New Year's Revolution

'Evolve or die' was the mantra this time last year. Right now I think it's more like 'revolt or die'.

Now, I've never been one to over dramatise, but (deep breath) we are all teetering on the edge of the abyss, and from where I'm standing I can see more and more people falling in. It's like Dante's Inferno or the climax of Ghostbusters. (Just covering all my bases there, and you'll note the assumption that all marketeers are destined for a future down below.)

But it is that serious. In 20 odd years (or two recessions) I've not seen our industry in a state of collapse like this, and it's not just the small and weak that are affected, there have been some big casualties - certainly out in the regions. Don't be fooled by all the PR guff about merger and partnership, just dig a little deeper and you'll see lots of strange bedfellows and marriages of (in)convenience, but hey survival is survival.

It's probably the toughest time to be in an agency ever. No sympathy required, as an industry we enjoyed our boom years and now we must cope with the lean times.

Enough doom and gloom. How are we going to get out of this?

Let's just put the macroeconomic picture to one side for a moment. Not ignore it, just focus on things closer to home, things we can directly affect, which little by little will help the bigger picture. Remember an economy is made up of people, and if we all change a little then it will make a lot of difference.

We are all creative people.........stop, don't say it, it's a small 'c', if we didn't understand creativity then we wouldn't be engaged in this industry. It doesn't need to be in the job title, we all have a responsibility for creativity. Yes suits, that means you too.

So we should harness that creativity and look at what we do, how we do it and make change happen. First in our own businesses, then for our clients, and maybe, just maybe we can get through this.

If the last four or so years has taught us nothing it is that this state of change is permanent, it is not going away. To merely evolve is not enough, we must fundamentally examine every element of what we do and seek a better way of doing it. There might not be one, but by looking deeply into our processes we will find new ways to work, new ways to engage, new ways to create things.

Our economy, our country even, was built on manufacture right from the stone age, through the indsutrial revolution and beyond.

Our greatest export now is our creativity so whilst we stand on the edge of that abyss, I believe this is the greatest time to be in the creative indusrty and it also offers us the greatest opportunity we will ever have.

It's up to us wheter we choose to take it or not.

So this time the revolution will most definitely not be televised, it will be on iphone, ipad, pc and mac alike and it will be happening in front of your very eyes, if you're not careful.

Trade Places With Your Customer

                         
Not only is it a great 80s movie reference, but this always reminds me of the importance of putting yourself in your customer's shoes, thinking how they think. Some call it empathy, I just call it common sense.

If you treat the customer as a human, as someone with hopes, dreams, likes, dislikes, fears and ambitions rather than a statistic then you will have a greater chance of understanding what will motivate them to respond to your message rather than the other 1,345 they will be exposed to today.
 
Think about how they will be exposed to the message, their likely frame of mind when they are receiving and take this into consideration too.

For example, I have been watching/brainwashed by (delete as appropriate) Channel 5's Milkshake strand of late.  If you don't know it runs from around six in the morning and is a combination of Peppa Pig, Thomas, Noddy and all the usual suspects linked by a disgustingly perky and shiny set of presenters for that time in the morning.

I noticed over Christmas a much greater proportion of ads clearly targeted at parents in amongst those for ridiculously expensive toys and games aimed at the children themselves . Step forward the usual roster of baby products, toiletries and laundry products.

As a media planner the opportunity looks great on paper, bang on demographic, good share for the time of day, mainstream channel - but has anyone considered what the audience are doing in the breaks?

If our house is typical then the 'audience' will be looking behind sofas for dropped pieces of toast, dashing upstairs to get to the potty on time or roughly translated anything but watching the screen.

So for true customer insight, really get to know your audience, after all the relationship with our favourite brands is akin to a friendship, and friends know how each other think, and sometimes it's what we don't say that's as important as what we do say.

Now how do I get my hands on a genuine GI Joe?

Suck On This

Sucking eggs - why would you want to do that? 

Anyway here are a few things I've been musing on as it's the start of the year, and to be fair it just reads like a whole load of common sense to me!  So at the risk of feeling like the man in the picture ...............read on.

Don’t wait for business to get back to what and where it used to be – heads up, things have changed, they will never be the same again.

Understand this phrase “You are who Google says you are”. You can’t control the message like you used to. Monitor and interject only when appropriate.

