Customer engagement or customer con job?

19 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Digital, Marketing, Social Media

When I was a lad my mother shopped locally and regularly, much as we do today in fact. The local butcher knew all about that modern buzzword; customer engagement.

Whenever we entered his store, he’d chat to my mum about things specific to us. He was a BIG DATA man and kept customer knowledge in his database – sorry, brain. He would also have a quick comment for we kids, accompanied by a smile. (remember when you got those regularly in retail stores?) And he’d throw a couple of extra sausages in the order, just for us.

Like a couple of snags kids?

The butcher was also a pioneer of social media – he would call my mother on that amazing technology that transmitted voice over data lines – known colloquially as the telephone. He’d say things like “Hi Pam, the new season lamb is in, would you like me to drop a leg in on the way home?” And true to his word he’d drop a package in on the way home. Bloody amazing stuff, given he didn’t have a computer.

My local butcher recently left our meat order in the supermarket next door to his shop, because my bride was late collecting it, and he was closing for the night. He told the supermarket owner it was for Maya and Hunter’s mum – he knew my kid’s names but forgot whatsername. But hey, the service was excellent, so were the chops.

Hello Pam…

In fact, I can think of nothing more engaging between a seller and a buyer than the personal moment when Josephine Shopper (buyer) is handing over her hard-earned cash to the butcher (seller) in return for a kilo of snags. Or when one is signing the credit card to pay for a meal and one is deciding how much to tip, for example?

So why is it that everywhere I go these days – seminars and online marketing places – all I hear is the constant mutterings about customer engagement. I mean, why is this suddenly important, just because of the interweb, or because punters are being forced to click lots to get things done? Why does this make a customer more engaged to a brand now, than in any other time in history?

To me ‘click and forget’ is the beauty of the interweb. You can reduce your engagement, let the computers worry about it.

I’ve asked two different speakers in seminars this week, “what do you mean by customer engagement?” (given they used the term more than any other). And you guessed it, neither could give me a specific answer, as apparently it means different things to different marketers.

Do you, like me, smell something whiffy here?

something smells a tad whiffy…

I went to Wikopinion, also known as Wikipedia – the font of all opinions – to see if I could learn more. All I discovered was this crock:

Customer engagement (CE) refers to the engagement of customers with one another, with a company or a brand. The initiative for engagement can be either consumer- or company-led and the medium of engagement can be on or offline.

Customer engagement marketing places conversions into a longer term, more strategic context and is premised on the understanding that a simple focus on maximising conversions can, in some circumstances, decrease the likelihood of repeat conversions. CE aims at long-term engagement, encouraging customer loyalty and advocacy through word-of-mouth.

Online customer engagement is qualitatively different from offline engagement as the nature of the customer’s interactions with a brand, company and other customers differ on the internet. Discussion forums or blogs, for example, are spaces where people can communicate and socialise in ways that cannot be replicated by any offline interactive medium. Customer Engagement marketing efforts that aim to create, stimulate or influence customer behaviour differ from the offline, one-way, marketing communications that marketers are familiar with. Although customer advocacy, for example, has always been a goal for marketers, the rise of online user generated content can take advocacy to another level.

Forgive me if I’m not getting it here, but claiming that online allows you to be more social than face-to-face conversations with groups of friends or colleagues?? And what does “offline interactive medium” mean? Is it a buzzword for your mouth?

Maybe online comments allow you to reach more people via a social site – but that assumes of course, all the people are waiting with baited breath for your post and they bother to read it.

Even worse are the results you get when you search images for “customer engagement”. Lots of flowcharts, but bugger-all customers. Here’s an example:

Customer engagement – WTF?

I believe that marketers use the ‘engagement’ term to mean customers are more emotionally connected, or have stronger feelings towards a brand as a result of some action involving the brand. It could be a TVC, an act of service, an easy to use website, the list is endless. And if you stretch the bow a long way it could possibly be a “Like” or a post on a social site, but it’s a long stretch.

I ran the Wikopinion CE paragraphs through the Flesch Reading ease score. The average number of words per sentence is 25. Reading Ease is 14.9 – you need a score north of 50 (out of 100) for it to be easily read. The Flesch-Kincade Grade Level was 16.9 – which means you need more than a PhD to begin to even comprehend it!

Go to www.thecopymentor.com to learn more about Flesch.

I think my mate Drayton Bird said it best – “if I want to be engaged I’ll get married”. And he did, 3 times.

