bloggosfear

Kodak failure a lesson for all, but not surprising

2012-01-20T08:51:00.002+11:00

It's sad about Kodak, the venerable brand that has played a central role in capturing a big chunk of modern natural and human history. Perhaps more sad is that fact that the people running it either a) didn't see digital coming or b) saw it coming and buried their heads in the sand and refused to embrace it.

The company's demise is no surprise to me. I consulted to another long-established and highly respected brand in the 1990s - Agfa. They were in the film production business also and arguably produced the best consumer film product on the market.

The interesting thing about Agfa was that it had seen the digital age coming and was actually a leader in the area of high-resolution medical and pre-press imaging (remnants of it still are, as far as I know). Even in the mid-range scanning segment, some of Agfa's flatbed scanners were second to none. So there was no excuse for its rapid demise and disappearance in the consumer imaging sphere.

The writing was on the wall for me when I was asked to promote Agfa's range of digital cameras. I had a stockpile of them in my office that I promoted to the camera cognizenty in the media to 'road test'. I remember them clearly - 2 megapixel resolution on the base model, with a premium 4 mPx on the upmarket model.

That was great for about six months, but not for the several years that the company promoted the range. It got to the point where I was forced to have a very robust conversation with the company's executives about the wisdom of maintaining the media evaluation program when competitors were rapidly moving on to a whopping 6 mPx and beyond.

In fact, in my famously diplomatic way, I shipped all the test units back to them declaring that there was no evidence that the company had any commitment to the segment and no product development strategy that I could see.

Twelve months later, and to my cost, I received the inevitable call from Agfa Australia. I was to lose a significant marcoms account - not because of what I said, but because I had been proved right and the Belgian HQ had announced Agfa was withdrawing from the consumer digital imaging market. That was back in 2001 and, in my view Kodak was not looking much healthier even then - remember the $15 million Australian Government subsidy to retain Kodak in Australia when Ziggy Switowski headed up the operation? Perhaps we'd rather forget this in the context of the auto industry funding debate!

But, back to the knitting. I was later told that Agfa had withdrawn from the sector because it saw mobile phone and electronics companies as the future players in photography for the masses. And hey, they were correct. The digital cameras offered in mobile devices today are vastly superior to their early offerings. But the point is, why didn't they take action to forge alliances or even negotiate mergers with some of these operators?

Agfa's brand in consumer photography was massive in Europe, respected in the United States and growing in Asia-Pacific. It had strong advocacy in professional photographic ranks. But it appeared the executive placed no real value on the potential for their brand to assist other companies not already in the consumer imaging space to, at minimum, develop and manufacture products for them.

I am not close enough to Eastman-Kodak to know the intricacies of why they went broke, but Rupert Goodwins of technology website, ZDNet sees it this way:

"Kodak made all its money from selling film, then the digital camera came along and now no-one's buying film. It's not like they didn't see it coming. Kodak hesitated because they didn't want to eviscerate their business," he said.

Sounds a hell of a lot like history repeating itself to me and there are lessons in it for all of us. Purists might argue film produces superior images with more subtle colour gradations and so on, but no one wants it. Some audiophiles still argue vinyl LPs deliver a warmer sound than CDs. And even I believe CDs deliver superior sound to mpeg devices. But those views don't matter if the masses don't believe them.

Consumer demand drives our businesses, not the widgets we might develop or service models and systems we might think are good, or even superior, for them.

It's not only the Earth that's spinning!

2012-01-20T07:13:00.000+11:00

Have you caught up with the discussion about whether we should ignore the Earth's speed of rotation on its axis and set our time by the obviously more accurate atomic clocks? If you haven't, pin your ears back because it occasionally has implications for all of us.

If you didn't know it already, the Earth is not an accurate keeper of time because, would you believe it,the damn thing cuts a nick off 24 hours every time it spins. This is because it actually wobbles several degrees on its axis and gets hit by various bits of space debris, solar winds etc.

So if you stuck around a few million years, if you relied on good old Mother Earth to run your life, you'd effectively be robbed of a few weeks or so. In fact, the boffins who work tirelessly to deliver this info to us calculate the loss of about half a day every 6,000 years. It means that once in every few thousand years, your client's deadline of tomorrow is really closer than you think.

To better focus our minds on this, our boffins have spiced this debate up in a way that should soon have management and IT consultants donning the sandwich boards again declaring 'the end is nigh'.

Remember the Y2K millennium bug? Filled newspaper columns and IT consultant pockets in tandem, as we waited in dread throughout 1999 for the moment when society ground to halt as we ticked over past midnight to enter the 21st Century.

We'll never really know whether the 20th Century habit of encoding the year date as two digits in PCs would have brought down contemporary society because our multi-million dollar investments in IT upgrades were completed in time, but it was probably the biggest ever millennium con we ever fell for! Of course, Apple users were immune from the travails faced by mere PC users - more iTuned into the future as usual.

Now scientists are debating whether we should abandon our current practice of bumping our atomic clocks by a second every few years to compensate for the Earth's wobbly behavior lest it upset our computer systems. The Ghost of Y2K perhaps? So, if we stick to the atomic clock, some are arguing that we won't have to make the miniscule adjustments that put our computer driven society at risk every few years.

What we really need now is the daylight saving lobby to zoom in on this discussion. What are the implications of moving to atomic clock time? Will this result in extra daylight seconds - those poor farmers having to get up micro-seconds earlier to milk the cows, curtains fading, outdoor decking needing extra oil. The consequences don't bear thinking about.

And what about the nuclear lobby. Where do these atomic clocks derive their power. Where will we dump the nuclear waste? My God, we already have atomic clocks. Is there a waste dump in my backyard? Should I start buying BHP shares to capitalise on the proceeds from the Olympic Dam development? Big social and strategic issues that strike at the heart of my general well-being!

And then there's the Green lobby. How is carbon pollution influencing the timing and rhythm of our existence? Should we go nuclear or keep burning fossil fuels to keep town hall clocks running. Should we re-introduce wind-up watches so we derive health benefits as well as energy savings.

We spend a lot of time talking about this stuff, yet we have all been turning back the clock to help our punctuality for years. Even as I write, I'm betting someone somewhere is adjusting a watch heading into meeting to declare their timepiece had let them down again.

For the most part, knocking a second off a deadline once every few years is not going to resolve my day to day tardiness, especially when the atomic adjustments are most likely to occur on New Year's Eve!

Social media - awareness or equity in the brand equation?

2012-01-14T08:30:00.001+11:00

I'm pretty much over the Marcoms seminars on social media, so just to bore everyone yet again, I'll talk about(yep, you guessed it) social media. The reason I'm over these discussions is because I'm essentially over the line with it, both a relatively early adopter and convinced that it has a role to play in corporate communications.

In fact, it plays many roles, both offensive and defensive in overall communications strategy but, from a brand perspective, I'm starting to believe that in some sectors it is a greater brand awareness than engagement tool. Many would argue that they have run successful engagement programs using social media. I have seen some very creative and engaging programs. My issue is, what exactly has the target audience become engaged with? I'd argue that in nine out of ten instances, the engagement has been with the creative rather than the brand. The brand is a sponsor of the program, but does it translate into calls to action of commercial benefit to the sponsoring brand?

Sponsorship is perhaps an appropriate analogy. How does sports sponsorship benefit a brand? Does it deliver greater brand awareness, or does it build brand equity? In some instances, it can create a positive disposition towards a brand, but does this ultimately translate into sales?

Both social media and sponsorship generate interaction with the brand. Both can promote brand values by positive association with well crafted campaigns, well-chosen partnerships and so on. But there is increasing evidence that users of social media, in particular FaceBook, are not enthused by the thought of interacting with business in these channels. There are better online vehicles for that, principally online search and aggregator sites like eBay etc.

And if we generally accept that social media is not the appropriate channel for handling specific customer queries and complaints, we by definition remove one of the most effective drivers of interaction from the social media space.

On the flip side, followers on Twitter and friends on FaceBook have expressed an interest in your company simply by following your news and commentary and given you permission to access their space. Even so, I think you'll generally find that very little flows back the other way from these disciples - unless, of course, you really want to launch some edgy conversation. That's why I qualified my opening comments by saying engagement is difficult in 'some' sectors. Part of the brand DNA of some organisations may actually court controversy - think Benetton.

It's why I'm leaning to the view that, for most sectors, social media has greater potential for brand awareness building through leveraged distribution of information than it has for true customer engagement reflected in increased sales.That's still better achieved through well constructed search and website strategies.

The key for me lies in optimizing online strategy to ensure that, no matter what online channel people are in, that they are ultimately directed to a websites designed by you to provide solutions and advice aligned to their interests. You never know, doing so, may actually encourage people to really 'Like' you!

A brand new Vision - a triumph for branding

2011-12-08T07:14:00.001+11:00

As some may know, I have been involved in a brand project that brings together two long-established superannuation funds in Australia - Equipsuper and Vision Super. Naturally, the question on everyone's lips was what will the new fund be called? What will the logo look like?

As people involved in brands already know, the name and logo is merely the end of the brand journey, with a whole bunch of other stuff preceding it - qualitative and quantitative research, identification of shared values and culture, SWOT analysis and the list goes on. I prefaced the first Brand & Communications Group meeting by saying I did not want to see any crayons or sketch pads in the room until the real work was done.

It's now common knowledge that the merged fund will be called Vision, dropping the 'Super' name from the original fund name. This was the best decision on a number of metrics, but how we got there is what convinced me that it was so.

When the funds announced the merger about 18 months ago, the guidelines provided to the B&C Group was that the new fund should have a new name, in other words should not adopt either of the previous names. There were a number of factors driving this, which are largely irrelevant, except to say the instruction preceded any evaluation of brand metrics or objectives.

So the B&C Group's brief was to come up with a new brand name and the process was established accordingly. However, as a precaution, we did drop questions about current names into the stakeholder research conducted for us by CoreData.

Elmwood Australia was commissioned to undertake the brand development work based on the research findings and other investigations. And that's where the rubber hit the road with the naming challenge. We invited staff to submit names, Elmwood came up with some and I found myself sitting in front of several screens on weekends creating and evaluating names and their availability. Elmwood mobile devices regularly sprang to life at 5 a.m. with 'what about this?' questions.

As directed, we spent a few sessions with the usual butcher's paper sheets of names stuck around the wall looking for new names. Vision was up there as an option, but was struck out early, for all the wrong reasons.

But over several weeks, it became clear that nothing we had come up with was superior to Vision, which captured a number of the core brand and cultural values established by the research. Most of all, none of the new names retained any sort of connection with the 80-year heritage of the two existing funds. In particular, the research had established there was greater attachment to the Vision name than the Equipsuper name across existing stakeholder groups, including staff.

Of course, a new name would have clearly signalled a change both internally and externally and the recommendation and approval of the Vision name has created its own unique challenges - in particular that of ensuring that the current Vision staff recognise that the name, the visual treatment of it and the brand narrative surrounding represents a fresh beginning. Our internal communications campaign is therefore headlined 'A brand new Vision'

Despite this challenge, Vision is absolutely the right name and I am delighted to say that, a key derivative from the brand project has been the articulation of a clear vision for the brand and a guiding 'Big Idea' to which the new organisation will subscribe.

I also am pleased that the executive and boards of the existing entities had the courage to put aside the initial directive and to hear and approve the brand recommendation on the basis of a thorough investigation of key metrics, a recognition of the value of heritage and the adoption of a challenging guiding idea for the future.

To hear more about this and see the new visual identity, I'm sorry you'll have to wait until mid-next year when the merger is completed and the 'brand new Vision' comes to life.

How wrong can you be?

2011-12-07T06:34:00.001+11:00

After reading an report last week that Coke's idea of putting names on cans was one of its most successful campaigns ever, I have to swallow my pride and admit I never thought it would be a goer.

But you cannot underestimate the power of personalisation. The trouble some have gone to to find a can with their name on it is unbelievable. Serial tweeter and Deloitte Digital CEO in Australia, Pete Williams, tweeted last week that he'd finally found a can with his name on it. "Straight to the poolroom," he tweeted (the Aussie version of the trophy cabinet).

So congratulations to the people at Coke for their much greater appreciation of consumer behavior than yours truly.I have one challenge though - could you please set up a digital can printer in retail outlets so we don't have to freeze our hands searching frosted for a can pre-printed with our names? Now that would be fun because we could progress to nicknames and other terms of endearment.

The career-limiting Christmas wine list

2011-12-06T06:51:00.001+11:00

Right outside our office window over the past year, we've witnessed construction workers walking along a crane gantry in quite high winds - a high-risk occupation by any measure. But I was tempted to swap places last week when by far the most daunting task of the year hit my office desk - selection of the Christmas party wine list.

This is an extremely career-limiting task. Roughly 50 palettes head down to a Southbank restaurant for the annual bonhomie that is the feature of the end of year Christmas party. And because we're in the process of merging, I've suddenly inherited a few additional palettes - with opinions!

So the pressure is on - balancing the lolly water palettes of the Sauvignon Blanc set, with the 'sophisticated' tastes of the Pinot group and the raw Aussie bluster of the big bold Shiraz bloc. Add to this a 'salary cap' of $50 a bottle in a place where the cheapest drop is $45 a bottle and you are in very challenging territory.

These days, the task is not made easier by the proliferation of wine labels. I don't know what it is with the wine industry, but new 'brands' seem to pop up like daisies during the year. Gone are the days when the choice was basically Ben Ean Moselle or Asti Spumante for the more discerning (sorry, that was university days).

So why does this task fall to me? Yes, I'm responsible for brand in our organisation, but that doesn't mean to say I should be across every new label appearing in Dan Murphy's or Vintage Cellars. No. There is something far more fundamental.

You see, I'm relatively old, perceived as in the twilight of career by everyone except the Federal Government who believe I should work until they carry me out feet first to save the drain on the public purse. The logic is, therefore, that if I stuff up the Christmas wine selection, I have least to lose - less career years lost, diminishing prospects of promotion not too severely impaired.

There's also the view that caginess born of long experience will ensure I read the Gold medals on the bottles properly to ensure that the accumulated awards are from the Adelaide or Sydney wine shows, rather than the Bullamakanka Ladies Local Produce Awards.

I have picked five wines for this year's luncheon, of which I will have to consume a reasonable quantity as I anxiously scan the dials of colleagues partaking of the first drops for signs of approval or disdain.

For the record, I've picked the following varieties: a Prosecco (because the boss likes it), a WA Sauvignon Blanc Semillon (I had to add something to the SB to manage reputational risk), Pinot Gris (NZ) for the Pinot set, a Pinot Noir (the Pinot group is influential) and a McLaren Vale Shiraz (my favourite region for this variety because I bloody deserve it).

The Christmas wine list - not a job for the faint hearted!

Just another bum on a seat

2011-12-06T06:06:00.001+11:00

Tonight I'm doing something that, as a football tragic, I'd normally never do unless Liverpool were visiting - attending one of those pointless 'friendlies' between a half-decent overseas club team and a local team struggling to score.

Yep. I'm about to watch LA Galaxy play Melbourne Victory. More correctly, I'm expecting to watch David Beckham play Harry Kewell. With due respect to others in those teams, that is how my teenage daughter describes the event.

She finds football boring, preferring the local free scoring goal fest that is AFL. But the Becks brand (not the beer, you idiot!) has worked its magic and we're going to experience 'His Presence' rather than attending with any hope of seeing an exciting contest.

Reports are that over 35,000 tickets have been sold for this event, I estimate about 25,000 more than if LA Galaxy were playing Melbourne Victory. Oh hang on! That's what we're going to see. Almost forgot.

So at $60 a throw, the Becks brand has added about 25,000 bums on seats and $1 million big ones to the gate. And wait a minute - it's live on Foxtel. Bit of an overstatement. 'Live' is not how I'd describe my expectations for the game. So Uncle Rupert and Telstra have also subscribed to the Becks phenomenon to boost the coffers of Football Federation Australia.

Of course, this is all small potatoes to Becks. At 36, he's made hundreds of times more than tonight's gate takings and this is probably his last game for LA Galaxy before he heads to Europe to convince some aspiring team that he can still flog more merchandise by merely appearing on the subs bench.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not slating Becks. I'm just jealous that brand BrooksieG is trailing somewhat in the financial rewards stakes. I played football years ago, but usually bent the ball out of play or wide of the goal rather than bending it like Beckham. There are few enterprises other than the trainers of Golden Retrievers who'll sponsor that sort of talent.

What's probably more concerning about the Becks phenomenon is, for my daughter. the allure is more about pecs like Becks rather than football skill. It's a worrying time.

Great news! I'm now drinking in the national interest!

2011-12-02T06:09:00.001+11:00

I'm not a great beer drinker - the absence of grapes in the mix deters me. Nonetheless, when I do partake of the amber, my favourite brew is Coopers. And now, thanks to offloading Fosters to South African brewer, SABMiller, yesterday for a cool $10 billion, when I drink Coopers, I'm drinking in the national interest - crusading to keep the last great Aussie beer brand in local hands.

As I jump in my chariot of choice and drive over to Dan Murphy's to collect a carton, I know the crusade will be a long one. Coopers only has 4% share of the national beer market. So it will be guerilla warfare, with a few diehard defenders of Aussie brands sniping with their credit cards at the overseas behemoths.

The great thing going for Coopers is you can consume more of it, because you don't need to eat with it. All the food's contained in the bottle, with that familiar sediment churning through it to nourish you as you drink. Someone told me that you can never get a hangover from drinking Coopers because it's naturally top fermented - no added chemicals to give you the headache. Even though I heard this about 30 years ago, I find it hard to read the ingredients information with the bottle in my mouth, so cannot verify the veracity of this claim.

Yes, it's a comforting thought knowing that the internationals haven't really developed a beer that you can eat chilled. Chilling is mainly confined to what the Europeans would call lager. Beer they drink warm. Any pom will tell you that Aussies are not beer drinkers. We're all lager drinkers. So we've sold the South Africans a dud - they've bought a lager company when they thought they were buying a beer brewer. Aussies have never been good at disclosure.

Are we sad that another icon Aussie brand is heading overseas to live? Has Fosters gone the way of the Speedo? Will beer in stubbies go the way of men in Stubbies. Remember Stubbies? Those shorty cotton shorts that gave everyone a peek-a-boo at some of Australia's greatest nut crops on building sites? Let's hope we exported the roadshow as well as the brand!

Seriously though, it seems we're good at creating brands, but not good at hanging onto them. Doing that is a bloody hard exercise when your domestic market would fit in a schooner and you've failed to really make decent inroads internationally.

A Fosters spin-off, Treasury Wines, is now attacking the Chinese market and called for Aussie winemakers to resist the temptation to pour cheap crap into China and to build the market based on quality and, therefore, sustainable margins. With some of the brands, like Penfolds, in the Treasury Wines cellar, it's no surprise they're encouraging this approach.

In any event, I now have a job to do. Christmas-New Year beer will be there to be eaten, not drunk. Coopers is it and my 2012 Coopers Crusade will begin. Let's drink to save a great Aussie brand.

Paving a path to the bleeding obvious

2011-11-04T13:16:00.001+11:00

People much smarter than me tell me that the generation preceding my boomer group were 'Builders'. These were my parents' generation - people who remembered the deprivations of the Great Depression and the conflagration of World War II. So they were thrifty and did things themselves to save money. Compare this with the great outsourcing Gen X and you wonder how the boomers, who are stuck in the middle, go about things.

Well, I can tell you. For the past few months, I have been posted down on the Mornington Peninsula for days on end, doing it myself to save money. I recall keystroking through the pain barrier in August after the first four days of a marathon garden upgrade, which involves laying over 90 square metres of pavers. As I drank another glass of red to anaethetise the pain, I wondered how it would gel with Panadol Osteo.

Am I typical of the boomer generation - the generation that lived by The Who's iconic lyric 'Hope I die before I get old'? As I get older, living the lyric is getting tougher. Insane decisions about laying pavers, with all that precedes, symbolise the refusal to get old, to prove you still have what it takes.

But you don't. Let me tell you, after four days 'on the tools', I could no longer cut a piece of broccoli. The nerves and muscles charged with that task in my left hand would not allow me to push my fork into the broccoli. The nerves and muscles in my right hand would not permit me to open the screw top on the wine bottle, although somehow it happened - wine over broccoli trumps mind over matter any time.

My wife thinks I'm a nutter, which explains why we filled in separate census forms in August, but my 'Builder' generation parents cheered from the sidelines, even though they also suspect I might be a nutter.

The great thing is that being down there doing landscaping stuff put me back in touch with good Aussies. I just completed an excavating apprenticeship with a local guy called Rutz. Forked out nearly four big ones for the privilege, but education isn't cheap is it? Consulted with another dude, Tim, about putting poles in the ground for shade sails. He was formerly a corporate marketing bloke, but cast that aside, took a big pay cut to work for a builder for a couple of years before striking out on his own. You gotta like doing business with guys like that.

I think the Builders generation had something. Have a crack and see what you can do. While I took leave to landscape in frontier land, back at work they were cranking out a message about the stock market schemozzle, trying to deliver confidence and certainty amid irrational investment markets.

But down there driving a Dingo digger for two days made me impervious to stock market shenanigans. There, I could sink money into something and see the outcome. Yep. Rutz didn't come cheap, but his advice didn't carry a disclaimer and everything was crystal clear.

When it all comes down to it, the generational thing is bollocks. All anyone wants is clarity and direction. We all want authenticity and outcomes. The biggest source of failure in brand and marketing is failing to satisfy these basic customer needs.

New evidence - Audi is a 'chick magnet'

2011-09-02T08:38:00.001+10:00

As a 50-plus male, I intuitively knew that driving an Audi made me more attractive to women, but until this year I could not produce any tangible evidence of it. Yesterday evening, I completed the jigsaw as, for the second time in seven months, an attractive young woman ran into the back of my Audi.

It was about the same time of day, driving home from work. In both instances, I was stationery at a set of traffic lights. Imagine my delight at being able to jump out of my car again on the way home and have a valid excuse to capture the mobile phone number of a woman half my age! Try it any other time and the result would lie somewhere between a slap in the face and jail.

It's a methodology I wish I'd thought of about 25 years ago, but the problem is that there were no mobile phones then, I was driving company-provided Fords and half my age would have been about 14, but you get my drift.

Perhaps it never happened because even 'chicks' in my era were unattracted to Fords, or people driving them. The blue Ford oval didn't have the hypnotic effect on them that the four linked circles of the Audi logo clearly do as they approach them at intersections.

Last night as I perused and considered the cost and inconvenience of my car being a resurgent chick magnet, I felt relieved that, even though the young woman concerned had revealed her insurer, she hadn't asked for mine. Australian Pensioners Insurance (APIA) is not the brand name you want to parade out there when you're trying to impress a 20-something woman.

Yes, at every point in life, you encounter the power of brands. On the one hand those you're proud to be associated with, on the other brands that actually match your profile but reflect terrible truths about you that are best left unspoken.

