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I’m at a swanky restaurant that has featured on TV and has a weird name, like 16 or 14 or something. I’m actually wearing a jacket, cause I was asked to very politely by the people organizing the function.
It’s a weeknight and there’s a huge table with about 25 people on it, set in a dark corner. I gaze around, feeling like a Taipan hunting frogs in the dark by smell alone.
My eyes get used to the candle light. I’m the only person who looks like they can’t afford to eat here, and I suspect the only one actually paying to attend, cause I felt guilty and got them to send me an invoice first. Sucker. The much younger than their husband skinny (second wife) blondes are hanging off chubby balding men in expensive suits. They stretch their backs, flick at their nails, toss their hair around, preening, advertising. This is juicy hunting ground for hubby number two or three. There’s also some fast money here – dressed to kill in black and three day growth for ultimate metrosexual effect.
The food is designed not offend any particular religion or eating disorder – they serve chicken or fish (no religion except perhaps Buddism that doesn’t eat them) and a good range of vegetarian dishes for the oh, so politically correct to pick at. The wine flows (no short cuts here either). The chatter rises. People are getting on well together – they have a lot in common it seems. Chosen for similar values, aspirations, possibly ethnic backgrounds.
As the chockies are handed out (none eaten) and the coffee poured, the host stands up. He tinkles on a glass for attention, and the table falls silent. He’s in Hugo Boss, understated tie, salt and pepper grey hair, polished finger-nails, tanned. Could be a successful merchant banker or a mafia don, but he’s instead the head of the charity who’s spent thousands on a night. I’m expecting ‘We want you to give us this much tonight or you’ll be washing dishes for a month’ to roll out from between his perfect, bright-white capped teeth.
But it’s not quite like that. He talks about knowing yourself. About deciding who you are. About how it’s the little things in life that make up the person, the experiences, the people who helped you along the way. About making a change, giving a bit back to society, about knowing how you want life to be. Making those little adjustments that turn a city into a metropolis, a society into a culture, a system into a way of life etc.
He’s a very good speaker. I’m starting to get drawn in. (I feel like a sheep in a stock yard, watching all the other sheep going up the gang plank, to certain death, but feeling to myself – hey I’m a good looking sheep – Why have I been ignored?)
He goes on to explain how they are not looking for big donations or small donations. They have a cause that is so critical for XYZ reason, and all he wants us to do is take his call in the next few weeks. Just have a coffee with him. No commitment, just remain friends, be open to conversation. He concludes by saying that people think the phone is dead. That meeting up with people is old hat. But he believes in people, he feels we all do too. So take my phone call, please.
It’s fabulous, pulpy, mushy ‘mother hood’ logic (a brilliant McKinsey consultant explained to me once how to use ‘motherhood’ concepts to sell. You use a statement that no-one can argue with – because every-one was born, so no-one can hate the idea of ‘mother hood’ itself) – everyone feels comfortable. They all nod they’ll see him for a coffee.
This is a very slick way to go, the soft, polite, we-can-connect –you-to-others sell. But also an expensive gamble. What if no-one at the table ends up giving a few thousand to the charity? They’ve pissed up against the wall a lot of their precious budget in one evening. But I think it’s working. He ends with another plea for an open ear and I guess, dare I say it, an open wallet.
On the basis that his cause deserves our money more than the next one. Just another brand really, isn’t it?
Causes and attaching your brand to causes, is a topical issue in marketing land. People use them for brand credibility, brand profile lifting, and many a good marketer’s got a few years at a NFP (Not For Profit) proudly on their CV.
Definition of Causes
I’m saying anything that lifts your lid. Footy Clubs are as legitimate in my eyes as Sailing clubs. Kids on the Street type causes as important as anti-depression, anti smoking and anti anything else you feel like tossing your money and time at. I’m big on ignoring the smelly human race and focusing on those poor things we are trying to kill off. The rain forests, the little birdy’s, the fluffy kritters, even insects, rare plants.
I’m especially interested in saving the oceans – letting the creatures of the deep the right to swim free, untroubled by hooks, nets, poisons and pollution. If we don’t stop commercial fishing of international waters there will soon be no viable fish stocks. Whole species, whole links in the chain of life, will cease to be. (Any moment the rare Blue Fin Tuna will be no more. I implore you; give up tuna.) There will be major gaps, major over-supply, plagues, of species. Worst of all, the algae, often single-celled creatures that in their millions of species can live in any environment on the planet, including happily munching through oils, metals and living in 500 centigrade temperatures on the walls of under sea mountains thousands of metres and hundreds of atmospheric pressures below. It’s the building blocks of life, the humble, most basic, algae that will be our downfall. If we let the algae have their head, by not having millions of fish and krill to consume them, it will make all the fuss about global warming seem very long term. Algae can double in number in a few minutes. Think about a dam with blue green algae – jelly – oceans of it. What sort of weather would we have if the oceans aren’t evaporating – set together like thousands of square kilometers of blancmange? Yep, I care about that.
Who runs the show, keeps the dough
But I don’t care about many causes. (If you did, you’d be so depressed you’d never get out of bed.) Many of the bigger ones seem more like money-making machines and fortresses for people’s egos than genuine attempts to improve our lot. Charities, the hard-edged corner of the cause bucket, are often especially messy.
