Blogbook
Advertising Clichés… We’ve all seen them plenty of times. Frankly, once is too many. Copy clichés are more likely to put off prospective customers than convince them to buy your product or service. If your advertising copywriter comes up with them, find another advertising copywriter. Here are the worst offenders in the UK – and the reasons why you should never use them.
Expect the unexpected – This is number one on the list for a reason. It’s the advertising cliché you’re most likely to be subjected to and, ironically, it disproves what it’s actually saying. Think about it. You’ve seen it so many times, you just know what to expect when you see a phrase like this. Something everyday, so-so and…expected.
The best just got better – Are you (and the Advertising Standards Authority) quite sure about that? And what happens when that which got better gets even better?
Tomorrow’s xxxxx today – Just about acceptable when first coined, but soon devalued by overuse – and the realisation that the accuracy of predictions isn’t what it used to be.
A once in a lifetime opportunity – Precisely how many once-in-a-lifetime opportunities can one person have?
The best kept secret in… – Then why are you advertising it to all and sundry?
The Rolls Royce of… – At one point this was so common (and misplaced) that Rolls Royce started to sue companies for making the comparison. Nowadays, it just sounds ridiculous.
Thinking outside the box – A popular entrant in the last few years that has become almost omnipresent. Likely to show a writer who thinks very much inside the box – and who should be locked up in one.
Our people are our most important assets – There was once a Dilbert cartoon about this one. Turned out that people were actually about fifth. Just below paperclips. Seriously, though, far too many companies use the phrase to play lip service to the concept.
Let us help take you into the 21st century – The successor to ‘let us help take you into the 20th century’, a cliché used almost until the champagne was being poured to celebrate the new millennium. And nearly as meaningless as its predecessor.
Open the door to success – The door you can actually hear is the one banging shut as the prospective but bored customer makes a smart exit.
I Love Coles, BUT…
FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK. This is coming from the next aisle. You could be forgiven for thinking it was a couple of iced-up hip-hop dudes from the western suburbs, all baggy pants and 50 cent attitude. You might imagine it’s a 3 year old trying to tell Mummy he can see a Truck on a packet of cereal. But no, it’s two blonde, jeans wearing, late 30’s Mums. The oft-cherished Household Grocery Buyers. Deeply pissed off with not being able to get the pasta sauce, biscuits, a cheese… can’t get the brands they want. These women are not unique. They are complaining loud and long right across the suburbs in their millions. They are upset that the supermarkets have introduced Private Labels and deleted all the little brands they’ve come to love. So the gourmet market is leaving. The middle ground is leaving. The poor down and outs are disappointed, angry. Any of us given an option are going elsewhere. It’s about choice, range, options. Pure and simple.
You can’t get what you want. You might like Milo or Nescafe, big brands, but you also like that funny little brand of capers from Portugal or the roll-mops from Finland. So by deleting the smaller brands, the supermarket is destroying your sense of self. Your kitchen, your family, is not as it was.
This is the direct result of a management policy running like a rampant disease through retailers in supermarket land. Dumber than shooting yourself in both feet with a spear-gun then trying to justify it by saying you’ve got less chance of falling over, the Coles, Woolworths, may-be soon the IGA’s of the world are taking what we want about them and ditching it out the window.
The concept of Private labels is in direct contrast to why I go to their stores in the first place. Why do I go to a supermarket? Because I can’t get certain stuff at a Milk-Bar. If the Milk Bar on the corner had range, was a similar price and obviously more convenient, I’d shop there over the supermarkets. Derr. And they think I don’t care. And that I’m so stupid I’m likely to believe their product is as good as an independent suppliers. People who’s lives depend on the product competing.
Who this really hurts
You and me. It’s often poorer quality. The wrong shaped granules or bitter tasting or whatever. In many cases sizes aren’t optimal, colours, packaging etc. don’t suit so well. Or it’s shit made in China, not Australia, for the sake of a few cents less.
And obviously it massacres the companies that make things here. And the small and large suppliers to those companies – the truckers, the input products, services like accountants, ad agencies etc.
But the thing that saddens me most is the stupidity of the strategy in a marketing sense. Not content to prove their own lack of imagination and education by constantly harping on about price when professional marketers all know there are other more effective, smarter sales motivators, many of the supermarkets and other big retailers continue to doggedly trade on price.
Where supermarkets do offer service (How can I help you today? – Foodworks) community involvement (Supporting our local community – Ritchies) convenience (We’re locals and we’re proud of it- IGA) etc. they do way better. But the best strategy of all, in any retail setting, is range. Giving people stuff they want. Delivered best at present by intelligent independent supermarkets. The little guys. Good on them. If you want to see range and how it works, in Melbourne, try Leo’s in Kew. Or any of the small supermarkets in Atherton Road, Oakleigh or Sydney Road Brunswick. In Sydney, I’m told to try Jones the Grocer or About Life.
In Brissy, Fresh on Melbourne, Power’s Markets or James Street Market, Newfarm.
Balance? What’s that?
This treatment by major retailers of other businesses reflects no understanding of the delicate balances working in our society. I remember overhearing a quip from a buyer once ‘It’s mind over matter. I don’t mind and they don’t matter.’
The march to Private Label displays no integrity on the part of the big supermarkets. Nor for that matter, any integrity on the part of the sucker companies making for them and thus, like sheep racing up the Abattoir gang way, assisting in their own destruction. (Yes, I know they need to feed their families. Which is the only reason they go along with what amounts to blackmail.) A limpet on the retailer whale shark as it sucks out their production lines, making someone else’s brands on minimal margin. And just as bad – often disappointing their other customers; the very people they need most – weakening their negotiating power still further.
Attitude
The arrogance of the big guys. The cheap-brained grab for money. The condescending assumption – that our desires don’t matter – only the eternal dollar. The sheer bad naturedness of beggaring little companies all across the land. The draining effect on Australian morale. Our diets dictated by what Coles or Woolworths management deem us to be able to eat. In a democracy? Talk about losing touch with your consumer….
Market power
This arrogance comes from the knowledge that a lot of people will have to change the buying habits of a lifetime for them to lose market share. The current situation is that 75% of the $60 billion grocery trade in Australia is owned by just 2 companies. I wonder how long this dominance will last?
With Coles (these figures are a few months old – one wonders how far they have got with this plan) the aim is for 6000 (six thousand) products to be in the mammoth ‘I love Coles’ range, at 10% cheaper than the ‘average’. I believe they are up to at least 2,500 or so. Some 230 plus in the ‘Smart Buy’ range at 30% cheaper. I guess that would be the black and gold stuff- all crumbly loo-paper, gluey pastas and stuff your dog would say no to. About 200 of ‘Coles Finest’ at the same price as the long-dead average competitor. That’s, in many categories, three ‘brands’ they own. How much space is left for the products they have unashamedly copied? Coles wants 30% of all products to be house brands by mid 2008. Are they on target?
Woolworths is just as bad at giving customers what they want. They are looking at 900 ‘Homebrand’ at 30-40% cheaper. 300 or more ‘Select’ at 10% cheaper. But they are being slightly sneakier about it with what seems to be more home-owned but not acknowledged brands, registered to their various offices locations. They own ‘Southcape’ and a stack of other pseudo brands. (With Coles look for ‘Toorak Rd Tooronga’ on the label.) Which makes many of these figures miniscule in reality – the hidden home-owned brands, I’m lead to believe, account for much more than either will admit to publicly.
Retail cancer
And the sickening thing is it’s not just supermarkets. Almost all significant retailers, from Bunnings to various Chemists to the Just Jeans and Dick Smith’s of the world all do it. The bloody tyre shop has it’s own brands. Like I want to trust my families lives to the (sadly) recently deceased Bob Jane’s product development department. What’s that consist of? A grumpy part-time buyer beating up Dunlop’s lowest paid engineer?
And it’s all over the world. Tesco has 31% of the UK grocery mkt and Sainsbury’s 16% grocery mkt. House brands account for 30% of all lines in the UK. 20% of all products bought in Europe and the USA are now private labels.