Stop with the jargon, particularly if you don’t understand it yourself, or cannot explain it in an alleged online dictionary. Using manufactured buzzwords does not make you appear more intelligent, or get you into some secret brotherhood of mysterious marketers who know stuff that nobody else knows. You just look and sound like that word that rhymes with banker.

Am off to use the telephone – I have to engage my insurance brand. They’ve just increased my premium and despite telling me I don’t need to do anything, I’m going to call them anyway. Should be a very engaging conversation.

Social media completely over-hyped by marketing press

18 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Marketing, Social Media

≈ 10 Comments

Like many a few years ago I viewed the dozens of videos claiming the interweb was trumping all other media at nuclear-pace. In particular was one video designed beautifully to position its creator and author of a social media book, as a legendary expert in an industry not yet 2 years young.

I tried to find the source documents to support the author’s claims. And as is typical of much that purports to be real online, there were none. Just a slick use of statistics stated within high production values of a video, so they must be real.

Realising it would take a lifetime to gather the correct statistics myself, I was about to give up when I found a brilliant article by Gisle Hannemyr in Norway. He is a researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Informatics, University of Oslo and created the his first website in 1993.

Gisle Hannemyr, author The Internet as Hyperbole

He’d had the same concerns I had and had done something about it. He published a brilliant article called The Internet as Hyperbole. It examined the over-hyped claims of adoption rates of the internet versus existing technology, like television. Take a minute to read it, you’ll be fascinated.

This was part of the resources we used to create this video about social media.

But moving forward to the latest piece by Mark Ritson whom I quoted in last week’s post about social media numbers.

Mark has done an experiment whereby he tracked the number of articles about social media by the marketing and advertising magazines in Australia.

He says: “Given the average Australian marketer is spending 5 per cent of their budget on social media and the average consumer dedicates 8 per cent of their (media) time to it, we would expect a similar ratio of coverage in the marketing press.”

What do you think the percentage of articles about social media is versus the coverage of other media channels?

10%? 20%?

Try 50%

That’s right – we are being hoodwinked by the trade press into believing the social channels are far more important or successful than they really are. The digi-zealots are conning us big time. And that’s because they are living in fantasy land themselves.

As Ritson said: “As the recent debacle about the Oreo Superbowl ad (a Twitter post during the blackout: “You can still dunk in the dark”) demonstrated, only in social media land can a two-line Tweet seen by 150,000 people be deemed more effective than a 60 second TV ad for Budweiser watched by over 100 million people.”

I did an experiment once whereby I tweeted a piece of research that claimed most tweets were just pointless babble. It was never retweeted and I was attacked for doing so. Then I tweeted a piece of positive research about twittering and the twitterati retweeted it with enthusiasm. Gotta luv a self-fulfilling fan base.

But I have to go – need to post this article on my social media. I hope someone reads it…

Where’s the digital dividend? Show me the $$$…

16 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Digital, Marketing

≈ Leave a comment

Banner blindness or banner blocking are terms given to the action of humans when they ignore advertisements on websites. We actively ignore the advertisements to focus on the articles, or videos.

I suppose it’s much like those readers of Playboy and Penthouse magazines who only read them for the articles and ignor the rest of the ‘content’. Or it’s like the male of the species when watching television. What does every male in the world hold in his hand when sitting in front of the TV (apart from beer)?

That’s right, it’s almost part of his DNA – the remote control. And the moment an advertisement appears, he quickly changes channels so he can watch at least 3 other shows at once. He rarely views an ad.

The interweb and offline media are two quite different beasts when it comes to advertising space. There are a limited number of television channels and radio stations for example. And these can only broadcast for 24 hours a day. This means there is a limit to the number of advertising spots available. As you know, the number of people watching television and listening to radio has declined as more options have become available with digital technologies.

By contrast, the interweb’s advertising spots are growing exponentially every day, as more and more sites and pages are loaded – all dependent on the lifeblood of advertising dollars for survival.

It’s a fascinating paradox that the interweb has allowed so many to create ‘businesses’ but these businesses are not creating things for which consumers will pay money. Rather these businesses can only survive if advertisers fund them. Imagine if all that initiative had been used for the collective good of mankind, creating things people wanted to pay money to use?

But I digress.

In an interesting opinion piece in Reuters recently, Felix Salmon quoted Todd Juenger. Here’s a part of it:

Just because there is a large and growing supply of Internet inventory doesn’t mean advertisers have a correspondingly large desire to deliver more Internet impressions.” Indeed, as the price of online inventory continues to fall, it seems just as likely that online ad spend will go down (because the ads being bought are getting cheaper) as that it will go up.