I don’t hate charity. I hate bullshit.
I can only bring myself to give to charities that I think are well run and working on a cause that can actually be fixed. Hopeless causes are just that, not worthy of addressing. I don’t think I’m the lone ranger. Many people give to very specific charities. With hundreds of thousands of NFP’s in OZ, you don’t have a choice but to focus. If you supported everything, you’d be broke in ten seconds.
Don’t get me wrong. (Like many marketers, I am forced to live a life of constant, often embarrassing, blatant hypocrisy.) I believe Causes are vital. They are a motivator – the life-blood of our society. If we didn’t care about things we’d be a race of sociopaths, mowing down all for the sake of a quid. (Now I think about it, I could list a few company directors who by any definition are sociopaths….) We need people to care and we need volunteers to help those in society, whether animal, human or mineral for that matter, that can’t defend themselves. I volunteer for a number of causes; local kinder, tennis club, residents action group, and big international ones for environment, politics etc. And Starship does pro-bono work (which I’m paying for) with several.
It’s about personal tastes
Like me with the oceans, people choose charities due to emotional connections. (There are a few who do it for tax and networking reasons, but emotions are king.) If they don’t believe in the cause, you’re gone – cause the tax deal will just go to the one they do feel a little bit for.
Logic is not an issue. Logic would have you supporting operations to kill off people as quickly as possible – we are a virus on this planet and issues like air, sea, water pollution, endangered species etc, would be much better off if we just got rid of most of the world’s population. I live in hope of the flu doing the job. The only debate I ever have about this is, what if it gets my kin or me?
The vast majority of charities are about helping people survive for healthier, happier, longer lives. This is plain stupid for the long-term survival of our planet. But try telling a group like Care (who run those ads with the starving little black kids mournfully looking up at the camera) or the Red Cross, that they’d be better to shoot the people they are trying to help. There’s actually laws against killing humans, too, for pity’s sake. They are probably quite tasty, roasted with sage and garlic…a crisp pinot gris….
Often little effect on the root causes
But money does not mean impact. According to Simon Chapman, professor in Public Health at University of Sydney, and ex-deputy chair of NSW Cancer Council, there has been not much progress in cancer survival since 1990. The research has achieved bugger all so far. He thinks we’d be better off to give money for palliative care, when people are dying, or prevention via anti-smoking campaigns etc. And he decries the focus on ‘fashionable‘ cancers like breast or prostrate, and the lack of funding for equally debilitating, but sadly less flavor-of-the-month cancers like colorectal, pancreatic etc.
Oh, fuck it, we’re Marketers and we’re here to do the gig. What to do to make your job easier as Marketing head of a NFP?
Understand your segments
The Breast Cancer people used to collect not much but were aiming at those who got breast cancer, mainly women in their 50’s and 60’s. When they lowered their guns and started firing at 20-30’s, who might get breast cancer one day, with a campaign spearheaded by Sarah Murdoch, they shot up to $5 mil a year. Lesson? It may not be the actual beneficiaries who are the best people to hit on.
Daughters might be the best people to target for men’s prostrate research – they care about their dads a lot more than their dads do. Their dads think they are never going to get sick, let alone die.
Align those targets with your charity
Breast Cancer uses pink as its theme and has an obvious target market – women. They are also main grocery buyers, main finance decision-makers, the list goes on. Because it’s a pretty clear target market, it’s easy to get big brands behind it and fill the MCG with women dressed in pink, then corral them into the brand’s ‘shape’ for a lovely aerial photograph that makes for a good outdoor poster.
Assume you need to broaden
The long tail is a very powerful thing. Don’t always think that the traditional reading of market segments, which leads to a narrow focus on say two key segments, is the best way to go. Instead of a demographic focus, I believe strongly that because this is such a highly emotionally charged decision, psychographic profiling is much more important. What kind of person are we aiming at here? How do they think? What do they have in common? Should we look for clusters, rather than slices?
Bolt onto other businesses
You must get into people’s faces; better into their hands. FMCG is always a nice vehicle, unless the brand itself is a very bad fit and that’s also really important with retail. Often very productive aligning with big chains like Shell Shops or Australia Post stores etc., except if you don’t want people to drive cars or use paper…
Enlist big players
Breast Cancer has pink Tim Tams. Pink borders around Real estate signs. Pink footy teams. (Melbourne – quite appropriate really) The list is as long as an Orang-utan’s arm. Do the same – get a bunch of big operations on your side to carry the load and extend your reach. Best to find someone on their board or marketing team who has a relly with the disease.
Celebs love lending a hand
As they get to promote their own brand in a positive light, most real household-known celebs will have a few causes hanging on their trophy wall. And it’s also quite effective to create your own celebrity – if you find someone dying, track their progress down hill and call the charity after them, like Alannah Hill or Jane McGrath, the cricketer’s wife.
Create a day
There is no actual body which controls the naming of days, weeks, months, years. It’s the wild west. You could even name a season….
Choose a colour
Most of the snappier ones have gone, but there’s still, I think, salmon, some purples, darker greens may-be. Get everyone in it. Even your cleaners should have that color knickers and sox.