As for the documented evidence of the allure of the Audi brand for young women, it's all at APIA, where all ageing dudes secretly accept the discounts for being senior members of the community. Perhaps APIA will start tightening underwriting requirements soon, insisting that older folks reduce their risk by associating with less sexy brands.

America's new copy writing sweatshops

2011-09-01T15:40:00.000+10:00

If you're a writer and you're knocking together 5-Star online endorsements for products and services for $5 a pop, then you're totally out of your mind. And if you're hiring writers to do this sort of stuff, then your brand is seriously in need of a makeover, or soon will be.

What got me started on this rant was an article I read today reporting that some companies in the US were hiring writers to write favourable 'reviews' for five bucks each. After reading this blog, some may not identify me as a writer, but nonetheless I stick doggedly to the proposition that it is a professional category with which I have some affinity.

Even back in the good old days of freelance journalism circa 1980s, a decent journo could pull something like $150 a thousand words from even the stingiest magazine publisher, so $5 for an endorsement wreaks of serious under-payment, even if house prices in the US have collapsed and the Tea Party refuses to spend any more. Come to think of it, perhaps the brand needing the cheap endorsements is the Tea Party - if not endorsements, then perhaps endorphins, but I digress.

You see, the thing with these $5 mercenaries is that they're providing three things - words (presumably coherently crafted), a personal endorsement and, as a by-product, great risk of trashing their personal brand in the process. Willing to put all that skill and reputation on the line for $5? I'm certainly not!

For their clients, there is the small matter of brand authenticity, widely regarded as the currency of social media. What happens when they're found out, as they surely will be? Already, companies like Amazon are commissioning sharp software dudes to develop algorithms to identify and weed out fake endorsements. It will be interesting to see if, in the process, they publish the names of the businesses who have chipped in their $100 for 20 or so "recommendations".

Their only hope is that unsuspecting customers driven to these businesses by the rave reviews have an extremely positive brand experience when they make contact. Because if customers are savvy enough to source third party recommendations online, they're certainly smart enough to go back online and express their contrary view if the experience does not live up to the promise.

There are plenty of websites dedicated to publishing consumer reviews. Perhaps we're about to see a flourishing business based on reviewing the reviewers! Oh dear ... who are we to believe? My head's starting to hurt.

Celebrating Brand Melbourne

2011-08-31T06:48:00.003+10:00

I've never been to Vancouver and the great news is that now I don't have to because I'm already living in the "World's Most Liveable City". Yep, we finally knocked the Canadians off their pedestal.

The problem is that the title is bestowed by the Economist Intelligence Unit which, to me contains an oxymoron given the performance of economists in getting things right lately. One thing's for sure though, economists have clearly emerged as a collective of sports lovers and culture vultures, because these are two of the criteria that helped get Melbourne over the line in the comparison of about 140 cities.

I put Melbourne's success down to that funky logo we developed for ourselves a few years back - the cubist one influenced by our architecturally renowned Federation Square. Another contributor was our former 'can do' State Premier, Jeff Kennett's decision to rename Flinders Park, which became Melbourne Park to highlight to international audiences where the Australian Open Tennis Championship is played. The EIU may never have known this otherwise.

And then,of course, there's the controversial Australian Grand Prix at Albert Park, which is drifting from a daytime event to being held under lights to align it with European TV viewing time and increase Bernie Eccleston's ability to increase broadcast revenues accordingly.

By international standards, Melbourne is not a cheap place to live, thanks to a booming Australian Dollar and zany real estate prices that are putting the dream of home ownership out of reach of many Gen Ys. Just ask them who they blame for this and they'll quickly point to the Boomers who, thanks to the tax benefits of negative gearing have bought property like there's no tomorrow. Bottom line is that many Gen Ys will enter the real estate market through inheritance rather than saving.

When I moved from Brisbane to Melbourne in 1981, the city was still to identify the advantages of Port Phillip Bay. Suburbs like St Kilda and Williamstown were down at heel places, full of 'character' and all that goes with that. Now they're highly sought after, trendy locales, with house prices to match.

The city's infrastructure has improved to transport people more effectively around it's horseshoe plan, wrapped around the top of the bay. Much to the chagrin of public transport advocates, we have dramatically improved freeway links, opening up the Mornington Peninsula as a commutable proposition.

I think this is one of those rare occasions when the economists have got it absolutely right. But then, I'm biased. I live here, am employed, own my home and like sport. I even use the toll roads to get around more quickly. Like anywhere, life's good when you able to take advantage of the things your city offers.

Back to brand basics in the backyard

2011-08-30T15:52:00.001+10:00

As previously noted, I've been doing a bit of landscaping recently, which involves the task of selecting providers of various products and services, such as excavating, shade sails, equipment hire and various types of dirt, like road base and sand.

Not knowing anyone in the area is a good way of evaluating the marketing-sales funnel at work. The usual starting point is aggregators - whether on or off-line. In my case, the search was principally online. Here, Google leads you to more aggregators like TrueLocal and other lists of owner-operated businesses, many of which still don't have websites.

So it becomes a call and hope process - phone call and hope they turn up on the day to quote. In most instances they did arrive - it being winter in Melbourne and most in the outdoor reshaping business being a bit hungrier than in the warmer months.

Presentation quality varied significantly among potential providers - some bringing their dogs to help quote, others arriving after being held up due to an 'emergency' callout. Some gave the impression that the emergency call out was the alarm clock's fifth attempt to get them out of bed after a hard night.

Quotes, if written at all, are provided on letterhead and the backs of business cards with graphic design that would struggle to get in a school child's portfolio. In other words, the sales and marketing collateral usually left much to be desired and in no way helped the purchase decision.

One guy I did hire was the excavator, largely because by accident or design, he had managed to secure the internet domain excavate.net.au, which I didn't think was a bad effort for a one-man operation supported by a choice of a 5-tonne or 1.5-tonne bobcat. He didn't strike me as a social media guru of any sort, but perhaps I misjudged him.

Apart from that, what did drive me through the marketing-sales funnel to purchase the other stuff. As I look back, it came down to my assessment of the authenticity of the guys (there were no gals) that I met. Personality, service approach, likely capacity to work with me to resolve my planning and resourcing issues.

It made me think that while we run all kinds of research, analysis and creative workshops to develop corporate brands, perhaps we overlook the bleedin' obvious.

I chose these guys based on criteria that were simply about their capacity to support me as I strived to achieve my goals. They were walking-talking brands, winning business and referral on the basis of delivering what was expected and, in one case, a lot more. Perhaps that's really all there is to successful branding.

Is 'Made in China' the world's biggest brand?

2011-08-29T13:22:00.000+10:00

Been doing a bit a landscaping lately, so buying odd bits of equipment here and there has become part of every weekend. Last weekend it was a screeding bar with handle fitted. If you don't know what that is, then just ignore the technicality and read on.

What was unique about this piece of equipment was that it was 'Made in Australia'. I mean, whoa! is that a point of difference or what? It was pretty basic. No moving parts, but it was powder-coated, something we still seem to be quite proficient at here. The rarity of the piece put me in two minds about whether I should use it on the landscaping, or display it in the house as a rare sculpture.

This was the first thing I'd bought in weeks that didn't bear the 'Made in China' tag. It makes me wonder whether 'Made in China' is in fact the world's biggest and best-known brand. Even if you made a product in Australia, you might still label it 'Made in China' to leverage off the awareness!

Even something as basic as a long-handled spade is "Made in China'. I compared several of these, picking the one I thought was the best quality, only to read 'Made in China' on the sticker. So quality is not a reliable indicator of sourcing. 'Made in China' is no longer a poor relation to other superior monikers. Or is it?

What about those 'Great Wall of China' utes promoted by that irritating: It's not good. It's great! catchline?
Surely much better to buy a German-made car or, dare I suggest it, a home-grown product, than one of those. But, oh dear, look under the bonnet of your 'German-made' car and there's a decent chance these days that you may see the ubiquitous 'Made in China' sticker. The Germans have been very good at gaining a foothold in China in many sectors.

The bottom line is that 'Made in China' has become one of the most widely distributed labels in the world and, driven by a growing domestic consumer base, that's not likely to change any time soon. Whether you're shovelling dirt or hauling it, you're most likely going to be using 'Made in China' equipment.

Digital making corporate brands equal the sum of personal brands

2011-08-25T14:30:00.000+10:00

I've been observing the activities of some individuals employed by quite large and well-known organisations who, through their own significant digital footprint, are building a personal brand that arguably outshines that of the organisation that employs them in the niches within which they specialise.

To me, this creates an almost symbiotic relationship between the employees' personal brand the the brand of the employer. It suggests that if certain individuals resign, there is a much greater risk for the employer that client and even wider relationships will follow them out the door. It also places additional demand on internal brand management.

It's an issue that many of our more open-minded, early adopter organisations in the digital space have not entirely thought through. At the outset, positioning these digitally fluent individuals as the faces of the organisation in online networks was a simple proposition. The individuals were credentialed and validated by the corporate brand that sat behind them.

But as the phenomenon of personal brand has rapidly evolved through digital media, organisational brands have become less relevant to the acceptance and credibility of the individuals that represent them.

It's an issue that's not going to disappear. In fact, it will accelerate as a greater number of employees are granted access to social media and other networks to converse on behalf of the company - whether as part of a deliberate strategy to build online brands, or simply using new forms of media to deal with day-to-day customer queries.

This trend will crystallise what many brand experts have argued for years - that brand starts internally, with total alignment of employee behaviour with brand values and promise. Organisational brands will increasingly become the sum of the collective personal brands they employ.

The implications offer enormous potential for the organisations who get recruitment, induction and behavioural modelling absolutely right. It presents enormous risk for those that get it wrong.

Humphrey Bear - A brand in need of a cuddle

2011-08-25T13:54:00.000+10:00

I recall the days when the politically correct were calling for Aussie children's icon, Humphrey Bear, to be banned because he wore no pants. The other day I noted that, like the Emperor, Humphrey now has no clothes.

You see, the production company that owned the Humphrey Bear character went into administration a couple of years ago. The upshot of that is that Humphrey's most recent public appearance, after a two-year absence, was in 'For Sale' advertisement placed in The Financial Review by the company's receivers.

Question is - what is Humphrey worth? This is a crumpled brand that will need to emerge from hibernation and tackle a whole array of far more contemporary characters and distractions. And let's face it, the tail end of Gen Z and the emerging Gen Alpha are a pretty savvy and hard bunch to please as they practice their keyboard strokes from birth to engage with modern-day entertainment.

I challenge brand gurus to throw up some ideas about how they would tackle the rejuvenation of the Humphrey Bear brand. Does he need to rap with Eminem? Perhaps throw away the green waistcoat and climb into an Industrie ensemble? Perhaps enter the bear pit of The X Factor or Australia's Got Talent to re-establish his credentials?

The sad thing is that any brand equity remaining with Humphrey is among the generations who were brought up with him - boomers and Gen X - neither of which is going to be of any value now. I even heard Kochie on Seven's Sunrise commenting this morning that he might be worth buying.

Now that would hasta la vista for Humphrey B - Kochie buying the rights and donning the bear suit for the Sunrise audience!

Sex hardware - plumbing the depths

2011-07-31T09:07:00.000+10:00

This is not strictly a brand story, but it took place in Bunnings this weekend,when my wife broke the taboo and accompanied me on the weekend pilgrimage. Being a Bunnings story qualifies it as a brand experience for me.

I won't bore you with the background to why I visited the plumbing department, except to say I was embedded in conversations with brass fittings when she asked me what I was looking for. I said there's no point in explaining and carried on.

I yielded on persistent questioning and advised I was looking for a 3/4 male into 1/2 female reducer. It was an inevitable response: "how can you have fittings that are both male and female. Last week you were telling me we had a male lemon tree, now you're looking for things that are both."

Another weekend warrior laughed as he overheard this, nodding knowingly in my direction - that sort of "serves you right, you should know not to bring them" look.

But worse was to come. She collared one of those semi-retired tradies Bunnings employs to help out deviant male-female shoppers. Having heard what I was looking for, he said: "Oh. You're after a nipple."

My wife was last seen heading for the car park. No way she was going to be seen at the check out with a trolley load of adult toys!

The AVEs now AVE nots

2011-07-25T14:18:00.002+10:00

Phew! Ogilvy PR has just announced that it's dropping the Advertising Equivalent Value (AVE) measure of PR effectiveness, simultaneously declaring the 'age of spin is dead' (http://tinyurl.com/4yxzuaq). Am I missing something here? I thought that was abandoned as a metric years ago when something called the internet was invented!

Basically, the AVE looked at the value of editorial space (either column cms or time) relative to what it would cost to purchase that space to drop in an advertisement. Depending on who you talked to, whose hand you were shaking and other variables, there was usually a multiple applied on the basis that editorial space was worth more than advertising space.

But the disaggregation of media with the much greater control it gives to information consumers has long made a mockery of all this. The blunt instrument of circulation, readership, TARP and so-on naturally inflated the estimate of audience reach and, along with it, the value of advertising space. All the multiple did was hyper-inflate the value of editorial space.

That's not to say, high quality editorial in a respected publication that favours your cause is not worth more than its space in gold. It is. But in the age of infotainment and advertorial sections, to generally apply a rule of thumb to the value of editorial relative to display advertising is a ridiculous concept.

Compare the various blunt instruments of audience reach with the more precise targeting and measurement accessible through online media and the shortcomings of AVE and similar are immediately apparent. No wonder we're seeing big shifts in media budget towards online - the accountability for campaign success has never been greater. This, of course, will inextricably also apply to television and, ultimately, print as these channels converge and interact with mobile devices.

And, in the same announcement, here's another revelation from Ogilvy PR that caught me by surprise: "More than ever before, brands must remain authentic as audiences are looking for more engagement that interests, excites, amuses and provokes thought." It's almost like the PR industry is just discovering authenticity and engagement. No wonder it's struggling to define itself. Consumers have been onto this for decades.

If it's taken leaders in the PR industry this long to discover this truth, then it's no wonder PR has failed to own the brand space, as it should have done. With brand tightly intertwined with reputation management, the PR industry was the logical facilitator of brand strategy and implementation. But it's not. Specialist brand agencies have filled the space and are talking the authenticity, cultural alignment and all the other things that should be part of the PR business' bread and butter. Even advertising, graphic design and human resources companies have positioned themselves in this space.

There are PR companies that are engaged in this activity and that are doing it very well. Carrying the legendary David Ogilvy's name would suggest Ogilvy PR is likely one of them. But the PR industry has never effectively positioned itself as the natural provider of these services.

The elite sports in PR have been issues and crisis management, political lobbying and communications that have historically involves some level of 'spin'. But often, spin would not have been required if companies, or politicians, had delivered on their brand promise in the first place and evaluated every decision through the prism of their commitments to, and reputation with, customers and other stakeholders. PR companies could have assisted clients with the alignment of commercial activity with brand promise.

Brand in its broadest sense is where PR should have started its journey. And that journey has always involved authenticity rather than spin.

Update on News Corp's brands

2011-07-20T16:16:00.000+10:00

Just noticed marketing guru, Mark Ritson, has put up an excellent article on possible implications of the crisis for Murdoch's House of Cards.

Why News Corp's House of Brands is starting to crumble: http://bit.ly/rm29Gx

Rock brands - from Clapton to clapped out

2011-07-20T08:59:00.000+10:00

As usual this morning, I was professionally negligent while driving to work. As a communications bloke, I should have taken advice presented at a seminar run by Don Chipp's brother and former Melbourne PR doyen, Alan, while I was a young PR turk.

Alan told us that, as public affairs practitioners, we shouldn't be listening to pop music as we commuted, but rather ABC Radio's venerable morning current affairs, AM, or an informative chat show on 3AW - OMG, has Neil Mitchell been around that long?

So this morning, I was negligent, iPod playing Cream of Clapton through the car sound system. This is music played by a rock icon - a 'Guitar God' of the 1960s and 70s. Eric Clapton was a walking, talking rock brand and it got me thinking about the lifecycle of his 'brand' rather than his band over the years.

It started with a wailing, yet thoughtful electric guitar. The man nicknamed 'slowhand' (watch a video clip!) and who released an album by that name, giving his all to drive the guitar sound over the top of Ginger Baker's drums in Cream. Cream gave way to Derek and the Dominos, then 'God' moved into a solo phase, then to participating in big London-based charity gigs accompanied by other stars in decline like Bill Collins, who hit his heights in partnership with Peter Gabriel (he of Sledgehammer fame) in Genesis before going solo.

And finally, we have Clapton mainly doing 'unplugged' gigs - slipping quietly into the night. In fairness, I'm probably doing him a disservice, as the fraught and heartfelt Tears in Heaven after the tragic death of his son was a fine and, no doubt, enduring acoustic piece. And after all, with some exceptions, we do like more peace in our lives as we age.

How does this relate to brands? Well, at their height, there are no brands bigger than rock celebrities but, no matter how talented a la Clapton, they fade with changing tastes and styles. I try to tell my daughter this about Justin Bieber! They try to reinvent over time, but the boundaries of their success are defined by talent and adaptability. And there are many times you wish they'd just stop trying to look cool at 65. In the rock world, there is such a thing as 'shelf life' for personal brands and I wonder whether this also applies to corporate brands.

Sure, many have stood the test of time. Coca-Cola is still one of the world's best-known, but has battled to adapt to changing tastes with all kinds of hybrid products - to the point where the product around which it was built is just one of a stable. Apple is enjoying a resurgence but, after Jobs, how well will it keep adapting and is it only one breakthrough innovation away from being threatened?

The hot brands of the moment, Google and Facebook, operate in one of the most chaotic and anarchic environments ever created, the internet. What are the threats to their longevity? How far away is another breakthrough product from someone else? I've even heard the suggestion that the 'internet is dead' and apps are the way of the future. Personally, I think that's a little way off and it depends whether you regard the internet as communications infrastructure, or as the user interface, but that's for another discussion.

Should companies recognise that brands really have a defined lifespan beyond which the resources required to sustain them become unviable? Look at the auto industry. How much money has been invested to keep Saab alive? What about the Rover saga, the brief foray into reviving it in the 1990s was an abject failure, with only Land Rover surviving as a BMW subsidiary?

Baby boomers are the sole reason that many brands and bands survive. When our generation goes, the Beatles will be about as popular as Tchaikovsky and perhaps less well known. As one of that generation, I am doing my bit in February to keep the flag flying for old rockers, taking my 13-year-old daughter to Roger Waters' The Wall. (For non-cognizentia, Roger Waters was a key figure in Pink Floyd. Who's Pink Floyd? Forget I mentioned it!)

How I convinced her to attend with me, I don't know. I suspect it's something to do with the fact that she wants to remind me that 'We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control.' She loves Another Brick in the Wall for those words. I suspect that sometimes we might be better letting old brands and ideas fade into the sunset, lest they return to haunt us.

Will Rupert's papers give content free as News goes to war?

2011-07-20T08:12:00.002+10:00

It's all very well charging for content when your brand's flying high, but Murdoch's News Corporation is now in a pitched battle to restore a modicum of lustre to both it's brands and the founder's family name.

As family members and a former executive appear contrite before a UK Parliamentary Committee, one thing they have on their side is plenty of outlets through which to pitch their side of the story. But some of their most respected mastheads are already restricting content to paid-up subscribers only - think Wall Street Journal and The Times, both of which you want in your corner when your stock has dropped nearly 20% in a little under a week and your reputation possibly by even more.

While it's likely that the Murdoch clan members and even some senior executives were unaware of the extent of the scandalous actions of a few journalists, the issue for News Corporation is that somehow the organisational culture, particularly on the UK's notorious tabloids, at worst encouraged executives to turn a blind eye to phone hacking and other practices or, at best, allowed individuals to run the risk of causing serious reputational damage through lack of checks and balances.

As News Corporation emerges from the immediate crisis, it will do well to remember that brand and reputation start from within organisations. That's where the process of restoration must begin.

News Corporation is a house of brands, some of which, like the newspapers mentioned previously, will recover from this quite quickly - guilt by association won't last forever. Transparency in the change process via these media could play a significant role in the brand rebuild. A good start might be to maximise their audiences by dropping the subs for their online coverage.

TAXI or SMSF - which will take you further?

2011-07-15T11:02:00.000+10:00

I couldn't wait to write this entry as a matter of record that I had an interesting and insightful conversation with a Melbourne taxi driver yesterday evening. It wasn't about the Prime Minister, carbon tax, boat people or religion - it was about money. Specifically, it was about the money in the taxi business.

I use a regular group of taxi drivers who operate a network within a network as quality service providers. All mobile phones, spooks and airport drama. There may even be sex involved, although I haven't encountered it yet.

Yesterday evening's driver owns his license and cab. Another driver I frequently use has four licenses. These are guys ranging in age from 45 to late 50s, the sort who should be starting or well-advanced in executing financial plans to ensure a comfortable retirement. As self-employed bods, they are probably candidates for a Self Managed Super Fund (SMSF). The thing is, that these guys don't need an SMSF - they're driving around in it.

Yesterday evening's conversation revealed that:

A Melbourne tax license is worth $500,000 (if you have four you therefore have two million big ones);
A good cab and driver delivers revenue from $180,000 to $200,000 a year;
Cabs are serviced about every three weeks for about 60 bucks (oil and filter change), by some guy who literally operates a drive-through service operation with 20 mechanics (probably another multi-millionaire);
The cab lasts about 6.5 years;
Despite Ford Australia's protests, you can service a six-speed transmission and not replace it every 200,000km (this is not a financial insight, just an interesting one to anyone like me who use to spin for Ford).

So an owner driver shuttling you around town is probably richer than you are, possibly grossing 720G a year less expenses and sitting on a debt-free capital asset outside of the family home that most of us would give our left nut for (sorry girls). Why debt-free? Most of these are tightly held from the days when 'G' was better known as the first letter of 'goat' rather than 'grand' and licenses were dirt cheap.

And retirement planning? Farm the cab out to some other dudes willing to tour the town with punters of unknown origin. The money (slightly less of it) will keep rolling in.

So how do we market super to these high net worth cabbies? They just love the drive-through service guy. Perhaps a drive-through set up with an interactive join and contributions screen, free boulevarde coffee mugs (if you don't know what I mean, visit LA) and a long-range client breathalyser warning device, might be the go.

On the other hand, they might just tell you they've already got it sorted better than you have. These days the a TAXI license seems far more lucrative than an AFSL (Australian Financial Services License).

Meter's running, I gotta go...

Education and advice is the only hope for financial services

2011-07-14T09:59:00.000+10:00

As custodians and promoters of financial services brands, we all talk about customer engagement. But in an age of disaggregated media, are we kidding ourselves and should we be striving for something different?

No one LOVES their bank, or their super fund, or any other financial service. Financial services organisations are merely channels through which customers or members can reach out for concepts they're really engaged with - like buying a home, buying a luxury car, planning a holiday.