Goodbye consumers
It looks like an unstoppable machine. One that flies in the face of fairness and customer enjoyment and respect for your buyers. Where were the people in their marketing departments during lecture 101? Or haven’t they employed any qualified marketers?
Their boards talk about a marketing focus but they don’t satisfy customers. They talk about destination shopping. The shopping experience. I live the shopping experience every day and I’m telling you it’s getting worse by the hour. I’d rather drive 10 minutes further and go to an independent where I’m often the only person in the store who speaks passable English.
Aldi as a model?
From fear of competition, Coles are copying Aldi, a bottom feeder from Europe that targets the poorest 10% of the public (pensioners, unemployed) and sells them their own brands at a considerable profit. Instead of taking their rightful place as a middle-Australia supplier fighting shoulder to shoulder against Woolworths, Coles are diving their brand down the feed-chain, chasing Aldi. Why ruin Coles? What do they think their own discount-house brand oriented Bi-Lo stores are for?
Why do they do this?
The real motivation is margin – from 15% rocketing up to 45% plus. More control. Possibly to save on buyers wages. The business model is ‘We’ll steal their idea’. And the culture is ‘we are invincible.’
They hide this grasp for profit behind the expressed motivations of ‘Saving you money’, ‘Better quality control’ and the frankly incredible ‘We can do it just as well as them’.
Who this really helps
Only retailers. To a lesser extent, over the short-term, it potentially helps the mythical ‘shareholder’, (Westfarmers bought Coles recently, so it can’t have worked for the shareholder much, can it?) but actually it helps directors and various key executives on short-term arrangements with KPI‘s that can be manipulated to make it look like it’s going to be profitable. Heaven help the long-term employees or the public.
Not helping marketing one bit
Where are the marketers in Coles and Woolworths? What are they doing about this? Are they so scared of the accountants sitting above them that they don’t say or do anything? If you’re a middle level marketer at a big supermarket, you’re not doing your profession any good being there.
Our lives are affected in some ways worse than anyone else’s. For we marketers this policy reflects a severe professional threat. With some 10,000 or so Private Labels eventually cramming the shelves of Australia’s major retailers, without marketing budgets, that’s five to 10,000 or so marketing managers and/or product managers, sales managers out of a job. It’s less work for the media, the packaging people, everyone. You, as a marketer, have less chances with your career.
The destruction of these brands undoes decades of well-meaning marketing effort. If a brand is killed, it’s a useless word on your CV. It’s actually poison. ‘Oh, they went broke if I remember, was that your fault?’
Get this right. Fewer brands = fewer opportunities to stand out and lead = fewer chances of riches and glory and/or working for yourself etc
Big is not always right
I know this is sacrilege amongst ‘academic’ marketers, but we can’t just accept that because a practice is conducted by a big company, that it’s OK…somehow acceptable by mainstream marketing as a ‘marketing rule’, just because X corporation does it.
Surely our collective role as professional marketers is to make people’s lives better, not worse?
Open your eyes
What can we do about it? See the aggressive chess game for what it is. Watch the brands evaporating faster than the sugar dissolving in your coffee this morning. Talk about it openly and honestly. Call it the I.P. & asset theft that it is. The rape of Australian small business. The abuse of market power. Write to the ACCC about it. Send them an email. Ring them. Let’s hope with Rudd in they’ll try a bit harder than they did under Howard.
Shut up
If you’re a manufacturer squeezed between the pressure to give the buggers more market information to justify your product’s inclusion on their planner-gram, versus the certain knowledge they are about to launch a competitor directly against you, don’t play their game. Don’t make their products. Tell them to nick off.
Help those who help you
Seek alternative distribution anywhere you can. Put whatever ad money or support you have into the independents. Mention their stores on your ads. Shove your promotional people in there too. Nothing nicer than being accosted by someone offering a tasty tidbit while you slide down the aisle. Give them gondola ends. Case deals. Link your website to theirs.
Develop products with the independents that have say a 5 year exclusivity – guaranteeing they will keep your brand alive long enough for you to build it in the minds and buying habits of the public. Help them anyway you can. Making the independents a more enjoyable shopping experience, a more successful operation, will help them sell more of your stuff.
Change your channels
Look at other distribution options – web selling, party-plans, home deliveries. I don’t care; survive. You could set-up retail yourself. I met a pie manufacturer the other day who makes four brands and when I suggested he could run his own stores, he laughed at me. ‘We’re not retailers’. Well I’d rather be a not very good part-time retailer than just plain unemployed.
Promote, promote, promote.
Never before has the pressure been as intense to own a piece of your public’s mind. To develop, to cement loyalty from customers and retailers, than now. Powerful, creative, intelligent advertising will protect you way better than any other thing in this fight to the death. The reason most second/third tier brands are in trouble is because they have not promoted themselves well enough. American HVPG companies spend 10-12% of their turnover on promotion. Australian, more like 5%. Think about that.
Pick an agency.
Then pick a few media and attack the buggers. Give the public a reason to demand the product. For the buyers to fear dropping you.
Treat it as war
Use all of the weapons you have in your arsenal as a trained marketer. P.R. is good with HVPG, so’s TV, magazines, outdoor. You can run cooking shows now on you-tube. The digital world provides you countless options to promote your products and save your company. Don’t just sit there like a stunned mullet waiting for the filleting knife.
Innovate
You can even change your products so they have enforceable I.P. protection, even patent protection via unique packaging or formulae. Fundamentally, the reason retailers can copy products and get away with it is because those products have become a commodity due to copying in the first place by second and third tier brands. Make yours different.
Don’t help them
If you have to come to some agreements, do it badly. Plan your tactics so it doesn’t quite work for them. Stall, miss-deliver. Drop pallets. Don’t return calls. Make it hard for them to stuff your industry, whatever that industry is.
Gang up
You could get together with the other guys with similar equipment, similar suppliers – I know it’s illegal to collude – but that doesn’t mean you can’t have coffee with an old friend to discuss economics. Be careful of the 1974 Trade Practices Act – you can’t be proven to ‘withhold supply’, but there are many ways to skin a cat and these are decidedly feral.
Marketers are such wimps. I can’t remember the last time marketers in any industry got together to protect themselves and look after their own interests. Farmers do it all the time. So do Doctors, Master Builders. But marketers? What’s wrong with us?
What’s to stop a few decent, gutsy marketers forming an association? The ‘Anti Privateers League’? Or ‘Not at Home’? Or ‘No Name, No Future’? ‘Black and Blue about it’? Or ‘CCRAP – Companies and Consumers Rallying Against Privates’ We could get the ASMI & AMI behind it. God knows they do bugger all else.
Don’t shop there
And most of all, don’t buy the house brands. March away with your wallet like the smarter side of Australia is already doing.
Retailers
If you’re a retailer reading this and going purple from my attitude, put yourself in the position of your customers, for once. Do the right thing for your fellow Australians. If you have to make your own products, contribute to our collective well-being.
Help us
Do original products. Do better products – solve problems and/or inspire us with healthier preservatives, smarter, less wasteful packaging, more natural formulae, sharper blades, quicker setting or something else that’s useful. Market those improved products like professionals. Give yourself a reason to have some pride in what you do. Make we fellow marketers respect you rather than just fear you because you’re big and fat and can suffocate many of the smaller guys with a fart.
As a final point, I’m not anti-retail. I love retail. I just want a relationship with retailers that’s mutually satisfying.
Get to know your local baby boomer:
A psychological study into a group who don’t like you much.
I’m out fishing with Don. He arrived at 5am. Because he’s “Not sleeping too well, and it’s going to be a beautiful day, and you can sleep when you’re dead and why do you need much sleep, you work in advertising and what do you do all day but go to lunch anyway?”
So I’m out about 3 ks off Angelsea, lumpy water, sun inching its way into the sky, just getting nibbles and no real bites. And Don talks. He talks about politics. How Labor can’t get it’s act together. About the looming Muslim v. Christian war. About relying on your PC in business when you should keep a paper diary too. About the rise and fall of real estate and the escalating cost of medical assistance. About how the greenies have got it wrong about global warming. About a little girl with cancer featured on last night’s news and about how unfair any kind of God would be to let her suffer like that.