Multi-media it
Work out how you can involve lots of media, many segments. Making it newsworthy and interactive is frankly, just the standard today. And be aware that successful causes use social media automatically. The ‘we have this in common, connected to others, doing the right thing’ stuff that social media wallows in, is nirvana for a charity. People send on all sorts of bull-shitty guff about ‘save one puppy, you’ll save all of humanity’, ‘just say one good thing to another and we can prevent tongue cancer’. If you’re not milking the social media space, you are mad.
DM still works
Yes, it wastes paper and is bad for the environment. Yes, it’s old-fashioned. Yes, it still works.
TV works
If you pay for the spots. If you do a TV ad and hope the stations will run it, you’ll be lucky to get two showings in Newcastle on a dull night and no money in the door. The TV stations get hit on every day of the week by some bleating charity who thinks their cause is so bloody important. So they say they’ll help and basically don’t, because they can’t dedicate a profit making operation to serving non-profit causes all day long. It don’t happen. Grow up and pay for space. All the big guys do.
Hire good PR people
The cousin of a friend who CARES is not the best professional you could find, is he?
Commit to a budget
Assume a multiple of your hoped-for income needs to be spent to garner that income. With thousands of NFP’s competing for the public’s purse, it’s no place for a marketer without a budget. (Would you send a platoon into the jungle without guns?) Get the best team you can buy around you. The best production tools, the best media buy too.
Is it bad to fix it?
Many charities become a machine in their own right, with heaps of staff and regular events like balls and runs and fun things that people don’t want to pull apart. The cynic in me says it’s best if the NFP cannot ever find a cure.
An example of this business model is World Vision, where the stated goal is to end poverty. One could argue you will never stamp out poverty. Just the moment you’ve made everyone in Bangladesh a millionaire, you find that the Papuan’s are on the bread line, or worse, you discover that being a millionaire in Bangladesh Taka means jack shit cause a million Taka will only buy you a bowl of rice and half a chopped dried lizard for flavoring. Lesson? If you want to keep your job, go to a charity that has no hope of fixing the problem.
But if you want to actually achieve something before you leave this dirty globe, help a cause that makes sense and does stuff. Donate here: www.seashepherd.org.
Thump thump thump thump. It’s bloody loud in here, but the view is great and the conversation absolutely trippy. I’m with Rupert and Kerry in Kerry’s new Sagorski chopper, slowly cruising over Sydney’s greener suburbs. Kerry has the joystick in his hand, thinking he’s in control. Rupert is poised near the on-off button. (It turns out that this is Rupert’s key strategy to life’s problems. He just turns off the machine, and they’ll do anything to get him to turn it back on while it’s spinning out of control under no power. That’s with anything, governments, big businesses, religions…)
Kerry looks down at Mosman. Grins. At his age a grin also results in a dribble, but we don’t point it out to him, he is on a roll, he’s so excited he might have another heart attack, so we don’t want to interrupt.
Kerry: “We’re gona use the mobile phone relay stations. See there? And there on that hill? We’re gona broadcast TV by the suburb. They’ll be watching the 9 News and they’ll think they’re watching the same news, but they won’t be. We’ll be changing the content for each area. If they’re a strong Labor voting block, and we want to scare them, we can tell them wages are going down and Unions are being made illegal. If they’re strong Liberals, we can say house prices are on the rise and private schools are doing well. They’ll spend up. Bloody great. Think about it from your point of view, Geoffrey. Your clients will be able to adjust the news to their way of thinking. I can run a full story on the 6 o’clock news about the V8 Commodore, 60 minutes on Caravans and run a breaking story on the Late News about fuel prices going down and the caravan parks will be booked out till Xmas 2010!! It’s niche and mass marketing at the same time. Geeezes I’m smart. No wonder I’m so bloody rich.”
Rupert “You’re not rich. You might smell as rich as a wild boar in a ballet dress, but you’re just a big fish in a little pond. I’m rich. I’m so rich I have no idea what I’m worth. I’m so bloody rich I’ve just commandeered your idea and I’m going to run it world-wide. Cause it’s now my idea. And what are you gonna do about it? Sue me?”
Kerry smiles again. “Why don’t we get together on it, like we do with everything else? Like the new toy? Should we buzz little Johnny’s place again? He looks at me. “Last time we did, Johnny scrambled the fighters. They were gonna shoot us down till I told ’em who was flying. They thought we were Indonesians. But there’s not too many terrorists who can pay for a $50 million helicopter with that week’s flutter money.”
(There’s a reason the two richest Australians are in media. It’s very profitable. Don’t ever feel bad about haggling for a better price. They can afford it.)
We drop out of the sky low over Kirribilli House. Groundsmen drop for cover. Men in serious suits pop out from under trees and aim guns at us. Kerry just laughs loud and long. Rupert is jealous that Kerry’s still young enough to laugh without peeing, and threatens to press the off button…..
I wake up. I realize I’m just dreaming. I’m dreaming of accessible media. Of flexible media. Of media that cares what clients think and makes an effort to help them out. It’s sad, isn’t it? The reality is nothing like the dream.