This is the problem for online ‘publishers’. They need advertising revenue to survive, as there are too few people willing to pay for online ‘content’. And advertisers only have limited budgets themselves – and they’re not growing at the same pace that online “advertising opportunities” are appearing. So there are not enough advertising dollars to fund all the pages being created. It’s simple maths.

And then there’s the problem for marketers and business owners – where do they invest their marketing budget on the interweb?

But wait, you can stop worrying – it’s not a problem at all. I can reveal to you that the interweb is the easiest place in the world to advertise. That’s because on the interweb you can predict the future.

You can predict the future on the interweb

That’s right – everything you do online is measurable, so you can test your executions before investing your marketing budget. This allows you to determine how your messages will perform and what your results will be. And you can test and roll-out in a matter of hours.

I’ve done tests with email and online ads where the open and click-through rates varied by a couple of hundred percent between versions. And split-run tests on landing pages that have reduced the cost of acquisition to less than 20% of the pre-test costs.

Wouldn’t you like to know which of your ads worked so you could maximise your income?

I assume you’re now asking yourself something like: If we can test and predict the future so easily, and if the data analytics are available to all who advertise or conduct email campaigns, and we can therefore determine what works and what doesn’t; “why aren’t we reducing our marketing budgets to get the same results as previous campaigns, or getting better results from the same budget???”

Where’s the digital dividend???

Where are the savings in our marketing budgets, or the increased profits or market share? How come our online advertising isn’t getting better results? It’s predicted this year in Australia over $2 Billion will be spent on advertising on the interweb – and that doesn’t include email marketing.

With such an investment of digital dollars, why aren’t we seeing massive market share swings or outstanding results never witnessed before – thanks to the analytics and testing? Why aren’t marketers getting better results for their shareholders?

One of the reasons is that alleged ‘digi-experts’ don’t really have the skills necessary to create advertising for the interweb. Another is that we are ignoring the analytics – BIG Data is a Big Pain. But the main reason can be found in the popular book by Charles Mackay, first published in 1841: The Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It appears we are more intent on following than questioning.

The interweb offers marketers the easiest way ever to get the best results possible from their marketing budget. Yet it appears very few care about doing so – they care more about spending a marketing budget, than spending it wisely.

But hey, in most cases it’s not their money, it’s their shareholders, so why am I concerned? Hang on, I’m a shareholder…

Social media numbers don’t add up…

11 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Branding

≈ 11 Comments

Thanks to Frank Chamberlin who sent me this article by Mark Ritson in BRW magazine. Mark is an Associate Professor of Marketing at… Melbourne Business School and is recognised as one of the world’s leading experts on brand strategy. His clients have included McKinsey, PepsiCo, Donna Karan, Johnson & Johnson, Dom Perignon, Baxter, De Beers.

When you read it, remember eMarketer research revealed at least 25% of all people who “Like” a brand on FB disagree it means they are a fan or even like the brand. So the real numbers are even worse than those in the article. You might also want to view this video we created about 18 months ago – click here.

Your thoughts please…

Social media: get ready to be underwhelmed

Over the next three weeks I’d like to share some unfortunate truths about social media. Let’s begin with a simple statement: although social media presents us with wonderful new communication options, they are not as valuable a corporate tool as you might believe. That might surprise you, given 17 per cent of Australians use Twitter and 51 per cent patronise Facebook.

But delve a little deeper and it starts to get rocky, fast.

This week, I look at why Facebook and Twitter aren’t all they are cracked up to be. Next week, I will examine how social media has been over-represented and oversold to our nation’s executives. And finally, we will look at the tide turning against social media superiority and what marketers are doing to restore balance and sanity within their marketing mix.

If you take Interbrand’s recently published list of Australia’s top 10 retail brands and then add up all the followers on Twitter of these 10 brands, you get a grand total of 59,000 Australians – or significantly less than the attendance at the MCG last week for the season opener between Carlton and Richmond.

Not too impressive and it gets worse. Unlike Twitter users, the spectators at the G last week were paying attention. The average click-through rate for a branded Twitter page is only about 0.5 per cent. That means that even one of Australia’s biggest retail brands like Coles, which has 4600 followers on Twitter, will only get about 23 people to actually open its next tweet. That’s a slightly smaller audience than the actual number of players who were on the field last week for the Carlton Richmond game. Coles would literally be better off opening a window at their Hawthorn HQ and yelling at passers-by on the street than using Twitter.