In Australia, government regulation and an obsession with minimising costs rather than delivering value is commoditising financial services, which means customer attitudes towards financial institutions resemble their relationship with their electricity provider more than their BMW dealer.

Anyone who regularly conducts research in the financial services space knows customers value security, investment returns and accurate communications and reporting above all other factors. It boils down to - "I don't want to lose my money, I want to earn as much interest as possible (or pay as little, whichever is applicable) and I want you to report to me how much I have." The rest really doesn't matter.

Yet in financial services, we all try to build a brand association more like that enjoyed by the BMW dealer. The problem is that the BMW dealer can deliver the BMW. The dealer is the gatekeeper to a tactile experience that satisfies all the expectations and senses (I am actually a long-time Audi devotee, but I'm just trying to be objective!).

A financial services institution cannot deliver the lifestyle to which we aspire. The link between the service and the dream is quite distant. In the retirement savings space, for example, the delivery date is so distant that most people cannot associate with it - largely because no one regards themselves as 'old', or even ageing.
In a sense, financial services brands have tried to bridge the gap through use of imagery. The trouble is, lifestyle imagery is difficult to align perfectly with everyone's visualisation of the idyllic life. The image of being happily retired, walking hand in hand along the beach at sunset is, for example, certainly not me. And even if it was, I find it hard to make the connection between my financial services provider and the dream.

What I want is a safe place to park my money and to have instant access to it whenever I want it - preferably online, at minimum through a hole in the wall. My relationship with my financial institution is a website and an ATM. I really don't care what label it has on it, as long as it works and there's plenty of access points. The ANZ campaign promoting ATMs that follow you around is great from this perspective. They're selling convenience and access and that's exactly what I want. The only thing is, that when I cannot find the promised ATM when I want it, I get severely pissed off.

The only touchpoint with any chance of emotionally connecting with customers is in the area of education and advice. This is where it gets personal and financial institutions can focus on dreams and aspirations at the individual level to help people make the connection.

But this creates a paradox for most financial services businesses, which are actively pushing people away from face-to-face relationships - out of branches and onto the web, ATM or phone. Software cannot replace direct person-to-person contact. Would you want to date an avatar? Sorry, don't answer. But you get the point, I'm sure.

Education and advice, delivered person-to-person is the most powerful relationship a financial services organisation can construct. That's why I cannot understand why financial planners fear the growth of industry funds. They have a strategic advantage, if they know how to capitalise on it. It's called a personal relationship.

Families with lessons for brands

2011-07-11T09:14:00.001+10:00

I trundled all the way from Melbourne to Albury for lunch yesterday. To give you an idea, the 750km round trip is the equivalent of driving Melbourne to Adelaide. An amazing feat of endurance at the best of times, but at least trebled by the fact that I had three generations of family women in the car - daughter, wife and mother-in-law. And they wonder why I like coming to work!

But bragging about my stamina is not the purpose of this missive. The motive for yesterday's expedition was a family gathering of about 50 in-laws and out-laws in a town in which there is a thriving Lebanese community with Aussie roots going back to the early 20th Century.

I had not previously heard of or seen most of the people there, but what struck me most was their amazing capacity to argue, rebutt and bond simultaneously. It shouldn't be surprising really. The Lebanese have been traders going back to Phoenician times. Once a deal is struck, the decision is accepted as fair and everyone moves on to the next bargain.

There was an amazing dynamic in yesterday's four-hour gathering, from which a lot of companies could learn. While the far-flung relations had forged opinions on the merits or otherwise of family activities for many decades, these things were debated and dealt with internally. In fact, at every gathering of this type I have ever been to, I cannot recall one where differences weren't completely put aside, commonalities re-declared and unity of and clarity of family commitment firmly established as the party finished.

I'm sure any organisation that bottled this and apply it to brand strategy and management would do very well.

Zara - the Apple of fashion?

2011-07-07T17:11:00.001+10:00

How neglectful of me to miss commenting on the BIGGEST EVENT TO HIT MELBOURNE THIS YEAR - the opening of our own Zara store. Only months earlier, Melburnians sat smugly in their lounge rooms, dismissive of the rampant consumerism portrayed by the thousands of Sydneysiders as a similar event occurred in their city. Then we went into the same frenzy!

I can recall a similar 'happening' in Melbourne in the 1990s. Richard Branson won't thank me for reminding you all of the 'Virgin Megastore' opening in Bourke Street. ROFL as I think of the crazy notion of a megastore full of music CDs - especially with the hindsight afforded by the phenomenal success of iTunes and more infamous music download and shareware sites. By the way, what did happen to Brash's?

As Zara, the flagship of the Spanish fashion armada hit our shores, in other parts of town, stores in the Colorado Group's fashion stable were closing their doors. Various marketing dudes and receivers (who know lots about marketing!) piled in on the act to describe how Colorado had lost its way, along with other brands in the group, like the venerable Mathers footwear chain, JAG and so on.

Colorado had been brushed off the plateau of outdoor apparel by brands that had simply driven a crampon into their space, taken a firm grip and clambered over them. Brands like Kathmandu come to mind as owners of the space that Colorado should have secured long before.

And JAG - what a sad mess they made of that. I remember buying JAG in the 1970s. If memory serves me right it was a brand set up by Adele and Rod Palmer. I remember the high quality of the JAG range in those days. Much of it was made in Australia. In fact, there were a few brands around back then that carried locally made lines. A bit more expensive generally, but high quality.

Unfortunately, JAG just became another in the conga line of Chinese garment distributors that proliferate in retail these days. Yes, they all have their 'unique' designs, thanks to the busiest people at fashion launches these days, illustrators who have to get sketches to China by SMS by the end of the night. The result for designers: Originality 1 v. Commercial Advantage 0. Sort of like watching Arsenal play beautiful football, but never winning a trophy!

It will be interesting to see what Zara does to maintain the rage. Positioned as a retailer that brings the latest fashions to market fast and cheap (thanks to those busy illustrators!), its a position that could easily be challenged by other stores if they really focused on it. Let's face it, Target has been doing the same thing for years with Stella McCartney.

Generations flying by quicker than I can blog

2011-07-07T16:42:00.000+10:00

Social trends guru, Mark McCrindle, posted two separate items recently that said:

The last of the Gen Ys are in their final years of school meaning an 'all-Gen Z' school population; and
Generation Alpha has officially kicked off (that's the one following Gen Z for non-cognizentia).

I can vouch for the first being a proud slave to a Gen Z daughter. I think I recall saying in a previous blog that if marketers thought Gen Ys were hard going - wait until you hit Gen Z. They're the ultimate tech natives. The only difference between primitive man and them is that their savagery is directed only at deferred gratification, things that don't work as they should, and mobile phones that don't tidy their room for them.

Recently, a colleague of mine went on maternity leave - the result being the issue of bubba photos for immediate distribution around the workplace. I looked at this example of Gen Alpha and wondered how different we really all start out. The eternal question about whether how we turn out is governed more by what we're born with or the environment we grow up in.

Our Gen Alpha sample looked the same as most Gen Z catalogues that I've seen. In fact, it didn't look greatly different than the old boomer pix, except for the latter's monochrome reproduction. Gen Zs would actually argue that as we lope around in our navy blue trackie dacks we live up to the monocolour start that we had. (I've moved into purple recently to try and overturn this misconception.)

Nonetheless, I wonder what unique marketing challenges Gen Alpha will present? They'll respond to sensory cues that we haven't even dreamed of yet. Email will likely be dead and buried, replaced by cryptic Twitter code, illegible to any previous generations. They may Google by telepathy. Apple will have reincarnated Steve Jobs to develop the iHand, a phosphorescent skin that fits like a glove and glows to display downloads from their Google telepathy. "Can't shake hands 'cos you'll change my browser settings".

The employers of choice will be those who pay them more to stay at home as governments, congested infrastructure, office rental and environmental preservation kill off the city commute. In fact, we may not have employers, just a population where everyone can search for the best talent and skills to hire on an hourly basis.

Hard to believe that Generation Alpha won't, like all before it, be a product of its environment...

Messing with the mind of a weekend warrior

2011-05-07T07:39:00.000+10:00

At some point in the past two decades, men no longer visited the hardware - they only went to Bunnings. These hulking, green and red 'big box' hardware stores did something to men that the general store counterpart, Costco, could never do. Perhaps if Costco put on a sausage sizzle on weekends it might solve the problem. But back to the Bunnings experience ...

The long-awaited rival to Bunnings has hit Australia. A joint venture between supermarket supremo, Woolworths, and US-based hardware giant, Lowes, has taken shape in the form of the 'Masters' hardware chain. Although it can hardly be called a 'chain' (more like a couple of links right now), Woolies has ambitions to open 150 locations in pretty short order. The big blue stores could open in a suburb near me anytime - which will present me with a dilemma that goes to the heart of my only retail brand loyalty.

Will the temptation to become a 'Master' of the DIY landscape rather than a mere dabbler in things best left someone else be enough to tempt me out of my green box into a blue box? Will the sausages be of the same quality? Will I find myself flitting from one store to the other progressively chipping 10% off the lowest price I can negotiate in each?

It will be interesting to see how Masters deals with the challenge of being second into the market to take on a brand that has become a byword for hardware. It's hard to shake brands that have embedded into everyday language. And for that matter, it will be interesting to see how the changes Bunnings has been making over the past few years in preparation of the arrival of Masters work.

As a Bunnings browser, you see plenty of tangible evidence of brand repositioning. The changes are substantive at store level. DIY flat pack kitchens, floor coverings, bathrooms - My God, the renos are already half done for you before you leave the store!

And then there's the stock rationalisation. Among the changes, minutiae like the removal of one brand of sprinkler system valves (come on, you must have noticed that!) has occurred. Thanks to my bizarre interest in reading about retail business, I have known about Bunnings strategy to systematically rationalise stock - keeping the better quality, fast movers and ditching those with an unhappy sales history - and have taken it on myself to keep an eye on it. Sad isn't it?

But for me, the important thing is that Bunnings hasn't given too much of a shave to the things that really count for the DIY Army. The 'Commando' section, where you can take a good hold on a few power tools and practice a few martial arts techniques on an imaginary piece of timber or masonry.

This is the zone where the imagination runs wild and many a weekend warrior finds pleasure in camouflaging themself in the forest of drill bits and grinding wheels, while the spouse and kids grapple with lesser decisions like whether the cheaper potting mix is as good as the dear stuff.

To my mind, there's no doubt about it. Masters has got the task ahead of it to dig us Bunnings veterans out of a DIY fortification to conquer new 'enemy' territory. Perhaps the answer lies therein for Masters. How about they turn the whole big box hardware sector into a walk-in PlayStation for Dads and Grandads - 3D video game experiences where you can arm yourself with a power tool of your choice and take on the world?

You can see what's happening. There's now an internal brand battle going on that's messing with my mind. Time to go out and spend $2 at the Bunnings fund raising sizzler at the front door. A breath of fresh air and intake of a real bloke's dose of saturated fats and carbos will restore perspective. Go your hardest, Masters!

Guilty about unused store cards

2011-04-08T21:53:00.001+10:00

I shouldn't be in marketing if I hate the retail experience to the point of having various store gift cards accumulating in my drawer.

How can you study and comment consumer behaviour if you don't participate? It runs against the spirit of my policy of not employing marketing communications people who declare that they only watch the non—commercial ABC television network. Even if you hate advertising, at least take enough interest to know what your competitors are doing!

It is consistent, however, that I have a growing guilt about the unused gift cards that have accumulated since Christmas and my birthday in February. All my shopping lately has been on the internet, where there is no human interaction, other than the occasional last-three-minute skirmish to outwit unknown parties to win the last bid on eBay.

Perhaps eBay could liven the process up by hooking up various bidders via skype - creating something of a cyber poker game. Imagine eBay addicts all hooked in for the final bid - all wearing reflector aviator sheds to conceal the whites of their eyes!

Ah. Forget about it. If I want that combative experience, why not just head downtown with gift cards in pocket? Cya tomorrow maybe if your down at Myer. Perhaps Jennifer Hawkins will be there to cater to myw every need - Not!

Step out and indulge in a Qwiki

2011-04-06T06:03:00.001+10:00

Continuing the theme of my last rant about dealing with change, I have once again been surprised by a 'brand extension'. The latest version is a complete overhaul of my understanding of a Qwiki.

What's Qwiki? It's the latest plaything of Facebook founder, Eduardo Saverin, who's chipped in his share of US$8 million seed money with his YouTube counterpart, Jawed Karim, to change the face of internet search. Type in a subject and Qwiki hauls together all the videos and images it can find on the subject. Then it couples a visual palette of these items with scrolling text.

So how's this different, or better than, Google you ask? Well, Qwiki is like an audiovisual version of Wikipedia, featuring a button to "improve this qwiki". So you can add to the visual library. If you're familiar with another online toy, Tumblr, where you essentially construct a personal library of audiovisual images and texts that inspire you, you'll also see parallels with Qwiki.

Qwiki has announced plans to create links with Facebook and LinkedIn to enable you to write Qwiki profiles on yourself. It's much more preferable to build your own image online than put yourself at the mercy of Google that will dredge up every mention of you on the 'net - positive or otherwise!

The founders claim this hybrid of Google, Wikipedia, Tumblr, YouTube and social networking sites will be almost impossible to duplicate.

The opportunity for brand managers is that there is potential to 'improve this qwiki' by linking to audiovisual URLs of your own. As some readers may know, my daytime job is in superannuation so, inevitably, I entered this term into the Qwiki search last night. Believe me, based on that outcome, it's a green field opportunity for superannuation brands right now.

Qwiki may take a while to gain traction, but it's an interesting idea. And at this stage, it doesn't take much to give your brand the qwiki it deserves.

Am I just a grumpy old man?

2011-04-06T05:41:00.000+10:00

I delved into the chocolate biscuit barrel the other day. My claws wrapped around a legendary Aussie Tim Tam and swept it upwards and out of the barrel and straight to my lips. I anticipated the smooth milk chocolate with its chokkie biscuit centre until ...

I bit into it and immediately knew something was wrong. Instead of the crispy centre, my tongue engaged with something akin to jam. Soft, fruity and ... just not a Tim Tam. Sorry, but these brand extension things often just don't work for me. The Tim Tam experience compounded a series of bastardisations of tradition - Coke with lime, vanilla and other flavours (doesn't complement Queensland's favorite mixer, Bundaberg Rum, by the way!), some sort of cream cheesed Vegemite, Uncle Toby's oats with embedded flavours.

Apparently, citrus-flavoured 'lite' Coke was very successful in Europe, cherry Coke was a hit in the UK and so on. There is green tea flavoured Coke in Japan. So clearly, I'm out of step. My reaction to 'jam Tams' is out of whack with the rest of the marketplace. My conservatism is starting to overwhelm me in my middle years, or perhaps is just poor taste.

I thought us boomers, with our discretionary spending power were the darlings of marketers. Then again, perhaps indiscretionary spending on credit card, the province of new generations, is far more appealing. They want a much richer palette to choose from. The boredom threshold with 'more of the same' is much lower and brands obviously have to respond.

So while I make a rare visit to the local store and seek out the declining shelf space dedicated to flavours of yesteryear, others are swarming like locusts over other shelves seeking out the flavours of tomorrow. I suppose there's some form of street cred associated with being an early taste adopter.

With Apple's iPad2 tucked under your arm, you have to seek out other 'flavours of the month' to go with it - something I should chew over perhaps next time I visit the supermarket! I love the new tech, yet my appetite for change obviously ends there. Yep. I am becoming a grumpy old man.

Research is not a substitute for leadership

2011-03-05T07:03:00.000+11:00

I love market insights and am a passionate advocate for research. To top it off, I believe in the oft-criticized value of focus groups or, more broadly, qualitative research. But that's not the point of today's rave.

What I am even more interested in, is what organisations do with those insights and how they influence organisational behaviour.

This is because, like modern political parties, many organisations use research outcomes to fill their own thought leadership vacuums. I'm typing on an iPad right now. I wonder if this product would ever have seen light of day if Apple had been obsessed with research and risk management over innovation through thought leadership?

Good brand people are passionate advocates for creating organisational personas that reflect conviction from within. They build belief in organisations, then project that into the marketplace through words and imagery. Good branding means knowing what business or connections you're prepared to walk away from, as much as knowing to which groups you want to appeal.

This is where problems start. Not with the research itself, but with how it is applied. In a previous life in the auto industry, I saw and heard about many great product innovations that died on floor of what we called 'clinics', in which consumers compared future concepts with existing vehicles. We found customers didn't like certain elements of new designs and nervous executives often removed them, or watered them down, only for the car to look dated when it was launched two years later.

The risk of being handcuffed by research findings is related to consumers being conditioned by their recent experiences in the product category. Not being experts in future trends or being unable to anticipate their likely wants and needs a few years into the future, often makes them a poor source of insight into medium term brand positioning or product development.

Conducting research is like reading an annual report. It provides a snapshot of the marketplace at a given time. It provides insight into the current mindset of consumers and may provide a view of the scope of the task involved in taking them through the next stage of the journey. In terms of insights into the future, it is often only good for the next six months, a year at a stretch for some categories.

Organisations that fail to recognize this limitation are merely exposing themselves to a different type of risk - failure of leadership.

What's this thing called behavioural finance?

2011-02-10T12:33:00.002+11:00

I love terms like 'behavioural finance'. They add academic and professional cred to spending enormous amounts to time pondering simple questions like 'why do people waste money when they should be doing something constructive with it?'.

It's pretty simple really. What people do with their money is dictated largely by the next crisis or the next temptation (tick the appropriate box) that they're facing. Retirement savings are always trumped by buying a yacht, which is in turn trumped by school fees, which in turn are trumped by feeding yourself or buying beer, which are in turn trumped by allocating your scarce resources to wherever your spouse directs.

All these things have one thing in common - in ascending order of importance, they're motivated by indulgence, obligation, necessity or fear. I left out the other big motivator, lust, as its links to spending are often controversial and best left untouched.

This goes many metres towards explaining why, in financial services, it's much easier to flog loans, credit cards, ATMs and cheque accounts than investments and pension plans. When the tussle is between instant gratification and deferred pleasure, I know where I'd place my winning bet 90% of the time.

It's why, in part, people love buying their own home. They have the instant gratification of owning it, living in it and showing it off to their friends, while they get the feel-good vibe of investing their money wisely, or at least spending it on tangible evidence of once having money.

So behavioural finance appears to me to only have the opportunity to kick in when rationality or a serious excess of discretionary spend allows you both instant gratification and deferred pleasure. I'm obviously too low in the Maslow Triangle to derive these dual benefits. Like most others, my finances rest low in the Bermuda Triangle, where misbehavioural finance rules.

House of Brands idea great as long as they're not homogenised

2011-02-05T09:02:00.003+11:00

Hard to believe, but my car's heading into the panel shop for the second time in twelve months because some buffoon, probably texting or in deep conversation on the hand set, rammed into the BMW X5 stopped behind me hard enough to push it a metre or so into me. "It happened so quickly," she said.

What? We were stationery for at least a minute before she thumped the Beamer without even hitting the brakes on the Honda borrowed from her mate. I'd love to have heard that conversation later in the evening!

Anyway, the point of this is that it's once again locked me in mortal combat with my insurer and fender benders. I have my preferred panel shop and the insurer has theirs, but we haven't got to haggling over that yet. No. We're still at the so-called driveway assessment stage. Sorry. We're not at the driveway assessment stage because, as a seriously overworked traffic manager at the assessment centre pointed out, the company has cut staff, while adding to its stable of brands.

It's an interesting take on economy of scale and its interface with a multi-brand strategy. The brand bit of it is all about creating products and services that appeal to clear niches in the marketplace. The problem is that, at the head of the brand household, is a corporate entity with its own commercial objectives. The challenge from the brand perspective is to ensure that each brand retains its own culture, its connection with its community of customers, while you're taking advantage of greater corporate scale.

My recent experience suggests to me that one Australian company that prides itself on its corporate "One Company: Many Brands" strategy is battling to maintain individual brand identity while deriving benefits from economy of scale at the back end.

In short, the company is using its multiple brands as a growth engine, but failing to recognise that, when customers need it most i.e. to make a claim, they come into contact with the back-end of its business - call centres, assessment centres and so on.

This week, for example, I rang to make a claim and abandoned my call after waiting 12 minutes entertained by jingles and lame messages. Several hours later, I rang again, my first contact with humans being some 10 minutes later. And cheekily, one of the hold messages said they understood I wanted to talk to a person, not a voice prompt. They were right. I did want to speak to someone!

Concluding the second call, I was informed that someone would call me in the next 24 hours to book my car in for a driveway assessment. 24 hours later - nothing. My wife tried to phone the assessment centre without luck. She drove over. The harassed traffic controller said they'd cut staff and were struggling to cope. If this isn't material for Undercover Boss, I don't know what is!

Believe it or not, this is not a whinge. You see, the assessment centre is something of a processing funnel for all the company's brands - economy of scale. The experience you get with one brand at this point is no different that you get with any of the company's other insurance brands.

Homogenisation of back-end support systems to achieve economy of scale makes absolute sense from a financial perspective. But companies that take this approach must understand that you can't homogenise brand experience - because the essence of brand is tribal and unique.

Gen Y - Conspire with your customers to make things happen

2011-01-22T09:00:00.000+11:00

I find myself writing regularly about Gen Y and even the emerging Gen Z behaviours. Perhaps it's because I make a practice of trying to remember what a flawed dude I was in many respects as I passed various birthdays - a thing I think other boomers should do before ranting about 'no good' generations.

Why am I cracking on about it again? It's because we had a recent experience in our business that reinforced my view that Gen Ys do care about their retirement money and other things financial, whether they're deferred benefits or not. It's just that they don't put up with crap, pumped-up complexity that the government and financial services sector specialise in constructing to ensure customer relationships are made as difficult as possible.

The experience I speak of was an initiative to visit one of our contributing employers over three consecutive weeks. Members of our team literally sat in the staff canteen one day in each of those weeks so staff could walk up and talk about sorting out their super. They weren't looking for advice, just happy to get it organised - generally to consolidate their money in a single fund.

The point is that most of these staff worked in a call centre - a notoriously transient workforce whose frequency of job change is reflected in the number of super funds various employers stick their money into by default. Significantly, most of them are at the latter end of the Gen Y spectrum.

If they were disinterested in what was happening to their money, we'd have had no appointments through the online booking form and no walk-ups when we got out there. Yet our two guys were flat out on each of the three days, stamping paperwork on the spot to confirm IDs, helping people to complete the relevant rollover form etc.

You're mistaken if you think Gen Y's obsession with interactivity is just confined to the online space. They welcome the opportunity to interact face to face. As social rearcher, Mark McCrindle, has noted many times, this generation values advice from mentors, even though it might not readily be apparent. If your business cares about doing their business with this generation, it just needs to show it values their business (and their generally smaller accounts) and break down the barriers to doing it.