It’s all about control
The media is a force unto itself. Powerful. So powerful, you are wondering how we can dare to write a few words like those above and have it printed say 20,000 times.
(I think Marketing Magazine’s circulation is about that). By entertaining us, they control us. They control almost every aspect of our lives. Almost all the information most of us receive is from the media.
You, as a client, as an individual, even as a powerful, cashed-up board, are not able to control the media. But you can use it. You have to use it, actually. What choice do you have? If you want to communicate with your customers, you must use communication devices they will look at, watch, read. How else can you get your message to millions of Australians cost-effectively? (Direc t Mail? At $1.00 or so a hit? (if you own the database). That’s $20 million bucks for getting one message to all of Australia. For about $200,000 (1% of that) you could use free to air TV with absolute certainty that 98% of people would have seen it at least once.)
Media always get paid
They have set up an ‘accreditation’ system which forces ad agencies to buy minimum volumes of space and pay on time. And if they don’t get paid, as an agency, you’re dead. As an agency, you can’t get a ‘commission’ from the Fairfax Community group for example, unless you spend at least $50,000 a month on their local papers. This is historical. The first advertising agencies were set up as commission reps for media. Many agencies still exist on this basis. Which means they always push mainstream media and they always encourage you to spend more, regardless of real cost-effectiveness.
Media change terms to suit their own ends
For example, magazines use the term ‘branding campaign’ for something which shows the product – ie. not editorial. Radio use the same term for a dribble of ads, instead of a heavy buy….
Media always sell their own
I’ve never heard a radio rep suggest anything else, ditto with all media. It’s absurd.
How to buy (what you want)
Assuming you have a project to launch, a pressing need to get some sales in the door, a brand to build etc., what’s vital?
Budgets
Decide how much you want to increase business by. Ten percent of that is your budget. Some industries spend less, like agribusiness and ‘industrial’ products like overalls etc., which may only spend say 3-5%, and they grow slower. Some industries spend more, like high volume consumer goods, spending say 12-15% in very competitive markets .
Choose your mix
Your choice of medias should reflect who your target market is and the likelihood of success. Think about the purchase process – how do they buy, when? How are they influenced? Do they need large amounts of information. Do they buy on emotion? If you don’t know the process, do the research, stupid.
Don’t spread too widely
It’s always tempting to spread your budget across a wide range of media. Big mistake. Better to dominate a particular media for a period of time, than to dilute your message.
But move on within the media – say you’re using radio. Recognize that if they only hit say 10% of the people in that demographic, if you stay with that station, you’re only getting to 1:10 of your potential.
Get your frequencies up
Make sure that your potential customers see/hear your ad say 5-7 times. (I know the ratio used to be 3 times, but that was coined in the 1960’s. There’s a lot more media around now and people’s lives are lot busier.)
Buying
Use statistics
I don’t trust the stats either; I used to analyse them for the market research companies.
But you have no choice. If you ignore the stats, what are you going to make decisions on? Yes, after time you can use raw sales stats generated internally, but you’ll need deep pockets to get there. Compare more than one group’s stats though. They vary amazingly.
Consider media buying groups
An option is to do a deal with a media buying group, who say, because they buy in bulk, they get better deals. I’ve never seen a better deal from a buying group than from dealing direct. Why? Because no media is going to write a contract with a media buying group that isn’t profitable. But they will deal with a smaller player that way, for more cash flow. Many people swear by buying groups. At least it’s easier to justify to those above and it takes up less of your time.
Call your contacts
Contacts will pull strings, offer mates a really good rate, pass on useful information. To buy really well, you need contacts.
Interview/brief
Always see people face to face at least once in a while. It’s not cost-effective to do it all the time, but it’s much easier to get a deal when you really need it, if they know you. It’s how you make contacts, silly.
Tell them the mix
It’s useful to explain why they are only getting 20% of the budget. You’ll be amazed how much better a deal you’ll get, if they think there’s a bit more actual cash in the kitty.
Demand Value-Add
If you’re buying serious space, buy loyalty, buy concern, buy interest. Buy PR.
Can you get a better deal?
Always ask this. I think asking it six or seven times over 2-3 phone calls works well.
Avoid feeding the seagulls
Never give the rep more information than is absolutely necessary. It’s in their nature to follow-up any snippet of information you leave, and they will. You’ll endure weeks of polite phone calls if you tell them about a deadline or a project that isn’t quite ready. If you value your time, you must protect it. Don’t give them information.
In agency land it’s considered a huge mistake to tell the rep who the client is that you’re working on for this buy. The reason is again simple; the rep rings the client, tells them they’ve been sent by the agency, the client gets their time taken up by a sales person and more often than not the rep knows another agency/designer/his brother who does a much better job at half the price….
Being nice doesn’t pay
The media are not nice. They are untrustworthy, malicious and hide behind moral –high ground rubbish to perpetuate their own ends. Take a leaf out of Kerry and Rupert’s book. Be tough. You’ll see from the list below there are thousands of media options. Don’t worry about making friends. Make contacts. Judge them on how useful they are to your ends. Finito. It helps to occasionally tell them that’s what you’ll be doing.