Facebook, to be fair, has a much bigger reach than Twitter and if we again look at Australia’s 10 largest retail brands we do see much bigger audiences. Woolworths, for example, is typical with 489,000 likes on Facebook.

It’s an impressive figure until you appreciate that it’s less than 4 per cent of the 13 million people who shopped at Woolworths last week.

And even 4 per cent is over-generous. Consumers might have “Liked” a brand three years ago and never returned to that Facebook page. That’s why most brands look at engagement rate, the number of people who have more recently interacted with a brand’s Facebook site. This rate is indicated by the number of consumers listed on a Facebook page who are “talking about this” under the Likes number.

Once again, the numbers are underwhelming. The average engagement ratio for a big brand on Facebook is usually somewhere between 1 per cent and 5 per cent of total Likes. In Woolworths’ case 15,000 people, or about 3 per cent of their Facebook following, have recently engaged with the brand. That’s roughly the same number that will visit a single, big Woolworths store next weekend. Only another 749 stores to go . . .

This lack of interest in engaging with brands on social media means that despite gigantic potential audiences, Facebook’s value as an advertising medium is usually overstated. Its CPM in Australia (the cost to reach 1000 customers) is about 24¢ (8). Not bad, but no better than the CPM for a quarter page ad in BRW – so much for the death of print advertising. And this general apathy from consumers means that Facebook’s click-through rate for its advertising and its average cost per click are rarely superior to more standard search media options like Google Adwords.

These numbers are underwhelming because most Australians exclusively use social media to interact with each other, not brands. Of the total Australian population that use social media, 69 per cent don’t follow any brands or companies of any kind. The enormous dollar signs that sprang up in the eyes of marketers five years ago with the arrival of a billion people on social media has blinded them to a harsh reality. It’s called “social media” for a reason: most Australians use it to connect with people not companies.

How else do you explain the fact that a has-been Aussie pop star like Peter Andre has more likes and more engagement than any of the top 10 Australian brands? Or that a relatively unknown marketing professor like me can have more followers on Twitter than Bunnings, Big W, Target and K-Mart. Combined.

As we approach the end of round 1 you should be increasingly struck with two thoughts. First, neither Facebook nor Twitter should seem that amazing any more from a reach, value or impact perspective. Second, you might now be wondering why so many people believed they were so awesome for so long.

You can also see my previous posts on this topic here.

Hope is not a strategy…

10 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Branding, Marketing

≈ 4 Comments

A colleague commented that in tough economic times, people tend to hope things will get better, instead of working to make them better.

It made me think about how much of our business is driven by hope – we brief the work into the agency and hope they come back with a great concept. We hope the advertising we approve or create will work when we run it. We hope our friends and colleagues will like our ads – even Like them on FB or YouTube.

The reasons most of us live on hope has as much to do with human nature as anything else. Most people prefer the path of least resistance – the easiest track.

We don’t like doing the hard yards of analysing what works and what doesn’t, studying the figures, modelling data, or simply tracking if our advertising even generates sales. After all, it’s not much fun and if we look too closely we might discover some revealing truths.

And we rarely budget – either time or money – for testing, so we can learn what will have the best chance of success. It seems most of us find it easier just to run the campaign and hope it works, rather than invest in testing to at least have some confidence in the outcome.

It’s easier to work within the realms of subjectivity – opinions rather than facts. As working with facts is much more confronting, particularly if they reveal things we don’t want to know – such as the advertising campaign not paying for itself, or that a bunch of Likes has no effect on anything.

But there is one area where hope occasionally rears its head at great expense to both marketers and agencies. While most of us work to a written briefing template, every now and then, for whatever reason, a brief will be delivered verbally in the vain hope the creative services supplier understands it and delivers outstanding work in return.

Briefing your creative team verbally without a written brief is the equivalent of sending your kids to do the weekly shopping without a list. Can you imagine what they’d bring home if you just said to them, “Go do the shopping. Here’s some money. Spend it all – don’t forget what I said to buy.” What do you think they’d buy – what you wanted, or what they wanted?

And how would you judge their actions, given the way they had been briefed?

For the record, the most important part of the creative development process is “the brief.” The area where most things go wrong in the creative process is “the brief.”

And the verbal brief is one of the most dangerous things in marketing – because it relies too much on interpretation. That’s why putting your brief in writing with supporting imagery that reflects what you mean when you say things like “up-market” or “young urban single” will minimise the risks associated with interpretation.