I go fishing with Don because he’s kind of funny and he makes me think. And because he’s a bit older than me, he gives me an insight into baby boomers. They are a club the baby boomers, powerful, connected and they don’t like you, Mr Smarty Pants Gen Y.
Switched On
While you could argue that the older the person, the more of a laggard they are technologically, (my mother has never used a PC and still writes everything by hand) there are a lot of stand-out exceptions to this. Retirement Villages, for example, are bursting at the seams with older people who are becoming very web-savvy.
The Internet is increasing in popularity and Boomers one of the fastest groups to uptake. It is very helpful to meet friends, research concerns from Alzheimer’s disease to estate planning and to email your kids instructions, rather than bother to ring them and shout orders.
Boomers are doing every thing on the Internet, even exchanging spouses via the web. These were the people tossing their car keys into a bowl on the coffee table during the 60’s and 70’s….now it’s Entre-nous and RSVP.
Loyal
While they are harder to win over, as they have to trust you and are happy to wait a lot longer to see if you stick it out, they are also much more loyal once won, simply because they don’t switch as often. Making them usually a much better customer to win than someone younger.
Not Time Poor
The Boomers are one of the few major market segments I can think of who have time on their hands. Which means they can buy leisure pursuits, and respond better to long copy, direct mail etc.
Agitated
This disposable time also means they can be very ornery customers. Younger, time pressed people often can’t be bothered to fight a company about an issue. Boomers enjoy it for the fun sake alone. I’d love to check the banking or telco ombudsman’s records, but I’ll bet they are heavily weighted to older, bored customers.
Rich
While they are tough market to crack, it’s worth it. They control most of the companies, via either board positions or share ownership, they spend more in total terms than most other groups and in particular markets like travel, food, private schools (they pay the grand kiddies fees) or investments, they dwarf other target markets.
Media to use
Commercial TV
According to one source who really ought to know, 94.4% of boomers still watch TV most days, and their numbers are very strong during day-time, when few others can watch.
Newspapers
They have plenty of time on their hands, so, according to the same source, 86.1% read newspapers, probably while texting their kids orders on their iphone.
PR
Is very effective, especially in print media like women’s magazines.
Direct Mail
Works well, and names stay relevant longer, but be persistent. Few older Australians will trust you straight away. They didn’t come down in the last shower… Newsletters and company magazines/brochures are very effective sent the same way.
Local papers
Have a higher proportion of boomer readers – who are community focused and happy to have a freebie, even if it’s full of ads. For the same reason leaflet drops are also very effective, given the offer is relevant.
Radio
Still has a place with the boomer market – the older the more relevant. Many of them spent their childhood’s listening to DJ’s and they don’t sleep so well, so there’s a significant proportion who you can hit with radio, especially late at night and even early in the morning and I mean before dawn…PR stories at this time, especially talk-backs, where you can bitch about the current dumb/lazy government, work an absolute treat.
Packaging/Swing tags etc.
If you’re targeting boomers, design packaging and Point Of Sale with them in mind. That means promises that sound right to them, typefaces they can read, tops you can get off if your hands don’t grip too well….
Promotions
Given they are time-rich, many boomers like entering competitions. If nothing else, it gives them something to do. It’s amazing how participation rates go way up if you just aim your promotions at those in the community who actually might be able to enter….
Boomers are wrinkly and often grumpy. Wouldn’t you be if your hips hurt and you felt your kids were sitting around just waiting for you to die? But they are also a rich seam of potential sales and will stay loyal much longer when won. They are a powerful consumer group and very influential on their fellow customers – they have little to loose by speaking their minds. They are also big net-workers; upset one Granny in Dubbo and watch your sales plummet in Perth.
We take a very dim view of brands that don’t take boomers seriously, as they influence most markets and dominate many. Whether you’re in cars (my 70 year old mate just bought a Teslar) or you’re in booze (who else can afford a $60 bottle of wine?) as market, they are a very reliable alternative to younger markets who will buy from your competitor in Sweden or Tokyo before you can say yen.
More baby boomers marketing insights can be read here.
Hating IKEA and the whole self-service retail culture – I’m at Ikea with Stephanie, who works at Starship, and we’re returning four big boxes which contain one big bookcase, cause it was the wrong color when we opened the boxes, but it said white on the label.
This is because Ikea will deliver, but won’t ensure the items are the right ones and won’t take them back if they are not what you wanted. You have to bring them back yourself. This is Ikea mistake number one. Mistake number one has cost me as the MD (cause Stephanie couldn’t lift them) and Stephanie so far about an hour. That’s probably cost Starship more than several good lunches already.
We ask for ‘returns’ and have to trudge right down the other end of the warehouse/ shop thing in Richmond, trundling these huge boxes with employees literally laughing at us, cause it’s so hard to balance them. I mean that. Not helping. Pointing and laughing. Mistake number two.
We get down to the ‘Returns’ section and there’s about 20 grumpy people sitting around in what seems like a queue. A couple of people notice we are looking perplexed, so they nod towards a number machine (you have grab a number like at a deli). I go get a number, and realize we are going to have to wait a while. Mistake number three. Not valuing the customer’s time.
We wait in semi-polite silence for a few more minutes. I read the designer-inspired wall posters, that say things like ‘love it or return it’, or ‘ask our friendly staff…’, ‘be happy knowing you’ll get what you want’. Sadly I didn’t photograph them, but I may do so if I start the law suit….. but all I can remember of them is they were done by some bastard Danish art-director who was having a dig at the people he knew were going to be standing there, knowing they would hate Ikea even more cause they were so not how you felt. I felt like I’d made a mistake and I hate doing that. So mistake number four, making the customer feel like an idiot.
So picture this – there are three cash registers with no-one on them for about ten minutes with a crowd waiting at the returns counter. Eventually out comes someone to process returns. She moves to her register in slow motion. Like she’s had two Valium. You know those people who you feel like screaming at ‘try coffee’? Mistake number five. Attitude.
She looks up, no smile. And says, in a monotone ‘number 54’. Number 54 gets up and walks over. She asks them what’s wrong with the item. Not a ‘you’re not happy, we’ll change it without questions’ approach, which is implied on the posters, but actually asks what’s wrong with the item, like they have done something bad. Mistake number six. Not delivering on the advertising.
She interrogates every person/couple. She drags her arms and it feels like it’s so painful to help anybody. She takes ages longer than she needs to. She doesn’t care. She’s enjoying being slow. Mistake number seven. Attitude.
We eventually get to the counter. She asks us what’s wrong with the items. We say nothing but the colour’s wrong. They are wood and the box said white. She insists on opening each box and inspecting the whole thing and takes another five minutes.
We ask if there are any of the white ones left. She goes on the computer (this takes ages because she doesn’t want to. I have to beg) and she says they are a discontinued line so basically, bad luck. Only time she actually smiles. Mistake number eight, being happy to disappoint a customer.
We get the money, she doesn’t respond when Stephanie (against my wishes) says thank you. Mistake number nine. Being bloody rude.
We head towards the exit, when I, being the incredibly cynical bastard that I am, stop in my tracks and say to Steph – ‘Hey, why don’t we just go check if they actually are out of stock? They’ve got every thing else wrong.’ So we go to the warehouse shelving section where all the boxes are and we look for the same code number and there you have it, white bookcases. So mistake number ten. Not keeping accurate stock records.
So we grab them, lumber them to the cash register, pay for the right colour, tie the boxes onto the car, and after three hours we get back to the office. Now we have to assemble the bookcase, which takes another half an hour. Three and a half frickin hours on a bookcase…Hideous.
You might argue it’s Scandinavian retail. But it’s pretty indicative of most retail in this country. You go out to get widgets and three hours later, if you are lucky, you come home with them having struggled through an experience, and you think ‘never again’.
The experience isn’t nice
My feet ache if I have to go to Chaddy at the mere thought of it. Way before I even get in the car to start the journey. (Like Pavlov’s dog, salivating before the food comes, out of anticipation.) They know they are going to be in pain in an hour, so they warn me in advance. “Hey, please don’t do this”.
A lot of marketing people talk about experiential marketing. The experience, demonstrated in probably way too much detail above, is unpleasant.
