. However, if, as a child of the internet, it is gist you want then here it is. Yes the internet is changing our brains. Some argue that it is for the worse, some argue it is just different with pro’s and cons, others argue it is our choice whether or not we allow it to change our brains (reading more books would help us retain our intellectual reasoning apparently).
For me the most interesting comment in the Guardian piece comes from Ed Bullmore, Cambridge Professor of Psychiatry no less. He argues that the internet resembles a human brain and how it works and therefore we can learn a lot about how we think by studying it. He calls the internet “a prosthesis of our collective memory” that’s an artificial brain to you and me. I know extrapolation is a dangerous thing but it has struck me before that if, at some point in the near future (near being imminent in evolutionary terms) everything that has ever been written and conceived, everyone one of us, every artifact and idea is digitally coded and available on the internet, and if every person on the planet is uploading their thoughts and conversations in real time, and if there are search engines and social networks able to allow each and everyone of us to access and connect all of these things again in real time, that is in effect one global brain is it not? This sounds a bit far fetched I agree. So do the views of Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. Far from being shame-faced that community information has leaked out he believes that everything should be transparent and publically available. He thinks – this is really crazy – that the world would be a better place, we would all behave better, if there were no secrets, if we were all honest with each other. Actually there must be a flaw in this argument since I have only one brain and I’m not honest with myself.
Anyway, the fact is that the big brains agree the internet is changing our brains and how they function as well as how we interact in our global cyber society. I think that means marketing must be changed fundamentally since at its heart it is about influencing how people think, behave and choose, individually and collectively, to the commercial benefit of a business. In fact I’d say that was game, set and match Paul! I’d now like to move on to a debate about the cult of celebrity and its role in our slide into destructive global decadence (aka Paris Hilton will be the death of all of us).
Any takers?
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.
Just read Sherrington’s post on technology making us behave badly, internet etiquette etc (I do wish he’d run this stuff past me first). What a load of Billy Bollocks. The whole point of the internet is to be extreme, to drop the normal niceties and tell it like it is. That’s my philosophy. Someone can’t take a joke then f*** them (if I find someone has edited this and put in asterisks I’ll be really p**** off).
By the way, if any of you have been wondering where I’ve been I’d like to point out that I have been posting like a demon but most of them get spiked by Sherrington. If you are reading this then it means the bunch of flowers I sent Amanda has done the trick and she has slipped it past Shezza while he’s been busy with his ‘other ventures’.
Amanda is the one who converts all his ramblings and mine into stuff that can actually be posted since neither of us know one end of a computer from the other.
Up yours, Stame
Interesting piece by Tony Quin in Adweek about the battle for supremacy between traditional ad agencies and digital agencies. He concludes, sensibly, that it will be a “both/and” outcome. Some clients, on some occasions will want digital as part of a ‘full service’ agency offering, others will want more specialist digital or eMarketing agencies. Yet more – in my view the smart clients – will reject the idea of any kind of lead agency and will pull together a team of experts from a variety of agencies to suit their needs. (For more on this read “So you wanna know about eMarketing” available here)
Finance directors have been doing this for years. Depending on the particular project they have, they cherry pick advisors from banks, lawyers, accountants and consultants. For regulatory reasons (e.g. when share issues are involved) there may be one lead advisor but in reality it is a team led by the FD. Marketing Directors would do well to watch closely how they do this.
In Quin’s article he criticizes digital agencies for their inexperience in acting as a lead agency. I think there is some truth in this. Digital marketers are not always very good at explaining why they do what they do and the role of technology in particular. But frankly it was the same with Ad Agencies in the early days. Clients did not really understand how it worked or the nature of the creative process (many still don’t). Over time ad agencies got better at presenting what they did and clients became much more savvy about how agencies and creativity works, or at least confident enough that it did work that they let them get on with it.