Support the little guy
Like the farmer who buys from his local shop so the place stays open, if you want your children to grow up in a decent world, try to put some of your money into the independents, the smaller operations, like trade mags etc.
But screw the big guys
It’s your job to get the planned placement at the lowest cost. Don’t think Kerry and Rupert got rich by selling media cheaply. And do they give a hoot about your show? Even if you’re a big business they’d rather see you dead with thousands of people out of work, to sell a few extra papers on a Sunday, than give you a better deal on space. Keep that in mind.
We’ve got guests coming in 15 minutes and we’re short of a stack of essential items including milk, bread, fruit and most importantly, booze. My mind panics at the mere thought of an afternoon where I’ve got to be half responsible for a teeming mass of screaming kids, setting fire to the garden, pulling each other’s clothes or arms off, demanding food, entertainment and attention.
My nine year old son is in the car with me. White knuckled as I swerve through the traffic, fighting for a car length, skidding around corners, desperate to get to the supermarket and back before they arrive at our place.
We park outside the newsagent, next to the supermarket. I jump from the car and start to run towards the sliding door. I get a trolley. I turn, about to enter Cole’s cave of time and cost. Where the hell is he?
I see him standing engrossed, oblivious, staring at the latest fortnightly version of Lord Of The Rings collection models. In the back of the damn news agency. I put the trolley back. I swallow, calm. I march up beside him and lean into his shell-like ear and whisper ‘come on, we’re in a real rush’. He doesn’t move. Mesmerized. I can’t leave him here, it’s virtually a public thorough-fare and I don’t like the look of the two old guys collecting for the Church fund raiser out the front. Never trust anyone who’s trying to look clean-cut and nice.
I grab his arm and say “I’ll get you something in the supermarket”. He turns “This is the Riders of Rohan. I need it for the battle with Mordor Orcs.” I look at the price. It’s $11.95. Because I’m in such a rush and I can’t afford the 2 minute argument that normally happens before I give in, I just give in and drag him to the counter and pay. We then enter the supermarket, which costs me a hell of a lot more.
Point? The most successful marketing operation of all movie-time has just ticked over another sales milestone. They have used TV, Web, Print, POS, Viral Marketing and some serious psychology to stretch out a $20.00 visit (mind you, three of them too) to the movies into literally hundreds of dollars of after-sales. My son has just added to his collection of tiny plastic models. Not because he wants to be manipulative and takes that precise second to black-mail me, but because he is simply brain-washed by the magic and detail and sheer creative excellence of the whole Lord Of The Rings thing.
It’s a slick, brilliant system. A good story itself does not justify that system, to a parent. A bit of moral education, today’s version of Sunday School where the kids get a story and a lesson on how to be a nice person, by Disney or Dream Works in the form of movies or TV shows, is just a way of hiding their real target – getting our kids to buy junk. Still, it’s better than the next option, that of the nasty organizations who are doing the same thing without even trying to give the kids any decent values along the way; openly infecting our kids with a creed of violence, servitude and greed.
I was actually remembering that supermarket trip of only a couple of weeks ago with fondness. My son is now into Yu-Gi-Oh!, which is a card collection series at $7.95 a set of nine playing cards (he has hundreds) supported by a TV show and website etc, which is really quite sick. I use the word sick for its true meaning. Ill. Diseased. In Yu-Gi-Oh!, the poor brainless comic strip characters on the TV show battle each other for world domination using cards which have characters on them with fantastic powers …. It’s core values are fighting, death; worshiping acquisition and power.
I was a lot happier with Lord Of the Rings, violent and bloody as it is. At least it was good versus evil, Humans versus Orcs – we could all be on the good guy’s side.
What concerns me about our society is that it seems we are breeding a bunch of non-communicative wimps who can’t survive in any kind of jungle – how are they going to cope with real problems, real business? Or just plain life itself when the batteries run out? I think we need to help our kids know what it is to be Australian – not leave the building of our society to 20 year old Chinese comic-strip artists.
Sadly I have no control over what the kids in the school yard are playing unless I organize a pressure group and put the hard word on the Headmaster, like those parents who do that every time marbles as a game rears it’s beautiful but flawed head.
Why is marbles better than Yu-Gi-Oh! in my eyes? Because marbles teaches them hand eye co-ordination, it teaches them to measure things by color, size, design. It teaches them to negotiate according to perceived value. To count. To look after things. And girls are just as good as boys at it. It’s low cost – accessible to any kid. And any kid can get his or her hands on good ones, by bartering or skill or luck.
I note with some satisfaction his school have also banned Game Boys – which is Coke a Cola for a young brain. A sugar-laced high that eats at your soul. You can’t ‘imagine’ when you are steering pins into slots. And it’s their imagination we need to foster, not their capacity to work in factories driving pins into slots to make phones or cameras.
Should you, or shouldn’t you?
In kids marketing, you have the ultimate marketing career dilemma. On the one hand, you are employed to maximize revenue/profit for a company. On the other, you must take responsibility for the development of human brains, by your influence. You can encourage them to expand, be creative and inclusive and to view life forever positively, creating relaxed optimists. On the other hand, you can bend to the cultures of other nastier countries or other lesser professions (accountants) who view things in a lowest common denominator sort of way and commit whomever you influence (to whatever extent you do influence) to a life of shit.