That’s one of the main reasons I reckon people like shopping on-line. They can do it from home, with a cup of coffee, in their trackies, at 7 am or 7 pm and a few days later it arrives, without them wasting any time or putting themselves through physical, or financial or psychological pain.
Given that the biggest complaint most Australians list in many of the research studies published lately is sheer lack of free time, I can’t see why retailers find it so confronting and they stoically refuse to do anything about saving us time and making the experience better.
So that’s the subject of this article, how to turn the bog dumb retail industry around in this country before it smashes into a financial brick wall.
Retail reality
The first bit of the rest of this article is about recognition of fact – something very few retailers have managed so far.
We don’t have time.
We are all busy. Therefore if you take up our time needlessly, we won’t come back. And we don’t stop there. We will bitch about you to our friends on facebook or linkedin and you will have fewer customers.
You have too much competition
So many stock the same stuff. If they are stocking brown couches, stock green or red ones. I know this is hard for fashion-conscious people to get their head around, cause fashion means copying, but seriously, how can you hope to compete if you are carrying the same thing? If you do, you will get screwed on price. Be different.
You source from the same place
The bulk of retail products in this country come from China and a few dodgy ones from strange African republics that didn’t even exist when I was in school. Which means most retailers have gone to the European shows, bought a few items and stopped at China or Zimbabwe on the way home to set up a manufacturing contract to make them. They end up at the same factories. (The Chinese think this is hilarious, by the way. The same interpreters, the same taxi’s/restaurants, the same deals, the same products, the same pricing…)
We are shopping on-line
You know that on-line equals range, convenience and price advantage. Shit. The only thing it doesn’t equal, at this stage anyway, is speed and reliability – cause I can’t try things on and I can’t get them in 20 minutes. But that will come.
We love our brands
People grow deeply attached to locations and shops; retail brands. They love being safe. They love consistency – being able to find that particular pasta sauce at the back of their local IGA. They love knowing the place to get a good coffee at the sunny wing of a David Jones. Brands represent reliability, more than anything else. At its most simple it means this: you know what you are getting. So retailers, change what you stand for and how you are laid out, at your peril. Yes, we get it that this year’s collection will be in pink or cloud, whatever that is, but we want it at the back corner of the store where ladies fashion is always.
We don’t care
Sadly, even though we Australians go along with being mates and nice to each other, just a millimeter below the polished friendly surface, we are nasty, value-oriented buggers, most of the time. Welcome to the real world. You retailers have been ripping us off for years and have made fewer friends than Mohamar Gaddaffi at a Christian feminist convention. If you kick someone in the face a few hundred times, they don’t like you. Regardless of what you say about yourself. You cannot win the respect of the Australian people back with a nice ad campaign. Sorry. You might improve your image to the dumbest ten percent, but you won’t convince the bulk of us you have changed. You have to prove it over years. Given you are judged on quarterly results and no-one on your board truly understands the comings and goings of retail, cause none of them have ever worked on a shop floor, good luck.
You don’t even try when we do come in
I sat on my sunnies. So I thought, I’ll go buy another pair. I found some that made my otherwise fat-filled face look rather desirable, even to me. So I got all excited. But they were $399.00. So I asked for a discount. (The retailers reading this are going to say ‘Don’t give it to him. He likes the product. Screw him for the whole amount’. And you know, you would be right. That should be theoretically what you would do. If you were complete bastards.) The go today is that you give the punter a small discount. It’s policy in many stores overseas for the staff to say ‘Oh, cause you’re so nice, I’ll give you 20 bucks off Mr. Bowll.” That would have stopped me even asking, if she’d got in first. But no, she refused to budge. ‘That’s the price Sir. If you can’t afford those, we do have the Bolle range, there’s some more in your price bracket’. How would you react to that?
How to do retail really well
Experiences should be nice
Like sex, food, music and clothes, we go shopping to enjoy ourselves. Make it so.
Self service is no service
If I wanted self service, I’d have bought my own little farm and I’d be growing my own vegies and milking my own cows. But I live in a city, cause I want to be able to focus on more interesting things like marketing widgets to the public, not getting my hands dirty growing frickin green things. I am not unique. Service me.
Bunnings, some years ago, did research that said people hated not being able to ask someone for help who could, amazingly, help. So they hired old people who knew about things like service and what products do. It works. And old people want jobs and don’t get many offered to them, so they work cheaply, bingo.
You have convenience – use it
The most powerful thing that Australian retail has over on-line retail is so bloody obvious… You are here. They are over there. There’s no way I can get anything delivered from them to me in less than several days. You can therefore have in store sales or instant delivery and they cannot compete with that. In your own on-line stores, help them compete with more edge – like same-day delivery.
You can’t beat the web, so use it
A couple of billion people using the web everyday says you can’t stop the machine regardless of how much your tired old board would like to roll back the years.
Give up. Embrace new technology and get on with the battle that is modern business.
Learn from Zara
Flexibility, rapid change in stocks, doing what the customer wants…..Cool women I know go to retailers who change product several times a season, cause they never know what’s going to be in the store. Exciting, non?
Go Small or Big
Bunnings weren’t too sure if smaller warehouses in the inner city would work. They boom. Tie Racks are often only 4-6 square metres. Big milk bars are seven elevens. Ikeas are just large designer wanker stores.
Opening hours
If they are working nine to five, you need to open five to nine.
Use their brains
Teach your staff to ask other questions than ‘just looking?’. Get them to bundle up deals – “Hey, if you buy the widget with the wadget, I could get you ten percent off.”
Connect with your community
IGA does this very well, but it is not a Unique Selling Proposition. It is a necessity.
On-line, your international community is simply like-minded souls.
SMS or radio
Use media that hits them when they can respond– I have a client who gets a 35-40% hit rate when they send out SMS’s to their database on Saturdays and Sundays, cause working people are actually shopping then.
Mobile me
Smart phone technology, allowing you to send tailored messages to people who are near or even in your stores, is brilliant. Offer them a coffee, but get them to pick up the voucher on the other side of the shop – getting them to walk past all that lovely stock.
Re-design your stores
One of Ikea’s problems is their sneaky marketing trick – you can’t find your way out. Unlike people in Sweden in the middle of their long dark winter, we in Australia don’t have days to shop. So help us get what we want and then leave. The rest of you take note – it’s often cheaper to re-align your stores with customers needs than to paint them or even change your stock.
Treat your staff with respect
The reason the Ikea girl was such a bitch, is cause she was bored out of her brain. It’s the same four walls, day in day out. Move them around. Give them incentives to improve things. Make their day enjoyable and it will pay off with customers.
Think like a retailer
You get stuff in, you sell it on. You are technically just a vehicle for transactions. Don’t kid yourself you’re anything special and you’ll do way better than the wankers who work for most big retailers. To quote Absolutely Fabulous ‘You just work in a shop, love’.
Sack your boards
Why there are often 5 or 6 accountants on big retailers boards and no ex-retailers, who actually do know what it’s like to work in a shop, is because……?
The people power of politics – I’m in Toorak. At a fiftieth birthday. It’s a black tie affair organised by three women who went to school together, who have decided to combine all the effort and the costs of the thing into one big party.
I’m the only person in a cravat, a-la-Matt Preston, cause I went to lunch a couple of times over the previous week and I’m so bloated from wine and trans fats, I can’t get my shirt collar done up without turning bright red and flopping around on the floor gasping for breath.
No-one comments, except I do feel I’ve missed the code. (I should have had a shirt run up this morning another size larger. If I just knew where to go to get that sort of thing?) I’m conscious I’ve tried too hard to look good. All the blokes wear outfits that are so uniform, so boring, so exactly the same, it’s plain scary. They fit the mould. And the mould is “Don’t question me. I know what I’m doing. And if I don’t know you, you better be important. Or bloody funny.”
Towards the latter part of the evening, I look around the room. I’ve been introduced to judges, heads of the doctor’s society (would give it away if I told you which one), top legal people (and I do mean Senior Counsel) from big mining companies, owners of well-known retailers. And lots of second wives or second-husbands, depending upon who has the power. The ones who are here have it now, the ex-wives may have a few houses, but you can feel the income of these people pouring through the windows, as much as the rain is dripping down the inside of the marquee out on the lawn.