Yes, Gen Y is arguably addicted to instant gratification. But if that's the case, don't sit in the office and whinge about it, get off your butt and engage with your customers in their environment - whether in their home or workplace, or online. You might be surprised at the experience. They just want to know how to get things done quickly and easily. What's wrong with that?

If the IT boffins and adminstrators are telling you that systems won't allow you to breakdown barriers to customer satisfaction and engagement, don't believe them. Conspire with your customers to find other ways to make things happen for them.

These customers are no different to any others. If you can give them a leg up to getting what they want, you may just find the key to a lifelong association.

Does product placement embed in my head?

2011-01-14T08:32:00.002+11:00

I read an article the other day covering the 7 Network's decision to digitally place products in scenes throughout its top-rating Packed to the Rafters and Home and Away soapies. It got me thinking about the first time I can recall product placement and guess where it was? None other than American playwright, Arthur Miller's, Pultizer Prize winning play, 'Death of a Salesman'.

Why did this stick in my mind? I think only because in the school English exam I sat in the 70s I was asked what the use of the word 'simonise' signified. In the play, one of Miller's characters remarks that 'Willy used to simonise that car'. The correct exam answer was it was a word Arthur Miller had created to express the affection salesman, Willy Loman, had for his car. This was bollocks of course. The word was commonly used and derives from Simoniz, a brand of car polish launched in 1934 by George Simons. The reason I recall this product reference in the play was the deep disillusionment I felt about having to write crap in the exam rather than any favourable disposition embedded in me by Willy Loman.

So to 7's decision on product placement in these two shows, or placements in any other show or movie for that matter. I cannot see that digitally positioned packs of Kelloggs Cornflakes at the Rafter breakfast table, or a Fosters can down the pub in Summer Bay will convince me that I should try or reconsider these products. In fact, will I even notice them? As I peruse the supermarket shelves, will I be irresistably drawn to Cornflakes because Ben Rafter eats them? More likely, I'll be drawn to a product that tennis player, Pat Rafter, eats because he looks a thousand times better in Bonds than I do.

I guess it's all to do with alignment. I fit neither the Rafters or Summer Bay audience. Even though it envelopes me, suburban life doesn't fascinate me, and my prospects with babes down the bay started to diminish about 20 years ago. Problem is, I cannot really recall any product placement that has impacted me in any conscious way, except one - the Aston Martin DB5 in the Bond movies. Perhaps its appearance in no less than five movies in the years in which my testosterone flowed most freely has something to do with it.

I must investigate the psychology of product placement and how it really works. Luxury brands seem to indulge in this marketing pastime quite a lot, so perhaps has to be aspirational to work. With all due respect to the companies concerned, local cops chasing crooks in cars provided by Ford or Toyota just don't get me running to my local dealer.

I'll confess that I missed a great opportunity for product placement when the producers of the yet-to-be-released Mad Max movie contacted me about borrowing Ford vehicles to use in the shoot.

Sounded like a loony plot at the time and they did want to remove and replace panels from our pristine vehicles, so I declined. My worse brand promotion decision ever? Possibly, but perhaps it was good judgement because there were many fanciful chariots thrashing around the desert in that movie, but there was no readily identifiable auto brand that I could see.

Happy to hear from anyone who can present insights into the power of product placement. My mind is open, even if it's not retentive...

Gerry retreats from issuing consumer alert to web value

2011-01-07T08:43:00.001+11:00

So what did Gerry Harvey achieve by joining Myer's Bernie Brooks in leading the charge in the ill-conceived campaign to promote a GST on goods under $1,000 bought on the internet from overseas? As Harvey Norman's share price plumbed new depths, his primary achievement was probably to alert the large majority of consumers who didn't shop on the net that there was good buying to be had on there.

Let's face it, the vast majority of Aussies don't tune in to the daily movements in foreign exchange, don't have confidence in buying remotely from overseas vendors and - surprise, surprise - seem to have made air-conditioned shopping centres the venues for regular village get togethers during the hot summer months (whether they buy anything in them is another question!). And I think Harvey Norman even has stores in many of these centres, doesn't it?

Another campaign 'achievement' was to damage his own personal brand, closely linked as it is to the retail colossus that carries his name. Hard for a guy who owns some of Australia's best thoroughbreds, the annual Magic Millions showcase on the Gold Coast and many other baubles to earn sympathy from battlers who buy on the net to save money.

I wonder whether the retailers' GST campaign was inspired by the pre-election mining tax campaign, which seems to have gained more traction. If so, it failed to recognised a fundamental difference between the two issues. This is that the mining tax campaign focused on a single, politically sensitive issue - jobs. The GST campaign, by contrast, tried to build around job losses, but was derailed by a far more personal issue - big retailers wanted every little guy trying to save a buck to pay extra tax.

Less tax for miners to create more jobs versus more tax for individuals to save more jobs - it's an absolute no-brainer working out which one will gain public support. The retail campaign focused on tax and jobs, but in the rush to press failed to recognise where the point of hurt was.

Gerry is now taking a lower profile in the GST campaign, acknowledging it the communication was poorly executed, but that the campaign is still valid. Perhaps some retailers should glance across at what Bunnings is doing at the moment - reducing slow-moving and non-profitable lines, adjusting its inventory to make way for a move into high-value items like knock-down kitchens, carpet and so on. That's in anticipation of greater competition from the new Woolworths big box hardware chain.

Rather than moan in the face of competition, Bunnings is creating more reasons for people to visit its stores by stocking homewares supported by in-store advisory services. That's what retailing is about - convenience and a value-added store experience. They're things you find hard to match for less than 1,000 bucks on the net.

Social media challenge for superannuation companies

2011-01-06T06:57:00.000+11:00

Scored some merit points yesterday, being recognised as the only one of four Twitter-recommended super funds with an active account i.e. that offered any content. This either makes me a genius or a fool, I haven't yet worked it out.

What it does show is that people notice and talk about it when companies enter the social media space and do nothing with it other than secure the real estate. In this instance, the question was raised about brand promise and authenticity on the part of the companies that held inactive accounts. While I think this is a long stretch, there is no doubt that in the minds of those who use these channels, inactivity reflects a lack of engagement, or willingness to engage.

Of course, in financial services we can trot out the excuses about the legal and compliance constraints around engaging in this space, but the reality is that we'e the only ones who care about these issues. Consumers generally don't appreciate the constraints and, quite rightly, argue that if you're not able to deal with them, don't enter the social media space at all.

I recently wrote an article for trade publication, Investor Weekly, in which I said the only way to deal with social media and devise a strategy is get in and have a go. Choose a senior communicator who understands the compliance framework within which your company has to work and hand over responsibility to that person to experiment with social media.

There are many things you can do within that framework - pose topical questions about your business / industry, publish factual announcements prompting a call to action (a link to your website), provide links to helpful third party articles and websites and so on. These are just a few opportunities presented by social media that do not carry compliance risk.

I have a few other remarks on social media:

Be smart. Do not engage via social media channels with customer-specific issues. Simply refer any individual inquiries of this nature to your traditional customer help channels like your call centre or a relevant expert on your staff;
Be patient. For a low-engagement product like superannuation, your build of fans or followers will be slow but steady. You will also experience little interaction, but don't give up; and
Be aware. Add social media to your update check list. When you issue a media release, update your website or release a new publication, ensure that you also update your social media sites and, where appropriate, provide links back to the information. Remember that you have a 140 character limit for tweets on Twitter, so use a free facility like http://www.tinyurl.com/ to abbreviate your link and save on character count.

Social media costs nothing more than commitment if put into the right hands.

Rediscovering service might be a retail solution

2011-01-04T12:17:00.000+11:00

Big Aussie retailers are launching an advertising campaign in a bid to force the introduction of a goods and services tax on items costing less than $1,000 bought from overseas on the internet. Currently, these items are exempt from the GST applied to similar items sold in Australia.

The campaign is a furphy of the first order and the Federal Government is right to resist the call to tax these goods. In today's Business Spectator, Karen Maley, has summarised the relatively insignificant proportion of retail spending on internet sales. In addition, the dramatic improvement in the Australian Dollar relative to other currencies, particularly the US Dollar, has had a far greater impact than would the application of a 10% GST. As many consumers have noted already, the price differential between goods sold overseas and those sold in Australia is sometimes close to 50%, with the AUD at its current levels.

You have to remember that people are buying overseas despite the risks associated with goods being incorrectly delivered, or not delivered at all, and the issues associated with warranties that do not apply for even big brand products outside the country of purchase.

Rather than banging on about how unfair the application of GST is, the big retailers should focus on enhancing the shopping experience by providing knowledgeable and outstanding service. In most instances, this has been completely lost.

Case in point: My wife and I shopped for a barbecue yesterday. I am a frequent internet buyer, particularly of goods that I know quite a bit about. Bear in mind also that I usually buy online from Australian retailers or private sellers, as sometimes the price difference is insufficient to offset the added risk of buying off unknown overseas providers. But back to the barbecue.

I did research the internet first up and saw some cheap deals. But this was an item I thought I should see in the metal. I visited a small outlet, BBQs 'R' Us in Nunawading and one of the large retail outlets famous in the BBQ space. There was nothing flash about the small store experience, except the service and advice from Rachel. She really knew BBQs - even the difference in quality of the stainless steel used etc.

Contrast that with the 'big store' experience, where we interrupted a salesman's fly-past to ask about a BBQ similar to the one in the small store. "Is it on special?" Reply: "No. The specials are out the front." Nothing further offered, even though we had invited engagement on the BBQ we were standing next to.

The result, we phoned a deposit through to Rachel. Yep. Believe it or not, a Australian retail operator who had paid attention to what we were looking for and provided insights and great advice on what to look for. Indeed, she was so confident in her product that she welcomed us taking a look elsewhere. "You won't find better quality at this price," she assured us. She was right. We couldn't find better quality of product or service.

Herein lies the message for the big retailers. Don't shop around for the cheapest casual staff you can find. Invest in product training. Make sure the staff have more knowledge than I have when I visit the store. Train service providers rather than order takers.

The point is that shoppers allocate time to visiting your stores and there has to be a reason for battling traffic, finding parking and spending that time when it would be much cheaper and quicker to order on the internet.

And if margins are being squeezed, what's happened to the skills of 'upsell' and 'cross-sell'? These are outcomes that can only be based on in-depth product knowledge across competitor brands and vertically up and down product lines. If someone has to read the label on a television set to tell me how many HDMI connections it provides, they're merely doing something I could do myself. What's more, it's information readily accessible on the internet, so why should I visit a store?

The gift card challenge for financial services

2011-01-04T10:59:00.000+11:00

Want a measure of brand performance? Consider counting the total redemption value of gift cards you sell at Christmas.

Based on a quick, but not necessarily representative, sampling of my family, Apple's iTunes cards streaked ahead of Osmosis cards (an Aussie retail chain specialising in cool surf attire) by some margin as the most popular brand among Gen Zs this Christmas.

Ask any tween or teen what they'd like for Christmas or a birthday and its a gift card for a favourite store or service. You see, gift cards are a form of empowerment for tweens and teens - a form of income that allows them to enjoy the shopping experience and buy things that they know their parents would never buy for them.

For the grandparents in our family, the gift card thing is just a reflection of laziness - a simple solution to the long tradition of hours spent trundling around stores carefully selecting presents that the recipient can return later, or begrudgingly wear or display (take your pick) whenever they drop around. They regard gift cards as soft option akin to just giving money when imagination fails.

But the kids think differently. My daughter fought long and hard going to a friend's birthday party recently that taking a present was something of an embarassment when she knew her friend would prefer a gift card. "I'll be the only one taking a present. How embarassing is that?" she argued.

With this passionate advocacy for gift cards, there's no doubt financial services companies will have to find a way to tap into the gift card phenomenon. Do you reckon a gift carded voluntary contribution into a superannuation account would be a red hot go? Perhaps a $100 gift card to be spent with a financial adviser. Perhaps a $500 card to be used in home loan establishment?

Imagine the joy on a baby boomer's face at opening up one of these cards, beautfully packaged in a short-form Product Disclosure Statement with a pre-filled Application Form. It would create one of those priceless, unforgettable Christmas moments.

Happy and Safe Festive Season to all

2010-12-23T08:46:00.000+11:00

The final entry into the Bloggosfear this year is wishing all who read and enjoy, maybe even don't enjoy, my various ramblings, a very happy and safe Festive Season.

The Bloggosfear will resume operations some time early in the New Year, with a full appraisal of Christmas presents, the challenge of furtive returns to the store in the annual post-Christmas swap meet and the conversion of gift cards within the constraints of face value and store selection.

Cheers to you all...

BrooksieG

Christianity's millenium of missed opportunity

2010-12-17T06:41:00.000+11:00

The word Christmas originated as a compound meaning "Christ's Mass". It is derived from the Middle English Christemasse and Old English Cristes mæsse, a phrase first recorded in 1038. "Cristes" is from Greek Christos and "mæsse" is from Latin missa (the holy mass). Extract from Wikipedia

Yep. According to Wikipedia, the term 'Christmas' kicked off in about 972 years ago, even though the driver for it was the birth of Christ some 1038 years earlier. When you think about it, those branding dudes of 2000 years ago were pretty slow off the mark. Nonetheless, after taking over 1,000 years to get to launch date, no one could argue they hadn't thoroughly evaluated the perceptions of all relevant stakeholders in the process.

It's clearly the most effective branding program in history (unless you can come up with a better one!). Celebrated globally, even by non-Christians who've yielded to the market domination of Christmas by recognising it as another great excuse to party and indulge in unbridled largesse. The historical information in next bit also derives from Wikipedia:

The brand refreshment program for Christmas appears to have begun in about the late 18th Century when the brand consultants introduced a character to capture the spirit of Christmas, Santa Claus. Oddly enough, the 'character' first appeared in the 4th Century in the form of St Nicholas of Myra, the inspiration for the early European figure, Sinterklass.

Centuries later, circa 17th Century, the Brits created another bod, Father Christmas. Essentially, the guy had similar characteristics to his European counterparts - generosity of spirit, reflected in gift giving. Being a Brit, he also had a dress sense somewhat different to that of the Europeans.

The logical conclusion for the brand consultants was to merge the UK concept with the traditional European Christian evolution and polish up the brand story a bit. Enter stage left, a based in the North Pole, a sleigh tugged around by reindeers, elves and all the rest. An absolute fantasy, remotely located so no one using 18th Century transport methods could easily check its veracity!

Christmas is a fine example of branding. It relates a story that is both factual and mythical. It strikes a deep emotional chord almost universally. It's a bloody good excuse to take a break and let your hair down. It's a great time to socialise and a hell of a reason to reconnect with people you've neglected to call all year. In other words it pulls all the right strings - belief, leisure, pleasure and indulgence.

The great thing about living in the digital age is that if Christ was born today, we'd have quickly got our act together and not denied about 40 generations of humans from the celebration. To appreciate how quickly we could have got things moving, take a look here.

Best wishes to all from the Bloggosfear for the Festive Season.

Cost obsession driving the commoditisation of a generation

2010-12-16T09:32:00.000+11:00

As I watch my tween-aged daughter glued to the computer screen for hours each day, talking to her mates, I find my mind drifting to the sort of social conditioning that's been going on to encourage it. I hear you say, "well just stop her doing it, you negligent, no-good father". My immediate repost to that is "Just try it - and why should I anyway?"

You see, we've created this impersonal world of instant gratification and commoditisation. Every move we make from government down to small business encourages destruction of face-to-face relationships, even though they are ultimately the most effective, if not the most efficient, form of communication. When Gen Zs start their casual jobs in department stores in the next few years, just see how difficult it will be to strike up a conversation.

This is one of the consequences that concerns me as the competition ideologues in our federal bureaucracy roll out reforms to 'cut costs' to consumers. While I think some reforms are required to regulate against price gouging and, occasionally, outright theft, I draw the line at the almost single-minded focus on costs that seem to drive reforms.

It's a mindset that relegates the concept of value and personalisation to virtually nothing. Let's cut bank fees. Great idea, but then why kick up a fuss when banks close branches and cut staff to protect margins and push us across even more into the internet banking space? All of a sudden, regional MPs fire off salvos about the unfairness of it all, but they're complicit in the reforms that cut the guts out of the system in the first place. Doh!

There's a pretty good possibility that my tween daughter will see the time when there are no street shingles bearing the name of a bank or telco. She'll run her life online, interfacing with virtual customer service staff, computers in the clouds and she'll own products for which there is no tangible evidence of ownership. But perhaps we're being driven to a society that is so impersonal we no longer need 'personalisation'? And what does this mean for brands - the very essence of businesses with which people identify?

So when I ask why I should bother to get my daughter off Facebook, the question is well-founded. I'm swimming against a tsunami of social engineering and commercial reality that dictates that her life is defined within the perimeter of her 15.4-inch laptop screen. It's one of the costs of cheapness.

Pedalling through bicycle brands

2010-12-13T12:00:00.000+11:00

I've been punting around on a Shogun hybrid bike for several years now. It's sort of left-over water pipe welded into a triangular frame - the sort of thing a plumber might build. Basically I bought it on the assumption that 'twould merely be a flash-in-the-pan fitness kick that might see me staggering back up the last leg of a 10km run willing myself back into the driveway and a hot shower about once a month.

But no, this riding thing has kicked in a bit more than expected and I now find myself punting anything from 40 to 90 km on Sundays, being blown into the weeds by lycra-clad pencils riding cool-looking drop bar bikes. Even their gear changes sound good as they slide through the cogs and accelerate over the horizon. Clearly, this is not good enough, so the journey into bicycle brand evaluation has begun.

The journey so far has been akin to my home theatre shopping experience of a couple of years ago and covered in past entries. There's a bucket load of brands out there, all geared by the ubiquitous Shimano, which I've noticed also has a high profile in the fishing reel business. Basically anything with gears is in Shimano's kitbag.

You'd think that would be a leveller, but it's not. Because, like Sara Lee cakes, Shimano makes gears layer ober layer ober layer. There's all kinds of sub-brands and numbers, which make absolutely no sense to the uninitiated - like audio visual cable specs only ten times worse.

Some bike brands appear in every decent store - Giant, Trek, Cannondale - while others seem to have limited distribution. Perhaps the limit is their price, which is often akin to an amount you'd pay for a small Korean car. Then within brands, there is a plethora of models, with apparently exponential price increases for very little gain. You're starting to get the picture, I know naff-all about what I'm looking at.

So, in the absence of real knowledge, I inevitably end up looking for a 'reputable' brand. But is this the right approach? The guru websites that cover bikes place 'fit' as the most important purchase criterion i.e. whether the combination of frame, handlebars, seat, gearing etc. suit your body and purpose. So you'd think brand should not be a driver, other than it might suggest the bike might cover a few thousand kilometres before disintegrating under you.

But brand does matter and I think I've discovered the reason. Again, it comes down to the primal emotional drivers that determine brand success: When you're dressed in lycra it's distressing for the peletons of riders flying past to see that your undercarriage is not only rudely exposed by the lycra, but is also reflects blissful acceptance of sub-par performance. So how much do I have to pay to avoid that? Thanks. I'll take one of those.

Damn! I missed jumping on the Oprah brandwagon!

2010-12-10T07:00:00.000+11:00

The royal visit's well under way and I haven't prepared any plans for ambush marketing during Queen Oprah's drop in to Melbourne today. Because ambush it would have to be - marketing budget being somewhat constrained as it is by ... well ... lack of money.

But it's a great opportunity for the superannuation industry. We've missed the message that everything Oprah does is 'Super'. All the opportunities that presents! Where's Super Dude, Bill Shorten, with some government-sponsored slogan like "Oprah's super, like MySuper" ? Huge opportunity missed, Bill.

I have to stop deflecting. Back to the point about being a failed marketing bod for not having jumped on the Oprah brandwagon. Why didn't I see the potential to life a low-engagement product or brand into the stratosphere of the total pre-occupation that surrounds the Queen of Talk?

If only I'd used social media to engage my brand in the conversation. I should have recognised the vacuum that I left for networked Gen Ys wanting to know what our super fund thought about Oprah - particularly the nuances of her tour like whether she looks good in an Akubra.

Now there's a guy we need in financial services marketing - the Akubra marketing guy (used in the unisexual sense). Everyone's wearing an Akubra. It's a ubiquitous part of the tour kit - like boarding and alighting from Qantas aircraft - other than A380s!

Why didn't I set up a superannuation account for every member of the touring party and have them all walking around with new member kits? Cool huh? The ultimate ambush. Ambushed for life! I'd even waive the $0.95 a week member fee for Oprah in recognition of the cashflow contribution that 9% of her annual earnings would make to the fund. Does she know earnings are tax-free after age 60 I wonder?

Better get down to Fed Square and get a message and kit to her. I'll take a colleague from financial planning in case it gets personal...

Wikileaks opens a brand debate

2010-12-06T09:31:00.000+11:00

The democratisation of organisational reputation via the internet is a face of life. No brand is immune from public scrutiny and comment. The brandkarma website blog has run an article about whether governments are capable of resisting the web-based makeover experienced by every other institution.

It says in relation to the current Wikileaks furor: "What is at play here is the principle that democracy and the public interest, all the way to issues of national security, are better served by the truth than by secrecy and subterfuge." It proposes that the controversy highlights that governments may now be exposed to the "radical transparency from which they thought they'd be exempt."

The commentary refers to an article in The Guardian by Heather Brooke, which postulates further on the implications of digitisation for government, politics and national security.

Of course brandkarma has taken an interest because of the brand industry's constant hollaring about brand transparency and accountability. It's an interesting take on an extraordinary debate.

Big brands fly into storm

2010-12-03T08:57:00.000+11:00

Three of the world's leading brands have encountered severe turbulence in recent weeks - Qantas, Rolls Royce and Airbus and all three may be on a collision course in the courts, with Rolls Royce the company in the firing line.

The issue went public when one of Qantas' new Airbus A380 Rolls Royce engines blew in mid air, resulting in a grounding of the fleet, an investigation that pinned the source of the problem on faulty engineering or manufacture in an engine component and a recall by Rolls Royce of A380 engines from Airbus.

It seems that the upshot of this is going to be a significant dent in the cowling of one of the UK's most venerated brands and collateral damage to the other two. For Qantas in particular, this is an awkward situation. While there have been some concerning incidents involving Qantas over the past few yeasrs, the media has ensured every minor glitch discovered on the tarmac or elsewhere is magnified out of all proportion. So the Rolls Royce incident, not of Qantas' making, simply tags onto a conga line of stories damaging to the brand.

Qantas' brand problem is that customers generally do not analyse the veracity of some of these issues in any depth. Their perceptions are mainly shaped by their experience of on-time service and reliability. The question of unreasonable media scrutiny, helped by some mischief making by some stakeholders, doesn't register. Add personal experience to subconscious doubts about safety issues and you have a potent mixture of brand-eroding agents.