That needs to happen in digital. Yes the agency need to explain better the ins and outs of their craft but clients need to grow up. Too many are still seduced by sexy web sites that fundamentally don’t deliver and are clueless about the many other, often more important, tactics of eMarketing. They have imported rather clumsily their ‘creative appreciation’ from analogue, mass market media and it doesn’t help. At least the digital agencies are helped in this ‘journey towards mutual understanding’ by the numbers. They can prove their case with ROI.
While the debate at the moment is focused on the traditional ad agency versus digital specialist spectrum there is another dimension, a triangular one, that interests/frustrates clients and has done for years. Strategy versus execution versus creativity. All agencies, traditional through to digital, design to communications, even the management consultancies struggle with this perceived trade-off. If you are a great strategic thinker then chances are you’re not so creative; if you are really creative you are not always so practical; if you really know how to manage the details of the execution you probably weren’t smart enough to come up with the idea in the first place. A bit harsh but fair I think. Agencies or teams of agencies that can resolve this trade off and deliver fresh work that meets the business strategy and is delivered faultlessly have the upper hand.
In my view this trade off is easier to address than the digital versus traditional debate, at least for the next 5 years or so. I explain why in more detail in my eBook but the headline is that role of metrics and technology in the thinking and practice of eMarketing is so fundamentally alien to ad agencies that they will never be able to embrace it effectively. For many – not all – marketing projects where digital is pivotal you will not find a both/and agency.
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”.
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.
I have been asked many times about this, most recently by an old colleague who was interested in my advice about whether he should accept a ‘promotion’ to be the new Group Marketing Director, in other words to move into the newly created role. It is tricky. It’s a fancy sounding title but a job that can cause a lot of stress, frustration and disappointment on all sides.
If there is a role for a Group Marketing Director it is normally because there are a number of other executive marketing directors across a group of companies, often, but not always, a multi-national group. So there will be divisional or local CEO’s and Marketing Directors in the mix. What, then, is the job of the Group Marketing Director? This is often very poorly defined and, perhaps as a consequence, has a very unclear degree of authority. I have filled the role twice in my career and worked with many GMD/CMO’s in large corporates during my consultancy days.
My first crack at this came in Unilever, my last position for them – no coincidence. I was the global leader for two product categories working in the centre as part of the staff team for the main board Unilever Director. This was over 20 years ago and Unilever has undergone many evolutions of management structure since then but basically my job was to develop and police a global marketing strategy. There was not much of a brief, my boss was a particularly taciturn man, so I was left to figure out exactly what this meant. Unilever was groping its way towards a global manufacturing strategy starting with Europe and in order to make this possible we had to harmonize – crunch into one shape – the various brands we had in my categories (dishwash, hard surface cleaners and fabric conditioners – very glamorous). This was not a welcome move among the local marketing directors and their bosses. One of them, boss of the French business, explained to his MD that under no circumstances was he to offer me any co-operation or assist in any way. He did this in front of me with a big smile on his face – a smile which faded somewhat when his MD, a good mate of mine, explained to him that I spoke pretty good French and had understood every word.
In fact I found this first role fairly easy. The strategy was not that complicated, the benefits of it were unarguable (several studies had shown that harmonizing the brands and moving to a European manufacturing strategy would double the profits of that division), and all the local marketing directors were my mates. I had recently been one of them, in charge of Spain. So they trusted me and we were able to make a sensible plan. The local bosses were more tricky, as I’ve said, but they all fell in line eventually when it was linked to their bonuses and/or they were replaced with people who were on message. Nevertheless I found the whole experience very boring, especially working in the, then, stultifyingly dull Unilever House. I was a brand marketer – I liked doing things not just talking about things.