It’s what you choose to work on, and how you choose to promote it, that makes or breaks you as a marketer in kids marketing. Choose carefully. We parents are watching.
What is it about kids’ marketing that attracts us?
It’s a big market
How much do kids influence business? A staggering 43% of all sales are influenced by kids, according to one recent study in the USA.
Big Budgets
In the USA, companies spend $12 billion annually marketing to kids. I guess that means the ads pay – children are vulnerable to manipulation.
What about the market?
Key Influencers
Like with all markets, we are affected in kids marketing by the general trends throughout the western world. That of no time, parents separating (making kids more likely to view shows like the Simpsons as how a ‘real’ family lives…which is probably not far from the truth anyway) a sedentary, obese population, a noisy frantic minority (be they dumb religious nuts or bored over-anxious intellectuals, like the mums at my kid’s school) dominating political decisions etc. These influences force things to happen. Like the recent industry ‘ban’ on TV advertising of questionable food stuffs.
Less attention/less communication
Because we are time-strapped, parents spend less and less time with their kids. Kids need to be in our presence; passive observation. Not playing, or being ‘entertained’ just seeing how real adults behave. Or they grow up thinking TV characters are real life. A scary 26% of kids under 2 have a TV in their bedroom in the USA. Acting I guess, as an electronic baby sitter. Many kids today can’t have a conversation with their peers, let alone adults, because they have almost no social interactive skills. You can’t talk with a TV.
Less Play
The toys many kids are playing today, especially the computer games, limit creativity. 10 or more years ago kids might have, out of boredom, grabbed a card-board box and built a castle to defend against the Indians, or played doctor and nurse with the kid next door.
More ‘entertainment’
Today, 97% of our kids aged 5-14 years list watching TV or videos as their most common leisure activity. Playing electronic or computer games, 69%. (ABS Cat no 4901.0) According to our Bureau of Stats, of the 2.6 million kids who watched TV or videos, about half watched for 10 hours a week, one third for 5-10 hours. But don’t think the rest of the time was spent usefully. Those same kids spent another 10 hours a week on electronic or computer games. So in total they spend almost as much time rotting their brains as they do in school, hopefully building them. I reckon those numbers are grossly lower than the facts. My experience is that most of today’s kids live with the TV on constantly – mornings, afternoons, until they go to bed, most of the week-end. I’d be surprised if the real figure isn’t 80 hours a week.
Over-advertised to
On TV alone, a child will view 40,000 commercials a year (Dale Kunkel PHD, Professor of Communications at University of California.) They are not necessarily ‘sophisticated’ buyers of ad messages (ie. ‘it’s OK if we advertise to them in a manipulative way – they can handle it’), more likely, they are simply confused and exhausted by so much information.
Sticking their hand out
Because parents feel guilty about working long hours, spending so little time with their kids, and making the kid watch TV all the time, they buy them presents. Meaning the kid thinks a normal adult is like a constant Santa, and anyone who doesn’t give them a present is just not nice.
Instant gratification
Kids are encouraged to go for instant gratification, in an attempt by mum/ teacher/ older kid to get a tiny morsel of peace. So cheap but attractive products are big sellers. Broken and discarded in minutes. The worst example is the now ten year alliance between Disney and McDonalds. McDonalds have been built inside Disney parks and in return, most Happy Meal toys are related to the current Disney movie at the time. And wasteful? Shocking. Filling our landfill sites with plastic.
Selling ice-cream on a hot day
Kids love the characters, making sales easy. They associate the characters with pleasure and are happy to support their ‘friend’. Product tie-ins, placed at a child’s eye level, exist on just about everything – vitamins, juice, biscuits etc. In the USA, 45% of fruit snacks have licensing agreements, compared to 10% in 1996.
How To do it even better
Reflect the gender gap
Little boys respond to very different images than little girls. Girls go for pastels, softer music, more happy promises. Boys like to kill things and love the color of blood. Which is one reason many men prefer red ties.
Use TV – but live
Build the castle in front of her eyes. Have the model soldier knock over the other toy.
Kids want to see and touch the items. They do not understand the subtle much at all.
You could try ads for parents, showing the educative value played say at 9 pm plus, and ads for kids, played at their time?
Show kids they can relate to, using it
Kids are very peer group dependant. Show happy kids who look cool. This is the reason American ads for little girls dolls etc., are so cheesy. They reflect American little girl values. But not Australian’s? Think how much more effective they’d be if they showed our girls. But could you get the budget for it?
Kids look up to older kids. If you show older kids doing it, they will think it’s cool. Which is why Lord Of The Rings shows late teenagers doing what must be a mainly young kid thing; painting the models etc.
Use the web
You can find out what they like and make changes easily. Web costs can be literally 10 times less than a TV ad, given that a typical nationwide TV commercial’s production and air time costs are often much more than $200,000 compared with a fairly funky website that might cost less than $20,000.
There’s thousands of marketers like Life Savers using games to lure kids to their ads. (see www.candystand.com) But how about on-line radio shows where they can talk-back to peers, or games where they play against each other, instead of against a machine?