Airbus customers are airlines, who you would think would apply a fair level of analysis to the reasons for delays to orders due to the Rolls Royce recall. But it still isn't good news that refitting aircraft already in service will place priority demands on the supply of new engines, thus delaying deliveries of new aircraft scheduled for 2011.

Quite apart from the financial impacts, these companies, especially Qantas with its direct exposure to reputational risk among consumers, will be turning a lot of attention to restoring the lustre of their brands. So it's no surprise that Qantas has already announced it reserves the right to sue Rolls Royce for financial losses incurred through the grounding of its aircraft, should it not be able to reach a commercial settlement with the engine manufacturer.

Of course, that amount is calculable. But how calculable is the cost of restoring reputation? It will be interesting to see if that is built into the equation should the matter go to court. How do you calculate loss of brand equity?

And where does this leave the Rolls Royce brand? Perhaps it's flown under the radar of consumer consciousness, even the company's well-heeled automotive customers. There is no research yet to bear this out. However, if you want some insight on the burgeoning chorus of discontent, perhaps visit my old mate, Ben Sandilands' report, Rolls Royce under fire from all parties over A380 engines.

It's not all apples for smartphone marketers

2010-12-02T09:27:00.001+11:00

No surprise really that the only brand that attracts a reasonable level of brand loyalty amonth smartphone owners is Apple. The ubiquitous iPhone is an object of desire for corporate tyeps whose choice is often dictated by paranoia about iPhone's security architecture.

A survey conducted by GfK in the US, showed only 25% of smartphone owners planned to stay loyal to the operating system running their phone, with loyalty highest (59%) among Apple users and lowest (21%) among Microsoft users. RIM's Blackberry scored 35%.

The survey points out that the buyer decision is not about the handset, but about the high-end user features, in particular the apps available for the various operating systems.

GfK analyst, Ryan Garner says: "Loyalty with a handset is a lot more complicated these days in that people buy into experiences at the high-end level. If a phone doesn't do what it says it will do or what the owner hopes it will do, the maker will lose loyalty."

In the end, branding is a simple thing isn't it? The consumer experience is all that counts, not the means of getting it.

More detailed article at Reuters.

You think Gen Y is tough, wait for Gen Z!

2010-11-26T16:53:00.002+11:00

Having a completely automated and networked Gen Zer in the house just makes me realise how lucky we are that Gen Y is so easy to deal with! I am writing about this because of a convergence of personal experience and some of the stuff I've been reading (not smoking!) lately, particularly about media.

It starts with the challenge of getting Gen Zs to read anything in hard copy at all, despite all efforts to glorify the age-old pleasure derived from reading books. Sure, they read books, but only when it suits them and, more importantly, when they can take time from the arduous daily routine of updating everyone in their various networks about their day's activity. At dinner time, you have to give 30 minutes notice of your intention to serve, just so they can formally sign out from the couple of dozen Facebook and other conversations orchestrated on their laptop or iTouch.

In this context, trying to grab even a nanosecond's attention from this target group is going to turn marketing into an extreme sport.

From my personal experience, there are a few things I have learned about Gen Z:

They think everyone can be famous. This means if your brand is not on TV and/or appearing in internet banners, it can't be important. My daughter asks: "If your company is good, why don't we see it on television?" TV in itself is not important to them, or even particularly credible, but it does signal fame - an important ingredient in the communications mix for Gen Z.
The primary media distribution channel is social media. Every network, virtual or otherwise, has its gatekeepers and influencers. If you're not on their radar, you're not going to penetrate their networks. So much for paying for access to content! Think again, Rupert. You might have to start paying micro networkers for adding messages and tiny URLs linked to your website.
Instant gratification is key. So devise ways for me to interact with you online or, better still, via my favourite mobile device. If I have to download and form and provide a signature, forget it. I'll find someone who can do the job online. My wish is your command!
I'll never read a product disclosure statement, so don't bother sending one. If I need information, I'll ask for it. If you lose my money or send me a dodgy product, I'll make sure the world knows about it. Let me spell it out for you: "Just deliver or I'll trash your brand."

We are seeing the emergence of an empowered generation of consumers. They have access to everything, filter information quickly, believe 'us not you' and are quick on retribution if you fail them. Wasn't it just easier when people sued us enabling an appropriate out-of-court, out-of-sight settlement?

Why do blue skies become overcast when talking social media?

2010-11-23T20:46:00.000+11:00

I went to a presentation this morning from Jamie Pride who heads up Deloitte Australia's online practice. For an accounting firm, those dudes at Deloitte are pretty cool. One of Jamie's colleagues, Pete Williams, regularly does the rounds projecting his entertaining patter to industries from advertising to financial services.

These presentations always start with the Socionomics video on the exponential growth of internet usage and social media in particular (if you're the only person who hasn't seen one of these, here's a link - set aside about four minutes). Then we talk about digital natives, or those under 35 who've never known a world without computers. This is all good stuff, the audience becomes more animated. Even the pulses of actuaries can be seen to quicken - or start for the first time.

By the time the formal presentation ends, the whole audience is wondering how we'd ever survive without social media. Even more, they're growing restless as they realise their oversight in not making social media the core driver of their marketing communications. But then... question time and the clouds start to gather.

You see, most of the gigs I attend are financial services related. From our regulated, compliant regime, we dare only occasionally pull the curtains back to take a peek at what is possible. And what we see troubles us. All this freedom is unhealthy, when you're constrained by legislation and regulation that reflects the media landscape of the 1980s rather than the present.

How can we engage in online conversations when regulations say we cannot give personal advice? The whole thing about social media is that it's very personal - it's about talking to me, about my interests and concerns. I'm not interested in general information that I must take away, interpret and overlay on my own circumstance. I want an expert to chat to me and tell me what I need to know and I don't want to pay a few hundred bucks an hour for advice when my super fund, bank or insurance company is available to me online.

The boys and girls from Deloitte tell us what many promoting social media do. It's free, or low cost, so just get online and do it. Try things. Fail quickly, but learn and then try again. Persevere, this online engagement stuff is a long-term strategy. It's about relationship building and networking, not quick returns.

I agree that everyone should be considering integration of social media into their channel strategies. I agree that it's trial and error in most instances. What works for some doesn't work for others. Running test campaigns in social media is no different than similar experiments in traditional media - the beauty being that failed campaigns cost less. Or do they?

Every time you enter the social media space, you leave a digital impression that lasts a lifetime - perhaps beyond. For businesses, this is a brand footprint, which means reputational risk if you stuff anything up. You'd be amazed at how cheap it can be to ruin a brand, so if you're going to experiment, follow a few basic rules:

Know why you're doing it;
Know how it fits into your broader channel strategy;
Know how it will integrate with other customer service and communications channels;
Take time to learn the protocols for online engagement;
Know how you're going to add value to the conversation.

If you are vague on any of these issues, don't even start. Experimenting is fine, but blundering in without a plan is courting disaster.

Writing, cleaning or driving - the choice of unskilled tasks is yours

2010-11-22T17:00:00.000+11:00

Alan Kohler published an article today in Business Spectator on the new challenge faced by media - at least the traditional media. He points out that the human desire to interact is creating so much content that professional journalists i.e. bods who write for a living, are struggling to have their voices heard above the din.

If you work in marketing communications you will know, of course, that everyone can do your job. Everyone can write, is qualified to comment on, or amend, your copy and so on. As Kohler points out, the only thing saving professional writers is the fact that not everyone has time to write (which incidentally brings into question what's lacking in my life?). He argues that this trend may make professional writing akin to cleaning or driving, in which our participation is directly linked to the time we have to allocate to it.

So as marketing and communication people better start thinking about what they need to do to build a bastion against surges from the infidels. We better start thinking about our personal brands!

The commoditisation of communications really began with the internet and Microsoft's ubiquitous presence. I ran a communications and marketing consultancy for 12 years and saw the writing on the wall as the capacity to self-publish grew exponentially through the 1990s. I'm talking about self-publishing in the corporate sphere, rather than at the individual level.

In that business, return on revenue dropped from 22% to 6% over the course of the last five years - not enough to keep me interested in supporting the infrastructure necessary to turn out quality advice and services. Good people got more expensive, as clients squeezed budgets.

So, while the business was still holding the line, I closed it, selling off a few pieces of IP that had accumulated over more than a decade. Since then, I've seen marketing services companies pursue growth by acquisition to overcome the same challenges I faced. In nearly all instances, their share prices are reflections of the difficulties and the struggle to establish a clear value proposition in the eyes of clients. They cling on, desperately hoping for rescue by a private equity firm that has outlived the GFC.

This phenomenon is no different to what Kohler's on about with regard to journalism. We must all create a clear value proposition in the eyes of our customers. In my humble opinion, that proposition comes from within because, in most commoditised sectors, the only differentiator between one offer and another is the quality and uniqueness of the persona and skills set the organisation presents to the world. It is the way of doing business as well as the outcomes that define a brand, whether corporate or personal.

This means that organisations wanting to survive must be brave in their recruitment process and start creating their uniqueness from within. This often means being willing to take a bet on a team able to occasionally challenge the status quo and try something new. As marketers and communicators, our value to our employers and clients is the capacity to identify opportunities and connect in order to take advantage of them. If we fail to meet that 'brand promise' as a profession, we'll be competing with the journos for Kohler's cleaning and driving jobs.

Just gotta love Audi's commitment to brand

2010-11-19T08:47:00.000+11:00

Anyone who read this blog up to about six months ago knows the psychological distress caused to this author, a confessed Audi tragic who drove a VeeDub Passat for two years. Ultimately, I sought counselling from friendly Audi salesmen, who seem ubiquitous since Australia discovered the brand about seven or eight years ago. They immediately diagnosed the issue and resolved it by performing a brand transplant in the showroom.

But my purpose here is to mention a snippet I saw in an article in The Age last Saturday about the development of electric cars. I hadn't actually thought much about the potential hazards to blind people, or I suppose people just not paying enough attention, of cars that run almost silently. There's quite a buzz, or should I say hum, about contriving noises that allow people to hear these electric cars approaching.

I was gratified to read an Audi engineer quoted as saying that his company was actually putting a lot of time into developing an auto sound consistent with the company's long-standing brand tagline Vorsprung durch Technik, which translates into Advancement through Technology. The company is committed to fine-tuning a sound that cues associations like automotive, performance, leading-edge (hate that description, but it's too early on Friday for creativity) etc.

That's what you call alignment - when even the technical boffins in your organisation are explaining their role and goals in the organisation in terms derived from the company's brand values.

Have a good weekend...

No wonder brand is a hard internal sell

2010-11-18T07:04:00.000+11:00

Through various online sites, I have joined a number of networks that talk brand, marketing, communications, social media etc. You get the picture - living the delusion that I may learn a lot about these things by chatting to others with similar experience and interests.

In fairness, I have joined a few conversations that have been thought-provoking. For the most part though, I have merely been dismayed at the lack of consensus on what brand and marketing are. How often do you see people in these groups coming up with the questions : 'What is brand?'; 'Define brand in a single sentence.' ? For other variations, substitute the word brand with marketing. The answers are even more interesting, seldom cast light on the subject matter and leave you in despair.

The implications of this for those responsible for brand, marketing and communications are significant and career-limiting. These discussions merely serve to illustrate that brand means different things to different people and, worse, suggests to those not involved in brand that it is so ill-defined that it can be interpreted or ignored to suit pre-ordained corporate strategy. The brand community is largely failing to stake out its ground in the universe of corporate activity. In some respects, it is another variation on the theme of my earlier blog about the poor quality of brand / marketing presentations at many major conferences.

The purpose of this blog is not to add to the debate about what defines brand, but rather express my fear that while this sort of debate rages, brand will struggle to take its appropriate place at the top table of corporate strategy.

Mitsubishi's Outlander TVC - a lesson in communications

2010-11-12T09:33:00.001+11:00

I must confess, that being an old motor industry hack, I still following the marketing activities of car companies. From my seat in financial services, I guess there's a bit of longing for a sector where selling to customers was not a practice from the dark side.

From my repose on the sofa and between my feet resting on the coffee table, I caught a glimpse of a new Mitsubishi TVC last night that any communicator should take a look at. I'm not suggesting you should immediately rush out and buy an Outlander, just consider the take on removing jargon from communications.

The sales person in the advert starts by talking to the couple seated in the car in acronyms, "ABS, SRS, EBD etc." but then says, "What that means is it's safe." (or words to that effect). He then goes to the back of the car, opens the hatch and gives them a rundown of the luggage dimensions in millimetres and cubic metres, then says: "What that means is there's lots of space." He talks about the warranty and says: "What that means is you have worry-free driving." Each time he interprets for the couple, they're won over as they appreciate the customer benefits offered by the car.

The last of these is interesting. Would the legal bods in financial services allow us to use the phrase 'worry free'? If we used an expression like that in relation to insurance, there'd be a stack of objections like: How do you know you'd be worry free? Wouldn't it depend on your circumstances and how much cover you had? What about if you're worried about something else?

We'd no doubt have to put in a disclaimer saying: "We can only suggest that you might be worry free. There might be other personal and financial circumstances that create worry in your life. If you feel that your insurance cover might not ensure you're worry free, we recommend you seek personal and financial advice from fully licensed practioners, including your GP, psychologist, neurologist, financial planner, accountant and bank manager. There may be other professionals that we haven't thought of from who you should seek counselling. For a definition of 'worry free', please refer to our website, where we have a pop-up window that defines it. You may find the pop-up stressful if you haven't set your browser to allow pop-ups from our website. If this worries you, you should consider seeking advice from your 12 year old, who knows how these things operate." ?

I think you get my drift. Mitsubishi's Outlander TVC should be a training video for any aspiring communicator and even perhaps our corporate lawyers!

Superannuation investors don't care about brand - don't believe it!

2010-11-11T13:57:00.003+11:00

Just picked up on an article in today's Financial Standard, reporting that leading financial services company, Mercer, has surveyed 500 working Australians and discovered that a high proportion of members rate investment performance as their number one priority in superannuation (their pension fund), ahead of brand and choice.

As you can imagine, this revelation blew me away. Of course they rate investment performance above all else! Making money to boost your retirement savings is the name of the game isn't it?

Mercer also reported that only 6% of those surveyed thought it important that their money was managed and invested by a well-known brand. What concerned me was that this led to the conclusion that there is a disconnect between what members and the trustees of their funds want, with 'brand development' being bundled with the other peripherals of lesser concern to investors.

Rather than a disconnect between what members and trustees want, this reflects a belief on the part of the researchers that brand is simply a measure of awareness. It is not. It defines organisational belief and a behavioural model that establishes and builds relationships with customers. In other words, I believe if you asked consumers whether they thought it important to have confidence and belief in the fund (the brand) that was looking after their money, the answer would be a resounding 'yes' for the vast majority.

So whether fund members have their money with a 'big brand' (read: "high awareness"), or a smaller, lesser-known fund, they must have confidence in the fund's brand, the values that underpin it and alignment of its promise with their experiences. Yes, investment returns are right at the top of the hierarchy for most people, but isn't that just part of the brand portfolio for any decent fund?

I'm sure the level of understanding about the essence of brand varies considerably across the spectrum of funds. Fund trustees who really understand brand work on 'brand development' because they understand that achieving a perfect alignment of brand and customer values is the axis around which successful client relationships revolve.

Brand development is not a misalignment of customer and trustee priorities. In fact, building your brand with the aim of achieving alignment of customer and trustee priorities is the only thing that matters.

Bank bashing is a buy signal for investors

2010-11-08T12:23:00.001+11:00

There is an unusual dynamic to bank brands. As soon as a pollie gets up to sink the slipper into the banks, their share prices generally seem to rise as quickly as their interest rates. To turn Shadow Treasurer, Joe Hockey's words back on him, a shellacking from a pollie is, to a bank, like being slapped in the face with a wet lettuce.

You see, when banks raise interest rates, to shareholders it reflects good financial management because the action is:
a) to increase margins; or
b) to maintain margins as funding costs increase; or
c) both (although it surely would be churlish to suggest any bank would use the funding cost argument to increase margins!).

Note that I said it reflects 'good financial management'. If you subscribe to the ESG approach to evaluating company performance, financial management and profitability is but one component of good governance.

So I wondered what it meant when Westpac CEO, Gail Kelly, got up and said her bank's record profit was a 'quality result'. Westpac has been at the forefront of promoting and reporting so-called 'triple bottom line' accounting. Yet was Ms Kelly's reference to a 'quality' result a reference to outstanding performance across all ESG criteria, or just the financial component?

Although brand creates awareness, investors don't necessarily buy into it, but consumers do. That is why I think it is so easy for Joe and the boys to have a crack at banks, while their share prices increase. A consumer buying into a bank's brand believes raising interest rates is not contributing to, or even considering, the broader social good, let alone their own. An investor in the bank generally thinks differently.

What is it with the French and the guillotine?

2010-11-06T07:10:00.000+11:00

I was fascinated during a telecast of Melbourne's Spring Racing Carnival to see Mumm's brand ambassador demonstrating how to behead a bottle of French champagne with a sabre. It's no wonder they struggled at Waterloo - half the army directing their sabres at popping corks rather than rattling them at the advancing Brits and Prussians.

The trick for an effective champagne beheading seems to be to slide the leading edge of the blade up the neck of the bottle at the right velocity to neatly severe the bottle's neck where the wire binding nestles under the lip. I'm convinced that the French invented the guillotine to practice this, removing undesirables while saving money on expensive bottles of champagne.

This brings me to the question of what Moet's brand positioning is. Not being a champers connoissuer, I always thought of Moet as a 'premium' brand, albeit produced on massive scale by one of France's largest champagne producers. But over the past few weeks, the price has been down around the $45 a bottle mark. It's still dearer than a lot of the Aussie produced stuff, but is certainly not at the levels of some of its direct competitors. Perhaps they're passing on the full benefits of the rampant Australian Dollar - delivering value as well as prestige to our dedicated racegoers?

I suppose the question is - "who cares"? Still looks very acceptable to serve the guests, who generally seem to rate it higher than even some of the better Aussie versions. Me? Once it has bubbles in it, I can't really pick the difference. Give me a deep red sparkling Shiraz or Burgundy any day! Cya later... I'm off to Flemington for the last day of the Carnival!

On Target for Stella sales

2010-10-27T10:09:00.001+11:00

Stella McCartney appears to be nearly as popular as her old man - if Australia's leading shopping show, A Current Affair, is any guide. Consumers are just busting their buns to batter down Target's doors and grab a fashion 'name' at a bargain price.

The Stella McCartney strategy of delivering style at an affordable price through a suburban department store chain has been an outstanding success. The reason - exclusivity for Target, street smarts by Stella Mac and her marketing / distribution team. Don't be too proud to sell alongside 6-packs of undies and socks and the kids' toy section. That's where Mums go all the time - lots of eyeballs fine-tuned for style at a discount - and a personal treat.

Compare this story with the Myer and David Jones scenarios, where leading brands battle cheek by jowl for prominence and space - and pay a premium price for the privilege. At the retail level, both David Jones and Myer have invested substantially in upgrading and updating the real estate in which these battles take place. For them store experience is a big marketing focus.

But all Target has to do is do a bit of publicity work about Stella Mac's new range being in the store. No expensive fitouts - just more racks of cloths. And Target's in the 'burbs. 'I'll drop in when I go for coffee.' I expect we'll see lots of Stella McCartney, or at least her products, over the next few weeks as Melbourne's Spring Racing Carnival hits top gear.

Oh. By the way. Did I mention anything about nice timing, Stella?

Confusing and impenetrable - call in Bear Grylls!

2010-10-26T12:31:00.000+11:00

Do you even watch Man v. Wild on SBS? Our hero with the titanium-lined digestive tract, Bear Grylls, parachutes into some remote, hostile location and then finds his way through and out. I've never seen him fail to overcome the odds.

It seems people who have superannuation accounts identify with this show. According to new Government Super Supremo, Bill Shorten, just-released Australian Treasury research shows consumers face a superannuation landscape that is similarly confusing, complex and impenetrable.

That's why Bill's all in favour of MySuper, a much simpler landscape where superfluous investment options, insurance choices and other paraphenalia requiring consumer decisions are bulldozed to allow a clear view to the retirement horizon. The theory is that people will be able to more easily get their bearings.

MySuper - would Bear Grylls approve of it? No investment swamp lands to wade through, no barbed fee structures to hack through, no insurance wilderness to traverse. No need to climb to the high ground of financial advice to get his bearings. An armchair ride to retirement nirvana. Right?

Wrong! People will be disengaged and have no more idea under MySuper of how they're tracking than they do now. They will have no better idea of whether their lifelong investment is going to deliver their retirement lifestyle objectives. Knowing this requires engagement, whether in MySuper or any other investment product.

In Man v. Wild, our hero always ends up discovering a clear path back to civilisation. But the important thing is that, to survive and thrive, to find the path home, Bear Grylls fully engages with his landscape and the challenges it throws up. Through engagement, guidance from his survival training and expert advice, he makes it. Disengagement would be fatal. To varying degrees, this is true of most things in life.

Service with a sale

2010-10-22T17:03:00.000+11:00

Old car dealers never die, they just see opportunities. My wife bought a Lexus a few months back. Nice unit with fairly attractive lines - that is until an almost octogenarian truck driver running errands for his son's business decided to hook the rear boot lid of my wife's parked car under his trailer and drag the hapless Lexus into the car parked in front of it. 13 big ones worth of damage!

As the car was new, the boss took it down to the Lexus dealer to have them double-check that there was no underlying damage that the panel beater might miss. Nope. All good. Just make sure the four points align and she'll be right. Their much-relieved customer drove off in her mutated Lexus until ...

Yep. Today the car dealer was back with a bit of extra service advice. For only $16,000 she can trade up from her current new car to an even more current new car ("2011 model" - where are the compliance people on the car industry?). The opportunity to capitalise on the customer's disappointment at having a shattered new car was not lost on this guy!

I'm working through this weekend, afraid to go home in case she's accepted the deal. Talk about service with a sale!

Twitter failures

2010-10-22T10:21:00.000+11:00

I searched 'superannuation' in Twitter the other day. It's a sure-fire way of discovering a whole flotilla of dudes that just don't get it. The biggest culprits are those tweeting and retweeting (their own tweets) promoting self-managed superannuation funds (SMSFs) or DIY super opportunities.

The first page of the search is just full of them. Am I deluded, out of the loop or retarded when it comes to how social networking is supposed to work? I thought it was supposed to be all about dialogue, or at least trying to promote dialogue with other twitterers.

Perhaps we need to go back @DIY super or @SMSF types and tell 'em it just ain't working for us (or them!). Perhaps a conversation at @DIYtwitter might be a good dialogue to open up. But right now, anyone looking for useful information on super on Twitter would be best to find other search terms than the logical 'superannuation', or at least consider filtering to exclude all references to 'DIY' or 'self' in the search.