Be your own biggest critic. Before presenting anything be able to clearly define the pros and cons, play devil’s advocate and be able to mitigate every possible risk that might be identified. Above all else, ask yourself if you are proud of what you are sending out the door.

Meet with past clients every quarter for lunch. Keep in touch. 

Always be learning.

Love what you do. No really, love what you do – it shows!

Add value within your community or sphere of influence.

Understand your product inside out.

It costs less to delight a client than it does to frustrate him.

The most effective way to get new clients is to impress old ones.

The most compelling thing you can sell a client is more sleep.

There are at least 10 things your clients wish you’d do differently. Find them and do them!

If your clients can go months without hearing from you, they can go just as long without recommending you.

Never assume your clients recognise all you can do for them.

Find out what it’s like to be in your clients shoes. What are their targets, what will make them look good.

Experience your clients brand first hand. Buy it, wear it, work it, sell it.

Surprise your clients with something for free, a three hour clinic on a particular issue or subject, or lunchtime seminars.

Resist the temptation to urge salespeople to close deals quicker, avoid the whiff of desperation.

Go after the ones that got away, competitors positions may be weakened.

Try what worked before. Do other things as well, but don't discard what worked.

Challenge your clients thinking, don’t always take what they say at face value.

Slow the decision making process down. They’ll thank you for getting it right, not getting it spent.

If what you do can be done as well for less, be the one to tell them. Your brand is based on trust, don’t let someone else devalue that.

Frame the proposal in their terms, it’s their outcome that needs to be achieved, you are a means to that end.

Detach from the outcome. It’s not always about closing, if that’s your focus they can smell it. Be willing to walk away for the good of both parties. 

Ask your client how you can help – and listen to the answer.

Love it or hate it.....................

A client who shall remain anonymous once rejected a piece of creative I presented with the immortal words ‘I don’t like it’.

To the surprise of my colleagues I replied ‘Brilliant!’.

Once I’d allowed everyone to relocate their jaws I continued, ‘would you buy your product?’. ‘Well of course not, it’s cheap tat’ they replied, and made my point for me quite effectively.

‘We’ are not always the target for what we produce, so ‘we’ don’t have to like it for it to be an effective piece of communication.

An essential part of the briefing process is to understand the target audience. That means getting deeper than demographics and statistics. What are their motivations for buying (or not buying)? Why are the engaging (or not) with your brand? How will your brand enhance their lives?

We don’t think of the target audience as a chart or a PowerPoint presentation, we give them a personality and think of them as people. That way it’s much easier to understand what makes them tick and what’s likely to make them respond to our communication.

As long as we have a clear view of what we are trying to achieve then the solution will be an appropriate one.

And if you don’t ‘like’ that well you know what you can do!

Be Careful What You Ask For....

How often are we preoccupied with the answer, when the question is the most important thing?

My little boy is wearing me out at the moment, he’s reached the ‘why’ phase. I can’t wait for ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’ by the way!

Unlike a child’s relentless barrage of (sometimes meaningless) questions the key is asking the right question.

It’s been said that the most important part of a CEO’s role is to be ‘Chief Question Asker’ and not the provider of the answers.

Great CEOs and business leaders ask great questions, questions that are disruptive, questions that make a difference.

The ‘right’ question framed in the ‘right’ way is often subversive, it puts people in a place where they have to think, not just answer robotically. Yes, it can be uncomfortable at times, but that’s not always a ‘bad’ thing. When does exercise do you the most good? When your muscles ache, don’t forget the brain needs exercise too!

Great business leaders aren’t afraid of the answer, they need exercise as well!

Asking questions isn’t limited to the CEO by any means, but it’s their responsibility to deliver a culture and framework in which questioning is respected, valued and encouraged. Then it’s up to all employees to ask questions of themselves, their colleagues and their superiors.

Asking questions creates conversation, conversation creates communication, communication creates collaboration and collaboration creates solutions. Those solutions will take your business to a better place than it is today.

Thinking about how the question is framed is important too. ‘Why’ or ‘why not’? ‘What do we stand for’ or ‘what do we stand against’? Sometimes we need to take ourselves into a place that stimulates invention and new ideas.

If the last five years has taught us anything, it’s that there will be no ‘back to normal’ – ‘this’ is ‘normal’. Change will be the only certainty, so we need to make sure that we’re organisationally ready to make change work positively for our brands and our businesses and generating new ways of working and new ideas will be central to this.