I think about the purpose of this gathering. I recall the kids of one of the women being introduced around. I think about how she’s recently been divorced and how her kids are sitting on the fence of life, sometimes seeing Dad for a few days in a row, sometimes seeing Mum for a week or so. It occurs to me that the main purpose of this gathering, at least in the eyes of my friend who’s one of the organisers, is not simply the entertainment of her friends.
It’s a not too subtle statement to her kids that she’s the one in the family with the cool, powerful friends. That she’s the one who’s in control. And that she’s the one they need to stay loyal to. It’s a powerful way to establish the pecking order in her kids’ eyes, without them even suspecting that’s what she’s doing.
Your job is like that.
Your career needs these high-points. It needs blockbuster events that set you apart from your peers. That push you up the pecking order until there is nowhere further up you can climb.
Your career is about politics. It’s about perceptions, not realities. It’s about who thinks you can do what. And who you know. Who you side with. Who counts you as an ally. And who would not dare to stand in your way.
Most marketers don’t get politics. They think it’s wrong and beneath them. They go on blithely through their working days kidding themselves that logic, measurement and psychology and science and even fair play are all bound together with self-interest and profit and human nature. Marketers are nice. That’s why we fail to win what we should in the world’s boardrooms.
We stop too early from driving in the knife. We give the other girl a fair go, letting them complete the sentence, or have lunch with the boss without tagging along. We allow the new rep to see the client without us being there. We trust.
It doesn’t work.
If there’s one thing you get from many years of working with corporate Australia and big government departments, powerful people, is that politics is as entwined into every day life as is breathing and wolfing down a sandwich over a working lunch.
Corporate Politics is old
It’s something that has developed in humans from the primordial swamp, rising up through our DNA/genetic chain like our eyes and our brains. We, as the top predator on this sorry planet, are the pinnacle example of billions of years of development.
The creatures who died out through the practice of survival of the fittest, may not have had the political gene. A lack of that vital survivor/killer instinct could have brought about their downfall as much as the fact they didn’t have opposing thumbs, or couldn’t digest anything but eucalypt leaves, like Koalas.
Humans have made an art form of politics for thousands of years now. They have studied the principles of politics as much as philosophy and physics in Plato’s and Pythagoras’s ancient Greece. But nice, naïve marketers have simply failed to grasp politics. I suspect it’s cause there’s no subject for it in the bachelor degree courses offered by the Uni’s.
Way too many of us come from either the science side, where we think that logic should win, (most researchers and many creatives fall into this space) or the sales side, where they think that everyone is the customer, so everyone else should get what they want. And they’ll somehow benefit when everyone else has had their fill from the trough of life.
Politics is vital to your working life. If you get politics, you’ll do well in bigger organisations.
Who are the greats?
My favorites in the political sphere are those who were so good at it, they didn’t even register on the record.
But given I can’t name them, cause they are invisible, rich, but unheard of, let’s list a few who have become household names because of their political leanings. I’ve put these guys in cause they put their thoughts into books one way or another and you can glean lots of good stuff from them all. Niccolo Machiavelli (The Prince), Sun Tzu (The Art of War), Winston Churchill (History of the English Speaking Peoples), Mao Tze Tung (Little Red Book), Bill Clinton (My Life), Barack Obama (Dreams from my father)….. anybody good does at least one book. So probably did your boss, if you work for a really big company… something to remember there.
If you’re an aspiring marketer, who doesn’t have time to read lots of books, but needs a few thoughts and suggestions in her lunch-time, here’s my ‘What to do in Politics’, Marketer edition.
The first 24 hours
There’s the story of Howard Hughes (read The Carpet Baggers), who, at a mere 21, flew in low over the factory in a bi-plane. Taxied up to the factory and parked it in the management car lot. Instantly he calls his first meeting with his management team.
In the company toilets. He’s takes a slash. Makes them all watch as he pisses up against the men’s toilet wall. Told them that what was they were doing with his father’s company. And anyone who wanted to keep doing that could leave then and there….Half of them left. The ones who stayed turned a little explosives company into the Hughes empire, which by the 1980’s, had made him the richest man in the world.
My point? First impressions make or break you. Make powerful first impressions.
The first 90 Days
If you read the executive power books, which the local book-shops and the online stores seem to be bulging with, one of the driving themes is the importance of making sure your first 90 days in a job are electric. If you’ve gotten to 90 days and no-one has noticed you, and you’ve not achieved much, consider if it’s you or the culture and decide then and there whether it’s worthwhile hanging in.
Know your culture
Marketers blossom in certain cultures. Some are warm and moist and energetic and we can blossom and grow and do what we want and become the people we intrinsically want to be. Some aren’t.
What you do to affect culture will make an enormous difference to how your working life pans out in any corporate machine, small or large. Try to determine the real nature of the business before you agree to go there. It’s easer to say no then, than three months into the job where you’ve tried everything and hit a brick wall nine times out of ten. Write yourself a series of questions, that you want X answers to. If you don’t get a lot of crosses in the right boxes, don’t take the gig in the first place.
Shoot or be shot
Some people will see you as an enemy and lie to your face. Think about people’s motivations and whether you help or hinder their goals. Kill (metaphorically, anyway) those who have not got your best interests inherently in their camp.
Never be the bad guy
It’s so easy not to be there when HR takes the argumentative junior into the meeting room and shuts the door. It’s just as easy to write a good reference as an honest one. It’s easy to say hello at a Pub when you run into an ex-comrade.
Debts and alignments
Loyalty is based on one simple principle. ‘I need this person’. If you inspire loyalty in others it will usually come back to help you too. But this is not always so, so you need more than your own expectation of loyalty. You need to make sure the absolutely critical people (and this could as much be the receptionist as the CEO) need to be loyal to you. Don’t ask me how, but you get the idea.
Party lines
Everyone, in every group, follows established party lines. Any focus group of strangers will show you this system developing in front of your eyes within minutes. Pecking order, teams develop instantly. They work out who has power. (It could be them self.) They decide if that person is worthy of their allegiance, or they can get them on their side, then they draw up lines. Be conscious of your teams and your opposition. All your fellow employees are.
Power comes and goes
Like the tides, political power ebbs and flows. Where there is a vacuum of power, for whatever reason, anyone can drop in and take control. If the PM is sick for a few days, there are literally waves of excitement through the hundreds of politicians who want a crack at the leadership. Everyone wants a shot at the top job. And sometimes it even comes about without a coup….
Regime change
When a management team changes, you need to slaughter all of the earlier followers, who are not instantly on your team. It’s shallow, sycophantic, totally pathetic, but vital for the well-being of the new leader and their ego. No-one can act with confidence if they feel their people are potentially undermining them, so they always change the team. Keep this in mind for when companies merge, or someone does a take-over. Whomever is seen as ‘from the old regime’ is gone within weeks.
Take your team along
New leaders of bigger organisations invariably bring loyalists with them. The new Prime Minister has her advisors brought across from Dept of Ed or wherever she was before the new appointment. So does this happen in big business. How many times have you seen the CEO bring his old p.a., his old CFO, his old Marketing team into the new operation. Often the new CEO’s package actually involves 6 – 10 key people.
Nice gig if you’re the head hunter.
Your reputation is critical
Your brand is the most important issue in an office environment. You want to be the person others respect, are a bit afraid of, are in awe of what you know etc. If you wrote down the key things you are likely to get cudos for, it would change your focus forever.
Most great, successful people do this automatically. They take advice in the first few days, asking anyone they think might have a clue, and stick to it. Guys like Jack Nasser of Ford, now ANZ, don’t just swan in and think they know. They ask the head hunters, the directors they meet, the receptionist etc. But they also manage their brand very carefully. They wear the right clothes. Ask the right questions. Don’t get too close to the losers. They sack the dead-wood and they punish uprisings whether it’s an un-thought-through question or any disagreement with a polite knifing behind closed doors.
How and why do people get moved up?
Find out what the organisation is really looking for. They may say ‘increase sales’ but what they might mean is ‘make friends with Woolworths’.