Why brand presentations don't work with the beancounters

2010-10-21T20:27:00.000+11:00

I am becoming an absolute conference junkie. At least that's the way it feels at present, having attended about three in two months. Another year to the next one of any interest though, so I'm off the hook for now. The great thing is that they're a rich source of raw material for blogs.

At a recent conference, I saw a few brand / marketing bods presenting their thoughts on, well - branding and marketing. And from this experience, I have to ask one thing: Why do brand / marketing presentations always include 'illustrative' TV ads feeding from YouTube and other sources? The old Apple 1984 advert, a quirky European car ad and perhaps a 'zany' financial services advert from a nation noted for its weird sense of humour.

There's something awfully wrong, not to mention tedious, about all these presentations. First, they promote the notion that TV is still the primary driver of brand awareness. Yes, it's still a powerful presence, but TV does not define brand - just ask Google. Secondly, they never talk about important things that 'sell' the importance of brand to the collections of lawyers, accountants and MBAs that adorn corporate boards. Where is the information about setting up brand metrics for your organisation, about measurement, about translation of brand values into dollar value?

Unfortunately, when we go to financial services conferences, well attended by the aforesaid business technicians, these presentations merely reinforce the view that the brand and marketing dudes have no concept of improving the bottom line. You can see and hear the cranial cogs turning: "Nice ads. Bet they cost a bomb. Hope there's none of our marketing troop here picking up crazy ideas about funding similar ventures."

Yep. I really disappointed with brand presentations that reinforce the stereotype image of the marketing team. They contribute nothing to promote marketing and, more particularly, brand specialists to company boards. They do even less to promote marketing as an investment and not a cost.

Consumer advice from.... the land of the zloty?

2010-10-07T15:24:00.000+11:00

My first clue that I was reading tech product reviews on a site outside of the US was when I read words along the line - 'when the difference in price is something like 1,500 Polish Zloty". At first, not having heard of zlotys before, I thought it was a wind up. That was until I ran across the zloty again on another page and more thoroughly investigated the website.

Sure enough, I was reading sophisticated camera lens reviews on a Polish website, http://www.lenstip.com/. If you're in the market for a camera lens, check it out. Unlike a number of the others on this subject that I have visited, this one is full of lab test information on optical and mechanical performance, as well as commentary on performance in the field.

So, after buying a new camera body in Singapore en route from Thailand, I am sourcing information from a Polish website on the performance of products made in the USA, Malaysia and China. To round off this global shopping experience, I am a consumer based in Australia! And if I buy off ebay, then I could well source the purchase in Hong Kong or Taiwan (then again, I probably won't!).

Apart from the obvious implications for retailers, this experience raises an interesting point about how so-called international warranty undertakings have fallen behind borderless consumerism. Given that we consumers do shop globally, when are the 'big brand' manufacturers going to offer truly international warranty on their products? I went to register my camera purchase on the manufacturer's website in Australia and couldn't because I'd bought in Singapore. When I tried to register on the Singapore site, it wouldn't let me because I wasn't a resident of Singapore.

What a nonsense this is. I bought exactly the same product, same specification and, I believe, one substantially priced the same, if you ignore taxes and duties, as I would have done in Australia. So what makes warranties less valid on a product across national boundaries?

If we're happy to distibute globally, then we should be able to offer appropriate customer protection globally, despite the considerable variations in consumer protection legislation between nations, or some bean counter's neat international accounting structure.

If we could be fearless about the validity of warranties, then we could all buy genuine brands over the web or on our travels confident about the integrity of product and service that go with the brand.

Let's promote the NDS - Net Detractor Score!

2010-10-04T17:22:00.003+11:00

Call me just one of those crazy financial services guys if you like, but I think we need to remove the parentheses around the Net Promoter Score (NPS), reflecting a negative, and rename it the Net Detractor Score, NDS, so we can all score a positive.

What prompted this momentary lapse of reason was that I revisited a financial services industry survey the other day which showed none of the surveyed organisations scored a positive NPS. I'm sure that's why the research bods servicing this sector go out of their way to make us feel better about ourselves - as well as justifying more expansive research methodologies. They tell us the NPS is not much of an indicator in financial services because people want to retain long-standing friendships by not recommending anyone put their lifelong savings into XYZ Investment Manager.

The other thing that prompted this blog was a mailed invitation from the Fund Executives Association Limited to attend a Net Promoter Score workshop later this month, where several bods will evangelise about how using NPS had transformed their businesses. Only one of the facilitators is from the financial services sector and none from funds management or superannuation.

Chief convenor of the meeting is a marketer and academic for whom I have enormous respect, Prof. Mark Ritson, from the Melbourne Business School. Mark is a passionate advocate of NPS, so I fear I'd be a luddite in the land of the fairies should I attend this gig.

My problem is that in the funds management and/or superannuation business, just about everyone is on the nose since the GFC. This isn't helped by a not-for-profit sector that basically tells everyone that financial advisors who receive commissions are ripping them off and investment markets that refuse to stop bouncing around. GFC + Outrageous Fees + Uncertainty does not equal passionate consumer advocacy for the sector!

I've heard friends and relatives saying such and such a company lost their money during the GFC. How does your average 20-something call centre dude convert someone with that perception into an evangelist? It takes more than soothing words, nice phone manner and an attractive website.

Most NPS scores that I've seen for everything from banks to investment funds are languishing in the minus 20 to minus 60 zone. These scores wouldn't have customers queuing at the counter even if you were selling ice cream cones in Noosa on a hot day. Yet financial services businesses seem to live with these scores year over year.

I am in bed with the research bods at the moment. I think the NPS is an interesting, but fairly useless measure in financial services, unless considered in relative terms.

But, as always, I'm open minded about these sorts of issues. So I'd better register for the FEAL gig I guess because, right now, I'm not improving the NPS for NPS.

The IP cops fail the test in Thailand

2010-10-01T10:48:00.000+10:00

As promised, I return from a brief sojourn to Thailand to report on the state of play with regard to intellectual property theft - more simply described in layman's terms as the counterfeit watch business. I am pleased to report that this trade is thriving in Thailand, a veritable nightmare to the brand police at LVMH and other notable designer goods companies.

It's clear that all attempts to stamp out patent and intellectual property infringements have virtually been abandoned in Thailand and, most likely, most other developing countries in which this is happening. The only token response that I witnessed was a sign at the check-in desk at Phuket Airport saying that France and Italy could impose severe penalties on people found carrying fake designer goods into their countries. It was notable at the time I joined the queue that none of the international departures from Phuket were heading to either of those destinations!

The most interesting aspect of all this is that, at point of sale, shop proprietors take great pride in informing you that you're checking out fake gear. In fact, there is a degree of incredulity that you would consider buying the real thing, when you can get the fake for a fraction of the price.

But if I can offer any encouragement to the designer brands out there, my close inspection of many goods (none of which I bought!) indicated that the quality of fit and finish is nowhere near that of the real thing. I won't go into why I was looking at handbags - suffice to say it is simply inevitable if you're travelling with your household's female purchasing officer - but a number were already losing paint around the piping and glued parts had come adrift.

Then again, who cares, when you can buy ten and use each once before discarding it? In fact, these are arguably the perfect female accessory. You need never be seen carrying the same bag twice! And hey - if you're travelling to Italy or France and things get a bit dodgy in customs, you only lose about twenty bucks when you hastily discard the 'Louis Vuitton' purse into the nearest trash can.

Well, I'm just about out of time for writing this article - at least I think I am. The $20 Rolex has just died. I hope the Cartier's still working at home! It's a fair bet that, by the end of next week, I should be back to wearing the genuine Ebel purchased in Australia!

Dateless Jesinta Campbell - A sign we really are feeling miserable!

2010-09-16T18:51:00.002+10:00

There were two unrelated articles in Melbourne's Herald-Sun this morning that underscored the veracity of the other. Australia's Miss Congeniality winner in the 2010 Miss Universe pageant, Jesinta Campbell, can't get a date with a footballer or similar to go to the world's most boring televised ritual, the AFL's Brownlow Medal.

The other article was commentary from one of the nation's leading social demographers and researchers, Bernard Salt, on a recent Australian Government survey that found we're all quite anxious and dissatisfied, despite being wealthier than we've ever been.

When a hot-looking Jesinta can't get a date, there are possibly only two conclusions:

Our aspirations and taste for quality 'brands' are excessively high. What's a woman supposed to look like to get a date, if Jesinta isn't good enough? From what I've seen, she can even hold a decent conversation!
We've completely lost our self-confidence and our sense of adventure, even our sexuality, has been suppressed by an overwhelming fear of rejection!

As Bernard pointed out, there has been an amazing confluence of factors that have contributed to record wealth - a level undreamed of by the children of the Depression and WWII eras. But instead of celebrating our good fortune, we are anxious about house affordability, growing urban violence and the state of the environment. Paradoxically, all these anxieties are, in some measure, a by-product of our increased wealth.

So what is the solution? Well, if you're still feeling positive about the state of the nation and your sense of self, there's still time. Don a footy guernsey, grab a Sherrin and impress Jesinta. I know sitting through the Brownlow is a real downer, but would you notice?

Off to the land of affordable cachet

2010-09-15T23:46:00.000+10:00

Off to Thailand in a couple of days. A beautiful country without doubt and one in which you can purchase the best of European design at a fraction of the cost. I am certain to see more 'Rolex', 'Omega', 'Louis Vuitton' and other leading brands per metre than almost anywhere else I can think of.

I was with a bunch of people the other week discussing the subject of brand piracy or, more specifically, fake watches. The general consensus was why buy the real thing when you can enjoy the same cachet for a few bucks? And, functionally, the fake products do pretty much the same.

Prestige brands are battling copyright and intellectual property piracy across the world and it's a while since I took a look at the losing battle they're fighting in countries like Thailand. I will return with a summary and, perhaps, a suite of deluxe accessories, in about a fortnight. At least the cheap stuff keeps us under the $400 customs limit!

I suspect the Hemline Index is flawed, but has merit

2010-09-08T14:37:00.002+10:00

Saw an off-the-wall article in one of the newspapers today (sorry I looked for it, but couldn't find it, so cannot credit the publication) about using women's hemlines as a guide to the health of the economy. Some bod has taken the trouble to search through back copies of fashion magazines dating back to the pre-1930s Depression years to test the theory that, as the economy declines, so hemlines get longer.

This outstanding test of perserverence and hemline gazing revealed that if you invest on the basis of the Hemline Index as a measure of economic trends, then you're probably going to be buying or selling at the opposite ends of the cycle to what you should be or, more likely, about half way through the next cycle.

You see, the researcher discovered that adjustments to hemlines actually lagged the economy by three to four years - the lead time in fashion being about that time. So a financially stretched version of Armani would sew the seeds of repression in time for a garment to blossom about half way through the next economic upswing.

Of course, I believe this research is fatally flawed because, like any other manufacturing endeavour, the lead time to market for fashion has been compressed since the Depression years, so the lag may only be about six months. But that is my instinct talking, rather than capacity to provide you with any tangible data on this.

In any event, the Hemline Index is just one of many indices with flaws. But as a purveyor of all things economic, I have to say studying the Hemline Index just after the economy has boomed sure beats the hell out of looking at the VIX or the Baltic Dry Shipping Index!

Brand values get JG over the line

2010-09-07T18:54:00.000+10:00

So Julia got over the line and avoided the potential of becoming the first Australian female prime minister never to have won an election. I have to say that, during the post-election process, there appears to have been more of the 'real' Julia than during the campaign itself. Why do I say this?

Because, according to the two independents who finally got her there, it was the core Labor (and Julia!) strengths of health, education and, more recently, national broadband access that won the day. If these are truly the things on which the independents made their decisions, then it underscores that being true to brand, in this instance at least, reaped its rewards.

Lego platforms for your corporate communications

2010-09-01T19:47:00.000+10:00

Hey, what kid didn't play with Lego blocks? Lego made anything possible - at least it does these days. I remember getting a Lego set that included a set of wheels and I thought it was fantastic. Now, there are all kinds of bits - people, animals, bendy bits and so on that make even more possible. I'm so jealous I want to talk to a rebirthing consultant (remember that crazy '80s fad?), so that I can start with Lego all over again.

Communications platforms are like Lego these days. They're so bloody good that you can mix and match print, audiovisual, interactive and a host of other channels at minimal cost. Okay, I can hear you saying: "That's typical of the boomer generation - anything below a millions bucks is 'minimal cost'".

Well, surprise, surprise! You're absolutely wrong. As the former owner of a small business, there'd be no marketing communications bloke more conscious of making a dollar stretch to deliver the best possible outcomes. When I say minimal cost, I'm down in the tens of thousands for content-rich, single-touch editing platforms that ensure technology-enabled brand consistency, compliance and reduced cost.

In the financial services sphere, communications platforms are not optional. They're mandatory. In a regulated environment, there is a substantial chunk of communications activity that is compliance and process driven. There's nothing fancy about it. Even within more creative campaigns, there is a hard core of disclaimers and other information that is non-negotiable. My point is: Who wants to spend time and money on process, when a sound technology platform can empower you to allocate your 'life-support' level budget to the real tasks of building customer relationships and new business?

This was the point I made to my mate, Nige, who runs a boutique agency called Coolwise Creative in Melbourne, as I convinced him over a series of very pleasant lunches to invest over 100 big ones on building a platform that, at face value, would reduce his billings to me.

The point I made was that building this platform would not reduce my spend, but improve my spend. And over the past three years, that's proved to be the point. Less spend on process and more on creative.

Most recently though, I have been evaluating delivery platforms to enable an ever-growing emphasis on audiovisual, interactive communications and, to my pleasant surprise, I've found quite a few on offer. Even big international operations like Thomson Reuters offer solutions at price points within reach of moderately sized enterprises. I can deliver a series of engaging communications online that cost less than producing and distributing a single newsletter to customers.

I remember getting quoted quarter of a million dollars for production of a corporate video in the '80s(ROFL!). For that, I can now deliver something like 25 webcasts, or 40 online TV interviews, or a plethora of targeted email communications. Okay, the '80s quote was over the top (I've never forgotten it), but drop the quote by 75% and the equation's still pretty attractive.

What's more, I can track the success of each communication. Total accountability. What Board, CEO or CFO would not love it? Of course, I know from my own research, that there's a significant proportion of people who prefer traditional snail mail communications. But there are new generations of consumers who probably don't even open their mail. These are the consumers of the future.

New platforms for digital production and delivery put smart communications strategies within easy reach. If you're not reaching out and grabbing them, you're just not in the game. So ignore the luddites that surround you and make your move. This space is the future, just make sure you evaluate and invest in a great launching pad before you build the spaceship.

Yikes! I qualify for pensioner insurance!

2010-08-31T19:49:00.000+10:00

There's lots of things that give away the fact that you're not quite as young as you used to be, despite what your brain fools you into believing. Even avoiding mirrors doesn't help when brands you never previously associated with suddenly identify you as 'one of their demographic'.

I was hit between the eyes with this when my wife started telling me about quotes she had obtained on car insurance from APIA (Australian Pensioners Insurance Agency). "That's great," I said, before realising she was actually obtaining a quote on my car.

For those not in the know, APIA (I prefer the acronym because of the non-reference to 'pensioner') is an insurance company that offers cover only to people over 50. I thought the small print might get me off the hook, as they only cover people who are not working full time - the theory being if you're home knitting or repairing your false teeth, you're less likely to have a car accident or have your home burgled. But alas, you can get cover if your partner is not working full time - I qualify again!

I desperately thought I could put them off by demonstrating that I had just bought a car that belied by age - sports seats, sports suspension, big diesel motor, xenon lights and even a multimedia interface for my iPod. Sadly, this only confirmed the likely onset of mid-life crisis.

I thought of other age-proofing evidence I might throw at them to push me into the exclusion zone - gym membership, cycling, listening to Green Day, knowing what LOL meant in chat rooms and I even boring people with my blog. But to APIA, all these things just smack of an older dude still vainly trying to be cool.

There is one answer - divorce. It's the only way I can see my way clear to disqualifying myself from pensionerhood, at least according to APIA's criteria. If I don't have a partner who is not working full time and I remain working full time, I'm off the hook. But APIA are smart. They know the premium I'll pay for divorce is much higher than anything they plan to charge me.

There's only one saving grace in all this - I don't yet qualify for government seniors concessions. I love the idea of pushing the retirement age out to 67. It means the government won't identify me as 'one of their demographic' any time soon.

I don't need smart marketers and ever-vigilant CRM systems to mark me as senior. I'll know when I've met that definition - dribbling will apply to my state of health rather than my limited soccer skills. That's my yardstick but, in the meantime, I'll keep fooling myself while taking full advantage of any discounts that seniority might deliver.

The social media challenge for regulators

2010-08-28T15:30:00.005+10:00

I heard this week, probably some time after everyone else, that the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) has released a discussion paper on guidelines that could apply to the use of social media by the financial services sector. I have to say a 'discussion paper' on social media sounds like something of a paradox. Why not just start up the discussion on a Facebook page (yep. ASIC is on FB) or have a crack at opening up discussion on Twitter? It might cast a light on some of the challenges we face!

I have to ask is there any point to a discussion paper on social media? Isn't this a bit piecemeal? As communications strategists, we don't consider social media in isolation, but part of a multi-channel, organic whole. So why would a regulator not consider a review of the entire disclosure regime with social media included as an integrated component?

To consider it alone is like the discussion that led to Product Disclosure Statements. Why wasn't incorporation by reference to website information integrated into the PDS discussion in the first place, rather than having PDSs considered as a stand-alone communication? Let's face it, the Financial Services Reform Act became effective from 10 March 2004 (who thought of that date), by which time we all had websites.

There's no doubt that the industry needs guidelines on social media's fit into the regulatory matrix. The disclosure requirements for the financial services sector are outdated by virtue of being geared to print media and, to some degree, traditional websites. Try putting full disclaimer into 140 characters on Twitter! What about throwing a few extra lines of disclaimer in an SMS? Users will not tolerate it.

The biggest challenge for social media integration is not disclosure, but engagement in two-way conversations. What are the rules around archiving? Is there any need to archive? How can social media conversations be captured and interfaced with more traditional communications channels such as call centres? Imagine a call centre employee picking up a call from a customer who claims to have just been 'speaking' with someone from your organisation on Twitter. What evidence does that operator have of promises made, advice given and so on?

These are questions that must be answered before social media can be fully integrated into wider communications and engagement strategies. Until then, we've only got a toe in the edge of the pond. One-way, outbound conversations will not deliver desired outcomes in the social media space.

However, I believe that any brand-conscious business should not be relying on the regulators to answer these questions. It is in the best interest of effective and rewarding customer relations that organisations answer these challenges. As usual regulation is only required to look after the interests of consumers potentially exposed to unscrupulous operators.

Will consideration of appropriate social media regulations provide new perspectives on those we already have for more traditional channels and produce overall improvement in communications? I fear that by considering social media as yet another stand-alone channel, we could just add an overlay of unique regulations or amendments that will further complicate an already muddy customer interface. It would be much better to launch a more holistic discussion of communications channels.

Brand no longer a marketing function

2010-08-28T13:05:00.001+10:00

I attended the annual Rainmaker Marketing Symposium this week, a talkfest for marketing and investment types from the Aussie financial services sector. One presentation from Julie Bennett, Principal of 64 Media, got me thinking about where brand rightfully sits within organisations now. Julie ran through her version of the differences between marketing and PR functions within organisations.

This is a oft-regurgitated discussion and Julie's list of responsibilities were interesting. I actually challenge the value of the term 'PR' these days. It has unfortunately been defamed too often through association with hucksters, frauds and spin to have any credibility. But that's a discussion for another day. Julie's list, while not specifically identifying brand within the PR portfolio, certainly included the key ingredients of brand - reputation and corporate citizenship, stakeholder relations and so on.

Admittedly, Julie is from the PR industry so this could perhaps be seen as a lunge to secure the territory. After all, in terms of influence within progressive corporations, steering brand trumps marketing and/or communications any day. Not belittling these activities at all, but strategy flows from brand, not vice versa.

Not everyone will agree with this assertion of course. Financial, legal, compliance, investment and a host of other professionals and executives will not see their activities as subordinate to brand. But the reality is that all other activities are, by definition, subordinate to the organisational values and ethos - whether this is formally recognised and expressed or not. Brand is the expression within and projection into the community of underlying organisational values.

Those organisations that understand this will not make any governance, financial, ethical, product or service decision without evaluating how it aligns with brand. Brand is a focal point for everything an organisation stands for.

How many organisations lose customers because their actions are not authentic - truly aligned with the values they communicate to community? Even the mighty Apple brand lost its way for a time when it stepped back from servicing and appealing to the creative industries to pursue the mainstream corporate market with beige boxes built to a price.

When Steve Jobs took his sabbatical, executives failed to realise that its traditional market was a rich source of early adopters and trend setters. The company quickly enjoyed a resurgence when it returned to its core traditions of breaking new ground with slick, appealing design and market-leading user interfaces.

Apple doesn't have customers, it has a community that belongs to it. Nokia, Blackberry and others will never crack the Apple customer base in any serious way, because it's not about price, distribution or even features. It's about Apple.

And that's what Julie's presentation this week highlighted. The marketing list did not include relationship and community development. The communications function did. Therefore, in my view, marketing cannot own brand. It is too one-dimensional, too sales-oriented. Brand is not about making a sale. That is merely a single component. From a brand perspective, the first sale is merely the first customer experience of an organisation.

From there, through on-going interaction, brand is the delivery of a series of consistent, positive experiences through the life of the customer. The outcome of that is favourable customer pre-disposition for repeat sales. Marketing merely leverages that pre-disposition.

Political campaigns - branding on steroids?

2010-08-20T11:05:00.000+10:00

I promise this will be my last entry on the Aussie election campaign. But there is a strange mesh between what I've been observing and what someone said to me the other week about merging with another organisation.

He said that achieving stakeholder buy-in to a merger, and the launch of a new brand, requires running a campaign - more akin to a political campaign than an advertising campaign. Great time to suggest this don't you think? I almost wanted to rush home and take notes as Tony and Julia traded blows - or at least their campaign teams did.

But I resisted the temptation. As I remarked the other week, with a merger planned for completion in about two years, it would be hard to 'maintain the rage', to quote a line from a bygone political campaign, for such an extended period. Stakeholders Australia-wide would drink to that notion as the electronic media blackout on election advertising descended the other night.

Every election we choose from two brands (with due respect to the Greens and Bob Brown, who I can predict with certainty won't be prime minister on Sunday). The campaigns promoting them are branding on steroids. They're brands muscling up to each other, with messages often trying to encourage us to forget brand heritage as we look to the future.

What does this leave us with? Will we actually buy into one of these brands, or are we comparing two commoditised products from which we will ultimately select the one that will cost us less? How often could you get away in the commercial world, with a brand strategy based on debunking competitors?

This is what makes political campaigns fascinating from a brand perspective and that's why I disagree that running a political campaign to secure stakeholder buy-in for a company merger is not quite right. Selling a merger will require close attention to identifying and promoting positive attributes. I haven't seen much evidence of this in the 2010 election campaign.