Here’s another comment often given when judging a piece of creative work: “That’s not what I expected.” Speakers of this phrase should be removed from the industry. If you had expectations and they were not included in the brief, you have wasted everyone’s time and money.

The only time “that’s not what I expected” should be heard is in enthusiastic praise for the wonderful execution you are viewing.

A couple of other words used regularly in verbal briefs are “quirky” and “wow factor”. You don’t see them in written briefs, because when you write them down you realise how they sound.

The definition for “quirky” is “eccentric” and means “strikingly unconventional or given to idiosyncrasies”. The synonym that occurs mostly with “quirky” is “kinky”. I’m not sure what brands want to be seen as kinky, or strikingly unconventional – particularly in the financial services category for example – but you can see the risks we create when we baldly use these words in briefings.

WOW factor really helps…

It’s hard to even find a definition of “wow factor”. But I assume that we all interpret it in the same way – don’t we?

If you do want a quirky creative execution packed full of wow factor, then supply samples of advertising that you consider to be quirky or that contains wow factor. After all, one person’s wow factor is another’s sleep remedy.

I prefer work that is relevant, but executed in a creative way – these days that can mean a grammatically correct letter, written to say “thank-you for your business”. Manners have become so rare they stand out from the clutter.

I suspect most people have high hopes for their creative work – it can be career defining. So give your work the respect it deserves.

The greatest writers spend more time on preparation, thinking, research and jotting down notes, than they spend writing. Marketers should also spend as much time as possible on preparing a written brief, if they want the best results, with lots of wow factor – quirkily speaking of course.

(I decided not to include quirky or kinky images today – you don’t want to go there on Google)

Read the F****g Manual…

09 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Direct Marketing, Marketing

≈ 4 Comments

A few years ago I delivered a presentation at my friend Drayton Bird’s European Academy of Direct and Interactive Marketing. The attendees were mostly Eastern European, but there were also two delegates flying the Aussie flag.

Another Aussie patriot flying the flag

Direct marketing is now taking off in Eastern Europe and a few things were obvious from the outset. One being how the delegates just assumed the interweb is simply a digital channel for direct marketing – end of discussion.

Another is that we probably take for granted just how good our infrastructure is in terms of media, lists and distribution services. For example, most of the emerging countries don’t have address lists – mail, e-mail or sms – so they are hamstrung before they begin. Much of their activity is aimed at building lists through direct response advertising with landing pages as the response device.

One Slovenian marketer is having great success using former Soviet currency as an involvement device. Apparently you can buy old bank notes in bulk for a few cents per thousand. He uses them in customer mailings and handed out dozens of notes to the audience to prove his point. An old trick, but not when it’s in a new market.

The other thing that became immediately clear was how much jargon our industry uses. It’s not until you’re trying to translate to a room full of people from non-English speaking backgrounds that you realise how much doublespeak we blather.

Try explaining TARPs, CTR, SEO, SEM, CPL, CPA, RFM, CRM, etc to people who haven’t been trained in western marketing practices and for whom English is a second language.

I also tried out my (excuse the jargon) tipping-point questions that I’ve been asking Australasian audiences. One question I asked was; “who doesn’t own or wear a watch?” The answer is usually between 20% and 40% of the audience no longer wear a watch. So we’re getting close to the tipping-point where more people won’t wear one, than do wear one. You’ll be glad to know that about 30% of the European audience didn’t own or wear a watch either.

Another question I asked was; “what do you think of when I say multi-channel marketing?” The answer was similar to audiences here; campaigns across numerous media such as TV, radio, press, outdoor and the interweb. Although you will get more people including mail in their answer here. The term ‘digital print” is never used when answering the multi-channel question.

Which brings me to some of the jargon being used by the local digital print industry. As you may be aware there is a push by digital printers (and also digital art studios) to position themselves as marketing service organisations. One of the reasons is that because some of them now send e-mail and sms, they call themselves providers of “multi-channel marketing services”.

Let’s get real here – just because it’s new for a printer to offer more than printing, doesn’t mean a multi-channel campaign is new to marketers. In fact, marketers don’t order a multi-channel campaign from their agencies. They simply ask their agency to produce a campaign in the media required to get the job done – whether it’s one or many media. Multi-channel isn’t marketers’ jargon.

I cannot recall a marketer briefing an agency with; “can you create a $100,000 multi-channel campaign thanks?”