Movement has to be north?
Momentum in anything is key. If you are not going forwards, you’re going backwards. Even if you don’t think you are making significant head way, tell people you are. Winners don’t admit defeat. They change the rules.
Fashion the way you wish to be judged
Given anyone can change the way they are judged purely by asking for it to be so, you can take control of your work environment. If you’re better at client relationships, have that put into your ¼ ly assessment. If brand awareness is a thing you can influence, make it a vital issue. (NB. This article is not about what you should do, as a professional marketer. It’s about what will work for your career.)
Choose your leader wisely
If you have to be under the control of another, and most of us do, try to ensure it’s the right person, who gets you. If you have to change your behavior/personality significantly for you to blossom in this role, do it consciously. And don’t be afraid of it. Or move.
Propagate people
I actually personally disagree with this ‘no prisoners’ style of leadership. I think dissenters are vital for quality work. We need people inside who argue about the process and the objective and the method etc. So we in ad land have to encourage a culture of questioning and debate. Because as an agency, we are not simply judged on politics, but we are also invariably judged on actual results, and as an outside supplier, you’re always subject to assessment in an objective, Return-On-Investment way. But I’m running an ad agency, and most of you reading this work within a client style company and your position is much closer to the classic Machiavellian situation than is mine.
If you truly can’t get your head around office politics, seriously consider consulting, one of the great things about being a consultant is that you only have to worry about you and your clients. Not your comrades trying to kill you too.
I’m at Zinc, Federation Square. Russell Howcroft is on stage. The place is chock a block cause he’s an ad land hero and lots of clients, consultants and media people have come along to hear pearls of wisdom drip from the mouth of one of our mega Gods.
The breakfasts are better here than most corporate functions cause somebody realized people hate the yellow mushy scrambled eggs the rest serve and something in their wild soul said ‘hey, we could use real eggs, wouldn’t that be radical?.’ And so I look around and see people actually finishing their plate. If they could only get the coffee right, I’d be tempted to go there every morning. Why is it, in the coffee capital of the Universe, Melbourne, the place where lattes and machiato’s made from Coffex, Map, Lavazza, are everywhere, the event places insist on trying to get us to drink old stale filtered coffee? It smells like teenage boys socks and tastes like vegemite mixed with sugar and milk.
So I’m there listening to Russell give his 2011 speech. I know it’s the same speech cause I’ve heard him say it twice in the last few weeks because for one reason or another I’ve been to several conferences lately. I guess the creative team who put it together for him figured no-body would be daft enough to hear a bloke speak more than once in a year, but here I am, living proof that certain jokes get the same laugh every time. I now have a great deal more respect for those amongst us who talk off the cuff on new subjects. They are so much more talented than those ‘actors’ amongst us, the politicians, industry gurus, who only recite lines written by their teams.
So Russell is talking about the ‘creative process’ and showing videos, and the media landscape and showing videos, and I find myself drifting off, cause I’ve heard it before, thinking, ‘how would you be trying to compete with this slickly rolled out presentation’?
How would you feel if you were a competitor, seeing these nifty 5 minute films explaining one aspect or another of the ad world so well even cynical old me is buying into it. Then I realize, I am a competitor, and it gets me thinking about where I started and what the early days were like.
I remember them well. They were tough, dude. I was starving. It was 1990 and there was no work. The world as I knew it had imploded. The recession we had to have hit and nobody was spending anything on anything. I was unemployed. Said to myself, shit, why not start my own show? I could be a consultant.
What do I need? A business name, a few cards a pc and off I’d go. And so I did. Miraculously, I survived. Through some hard work, a lot of dumb luck and a dodged determination not to work for a boss cause I figured they’d get to tell me what to do once in a while and I hate that.
There’s lots of you out there in marketing land doing exactly the same right now. There’s a lot more who think about being a consultant and are unsure what to do to get started.
Yes, you’ll be the bad guy. Yes, you’ll be the one who fucked up. Took the loss, had to think of the solution. You are also, months later, the one who gets to buy the slick new car or go to Vanuatu on the weekend simply because you can.
Yes, the down side is the buck stops right there, at your feet. The upside is so incredibly tremendous. You can look in the mirror every morning and say to the face staring back at you, what will we do today, honey?
In my humble opinion consultants deserve immense respect. They’re the business world’s SAS troops. The elite of the business world. The tough ones they call up when they know the normal troops aren’t up to it. The guys they drop behind enemy lines who will be able to do the nasty job. As a marketing consultant, it’s a hard, dirty life, but you really know you are alive. Want to play?
How to be a great Marketing Consultant
Stand for something
Have a purpose – a reason to set up your business that sounds better than ‘cause I needed a job’. Be wanting to change a situation, fix a pressing problem, or lead a new technology etc.
Niche Consultancy
Anybody who says they can do anything usually can’t even tie their own shoelaces.
Consultants are supposed to be experts at something and bloody good at only a couple of other things. And that’s about it.
You get a consulting Micro Surgeon to work on your hand after you’ve shoved it into the blender trying to fish out the sugar spoon during a Christmas Cocktail party. He’s flown in by The Epworth and he costs $2,000 an hour, which you don’t mind paying, cause you’ll never play the fiddle /piano/your genitals again if the surgery goes wrong. You pay the big bucks for the top expert. He has a narrow niche of expertise. Fingers. That’s what you want him for. Yours. So what if you never see him again even if you set up a website about him and tweet how great he is and why you want to have his babies. He’s done his job and you can at least wipe your bum now.
I don’t care what you are good at. Pricing strategies. Rescuing family companies from the divorce courts. Launching French companies into Australia. It doesn’t matter as long as you have some hope that the niche is big enough that you could sustain a business in that field.
Have a long-term plan
Most people working on their own have never debated what they really should be doing. A percentage just want to be their own boss and not anybody elses. Let’s call them the hard workers, cause sure as apples they will have to work like dogs to survive.
A percentage will want to employ a team of people sooner than later and they will usually be more successful. A few will have grand plans for running this massive business and that’s OK too as long as it has some chance. Unless you plant the right type of tree, in the right soil etc. there’s no point in just watering the ground hoping something big will pop up. It might, but flukes don’t come around that often. A little planning goes a long way.
Plan the industry you want, the size of the business you want, they type of clients you want and the kind of work you’re going to do for them.
Branding in Consultancy
Do the right thing by your brand. Treat it with the same respect and intellect you give your customers. So few consultants do. They get a cheap logo done up featuring their bloody dog and/or their bloody name. I did when I was first a consultant in 1990, cause I didn’t give it a moment’s thought – that’s why you can’t find Geoffrey Bowll and Associates on google – that little brand died. I started Starship a couple of years later and that brand has grown. Every day, I thank the stars.
Profile
It is absolutely standard to write at least one book. Better still, you could set up a TV show, or a You-Tube show, or get interviewed on the radio every week. Or join a political party who wants a pretty face. The better you are known, the better you will do.
Twitter/LinkedIn
If you are not working for someone else you have more time and an obligation, no a desperate need, to self-promote. The people who are invariably the most vocal on LinkedIn are the consultants. There they are, sitting home alone at 11.15 am, second cup of coffee burning a hole in their stomachs, angrily wanting action in their lives.
And they are bored and lonely, so of course they run several conversations a day on all sorts of issues. They are being read by thousands of other professionals every day, who occasionally need a consultant for this or that. You are competing with them. Tweet, write blogs, do whatever it is you do well to grab market share. I write, not that it gets me very far, but you are reading it, so it must be working to some extent.
So meet and keep in contact with people, via phone, facebook or linked-in. It works.
Network
We humans have friends who come to our aid cause they remember needing similar help. And cause it’s fun. As a consultant your network is a vital thing. You never know when you’ll need what kind of help and you never know where your next job will come from. If you have a mate who’s the best brand guy/media buyer/ researcher/ sales manager etc, they will come in handy some time, somewhere. A good, big, healthy network of people you know, and who like and want to work with you, is like a nice warm fluffy bed. You can sleep easy.
Say no more than say yes
The magical thing about life is the more you say No, the more people want you, and the less time you spend with dickheads who are wasting your time or are not profitable enough.