Rules for you don't apply to me

2010-08-19T12:23:00.001+10:00

I'm already having withdrawal symptoms. No more election adverts as the blackout descends upon us. There's peace in our TV time. The war between 'phony Tony' and 'real Julia' is silent. No need for the NBN now, as we don't have to rush images of the two protagonists quickly around Australia with gigabit efficiency.

We can now sit and ponder, as the battle moves to the editorial pages and - God forbid! - our local shopping centre, did anyone think that Tony would have been on a winner if he'd promised to "Stop the adverts!"? Promise to stop meddling with Julia's hair which, according to Liberal Party advertising images, remains unmoved as here eyes and head swivel underneath it. And move to prevent any further images of his own, sepia, wild-eyed stare in Labor's adverts.

And what about banning the designer-daubed construction worker in Labor's ads, who uses the boss's time to promote the employment-saving benefits of the government stimulus package? I wondered whether the building site behind him was one of those sites where a house burned down due to dodgy insulation. "You've lost my vote Mr Abbott." he proclaims, raising the question as whether Neilsen or one of the other pollsters remembered to include this negative for the Libs into their latest figures.

And in the blue corner, the Libs counter with footage of a train wreck from the steam era - a methaphor for Labor's poor economic management, or am I thick and missing the point? Don't be surprised if this is recycled in a few months' time by the Victorian Libs in their campaign about the plight of public transport.

You see, the withdrawal symptoms are evident. I actually remember all this stuff and even think about it when I'm officially blacked out. Why do I remember it? Because it's so laughable. I guess humour is emotional engagement of a kind, the thing all of us who promote brands strive for.

Perhaps in financial services, we should use train wrecks as metaphors for the state of your finances post-GFC, or images of rebuilding to represent the scramble to recoup your retirement savings in the later years of your working life. Of course, we'd have to include a lengthy disclaimer along the lines of "this image may or may not reflect the state of your personal finances".

It's amazing what you can get away with in some spheres of marketing communications and not others. But perhaps not so when you realise that politicians set the rules for marketing and disclosure, with one key exemption - themselves!

Julia v. Tony - the battle for authenticity

2010-08-17T22:59:00.000+10:00

Have you noticed anything different about the "real Julia"? Since she declared a fortnight ago that the authentic "Julia" brand would be unleashed, I've hardly noticed any difference. She gets out a bit more, tossing coins to start footy games, chatting with truck drivers, cuddling babies - it's just 'so Julia', the hard-edged industrial lawyer and political apparatchik.

Anyone who knows anything about branding would know that it would have been much better for her to morph without making the formal acknowledgement that she'd been faking it for several weeks - a concept, by the way, that I don't think I should discuss with my young daughter!

Recognition of authenticity is earned not declared. It's Branding 101 stuff and not comprehending this just reflects inexperience that must pervade the advisory ranks of the Labor Party. As soon as you have to design an "authentic" label your brand's on the road to ruin.

As for brand Tony, we've seen no declaration of where or when the "real Tony" might have started or finished. The Labor heavies quickly dropped the quip "phony Tony", famously the result of the Kerry O'Brien 'gospel truth' interview. That might have been because they were suddenly about to acknowledge a fair level of phonyness in their own ranks.

I tend to believe that, loath him or love him, Tony Abbott is pretty true to brand, even though he seems to have suddenly become really focused on fishing and learning the fine arts of filleting (is this a metaphor for the disposal of Malcolm Turnbull by Nick Minchin and his troops?). Whoops ... sorry, there's no leadership coups in the Liberal Party!

I mean, who could possibly create, or even seek to create, a brand like Tony - a love child of Catholicism and Howard Conservatism? A progeny who would send Moses home if his basket inadvertantly washed up on Australia's northern shores, but only after consulting with Pharoah. A man who wants to stop boats, stop the NBN, stop debt, stop just about everything. And he means it.

I know Tony's authentic because he declares he 'is not Bill Gates' when he talks about his plan to short-change us on broadband. He's dead right. Bill Gates has vision that Tony will never have, despite the compromised software his company foists on us.

So we have authenticity (perhaps) versus self-declared authenticity. Like many Aussies, I find myself not convinced about either brand. But I'm not going to adopt the Mark Latham 'blank paper' strategy. I'll head off to the ballot box, complete the sheet of paper and make a choice. I can always return the goods to the store in three years time if the elected leader doesn't live up to the brand promise - authentic or otherwise.

Is understanding customer expectations like reading alphabet soup?

2010-08-17T10:56:00.000+10:00

Just completed an annual round of customer satisfaction research. What does it tell me? Pretty much what every piece of research about the superannuation industry is saying right now - people have lost faith as investment returns have taken a battering and superannuation administration and communications platforms fail to live up to 21st Century expectations.

You see, the bods who built the administration platforms 30 years ago are still influential in driving customer satisfaction downwards. They were platforms built when the world was a quieter place and customers weren't so vocal, or networked. They were built when you defined customers as numbers and transaction histories rather than people. Their legacy still lives on.

Overall satisfaction with communications in our survey has hardly moved for over three years, yet the supposed underlying drivers of satisfaction in this area have improved immensely. I might say with some pride that the underlying improvements are because we actually act on our customer research - re-prioritising and fine-tuning the points of customer pleasure and pain.

The question is: if the underlying drivers have improved by over 50% in some instances over two years, why has overall satisfaction not commensurately improved? In fact, there is almost no customer touchpoint, except printed newsletters, that have not improved their scores over the period. Is finding the solution like reading alphabet soup, or is there an obvious explanation?

Although not obvious, I think the answer lies in the relevance and customisation of communications. Superannuation fund customers want stuff that makes sense to them. So reporting the investment returns for each investment option every month is 'nice to see', but largely 'irrelevant to me'. When you have a big chunk of the population that has no notion of how to calculate a percentage, publishing what we do fails to communicate. Customers want to receive communications that do the calculations for them. 'If I am invested in investment options X, Y and Z, translate those monthly returns into the actual dollars I have made after tax, fees and other costs have been taken out'. They don't just want to see their account balance, they want a report on how much they made. After all, that's what investment's all about isn't it?

The other factor is timing. The old quarterly newsletter cycle is bunk. It's useless. When you need to say something, it's usually not in sync with the regular cycle and when you have a newsletter to publish, there's generally nothing to say other than issue more trite reminders about how it's good for you to invest or save more.

No period highlighted this more than the GFC, which tossed investment markets and investor confidence around mercilessly - and is still shaking out in the form of market volatility. When people are losing money, or think they are losing more than they should, they're hypersensitive to the relevance and timeliness of information and they're thirsty for it. They want to log into the website and see, if necessary, a daily summary of their total position in dollar terms, with all their accounts displayed on a single screen and how much they made - or lost.

And this is where the industry's technology platforms are failing investors. Almost with exception, they deliver this information, but not in a consolidated and interpretive form that makes sense to customers, who are often anxious and apprehensive, but far from knowledgeable.

Customers expect and need personalised information. The want dashboards they can configure online to present information in the way they prefer or understand it, the convenience of access via their preferred mobile device, and printed statements that are unencumbered by reams of disclaimers and notes that create suspicion about 'the small type' rather than clarity.

Yes. I know exactly why improvements in touch point scores does not result in an improvement in overall communications score. We're given credit for the quality of our existing touch points, but many customer expectations are forging ahead - demanding more 'on demand' and information formatted how they want it on the media they choose.

We've got a long way to go...

Choosing a research partner

2010-08-14T09:23:00.001+10:00

I've been going through the process with colleagues of considering alternative research partners to undertake the critical task of researching the underlying values of two organisations on the road to merger. Sensibly, over the course of the past fortnight, we have melded the brand and communications research with the human resource group's activities to ensure we get the best heads around understanding corporate cultures.

The process has encouraged me to revisit my thinking around the selection of brand partners, given extra poignancy by the fact that the objective is to select partners capable of satisfying the criteria of two quite cultural distinct organisations.

For the most part, the best research companies offer similar technical capabilities, but what emerges during presentations are quite different perspectives and individual styles. We have found criteria bubbling to the surface that have less to do with the technical capabilities of potential providers, but their personalities.

We are considering characteristics such as the likely performance of key individuals in the prospective organisations when presenting to two boards. And a key aspect of this is depth of experience outside of research - the ability to translate data into strategic recommendation.

We left the initial invitation to present credentials quite open to provide potential research partners to demonstrate insight and experience beyond our own. There was no point, in my view, in setting up a tight framework that may constrain original thinking and perspectives.

We have wrapped up presentations now and are on the road to locking in a decision. I suspect that I know the outcome. It will be the company and individuals that have the best prospect of, not only providing good data, but also the capacity to help us build a brand story that will ensure stakeholder buy-in from board to call centre levels.

In the end, human endeavour is all about dreams, stories and journeys. And brands personify companies. All we need is for the data to unearth a story.

Broadband isn't a luxury - it's a basic service

2010-08-11T12:41:00.001+10:00

Any communicator or market worth their salt should be voting for the best and fastest broadband option available. It's a basic tool of the trade - with bandwidth and speed to the maximum number of people for the maximum amount of time unleashing enormous opportunities to communicators and consumers alike.

From a business perspective, it can deliver a competitive edge internationally, not just in Australia. There are already some communications and marketing businesses taking advantage of time zone differences to produce and finesse content here ready for the first breakfast meeting overseas later that day (think about it!).

And effective competition in our business is not just about superior ideas and creative, it's about being able to deliver those ideas - many of them in the form of large audiovisual or even print-ready files - to customers when they want them.

As we think about the relative merits in the imminent Australian Federal Election of Labor's $43 billion fibre to home concept and the LNP's collage of various technologies (for around $6 billion), we should consider what this network has to deliver. Unfortunately, I believe it's often discussed within the framework of 'internet'. For some, this means simply being able to read emails which, I think, is why we get such crazy arguments about not needing the bandwidth and speed of fibre optics. That's why businesses with skin in the game should stand up and be counted on this as a primary election issue.

Through this broadband pipe, we increasingly pump television, general telecommunications, movies on demand. online games and so on. And the variety and volume of content is but one dimension of the increased demand on the delivery network. Look at the phenomenal growth of social networking sites like Facebook, the new users they introduce to the web, the exponential number of new links created, the thirst for bandwidth demanded by hi-resolution on-line games and movie entertainment.

I am sure all of us can think of great products that have been compromised to the point of underperformance in function, appeal and sales simply because some bean counter said by eliminating such and such a feature or design element would save $nat's..... per unit. Of course, I'm not suggesting $37 billion is a piffling amount. But peel away the price sticker and look at the value before making a decision.

We're in the information age. Users are increasingly paying for content and access - and they're prepared to do it. Mobile communications would not be in the midst of a boom and iPads would be unsaleable if people were not prepared to pay for content delivered how and when they wanted it. Let's take the broadband decision out of the three-year election cycle and look at its benefits long term.

And by the way, I'm not ruling the low-cost option out. I'm just sceptical!

Are you in control of your brand?

2010-08-05T13:42:00.000+10:00

It was great to see one superannuation fund CEO emerge from the pack to demonstrate an understanding of the essence of brand, in an industry otherwise generally bereft of any concept of the value brand delivers to organisations. The champion? Tony Lally of Sunsuper, who argued that, despite the free discourse facilitated by social media, companies still retained control of their brand.

In the opposite corner was Deloitte Digital CEO, Pete Williams, who pushed the alternative argument oft heard in brand circles now (particularly those of social media inclination) that brands are controlled by consumers. Pete argued that this was by virtue of their freedom to disseminate and amplify brand messages, both good and bad, through social networks.

So what do I think? And 'who cares?' you may possibly ask. Well, regardless of your level of caring, I'm going to proceed to tell you (exit here if you wish).

On the continuum of brand control from 100% organisation to 100% consumer, I'm going to give it 95% to organisation. And the reasons were clearly expressed by Tony Lally. Brand is not about your name, your logo or your advertising. It is about underlying values and the consumer expectations they engender. Aligning these is what effective brand management is about. It's about how you engage with customers, how your products perform and your organisational integrity.

All of these are levers controlled within your organisation. Sure, you'll never please 100% of the people 100% of the time and one disgruntled customer my possibly use Pete's social channels to amplify a negative message many thousands of times. But there are mechanisms for dealing with this - identification and resolution of the issue, conversing with your online community and so on.

My argument is that organisations who are getting brand management right will share control of their reputation with consumers, because consumer expectations will precisely align with brand values. Under these conditions, consumers will merely amplify an organisation's brand values through their social networks, whether online or alongside the weekend BBQ with a tinnie in hand.

An organisation that achieves this alignment has nothing to fear from social media, because the channel is merely a vehicle for... damn it... there used to be an old-fashioned term for this... what was it? Ah, got it! Word of mouth.

Let's reward our spectacular failures!

2010-07-26T13:46:00.000+10:00

Professional recognition is great, particularly if you're still in career-augmentation mode. More years ago than I care to remember, I won a few awards over several years. Subsequent job offers followed. Strangely, the job interviews that stemmed from those wins all took place in city bars, but that's something I'll never quite resolve.

All I remember is knocking back one offer because I was in such dire financial straits with interest rates at 18% that I was on the verge of losing my house. I therefore could not take on any job that didn't provide a car, because that sort of purchase would have pushed me over the financial brink (I worked for Ford at the time so was well catered for in this regard).

But back to awards. I saw some awards handed out last week at an industry function. With due respect to the winners, who had put together some okay campaigns, none of them broke new ground and several won because of the sheer weight of budget. In fact, I have to say in all modesty that, in most instances, all I saw was replicas/hybrids of what we'd been doing for several years. But we didn't enter the awards program!

My point is not to decry the efforts of others, nor to whinge about opportunities lost by not entering. All I am asking is what is the value of awards programs? Certainly consumers care diddly squat about whether we've collected a marketing or communications award. But of course, they may count for something when you go for your next budget increase or, even more significantly, grovel for your next pay increase, bonus or promotion.

But can awards ultimately do the recipient a mis-service over the longer term? If we win awards, are we tempted to kid ourselves that our effort and ingenuity sets a new benchmark for the industry? Because this is what good awards programs should be about - creating new benchmarks, thresholds below which no one should fall in future .

Perhaps all the good ideas that we're ever going to see have been acted upon, in which case we are doomed forever to view repeats as frequent as MASH reruns on cable TV. I hope this is not the case, because I would still like to see breakthrough ideas, people recognised and rewarded for taking risks with marketing and communications.

Perhaps every program should include a category for 'Most promising debacle'. This would give appropriate recognition that out of a failed idea might spring something fantastic that will point out new directions for the future.

On election campaign slogans

2010-07-22T16:49:00.005+10:00

Remember Kev07's pitch to Australia's 'working families' in the last federal election? What happened to those families and why does Julia 'Brutus' Gillard keep referring to me as 'the Australian people'? Have 'working families' morphed into just plain old 'Australian people'? If so, what were they before?

Perhaps Brutus is trying to embrace diversity, assuming that Kev thought the only working families were immigrants who hadn't been naturalised and, therefore, had not quite made the grade as 'Australian people'. Or perhaps, she has identified that there's a swag of votes to be had among the unemployed and/or occasionally employed families, who didn't quite identify with the 'working families' thing. But what grinds my organ is that the Australian people phrase is very third person - suggesting that Brutus may not be of this nation as she addresses us.

You know, 'the Australian people' thing is getting to me more than 'moving forward'. Both of these would probably be no more irritating than the Lib's battle cry, which might grate on me if they'd cut it in half so I could recall it. All I can think of from the Lib's catchphrase is 'action' which, unfortunately for the mad monk, keeps regurgitating the budgie smuggler image in my mind.

Election phraseology and imagery is of national importance and we're all occasional victims of it. Those that capture the mood of the nation like the legendary 'It's Time' campaign in 1972, produce outcomes that vitally affect all our lives.

However, most just cause mood swings rather than capture the mood. The more gratingly annoying this stuff is, the more it sticks in your mind and the gloomier you become. This year's Labor Party slogans suggest that the legendary 'Singo' (he of the infuriating Madge dishwashing liquid and 'Where d'ya get it?' commercials of yesteryear) is back on the payroll and puppeteering in the background.

Unfortunately, the Lib's malaise is akin to my experience of trying to create concise mission and vision statements in the corporate world. Recently, I came across a consultant who advised that a company's vision statement should be a single sentence. The executive group duly engineered a single sentence which, on any decent newspaper subs desk would have been broken down into at least five paragraphs. The result was identical to the Lib's campaign slogan - too long for anyone to remember, generic, and totally forgettable. I say sack the consultant and smuggle in a budgie to think of another.

Given that their leader will never get over the budgie smuggler or early morning cycling images, or the fact that the mad monk would be a first-time prime minister, perhaps an appropriate catchline for the Libs might be: 'Lycra virgin. His very first time'. Job offers - message me here ...

We kick off our brand challenge

2010-07-10T08:05:00.000+10:00

I currently have about the best brand and communications gig in Australia. No. I'm not exaggerating. I have one of those rare opportunities to head a working group, whose task is to research and develop a new brand as our superannuation fund merges with another to create the 8th biggest profit-for-member fund in the country.

How often do you get to start from the ground up to create a new brand for a substantial organisation? Sure, we've all worked on brand refreshment programs - a tweak to the logo and the corporate style guide, but the opportunity to get back to basics and thoroughly research two large organisations as they proceed down the path to merger is something like manna from heaven.

The outstanding news is that the executive teams from both organisations have recognised that thoroughly understanding the new entity's value proposition will be a primary driver of product and services modelling and even organisation structure and its required skills matrix. It's been a long haul for me in elevating brand to the point where it's a substantial driver of business strategy and modelling.

No doubt, the next couple of years will be extremely exciting and a period in which we'll accumulate various brickbats and bouquets. I just hope we'll be receiving more of the latter when the project is completed!

Just for the record

2010-07-10T07:50:00.000+10:00

Keen followers of this blog will know of the psychological and, I am sure, egotistical battle of the brands that I have endured in owning a VeeDub, but aspiring to an Audi. I am pleased to report, I now have my brand alignment thoroughly resolved with the purchase of an Audi yesterday. R.I.P. blogs on the VeeDub....

The brand I recommend during the World Cup

2010-06-24T08:39:00.001+10:00

Yep. Two hours sleep last night sandwiched between the England v. Slovenia and Australia v. Serbia games. As I work through my third cup of tea in three hours under the umbrella of my Quiet Please. World Cup Recovery in Progress sign posted to my office door, I find myself turning to that most reliable of brands, Poly Tears.

These are the eye drops that I will rely on to remove my canary look until I can retreat to an appropriate evening of recovery.

Congrats to the Poms for qualifying and to Australia for scoring the best two goals from a team just failing to qualify. Sorry to the teams playing tonight. I won't be watching. But then again...

Out of step as I consider trading the VeeDub

2010-06-23T09:40:00.000+10:00

The recently released Roy Morgan Single Source survey of automotive brand loyalty in Australia questions my sanity - but belies the claim of VW's advertising, which is about being different.

You see, VW enjoys the second-highest level of brand loyalty among car owners (measured by intention to purchase again) in Australia - the numero uno in the survey being Subaru which, incidentally, just ain't me. So I am clearly swimming against the tide as I shop Audi dealerships, even though my ever-reliable VeeDub Passat is only two years old.

At an Audi dealership last weekend, even the salesman was saying what a good looking car I had. I could see he was perplexed as to why I'd consider trading it at a changeover cost of 30-plus big ones.

So what is it with me? They should have severed the dysfunctional wiring loom in my head instead of the umbilical cord when I was born. There's nothing wrong with the VeeDub. In fact, I had it serviced only last Friday - NOTHING WRONG WITH IT! But unfortunately, it is a victim of Honda syndrome. Yep. I had a Honda Accord several vehicles ago. Boring, but....NOTHING WRONG WITH IT!

You see, plain functional vehicles that do everything right are boring to car enthusiasts. I owned a Saab. Broke down several hundred kilometres from home at a family funeral. Believe it or not, the crank pulley came off - something minor, a once in a lifetime event. Despite being tempted to bury it in an adjoining plot at the time, I duly had it repaired at the local dealer after negotiating a two month warranty extension.

Last car was an Audi. Totally pissed off when the Bosch ABS control unit failed after eight years, I discovered that this was a known issue on the car and that VW had issued an international recall, but subsidiary brand, Audi, had not. Presumably, Audi owners were considered wealthy enough to cover the cost of the $2,000 repair.

In the case of both the Saab and the Audi, I traded them shortly after or, in the latter case, with the problem. But you see, the point is that these issues gave these cars character. I've remembered every critical moment with those cars and am now blogging about their virtues.

Where the 'cars are just for getting from A to B' type owners regard these characteristics as an impediment to their motoring experience, Europhile owners just love the character - their brand's point of difference. We've heard all the stories - Jaguar, Porsche, Maserati, Alfa Romeo - the road is littered with the oil and debris of shattering electro-mechanical failings.

But herein lies the VeeDub's problem. It's sandwiched in the loyalty stakes between Subaru and Toyota which, given its well documented recent issues, should really have copped a drubbing (white goods are easily replaced fortunately).

Being the meat in this sandwich impacts hard on one's psychology. But more particularly, it explains why brands with character appeal to people like me. You'll never find Audi sandwiched between Subaru and Toyota in the loyalty stakes. Much better to be off the chart and unique. It's character building.

Give SBS the Australian tourism gig

2010-06-17T09:51:00.000+10:00

If you've been following the World Cup, you may have noticed that, in the breaks between the cacophonic blart of the vuvuzela, SBS has been running a thematic ad with faces from around the world singing 'Let's go play some football.'

It's a simple proposition and exudes passion, happiness, engagement and all those other good things that brands like to associate with. Even my 12-year-old daughter, who's so far into techno music that she thinks Eric Clapton played a silicon chip, thinks the SBS theme is fantastic. Every time it comes on, she starts singing it. 'Catchy' is the word.

Compare this with the Tourism Australia promotion of 'Brand Australia' over recent years and you can see what's been missing. It's cliched, no one gets it, here or overseas and, what's more, none of the campaigns since Paul Hogan's 'Throw a Shrimp on the Barby' are memorable.

If we want someone to get tourists singing Australia's praises, we could do worse than hire the SBS marketing team for the next campaign.

The magic of the World Cup and relationships

2010-06-11T09:00:00.001+10:00

Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, appeared on this morning's Sunrise program charged by the ubiquitous Kochie and Mel with casting some sort of spell to cure Harry Kewell's groin injury ahead of the Socceroo's first World Cup game against Germany on Sunday (Euro time). Much easier than inviting Fortescue's Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrester into a super mining tax lovefest - or is it mining super tax, or a mining tax for super? Never mind.