$100,000 worth of multi-channel marketing please…

If printers and digital ‘agencies’ are going to provide marketing services, then they need to understand the language of their customers and not try to force their own language onto the market. Many also call direct mail campaigns “DM campaigns”. DM is jargon for Direct Marketing, not for Direct Mail – so please get the jargon right if you’re going to use it.

But who really knows what’s right and wrong when it comes to jargon? Recently I was in a meeting where the marketing manager started talking about their CRM programme. Expecting a discussion around single view of the customer, software programmes and the like, I was preparing my two cents worth, when I realised I was in a parallel universe.

The marketer was talking about Cause Related Marketing, not Customer Relationship Management.

Although as an ‘old dog’ (or should that be Auld dog?) I shouldn’t be surprised. Years ago when addressing the new recruits for the ADMA Certificate Course I asked if anyone in the class knew what RFM stood for. One lady held up her hand and asked rather sheepishly, if I was sure I wanted her to explain it to the class. I encouraged her to stand up and enthusiastically explain the meaning of RFM and why it was so important.

I assumed she knew it stood for Recency, Frequency, Monetary – the 3 pillars of calculating customer value.

Instead she promptly told the room that RFM stood for Read the F****g Manual. She worked for IBM and that’s what RFM stood for in her world.

The poor gal was so embarrassed she never answered a question again the whole semester.

LOL

(in case you’re confused, that’s Laugh Out Loud, not Lots Of Love. Although I suppose if you want it to be Lots Of Love that’s OK. WTF does OK stand for?)

Death by marketing committee… is anything worse?

08 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Marketing

≈ 10 Comments

I was in a meeting recently – you know the sort. Those excruciating time-wasters where you think of what else you could have done with your life if only you didn’t have to attend meetings. In a moment of insanity I even tried to calculate how many meetings I had attended in my career and gave up north of 18,000.

Day-dreaming, I recalled a few meetings I’d suffered: one in which the account manager head-butted a client; another where I had to punch a creative director in the arm to shut him up (at the client’s request); or when the clients all brought their lunch but the agency staff weren’t allowed to leave the meeting to get anything to eat.

One of the worst ever was sitting with the politicians and bureaucrats trying to get copy approved for the introduction of the GST – never before have I sat in a room with so many stupid people full of self-interest.

John Cleese’s “Meetings Bloody Meetings”

One meeting in particular got me thinking about today’s role of marketers in large organisations. It was a tad depressing really, having been a marketing manager of large and some not-so-large companies.

It struck me that I couldn’t remember the last time a decision about creative work was made as soon as it was presented in a meeting. Usually, when you present creative work to the person who owns the business, or a company that is not a “blue chip” advertiser, you’ll get a decision on the spot. Either the copy hits the mark or it doesn’t. Maybe some revisions are agreed and the job progresses.

But in larger organisations with well-stocked marketing departments, decisions are normally the last thing made when creative work is presented. Everything we do is governed by the collective commentary of committees.

I was pondering this recently after presenting the copy for a mailing going to current customers. It wasn’t a difficult challenge. It was an insurance renewal campaign – so the list was hot and we had a reasonable offer.

The mailing was a simple O/E with a personalised letter/brochure — essentially “you’re due for renewal, so here’s an offer for you to continue doing business with us”. Rocket science was not required, just some persuasive writing.

Four marketing executives attended the presentation, though the person who briefed us couldn’t make it. And these were no ordinary marketing executives — there was a brand director, a direct marketing manager, a campaign manager and a product manager — all well-paid intelligent people. Nice too. The humble mailing was in esteemed company.

The copy was presented and they (the collective of marketing executives) all liked it. What is the collective noun for a group of marketers anyway — a marketing mix?

Given the positive response, we asked if the copy was good to go, or if there were any revisions?

To our surprise, nobody in the room was allowed to make a decision. Despite their job titles and salaries, the copy firstly had to go before the lawyers — fair enough in today’s litigious world. But after the lawyers, it still had to traverse a special sitting of the senior marketing committee.

Apparently these committee members don’t attend agency meetings. They stand aloof in another land, waiting to judge what their marketing minions bring them. I wonder if their shareholders are aware of this behaviour, not to mention the gross waste of money and resources?

a marketing mix

But the question has to be asked — why can’t a marketing manager be allowed to make a decision about a piece of copy? What are marketers being paid to do, if not to make marketing decisions? Why does it take at least six people with the words “marketing” or “brand” in their job title, to give their collective stamp of approval to a piece of paper with words on both sides, that’s going in an envelope to their customers?

Who let this happen? Who are these corporate constables neutering our marketers? Why do they hire dogs but bark themselves?