Go for big fish
You are way better off to do stuff that you are cut out for, that you understand, that you’ll be able to do well, for clients big enough to make it profitable, than to just do anything to make a quid. Small, money-pinching clients are to be avoided at all costs. There are millions of small companies who need and want help. Invariably they are small cause they don’t listen to people like you. You’ll never make money servicing them. They will take up your time you could be spending on more productive clients. And they drain you of love and energy. Small, needy clients are not ‘little fish are sweet’. They are a recipe for disaster.
Hourly rates versus projects
Projects sound profitable and fair and sometimes are. They can be nightmares.
Hourly rates sound too little and too much work, but often aren’t.
I’m a huge believer in remaining very flexible. Some clients have systems that only allow them to pay for things in a project system (purchase orders etc) where all costs are locked off. That’s OK as long as you build in some fat, cause invariably people think they can do things in X time but it takes twice as long, or clients change their minds about an issue and unless you’re really tough on them, they’ll get you to do more work for the same money, which drives the profits out of the business.
Hourly rates or retainers work very well for most consultants because it’s relatively easy to track your time and life is very good if you are working 30-40 or so hours a week on $300 bucks an hour, and you’re still able to play golf on Wednesday mornings or sail Thursday arvos etc.
Trading Terms
Really matter. 30 days will often stretch to 45 or 60 days. 7 will stretch to 14, even 21, but rarely get to 30. Half in advance will mean they won’t stuff around with the brief or the timing as much. Getting it right before you invoice will mean you’ll end up in Court almost never. Be tough. Bill regularly. Pull a job if the money is not in the bank and get respect. Nobody worth working with ever wants to work with a pussy.
Track results/do a folio
Case studies are very convincing and I can’t think of anyone who sacked a consultant exceeding their KPI’s.
People think in, and remember, visuals. I don’t care what your actual role is, nothing works better than pretty pictures about how things worked and what results people got, what the ads looked like etc. Even if you do psychological studies on human behavior, show them in pictures, via some kind of folio. By the way, a web site is mostly a folio on-line in this game.
Process
Work out the best way to do things, make adjustments, follow process. Formal process and systems are what makes successful businesses sellable.
Contract out unpleasant jobs
Most of us are only good at a few things. But what kills almost all small business people is doing everything. Doing the books, when it’s 11.30 pm and you’re so tired you can’t see. Vacuuming the front room so you can have a client over. Get a frickin cleaner in. Get a bookkeeper. Get rid of things that you are either hopeless at or that depress you. Every time you find yourself doing something for long periods of time, like say 3 hours a week, that you don’t like, hire somebody to do it
One of the weird but miraculous laws of the Universe is that whatever you don’t like, somebody else will. And that frees you up to enjoy life more and normally to make more money.
Gang-up
Consultants get lonely. They are also inherently weak cause they don’t have additional resources to enlist with any projects they might want to win.
Because large companies understand concepts like capacity, individual consultants often find it hard to land bigger jobs because few companies want to take on somebody who they are unsure can manage it. Yes, I hear you saying, ‘But I can gear up. I know people. I can just run it’. They don’t believe you. Bad luck.
An agency like Starship is really only a group of individuals working together under one brand. Same can be done by consultants if they are prepared to work together like grown-ups.
If you can’t stand other humans, or only getting half your ideas up, don’t bother ganging up. It will be too painful. But for the rest of us who are able to bend a little, it’s a great way to work some of the time.
The thing to watch out for most when ganging up is when people try to own/steal the client (ie. Go behind other peoples back and try to do a deal on their own) or split up the money in a different way to what was originally agreed. So get the critical stuff put in writing – email the others your understanding of the relationship.
Shoot Turkeys
There are dickheads who say things designed to cut your lunch like ‘half my advertising works and half of it doesn’t, but I don’t know which half’ Wasn’t that Lord Lever? The implication of that line is you could save half your money. The reality is, no you can’t. All marketing works to a greater or lesser extent and it’s a marketing consultants job to tweak the formulae to maximize income, not get rid of the budget. (This is the key take-out I got from the Zinc speech – thanks Russell) If you are in a room with a nob, politely (or not so politely) challenge the veracity of their argument. Tell them they are wrong and why. I don’t care if you don’t make friends, you will have more self-respect and the other people in the room will want to work with you.
Remember, the SAS does not take prisoners. They take the city.
All publicity is…good? – Gerry Harvey is that Uncle you wanted when you were ten. The one who’d fly in from carving out a gold mine in New Guinea on Christmas Day, give you a shot gun wrapped with a greasy red ribbon and say ‘Hey Junior, want to try it on those pigeons? He opens the window, shoves in two shells, grabs you by the neck, thrusts the stock against your shoulder. You close one eye, take aim, start to squeeze the trigger and your mother faints and hits the floor. Fantastic.
True aussie bloke. Rugged leathery skin, ocker accent. Wide-open personality and absolutely no concern about consequences. Genius in his boldness. But also dangerous; a bus going downhill without a driver, smashing into anything that gets in it’s way. Could never get a job in corporate Australia, but employs thousands. Just goes to show you how out of touch the corporate world is with the realities of smelly, people-oriented retail.
He literally makes the news worth watching. He’s guaranteed to say something wrong/ controversial/funny if they just leave the camera running.
But his recent exercise promoting the implementation of a tax on off-shore, on-line purchases, generated a whole lot more publicity than the rag mags’ latest expose. Tenth most tweeted person on the globe. And almost all of them negative. Angry about him wanting to push another tax on us.
I can understand why he’s frustrated that off-shore purchases don’t get GST lumped on them. It must give retailers the shits that they have to compete on the world stage against nasty companies who have cool websites that pull money out of our pockets quicker than one of Gerry’s bogan recliners can get your feet higher than your bulging stomach.
I can understand why they think it’s not a level playing field – they have to pay tax, you have to pay tax. Why should overseas items be instantly 10% cheaper?
And here’s the rub. We don’t care. Australians have been ripped off for years by big retail. We know products are way cheaper overseas. We go on holidays. We shop on line. We talk. We know retailers just flip off to China and get stuff. Why shouldn’t we get that stuff from an American or Japanese company that is prepared to make only a 30% margin, than an Australian retailer who wants 100% or more on the same product?
And most of us are grimly aware this is just a tiny part of the bad behavior of big retail. Big retail have made no friends for years, screwing everyone from telco to product supplier – no favoritism – everyone is treated as the enemy by big retail. How many of you readers have been into their head offices, with your new marketing plans, having worked for months, only to have all your hard work spat back in your faces? “I can see you’ve put in some work Bob, but we’re rejigging the category, so you’ll have to wait until we announce that. Oh, and I think you’ll find there’s actually three U’s in Fuck You.”
Or Coles and Woolies beggaring small food /FMCG manufacturers by their Private Label junk pushing smaller brands off the shelves. So Mum’s Special Pudding (or whatever) doesn’t taste the same cause the main flavor ingredient went out of business.
We the people, having been at the nasty end of this rich brat behavior, have zero sympathy for big retail.
Gerry has learnt a very simple lesson. That the people are not stupid and that if a billionaire cries out about losing some money, we the poor are not going along with it. We’re not going to say ‘Oh, you’re right Gerry, we should pay more tax and higher prices’. So he’s publicly backed down.
January 2010 Gerry Harvey beats a retreat by Mathew Murphy. Mr Harvey goes on to say “because of my profile, I then get all these threats and people home in on me … billionaires, greedy, ugly, old, out-of-date, c—s, and the people writing this seem to think we have been ripping them off for years and that we deserve this”.
And this gets me around to the subject of this article – publicity. Is all publicity good publicity? I used to go along with Oscar Wilde “The only thing worse than people talking about you is people not talking about you”.
But technology has caught up. Technology gave birth to social media. Social media may kill or fertilize at the whim of the public. Where an issue blows up – we talk & get excited, business, especially retail, either blossoms or fades. Millions of us giving our opinion with massive credibility – true word of mouth at its finest. The consumer, the people, us, now get our opinions heard, thank God, or higher – Bill Gates?