My next opportunity to be a Group Marketer came when I was offered the newly created role at SABMiller Plc working for Graham Mackay in London. It carried a seat on the main executive board so there was implied authority to the title Group Marketing Director. However, the brief was still somewhat woolly and to be honest in 4 years I never did get to the bottom of it. I knew what the ‘Barons’ (the CEO’s of the regional businesses) expected, they just wanted a sexual advisor (“we’ll ask for your fucking advice when we want it”) but it conflicted with what I thought my boss and the business needed. Graham is the best CEO I have ever met and the lack of clarity was due not to any indecisiveness on his part. I was the first GMD and the business was evolving very fast on the back of some mega acquisition deals. I ended up doing 4 years in the job, one year more than I had originally agreed to, and in hindsight I wished I had stuck to the original plan. I found the last 18 months thoroughly miserable. It turns out the brief was to ensure the regional businesses raised their game in marketing in a business with predominantly local brands and a highly devolved management ethos. I was effectively the ‘burr in the saddle’ to get them to take marketing much more seriously which they did really well to their credit. My role and that of my team, which had started so well, became one of internal consultants and trainers.
I did not go into SABMiller blind. Before I took the job I consulted a few mates who had been in similar roles and listened to their advice. I even got a very valuable briefing from the great Sergio Zyman, Coke’s famous former CMO. He did the job twice and the second time around he had the sense to negotiate a very clear and powerful board mandate. His word on any aspect of marketing in any part of the world was law. His central marketing team – which he strengthened hugely – had the right to walk in to any Coke market, anytime, anywhere, and ask to see whatever they wanted. If they did not like it – or Sergio did not like – it got changed.
Maybe that is a bit extreme, but the fact is ‘Group Marketing’ can be the end of a promising career. For it not to be, the issues that make the role so ambiguous need to be tackled.
So here is my formula for a successful Group Marketing Director. It requires getting totally clear on 4 issues:-
1. What is the brief for Group Marketing – what constitutes success?
2. How will this be measured?
3. What’s in it for the local marketing teams – what are the implications?
4. What’s the mandate – what authority do you have and how will conflict get resolved?
Start with the brief. What is the vision for marketing in the business, what is the agenda? Some vague idea about common standards of excellence and sharing best practice won’t cut it. Precisely what does the board want to achieve?
When that is sorted out you can move on to how it will be measured. What gets measured gets done and even if it can sometimes prove hard to measure precisely some aspects of marketing, there should nevertheless be some objective form of tracking the performance of Group Marketing.
Next, you need to tackle the implications for the local marketing teams. If they are expected to fall in line it must be clear what they get out of this process. If the answer is that they will find their jobs somewhat diminished to just execution then this must be confronted (as I understand it has been in Unilever). And then their bosses need to sign up for this (in my view, literally sign up) and have compliance made part of their bonus & appraisal.
Finally, what authority, in what areas, does the GMD have? If it is just implicit i.e. he reports to the boss and the boss will back him, well that’s something. But better still make it explicit – give the GMD accountability and responsibility. Don’t fudge this – it will always catch you out.
The best situation is, like Sergio, to have a really powerful mandate. The beauty is you then very rarely need to use it. Because every one knows you have the power, you can afford to be conciliatory, to listen, to understand and to be confident that you are having honest conversations. You can decide when to offer exemptions to certain aspects of ‘group marketing policy’. You can be reasonable. The worst situation is not to have a mandate and to behave as if you do. You come across as the typical ‘prick from head office’.
There’s lots more I could explain but I will leave it with these headlines. In my view I, or someone like me, should be used as a kind of coach-come-referee to both the CEO/Board and the Group Marketing Director, an objective but experienced (scarred) person who can offer the occasional voice of reason if the issues become too complex or intractable. But that is just an opinion. If the 4 issues are sorted out well upfront it should not be necessary to have a mediator. I just don’t trust that they ever are.
Finally, what is the difference between a CMO and a Group Marketing Director? In my view the former always has positional power and are responsible and accountable for the following:-
• The health and growth of the business’ priority brands
• Raising the marketing capabilities of the whole organization
• Investing resource to explore new marketing tools and capabilities that will give the business competitive advantage (an example right now for many businesses would be digital marketing).
Is that what you thought a Group Marketing Director did? Then call them the CMO, it always was a better title because it positions him or her alongside the CEO and CFO, and everyone knows what they do.