We’re not splitting the atom. We’re writing to our customers and asking them to continue to do business with us. Why can’t a university-educated well-paid marketing manager be allowed to say “yes that’s fine”, or “no that’s not right, we need to make these changes”?

Maybe we marketers have become so numb in our daily routines, we no longer recognise what we’ve been trained to do? Do we no longer question why we do what we do, or don’t do, as the case may be? That’s a lot of doo-doo by the way.

A real lot of doo doo!

Marketers must make a stand. Don’t accept as fait accompli that committees rule. What’s at risk here…really? Have we been conditioned to accept committees so no individual gets blame or kudos?

Here’s the risk, as corporations look to cut costs — if very senior management executives believe they just need committees to make decisions about marketing messages, then what’s the future for marketing managers? Will they use briefing clerks to brief suppliers and forward the responses to the lawyers and a marketing committee for approval?

Another reason to address this problem lies with our universities. They don’t teach us to be committee members. We’re taught that a marketing manager makes decisions on products, pricing, promotion, placement, etc. So if marketers aren’t allowed to make decisions in the real world, we need to change our curriculum, so our young marketers are educated for the reality of marketing by committee.

If you search your parks and plazas you’ll not find monuments erected to committees. Monuments are erected for individuals. Those who achieved – often despite great odds… and pigeons.

But I have to go now. I need to make eight copies for the presentation tomorrow — apparently there’s a big mix attending.

“You are all individuals… I’m not!”

05 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Branding, Marketing, Social Media

≈ 3 Comments

A friend of mine and I were discussing the problem with politicians and their utter fascination with themselves. Their whole purpose in life is to keep themselves in power – they care naught for the people who vote them in to serve, or the good of the country.

My friend said it reminded her of the old Brand Manager Syndrome. For those who don’t know, it’s that disease that afflicts Brand Managers whereby they believe the whole world is as interested and excited about their brand, as they are. The assume every consumer awakes each day with unabated enthusiasm to have a relationship with brands.

I’ve seen Brand Manager Syndrome affect all sorts of seemingly intelligent people. They become utterly convinced that consumers spend all their waking moments concerned about the brand proposition of their toilet paper for example. Even worse some believe that because of technology, customers are more engaged with brands, whatever that means.

They believe there are hordes of punters in supermarket aisles posting questions to their social networks before they buy, “should I get the low-fat strawberry or sugar-free apricot yoghurt? Check out my Instagram photo and ‘Like’ so I can make a decision please.”

They don’t realise technology has become so easy to use, that a “Like” has almost no value at all and reflects a disengagement of ongoing thought, rather than a connection and more ‘engagement’ – but that’s another blog.

An article in the press yesterday confirmed what many who study marketing history already knew – we’re a boring lot. That’s not a reflection on our intellect or sparkling personalities, rather it’s a comment on our purchasing habits. We buy the same brands with monotony and it takes quite a bit of effort to get us to switch brands.

Research in the 80’s (or it could have been 70’s) revealed that the main reason a particular brand of tomato sauce was number one, had nothing to do with advertising, or strategy planning. Rather, we bought a specific brand because most of us grew up in homes where the tomato sauce was stored on the kitchen table, along with the salt and pepper. Every day our family ate meals with this brand of sauce staring us in the face, whether we used the sauce or not.

People were conditioned to believe a table was not set unless it had tomato sauce in the middle. So they bought the brand they grew up with and put it on their table, or as table habits changed, in their pantry. And their kids bought the same brand of sauce when they moved out – in fact mum probably packed a bottle for them, along with other essentials.

Other research showed that the majority of consumers are set in their brand preferences by the time they reached 35. They have no desire to switch brands. It is much easier to grab the brand they know than face the pain of change. We are creatures of habit. Our nature is to resist change unless it makes life easier. As a species we are inherently lazy and prefer the path of least resistance.

Here’s a quote from the article based on research by Professor Byron Sharp and published in his latest book Marketing: Theory, Evidence, Practice:

“Brand loyalty is not as strong or passionate as companies like to think” he said. “Consumers adopt brand loyalty as a strategy to simplify their lives… it’s neither because they have decided that a particular brand is the perfect one for them, better than all the others, nor that they feel a great emotional bond to it.”

Mealworms, crickets and other branded grubs…

03 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Branding

≈ 6 Comments

When I was a young lad in Sydney my favourite pets were lizards. My mates and I kept all manner of blue-tongues, bearded dragons, frill-necks, and other quite ‘exotic’ species. It’s probably illegal these days without a license.