We believe that your brand is the truth of your business, that brands are made up of stories, and those stories lie within your business.

Our job is to help you find it, and guess what?

One of the best ways to get to those stories is to ask the questions and keep on asking til we get to the answer.

That’s why we don’t adopt a rigid process to how we make a difference to your business, we just ask the questions that count!

Originally posted at www.taylorobrien.com

Give Me Just A Little More Time

‘Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.’

Dylan Thomas

It would have been Dylan Thomas’ birthday this week and looking through some of his great quotes this one caught my eye and caused me to smile inwardly and raise an eyebrow. Though not simultaneously – that would be too much like multi-tasking!

Maybe it’s an age thing, maybe it’s an experience thing, but I remember when it was harder to put a presentation or proposal together, when we couldn’t just bash our thoughts onto a keyboard and then drag and pull them into some kind of order through the wonder of PowerPoint. And I think that was a good thing.

For all the fantastic things that technology has done, and I’m certainly not a Luddite, maybe it allows us to commit our thoughts a little readily. To paraphrase the poet, maybe PowerPoint lends ‘some sort of certainty’.

The ability to work more quickly hasn’t made us cleverer, the creative process is still just that – a process, and like all good things it takes time.

This isn’t misty eyed Madmen inspired nostalgia, but I remember the time when we used to present off boards too, when we used hand crafted rather than mac ‘visuals’.

These were great, because you could change the piece then and there, in front of the client’s very eyes, as they fed back on your concept. You may end up walking out of the meeting with a completely different piece from that with which you walked in, but that was great because it was a collaborative process and one which was shaped by the business issue we were facing.

Because it was a concept rather than a finished piece, the feedback we got was at that conceptual level. We were all able to look at the ‘big picture’ and get the proposition and key messaging right before we moved to the finite detail. It wasn’t black or white, right or wrong, it was interpretative and it was more likely to be ‘right’ before it moved on to its many and varied executions.

A knock on effect of work looking so ‘finished’ nowadays is that the feedback is often very ‘literal’ and detailed, and sometimes misses the point for that. Too often, we hear too early in the process ‘the logo is too big/not big enough/too bright/not bright enough etc.’ and bypass the ‘is the concept and messaging right’ stage.

As a brand consultancy we often deal in ‘big’ questions that require ‘big’ answers – your brand is the truth of your business after all – and we make sure that we spend time working with you ensuring that the big picture is right, before we focus on the detail.

Maybe it’s because we learned the hard way, because we still see what we do as a blend of art and science, or maybe it’s just because we care that we think this stuff is important?

First published on www.taylorobrien.com

Dial M For..............................Metaphor?

More and more often recently I have found myself talking to clients about ‘dials’ and how we need to turn them this way and that.

Apparently, I have been talking about the concept of ‘aggregation of marginal gains’.

As an aside, I’ve never been one for dressing up what we do in flowery language or hiding behind smoke and mirror to mystify what is, quite often, nothing more than the application of the bleeding obvious! Like the time I was asked to provide a ‘visual image representation’ of a concept – to which I answered ‘what, you mean a picture?’ – but I was young and naïve and didn’t realise that a VIR (!) cost twice as much as a picture!

Surely as brand consultants if we can’t express ourselves succinctly and clearly, then we can’t be trusted with your brand – cobbler’s shoes and all that!

Anyway, to the rather grandiosely named aggregation of marginal gains, and maybe I’m oversimplifying this, but if we treat each of the individual values of a brand as a separate measure, then surely it is easier for us to improve adherence to each value by 10% than it is to affect the whole brand by a whopping 50%.

It’s a great way of approaching a problem, when Honda wanted to lower the overall weight of the car, they didn’t look for one big change, they found a way of making each individual component one gram lighter – simple and effective.

So that’s why I’ve been talking about ‘dials’ a lot of late, because sometimes it’s easier to use visual metaphor to explain something, and I’m a simple chap.

If we treat each value as a dial and if we turn each one a single notch then we can make a significant difference to the overall brand and how it engages with its audience.

Those values should not be self sufficient, but will have a level of dependency on each other. So a positive change to one will in turn have a knock on effect on the others.

I’m sure there is a ‘management speak’ title for this out there somewhere, but I choose to think of it as the sum of the parts being greater than the whole.

And that’s a lot more straightforward than the ‘aggregation of marginal gains’ isn’t it!

Originally posted at www.taylorobrien.com