As an avid Liverpool supporter, I can assure all that restoring the health of Harry Kewell's groin has eluded some of the best sports medics in the world. So if Kevin747 can resolve this issue, it will go a long way to kick starting his own move back up the political premiership ladder. We await the outcome, but no doubt Kevin747 will be relieved that the nation's focus will, for a few days at least, turn to the Socceroos' first match against football powerhouse, Germany.

And talking about invitations and the World Cup, I should actually be in South Africa rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi of the global business community. You see, one enterprising conference organiser sent me an invitation about a year ago to attend a conference in Cape Town. It starts just after the World Cup and I found myself thinking back to the glory days of the 1980s when corporate boon doggles were the norm and major events were geared around the CEO's or the Chairman's overseas holiday plans.

I admit being extremely tempted to leverage the World Cup to the benefit of my employer. I mean what's $15,000 to attend a conference when you can schmooze and talk about football all night in local bars with people you're never likely to do business with?

I perused the list of registered corporate luminaries. Unusually for the invitations I normally receive, I noted it was not littered with US thought leaders touting their latest business tome. Instead, it had glitterati from European firms, like VW, Mercedes, Siemens... you get the picture (not many Greek luminaries I hasten to add). All there to promote their brands during the World Cup before opting for the conference add-on with its commercial imperatives of African wildlife safaris.

Luckily, as brand thought leaders, we all know brands are built on relationships. And there's no better place to reinforce those relationships than running up some executive expenses during the World Cup. Did I hear you say: 'But it should be around customer relationships.' ?

Don't worry it is. All these execs will want to be your mate when they return with their new suntans and they have to work out ways of chatting with you about the price increase on your next European car. The customer relationship is simple. You've just gotta love that car.

Whether your watching at home, or schmoozing in Cape Town, best of luck to you and your team. Keep an eye on Harry Kewell. If his groin suddenly goes up in flames, so might our Prime Minister.

Microsoft and Google collude to murder the corporate font

2010-06-09T14:34:00.000+10:00

Last week I was chatting to my mate Nige, a guy who appreciates a good font, especially if its full of red wine. We were talking about branding and a project I am imminently to be involved in. We came to the somewhat belated conclusion that the nerds had finally engineered the death of the corporate font.

So this blog entry is my official announcement of the font's demise in my future branding strategies. When everything was delivered in print or in tightly controlled, rasterised audiovisual media, fonts were part of corporate identity.

But today, we are constructing channel strategies in which consistent visual image is less important than useability by Microsoft-conditioned office workers and, even more importantly, less important than comprehension by the bots that scour the net on behalf of search engines.

Don't be misled. I'm not celebrating the demise of the font, merely acknowledging that in many applications, passionately policing the corporate brand guidelines is poor business strategy and definitely not career-enhancing. Anything Google is blind too is brand poison these days.

And, in turn, the Google generations have been rendered blind to the role of careful typography in corporate presentations. For instance, I reviewed a presentation the other day for one young colleague. I confess - it was a Powerpoint presentation (50 lashes stretched over a template!). I've almost given up trying to police the use of the 'brand guidelines' font in the headings. But I did have to remark on 'inconsistent' font usage.

When challenged as to what I meant, I pointed out that it was nothing to do with using the 'proper' font, but about at least using the same font on every screen! 'I never noticed,' was the response. I rest my case.

Corporate visual guidelines are fighting a rear guard action against the overwhelming force of convenience (i.e. corporate fonts being loaded and available on on every Microsoft-compromised machine in the office) and the search engine gods. Optimal speed, delivery and effectiveness is triumphing over optimal presentation.

The hair on graphic designers is noticeably shorter and more geek-like these days. But they still swear a lot. These days it's about having to work with HTML and bloody clients wanting to be on Google's first page. They rant against a world that believes it is far more effective to be ugly and out there than pretty and invisible.

So I'm going to strike a compromise in my next brand phase - I'll let you employ any Microsoft font as long as it's not Times Roman. After all, I am a man of principle! Furthermore, I hereby authorise an invasion of Microsoft's R&D facilitites to search for hidden WVDs - Weapons of Visual Destruction - that have yet to be unleashed.

White House writers from a unique PR club

2010-05-29T08:19:00.001+10:00

I never knew this PR company existed - but then again, I am as far removed from the White House as BP's PR right now! From what I can see, the White House Writers Group is a PR half way house for those released from Presidential detention with a pass to offer advice on corporate affairs.

I have no idea how many White House writers there are - a substantial number I should imagine given the scope of issues coverage from Washington's most prestigious home. WHWG is certainly maintaining the tradition of broad scope with an article currently on its website home page entitled "Analyzing Campaign Speech Writing on Norwegian Television".

White House Writers Group is certainly not a brand name that rolls off the tongue, but I have to say, it's a name that needs no tagline or mission statement to spell out its value proposition, experience or service offer. And their website offers free advice and insights - much better than most PR websites that are no more than online brochures that do the profession no justice.

If you're running a PR company, take a look and learn. The sprinkling of original free insights and advice would encourage me to hire this company ahead of many others.

BP - Trouble in the Gulf between fact and message?

2010-05-25T10:06:00.000+10:00

BP is certainly experiencing what it's really like when events stack up beyond petroleum. The company's brand is at risk of drowning in the Gulf of Mexico, with any number of reports like this one sprouting up everywhere about whether the oil disaster is much worse than the company is admitting. The only thing flowing as fast as the oil are the stories and commentary across the internet.

Naturally, whenever these cataclysmic events occur, the first instinct of a company is damage limitation, but in what order of priority? This is the question many residents along the Gulf coast will be asking, as oil seeps twelve miles into wetland areas. Government agencies - from local government all the way to the White House - are starting to question whether BP is doing enough and is what it is doing effective?

For BP, damage limitation extends beyond saving the environment to brand, legal and financial. And the messages the company sends out on its efforts to stem the flow of oil shapes world perceptions about which area of damage it is most concerned about. This is regardless of what its true priorities might be.

There is no doubt that this is an enormously challenging technical problem, which extends into explaining the issues to stakeholders, from local fishermen to the US Government. In the past few days, there have been reports that BP was forewarned about problems associated with this rig. No doubt, when the litigation inevitably starts, the veracity of these claims will be appropriately tested.

Nonetheless, rig integrity or otherwise, the fundamental question is what risk assessment took place before exploration and drilling began and either:

Why did it not identify the potential for this problem; or
If it did, why did BP not have an adequate disaster management plan and facilities in place?

To some extent, BP's reputation will swing on the speed with which it can resolve the crisis it faces in the Gulf of Mexico and the appropriateness of the reparations made to communities and environment.

However, I would argue that the measure of damage to BP's brand and reputation ultimately lies in the answer to the questions I posed, because reputation is built on conducting business with integrity at every level and stage of operation.

Tough times shape the thinking of Gen Z

2010-05-21T10:27:00.001+10:00

I arose every morning this week to discover that Wall Street had been crunched again overnight with a similar outcome expected for the Australian bourse in the day ahead. It got me thinking about the implications for branding as the punters lose faith in institutions and corporate and economic management.

The underlying economic problem right now is the risk of collapsing national economies - of countries defaulting on their debts. Widely referred to as sovereign risk, this is potentially a far bigger problem than the collapse Lehmann Brothers. I must say that, as they face the bailout of whole nations, I am amazed at the resiliance of the humble taxpayers who - whether they're underwriting sovereign or corporate debt - end up footing the bill somewhere along the line. I wonder what happens when taxpayers default - or revolt?

The fortunate thing for politicians is that we have institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) who appear to magically produce money to bail out cot case economies. Most taxpayers don't realise that the IMF magic pudding actually rises on the back of contributions from member states who, in turn, raise the necessary taxes to cover their contributions. How's that for adroit sleight of hand?

But I digress. As nations grapple to stay afloat, what are the implications for brands? There is a lot of research around that says, for Gen Y, brand loyalty has gone out the window. According to many, this fickle, demanding generation is almost impossible to pin down. But if you think Gen Y's tough, wait until you see the next mob. My daughter is Gen Z. She's gifted with xray vision and bullshit detection capabilities that us boomers can only dream about.

As current events unfold, they are defining the development years of her generation, which must inevitably grow up to question the integrity of institutions, brands and people behind them. While we in the branding community talk about authenticity, the aftermath of our series of financial crises will surely test our capacity to 'walk our talk'.

So if you're company's only paying lip service to authenticity, you'd better lift your game as the Gen Z shoppers are starting to hit the streets now!

Gazman and Toyotas

2010-05-20T11:57:00.001+10:00

My wife rang me at work yesterday from that bloody Gazman clothing store. It was about a jacket... oh, and by the way... there's also a pair of pants on sale... and a SKIVVY!! sort of thing.

This rang serious alarm bells. A 'Sale' sticker is like the lure on a greyhound track to my wife. She'll chase it all the way to the cash register. Nevertheless, I felt I had to make a stand.

'Unless Gazman agrees to use me in its next male catalogue, I won't be buying any more,' I resolutely responded down the phone, knowing full well there were plenty of more likely candidates. "I'm just about entirely attired in their stuff and I don't want any more!'

It was the return of serve to this comment that really floored me though - especially as I have some respect for brands. "I don't know what's wrong with you. Gazman is one of the best-selling brands in Australia. Everyone buys it."

I couldn't help myself: "Toyota is the best-selling brand in Australia too, but I wouldn't buy a Toyota." The silence was deafening, then: "A Lexus is a Toyota." This would seem a feeble response and would normally prove my point but, instead, it send shock waves through the domestic millpond. My wife has just signed up for a new Lexus IS250 - her new pride and joy - and I had just thumped my volley into the net.

How did I step back from the brink? I agreed to buy the Gazman jacket. If only all purchase decisions were so simple! At least I held ground on the skivvy thing, even though it would look good behind the steering wheel of the Lexus!

Collegiate approach to research a clear trend

2010-05-14T13:51:00.000+10:00

I've had three marketing / research companies push stuff through the letterbox in the last month offering me - or at least the company I work for - the chance to cough up some dough to participate in industry-wide research projects.

I think pitching into a research 'pool' with competitor businesses isn't a bad idea. I have been doing annual tracking of customer satisfaction for the past few years and I have to say, done in isolation, I'm often left wondering what it all means in terms of our competitive position.

This especially occurs in a low engagement business like retirement savings. I mean, if we didn't have mandatory contributions and big tax breaks on it in Australia, who'd be in superannuation? We'd all just stash our cash where we could get hold of it when everyday matters took priority over saving for the future.

The thing about tracking customer satisfaction on your own, is that you get an absolute score, whether NPS or other. But for better or worse, you don't know how that tracks against your competitors. Sure, there's plenty of secondary research around, but direct comparison is rendered useless by methodology that is not 100% aligned across surveys.

The best you get in annual surveys is a trend line for your business. This is useful for setting and rewarding against organisational KPIs, but a 5% annual improvement off a low base is deceptive if your competitors are achieving an annual 6% off a higher base.

This collegiate approach to independent research, where you have the opportunity to include your own customers assessed as a subset of a broader survey is precisely what's needed in order to gain meaningful insight into your competitive position in the marketplace.

Congratulations to the various companies who are taking this approach. When the time is right for us, I will be participating.

UK election: Recruit your lobbyist now!

2010-05-07T11:30:00.000+10:00

The Prime Minister's been hung by the British electorate and so has the Parliament. It's starting to look more like the US democratic model by the day - with no party reliably able to govern and presenting some of the most fertile commercial territory for lobbyists in the world.

A hung Parliament means ruling through arrangements ranging from formal coalition to loose collectives of common ideology and/or special interests. The problem is, of course, that the Government has no clear mandate to do anything. It leads to the gridlock for which Capitol Hill is renowned, and special interest groups running amok lobbying individuals and parties sympathetic to their cause or, worse still, owing them political favours.

For the next 18 months, or however long the new British Parliament lasts, there's probably going to be no faster-growing business than 'Government Relations' more commonly referred to as lobbying. So if you're running a PR agency with aspirations in the UK, I reckon you'd better start recruiting a lobbyist with strong political connections.

The only problem will be selecting one who has connections on the 'winning' side. In the end, that might be the one with strongest links to the Liberal-Democrats because, as I read it now, they're the party in the driving seat.

Things that go bump in the stats

2010-05-04T10:08:00.000+10:00

Two things have crossed my radar in the past 24 hours that have raised the question about statistical error and, more particularly, when one should act on research findings.

The first was on the ABC's excellent Q&A program where, as usual when politicians are exposed to public questioning, the conversation turned to climate change. Federal Environment Minister, Penny Wong, said that the research indicated that there was a 90% chance that human activity was contributing to climate change (note: global warming has disappeared from the vernacular!).

Segue to a newsletter I received this morning from respected Melbourne research company, Forethought Research, which discussed statistical error in research and what it means in terms of management decision making. There was stuff about p-value etc, which essentially measures the likely accuracy of statistical information.

The point in the newsletter was that companies are generally accepting of 90% accuracy, rather than the 95% that the statisticians would like us all to shoot for. Why is this?

I suspect it is because research is often used to test out management's instinctive or anecdotal suspicions that average performance according to a set of criteria has varied. In my view, a company with its finger on the pulse of what customers are thinking should not be totally surprised by research findings.

Which brings me back to Penny Wong and climate change. This is an area where the variables are so broad, and inputs so vague that anything close to 90% accuracy is miraculous. She put the argument that it would be irresponsible not to take action given the level of certainty around the research.

Penny pointed out that the last decade was the warmest since weather records began. I wonder if this is the 'managerial' anecdotal evidence that enables action on the 90% certainty? There have been warm periods previously. Antarctica used to be covered in forest - but perhaps that was when the Earth was still busy cooling the primordial swamps. The only climate records from then are layers of rock and fossils.

The only certainties I can see in all this is that global resources, though vast, are finite and economists, bless their hearts, still consider that the only valid success measure is growth in GDP. We talk about sustainability and still breed like rabbits.

More significantly, western democracies seem to have rendered themselves virtually impotent to do anything about it. Opposition politicians drool at the chance to harpoon governments if GDP declines, interest rates increase, new home starts fall and so on. Sometimes these are necessary evils. It's why the Chinese may be the best-positioned to act on climate change and make a difference. The are big emitters and special interest lobbies and the loonie fringe find it harder to get a foothold there.

In the end, climate change cycles outlast political cycles and will ultimately prevail. And you can bet on that with a high degree of accuracy.

Football clubs - Great insight into the brand balance sheet

2010-05-03T14:05:00.001+10:00

I watched my team, Liverpool FC, play Chelsea in the English Premier League in the wee hours of this morning. It was a sad end to the season for one of the proudest clubs, may I suggest 'brands', in world football.

Football clubs provide great insight into the brand balance sheet. On the one hand, they have everything that brand managers want - fiercely loyal tribes of advocates, an NPS in treble digits. On the other, they are brands open to the most rigorous scrutiny and comment. The players are ambassadors for brand value and, in elite sport, the pressure is on them to perform 24/7 both on and off the pitch. The tribe can turn ugly very quickly if their 'brand' doesn't perform or its values are trashed.

I turned 'ugly' this morning, although some would suggest this was a byproduct of my birth rather than football and happened decades ago. But I digress. The Liverpool brand has been slaughtered this season by indifferent owners looking to make a quick buck on the franchise, a manager out of ideas and a number of overpaid players who could not have shone the boots for more stellar players in bygone eras.

Read the internet banter among supporters and hecklers though and you can see why football clubs are great brands. Despite their disappointment, football tribes still vehemently defend their brand, even while hurling criticism at club owners, managers and players. The emotional attachment to football brands trumps all logical arguments that flow from disappointment.

The hard core of a club's supporters never think of going to support someone else. They merely heckle until the sheer force of public approbrium brings about change. How many corporate brands could withstand the barrage of criticism hurled at personnel and products as well as football brands seem to do it? How many would be game to freely host hostile commentary on their own websites?

Football is a winner-take-all business. There are no shades of gray. At the elite level, it's not how you play the game, it's whether you win or lose. If you're concerned about the political correctness of that, visit the message boards of under-achieving clubs and see how 'correct' they are.

Liverpool is an outstanding case. The club is a victim of its rich, winning heritage, of trophies won at the top level through intimidating speed and style. The tribe will accept nothing less and nor should it. Being true to brand is all they care about.

YNWA. If you don't know what it means, you're not one of us...! Bring on 2011!

Brand voted biggest impediment to merger

2010-04-21T16:26:00.000+10:00

I attended a luncheon hosted by the Fund Executives Association Ltd (FEAL) in Melbourne yesterday. The topic was merger and collaboration in the superannuation industry. It was prefaced with a report on the findings from an email survey sent nationally to FEAL members to test the prevailing appetite for fund mergers. But enough of the backgrounder...

Among the questions was one about impediments to merger and the one than stood head and shoulders above the rest was brand or, in simple terms, loss of identity.

I don't agree with this. For one thing - if two brands get together, why talk about not continuing them, assuming they do enjoy the loyalty and respect that directors and executives think they have? Why should a merger necessarily bury good brands. Why can't we do a 'Proctor and Gamble' and market multiple brands? Why can't superannuation funds run off a common back-end and develop sophisticated data capabilities and organisational structures to achieve differentiation at the customer interface.

It's because there are two underlying drivers when the top bods talk about merger. The first is that brand is an intangible for most directors. That's because in many cases (and I'm not talking about my employer here) there is no substantive research on which to argue a case that the brand is crap anyway and we might all be better off with a new one.

In the absence of hard evidence, it's too easy for reluctant directors worrying about their next board position to use brand loyalty and the implied exodus of customers post-merger to build a substantial barrier to merger - pseudo-intellectual as their argument is.

The second is unique to the superannuation industry in Australia. It is the bizarre belief that we are unique, unable to leverage off the experience of mergers and back-end homogenisation in other industy sectors. Roll out standard excuses A to Z, with 'heavily regulated industry', 'equal member and employer board representation' etc etc leading the charge to thwart any attempts to make it all happen.

Yes. It's alright to collaborate using common platforms, but a merger changes everything ... doesn't it? Of course it doesn't. Why should it? Any decent application of intellect will find a way of doing what is necessary, especially in an environment where government wants industry consolidation. If these 'unique' superannuation issues were to get in the way of mergers, there's even a good chance the government would adjust legislation to remove the hurdles!

And where does loss of brand identity fit into all this? Frankly, it doesn't, at least not as an obstacle to merger. It's because, at the end of the day, there are two clear courses open to the merging entities - retain and market their brands under the umbrella of a parent company, or launch a new brand.

The decision about which option to pursue has nothing to do with merger, but everything to do with thorough research and an objective assessment of whether the existing brand equity is too valuable to lose.

Merger. Do you ever start with a clean sheet in brand creation?

2010-04-16T06:36:00.000+10:00

My company announced a merger with another of similar size yesterday, so one of the tasks I'll be involved in over the next couple of years will be re-branding. As you'd understand, in a merger re-brand means more than tweaking the logo and dreaming up a new catchline. It's a baby and bath water job - clean sheet of paper. Or is it?

The concept of starting from scratch is a brand dude's dream. But when you have two companies coming together - one with over 60 years of history and the other close to 80 - you're never going to be starting from scratch.

If you believe brand starts from within the company, then your framework is clearly defined by culture. The first task is to research where the two organisational cultures share common values and where they differ. Hopefully, there's some crossover where you can lay the foundations for your new brand. If there is no commonality, the risk of failure in the merger will be much higher and brand will likely be the least of you problems.

Then there's the external perceptions of your two organisations. How do customers perceive them? Suppliers? Industry partners? Media? How do you project your brand into the marketplace in a way that will not cause dissonance within one or both of the customer bases?

I know of companies that have dreamed up new brand names and positioning over a few good reds at lunch time. Some are lucky and hit the spot. But I hope as I progress this process, those that approve budgets set plenty aside for preliminary internal and external research and market testing among our customers.

Converting ethanol into testosterone

2010-04-13T12:46:00.000+10:00

Avid readers will know that I drive a VW Passat. The identity crisis associated with this is proportional to the difference in price between my erstwhile chariot and other cars to which I aspire.

Nevertheless, its maker insists that I will only get optimal performance from it by filling it with 98 RON unleaded fuel. If I want to suffer poorer performance (responsiveness and fuel economy), I am permitted to use 95 RON. Below that and... well suffer the consequences. Engine seizure, heart seizure at the repair bill and so on.

And as for ethanol, even mixed in over-the-counter medication proportions, forget it. The VeeDub would most likely just lie dormant and wheezing in the drive way, as it slid through the gears into malnutrition.

The killer for ethanol is the suspicion that performance suffers. In the dark recesses of the male mind, this has sexual overtones. Like substituting your Viagra with pink icing sugar. In Australia, the V8 Supercars even use ethanol but, to my mind, it hasn't registered with the hoards on the hill at the Bathurst circuit.

No. To testosterone charged males, taking the lead out of petrol in the 1980s was the thin end of the wedge. I worked for Ford at the time and we dropped the V8! with calamitous consequences for top-end Falcon sales (now there's a contradiction in terms). Now, we're just diluting our potency further by adding plant extracts. My God, the cars will be vegetarian next and we know how thin and pasty looking vegetarians are!

Clearly ethanol is too much like estrogen. It even begins with 'e'. Nothing like the 'T' for testosterone or Tyrannosaurus Rex, or T-bar shift. Ethanol has as big an image problem as a Formula 1 or NASCAR driver called Ethyl. How's 'ethyl-benzene' sound? Just doesn't work like methyl-benzene.

Let's rename it Tethanol for a start. This close cousin of testosterone would have us queuing at the pumps for our weekly top-up of automotive viagra. And we'd be all the better for it - environment included. Who wants to do the global repositioning job for ethanol?

Do we go to conferences for comfort or to learn?

2010-04-07T13:46:00.000+10:00

Tossing up going to an annual conference for financial services marketers, particularly those involved in superannuation. This deliberation is taking place after spending some of yesterday afternoon with a PR consultant.

I always come away from these meetings with a warm fuzzy feeling. In the case of the conferences, it could be a mild temperature accompanied by giddiness and loss of orientation which seems to follow the regular awards night. But nonetheless, buried under the after-effects of the leisure hours, I think there's more to it.

I never learn a lot at these things, so it's not that. Most of the time, I just sit in the audience spying on what others have achieved or are thinking of achieving - undeterred by the fact that this professional voyeurism could morph into some type of intellectual and/or creative plagiarism.

No. I think the warm fuzziness comes from being surrounded by others who think like me or, in that unlikely event, at least pretend to comprehend what I'm on about - brand at the apex of strategic planning, communicating in plain language, the list goes on.

These events are an escape from the blank stares of lawyers, technocrats, auditors, actuaries and others who just don't get this idea about brands defining businesses. This gaggle of overseers who dissect then reassemble communications so the arse is often where the head should be.

Yes, I think putting this in writing has confirmed for me that these talkfests are not about learning, but about comfort. They're about reaffirmation that the loonies really are in charge of the nuthouse everywhere except in the marketing and communications space.

Where's that registration form? I'm on my way to therapy...