There was even a pet shop out west at Parramatta called Lewis’s Pet Shop – it sold snakes. I always wanted a carpet snake – it’s a python and quite safe, in terms of your chances of dying from a bite, as it isn’t venomous. One night my father was in an elevator in the city when a man entered with a box. My father joked “what have you got in the box, snakes?” Sure enough he did. It was the man from Lewis’s Pet Shop and he’d just given a snake show at a corporate event.

So at a late hour on the footpath of Castlereagh Street, my father found himself holding a carpet snake in one hand and a diamond python in the other, negotiating the price per foot length, to buy me a snake.

Carpet Pythons make great pets…

The next day my father told me the man offered him a deal – I was so excited. My mother exclaimed it was either her or the snakes. But it was not to be. When I discovered I had to feed the snakes live frogs, rats, mice or even guinea pigs, I changed my mind. I was a bit of a softy and couldn’t feed live animals to the snake, particularly as I also kept guinea pigs. So I kept lizards but no snakes – though I worked with some over the years.

Fast forward to last week. We live next to a lagoon and have blue-tongues and eastern water dragons, along with all sorts of other animals sharing our yard. We’ll never have to buy a pet, we have more than we need.

A baby blue tongue has been living in the front yard, but had disappeared. We found him a few days ago trying to warm-up in the sun on the path. He was freezing and could hardly move. Last year a couple of baby blue tongues died from exposure to the cold and I had to perform the ritualistic burial and explain to my kids why they had passed on.

So we took the lizard in, cleaned out an abandoned fish tank, built a house and put it into its new home in the sun. We’ll look after it through Winter and then release it back into the yard. Am not sure if it’s a boy or girl?

Bluey hitches a ride on my daughter’s shoulder

I dug up a few worms and our daughter raided our worm farm – but I explained that wasn’t really sustainable. Bluey (that’s its name) gobbled them up. I soon realised I couldn’t spend my day hunting grubs and worms to feed Bluey, so I went to the pet shop – well it’s more a rural barn in suburbia, catering for domestic animals and their owner’s egos.

That’s when I discovered branded insects. Now you may be familiar with these, given your own pet experiences. But it was the first time I had to decide between brands of Mealworm. They all looked the same to me – packets of sawdust with dark specks indicating the front or rear end of the worm. What was their point of difference, their USP?

I had to decide if the “Organophosphates-free and hormone-free” Mealworms (in 10 gram pack) were the right brand for Bluey? I mean what size would your average 1 inch Mealworm grow if they weren’t hormone-free?

This started me pondering. Are the Mealworms organic? Are they Australian Made or imported? I only want the best natural food for Bluey. What if Bluey is gluten or lactose intolerant? There was nothing on the packaging to allay my fears. Should I be worried? What if Bluey has an allergic reaction?

Organophosphate-free Mealworm – a good brand

And then there’s the crickets. A software developer who worked for me, used to buy containers of full-size live crickets to feed her man-eating fish (I didn’t dare ask). But the lady serving me wanted to know what size crickets I needed? “What size?” I stammered. “I have no idea.” I knew I should have brought Bluey with me.

The large ones looked like they’d eat lizards for breakfast, so I opted for the small ones – all grown to the same size on some cricket-formula-food, designed to maximize growth in the shortest time. Are these organic or chemical-free I wondered? The labeling was minimal. There was half an egg carton, a bunch of bugs and two slices of old carrot, all in a take-away food container.

I smiled at the irony. (that’s the take-away food irony)

Once home I discovered how high the small crickets can jump. It’s damn high – which means they can jump out of the fish, I mean lizard, tank. Do I have to maim them before feeding time? And how do I do that – they’re so tiny?

Thankfully Bluey loves the brand of Mealworms I chose – at the rate he’s eating them I’ll be back at the pet shop tomorrow. Maybe I could start my own Mealworm farm, next to our earthworm farm? But how do I know if I have breeders and not some specialist hybrid version that don’t reproduce? So much work to do for one lizard.

My kids are very excited about Bluey. They’ve just told me they want a carpet snake each. I suppose I should be thankful. They could have asked for a dog.

The Malcolm Auld Blog

~ Marketing Musings and More…

Monthly Archives: April 2013

Where’s the digital dividend? Show me the $$$…

Social media numbers don’t add up…

Hope is not a strategy…

Read the F****g Manual…

Death by marketing committee… is anything worse?

Mealworms, crickets and other branded grubs…

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