Letter-box drops
The ABS can tell you where they live. The parents won’t think you’re invading privacy. You won’t spend anything like as much on mailing lists or postage, and how many others do it?
School newsletters
Always carried and almost always read by kids, but aimed at parents. High cost per thousand, but few charge realistic amounts for the influence they can carry.
Bit tricky sometimes to get past the mums who edit though.
Direct Mail almost unheard of?
My kids go nuts when they get a letter. Their friends send the occasional party invitation. That’s it. Why don’t kids marketers use direct? It would really pay, given the stand-out nature of the medium, the detail available etc. While I say this, it should be noted that direct to kids is very unpopular as a mechanism with many adults. There’s a US Senate Bill on the floor as I write, that seeks to ban the use of direct, the sale of names & details etc. for kids under 16.
SMS
So many kids have mobiles today and they haven’t banned ads on them yet.
Bus Shelters
Kids wait for ages, then catch buses.
Kids Clubs, competitions
Many great marketers like Tip Top have been involved with sponsorships of decent healthy things like Auskick. Support anything that gets them away from the TV and interacting with other humans, preferably at a running pace.
Product tie-ins
With decent products like fruit, whole grain cereals, water, frisbees, footy’s.
Point Of Sale critical
Retailers who do kid-height displays find sales rocket. Amazing.
Why not the outside of a trolley?
Sit down next to a trolley. That’s the way your kid sees it. What’s wrong? No signs. Nothing to say to the main influencer, the best nagger in the family, that they need cheese sticks. Put a sign on the outside base line of shopping trolleys and I’ll bet sales go through the roof.
Connect the media together
TV with cards, POS etc. Integrated is critical when you’re dealing with a person who’s memory and cognitive abilities are obviously less than fully developed.
Work the mums
Mums make almost all of the decisions that count. If your products have real educative or health benefits, get a mums party-plan or some other networking system going. If that sort of job means she can spend time with other women championing a cause and making money too, you’ll soon have an army.
Find the moral high ground
Almost anything has some justifiable reason to be besides being fun or tasting nice. If it really is junk, perhaps it’s a great way to keep the kids happy on a long drive? Or you could try sugar coating the pill, so to say. How about ‘Look we’ve added Thiamine’ like one unmentionable product has just done, in it’s ads aimed squarely at reducing parental angst. Ok, I’ll name them. Kellogg’s Coco Pops. Seen the ad? Cringed for the marketers? Imagine what their spouses have to say when they are at the kids school BBQ. “Yes, Jane’s in ‘consumer satisfaction’ there, I don’t exactly know what she does…”
Be responsible
Like your Mum would be proud of. Given that the Church is a distant memory for most of us and Grandparents are throwing their keys into the bowl at a Retirement Village, going home with whomever says bingo first…. they aren’t around to be an influence. And we parents are so tired from work we can’t be bothered stopping the kids from watching your ads on the box, (instead of making the kids do their home work) you advertisers are by default one of the main influencers in their lives.
Teach them values like fair play, looking after those who can’t defend themselves, turning the other cheek, the worth of a new idea, freedom of speech. Equality for all. Encourage them to eat decent food, pick up their toys, to save. I say this knowing full well that most kid marketers won’t understand those last few sentences. I’m just hoping someone who does, will someday take over the marketing role at a major kid’s product group and ask me to show their board how to really add values to our society, rather than slowly tearing it to bits.
I’m on bended knee and it hurts. The marble pushes into my skin, the organ’s pipes rumble deeply. I can feel them vibrating inside me. I feel like I’ve swallowed an Oral B toothbrush with the button jammed on.
The music rises and falls, emotionally manipulating my very soul. I’m lulled into the swinging sing-song of a 500 year old Hymn…Onward Christian soldiers, Marching as to War….I feel a tear welling up in my eyes. The beauty, the majesty, the bullshit, so wonderfully sold. I snap out of it and look up at her.
She doesn’t notice me. She’s distant. She stares vacant, over my head. Surveying her assembled, humbled masses with an unfocussed eye, dreamy. Her nose is small and delicate, her fingers light and creative, her brow unwrinkled, her eyes blue and clear. No hard nights for her. No worries. No fears. No movement for that matter. A cold statue. Just a bit of dust and glue whacked together in the shape of a young woman.
She’s porcelain, lacquered. Perfect. Pristine. Untouched by human hands (sure – who made her?) Unsullied. The perfect woman. A virgin. And yet, somehow, miraculously you might say, she’s also a mother – neatly covering both bases…the need for chastity meets the need for procreation, the continuation of the species….how perfect, how improbable..
Isn’t this, the Madonna, she who dominates so many Churches throughout the world, the Virgin, the perfect brand? Like many things to do with the twisted English, it’s all about promise, without much delivery. What exactly can a Virgin do for a real bloke without changing her status (her core brand message) instantly and forever?
I go to so many meetings where the brand they hold up that they want to be like is Virgin. They say ‘can’t we be another Virgin?’ As if it’s as easy as being just another mother with three screaming kids and a mortgage.
Yet is Virgin the perfect brand? Is it bullet-proof? Is it the unassailable, the brilliant, the heavenly sent brand it’s purported to be?