It’s about you – your career
Lets put our motivations on the table; publicity is personal. A perfect life and more profit and power are produced by perceived prowess and professionalism, which are polished and promoted by publicity. That’s the 12 P’s of publicity.
Cheaper
Publicity is usually fabulous for R.O.I.. You can do it without any real budget, so it’s the first cab off the rank when you start anything. But you’ll need to advertise one way or another, to continue to get sales – to remind the public of why you exist and why they need you now.
And it works for sales, often despite the story
David Jones had a little PR problem during the year. Something about a court case? The CEO Mark McInnes had to fall on his sword, and it generated very negative publicity for the company and the brand. But would you be surprised to know that David Jones has posted 7.3% increase in sales for the 4th Quarter of 2010, as compared to the same time in 2009?
Damages the big guys more
There’s been a wave of catastrophe engulfing high-profile corporations over the last year – Toyota endured recalls, as did GM. BP now confronts the future with a new identity: progenitor of the worst oil spill in American history. So it can be tricky for big business. Big companies often don’t understand the critical nature of publicity. They have awareness and a brand personality by default. Even if it’s not one they want, and they employ people like me to tweak their brand’s positioning, they are still already way past the problem little guys always suffer from; obscurity.
Small Businesses need publicity most
If no-one has heard of you, they can’t put you on their shopping list. Brand positioning, CRM, media efficiency, the whole she-bang of marketing management is totally irrelevant if you have no awareness.
Awareness is the name of the game
Most companies, most people in Australia, are invisible to the rest of us. This has been the case since we stopped living in a village where we knew each other because we shared the same water well. There are now too many humans on this planet for us to know/remember more than a few thousand at a time. But for many marketers, but particularly Gen Y, it’s frankly, fame or death.
Social media is a voice for the millions who could not be heard before. We who didn’t either have the time, the story, the contacts or the position to be of interest to the rest of us. Andy Warhol quipped that we’d all get 15 minutes of fame in the future. Now, 50 years later, some six million Australians are on Facebook alone.
Comments about Gerry, from Linked in:- Paul Chappell: The positive take-out from this is that no business leader will ever underestimate the power of social media to tribalise and empower consumers. Gerry made the sort of mistake the retailer in Pretty Woman made when Julia walks into the store to spend up big. Presumption and ignorance has been his undoing.
Control is impossible
There’s a downside. Publicity is a raft without oars or rudder. When the wind blows fair and the seas are smooth, it’s a great journey. When things blow up in your face, you’re on your own. Even your best journo mates will turn their back on you – Prime Minister down, no-one is immune to being directly attacked or ‘taken out of context’.
Comments about Gerry, yes, taken ‘out of context’ from Linked in:-
Jennifer Bishop “As far as damaging the brand. Wholeheartedly agree. If one of the franchisees had made such comments I’m sure they would be swiftly whisked off to court in breach of TPA and contract law.”
How to do it nicely
Plan
It sounds like it could be fun to have an idea at 7 am and on the news by 8, but does it fit how we want to be seen? Is it a subject we should know about? Can we vaguely control the story? Will we be helping us or our opposition? Any of these questions would have been really good for Gerry to have considered.
Make it someone’s responsibility
Set tasks, deadlines, budgets etc and chase them up ruthlessly.
Use research
Journo’s and bloggers love and believe numbers. I can’t fathom why.
Cultivate writers/journos
Anybody who’s work you like reading, who’s interviews or stories you like, is only an email or phone call away and they all need stories every day.
Use great photos
If you’re ugly, hire a really good photographer and stylist. NB. A factory is not beautiful, neither is a widget. 14 tones of mercury pouring into Botany Bay could be gorgeous if you’re the EPA and need to get the Minister on the 6 pm show.
Always take the moral high ground
There has to be a good reason. This is often not stuff you find exciting or that helps you make more sales or more money. It’s stuff other people find interesting or vital to know. The inability for most companies to remove themselves from talking about the self-serving and look at things as an outsider, is the chief reason the PR industry exists.
Get your timing right
Better to be in the news, ill-prepared, than to be well prepared with yesterday’s story, cause you won’t be there at all.
Get others involved
There’s always another girl or boy in the office who has a good idea, or for that matter, another company you could pick on for a war (my fav) or buddy up with.
Be witty and well-worded Being boring and badly worded just means you’ll send out a lot of press releases or tweets and not have any effect.
Be consistent in values
Like keeping a brand’s persona on track, it’s critical to keep to your values. Gerry Harvey normally takes the role of the ‘small businessman/ battler’, though he’s not been one for a very long time. ‘Small businessman/ battler’ implies ‘consumer’ and ‘fair-go’ cause most small business people are closer to consumers than corporates. But in this last pro-tax action, he jumped over and was seen to represent ‘big business’, so he lost his decent values and was instead covered head to foot in corporate scum, which is close to ‘rip-off’ and ‘don’t care’.
Ride the wild horse
Once you’re up and running with a story, you can’t try to steer things much other than with sensible leaks, quality rebuttals and well-timed bits of fact. Really, you have to let it be a debate with all the messiness that involves. Good to contact the major producers /journos/ bloggers/ editors with useful information too, but philosophically, you can’t dare look like you are trying to hold the reins, or the whole thing will throw you, like it did Gerry.
Fess Up
When the shit hits the fan, fess up and tell the truth. It is the only strategy that is always effective. Some other tactics work sometimes, but to quote someone – Teddy Rossevelt? “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”.
From a blog, somewhere….on a product recall for James Boags:
“While we believe the risk to consumers is very low, we feel the only responsible action for us to take is to err on the side of caution and voluntarily recall potentially affected products in the best interest of protecting our consumers and customers, and maintaining our high quality standards,” Apparently, all affected beer can be returned to the place of purchase for a full refund or a replacement of ‘non-affected’ James Boags beer. My flatmate was watching at the time, and said ‘I’m just going to buy a heap of James Boags and claim that they are affected bottles. I’ll get heaps of free stuff.’ The fact that he was still talking about it ten minutes later, made me realise that it was far more successful than any advertisement could be. (And yes, I did see the glaring hole in his logic there; he’d had a few rival brews so he can be excused.)
Cover your bum
Every company has a bit of information they don’t want the world to know. If you’re going to shove your head above the rampart, and fire a few rounds at the world, for that nasty info you need water-tight data storage, excellent employment contracts and well thought through game plans for sensitive subjects, because they’ll eventually rise to the surface…oh, and good lawyers.
There’s never too much publicity
The line “You can never be too rich, too beautiful or too famous” was coined for publicity. It doesn’t matter how many shows, social media sites or newspapers you are on a day. The more, the merrier.
Push strengths – don’t whitewash weaknesses
Where many people go wrong is they generate a publicity angle about something they feel they need to fix. Say for example you’re a well-known, ‘flamboyant’ society doctor with a name like ‘Geoffrey Edelberg’ or similar. Better to turn a weakness into a strength with style.
Get Banned
The Australian Tourism Board’s “So where the bloody hell are you?” ad campaign was initially banned in the UK, but the publicity this generated resulted in the official website for the campaign being swamped with requests to see the banned ad.
Don’t believe your own publicity
Cause Gerry Harvey’s people said he was a ‘battler’ didn’t mean he could rely on always being seen as a battler. To have integrity, you have to live your publicity claim, not rely on it.
This article is about taking commodities and turning them into desirable brands. This may sound like a big deal for aspiring marketers – how to make what is other wise something that is indistinguishable to it’s competitor, into something that is desirable and differentiated. Presumably something that is more valuable. But, like how to make vegies interesting, which is a problem for Mums and Dads every night, it’s an issue that confronts practicing marketers every day in Australia. …
I’m staring up at a blue sky. Something moves at the edge of my vision. I think I’m seeing shadows, but no matter which way I tilt my head, it just moves in a determined direction, one way along the edge of my line of vision. A grey shadow just out of my visual reach. There it is again. Suddenly I have a brain-wave. (Something that happens so rarely I actually decide to start an article with this momentous event just to give myself some confidence that I’m not entirely without merit). …
The power of Small Businesses in Marketing and BrandingRead More »
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