Can Virgin get anything wrong? It’s launched shops, records, airlines, credit cards, how fantastic. How brilliant are the marketers that run Virgin. Can they not get anything wrong?
But what about Virgin Cola? Failed there. Virgin Vodka? Failure. What about Jeans? Failed there…
The point is even the best can get it wrong. Even the best can fail with brand extensions. This article is about how to launch new products launched under the banner of the existing, successful brand, and not stuff it up. Like don’t associate someone like Pammy, who is, let’s face it, not exactly virginal, (have you seen the email clips?) with a brand like Virgin. Good mix? Nup, big boo-boo there, Sir Dick.
But lets first look at why roll out brand extensions, the pitfalls, the opportunities.
Make Money
Let’s not mince words. This is about quick, dumb money. It’s easy-buck territory for marketers and boards. Everyone says, ‘Hey why don’t we launch a sister brand? We can trade off the good name of our big cash spinner and make even more money with no risk! Aren’t we smart business people?’
But how easy is it really? If you go into a fight thinking it’s going to be a cake-walk, invariably you get it in the nose.
Are there not competitors? Don’t they have marketing budgets? Don’t they employ public relations people to put an alternative spin? Don’t they talk to your retailers, distributors too? Don’t they spend nights lying awake, thinking up strategies or my favorite, sticking pins into little dolls that look like you?
There are many examples of how this obvious, easy-sounding exercise fails. Our research (yes, we always research these articles, believe it or not) found some 30,000 new SKU’s get launched in the US each year, (couldn’t find figures for OZ, if you know them, send them in) and the vast majority are brand extensions. Fewer than 25% of those are listed as successes by their owners.
So you have a one in four chance of getting it right. Better than some product launches, but only just. For something you’d reckon was going to be a walk in the park?
What do people do wrong? How or why do these launches fail?
Weak Market opportunities
Just because you think a launch would look good on your CV this year doesn’t mean this product is wanted by the public or your retailers. Most of the failures seem to have occurred because the wish for a company to run another product line is out of touch with the market’s needs. The public has no desire to get a Widget B to do X. They are perfectly happy having other brands do that for them. Especially not where Widget B model had nothing much to do with the core brand values of Widget A.
Poor research
Everything successful starts with research. Any new product deserves the same depth of research as you’d expect to put in to a major launch. If you’re using the wrong approach, if you don’t want to listen to the findings, if you’ve hired the wrong researchers (NB. they are the researchers who don’t tell you like it is, but tell you what you want to hear) if you don’t truly understand your core brand values or you have done the new packaging, brand messaging, channel or whatever research too late, or interpreted it too positively, you risk hitting the wall.
Over-stretched associations
Most of the failures come from an assumption that this product has something to do with the original one’s values. And most of the time they don’t. What the hell do Dunhill Pens have to do with Dunhill Cigarettes? The same basic shape? If that works, I ought to launch my own brand of potato.
Low budgets
So many companies think a brand extension is an opportunity to shave normal launch ad and PR budgets. In some wonderful cases, you do get carried along on the wings of the public’s love for your original brand. But they are few and far between and most of the time you get recognition, brand personality association, but you don’t necessarily get ‘reason to buy’.
Please understand this – you are just getting a nudge from the old brand – you are not getting a totally free ride.
You must spend promotional dollars – convince your board to put the same kind of funding into the launch and on-going support of the new line as you would into a completely new product launch.
Lack of commitment
At the end of the day most fail because no-one really believes in them. You might, or your national sales manager might half believe in it, one or two retailers might run a promotion about it, but three months after the launch, there you are, wondering what went wrong. You must be 100% committed to the new line. You must give it a reason to be in its own right, it must fill a market niche of its own.
Sure, it gets a lot of help from the original brand – Landrover Socks ‘get better grip’ or ‘give you a smoother ride’ or whatever, but in the end they are just over-priced socks and are they warm and comfy?
Are you really proud of the idea? Does it work for the retailers? Can you flog it over the web for lower than normal retail costs? Does it work better than the competitors? Does anyone actually care about it?
No champions
Most often failure comes down to no-body being truly responsible. No one person with their balls on the line. Make any new product some body’s problem, and keep them accountable to it, and you’ll see way better results.
Poor Organisational Capacities
Often companies are operating at their maximum capacity in many areas – especially in times of full employment like now. Even if the marketing department can find a few extra hours between 7pm and 9pm, the truckies, the warehouse guys, the sales department girls, the accounts department dweebs, somebody drops the ball and the whole pack of cards falls over. Make sure you have capacity in all sections before you commit your whole organization to more work.
Upside
Line extensions are damn simple to sell to a board. So if you need something to do, or want to give your researcher mates a project, or your ad agency an easy ride, they are easy to get senior management support for.
But they do not become a brand unto themselves, so they are always under the cloud/wing of the original brand, they are always playing second-fiddle to a brand developed specifically for that niche in it’s own right.
What’s got more credibility when it comes to flying? A balsa wood kit plane from a family that’s been making wooden biplanes for 100 years, or the BP card-board enviro-biplane launched to promote BP’s green credentials?
They are also usually of less intrinsic asset value when it comes to a sale of the company, or for that matter commitment from your board, or your retailer channel partners. The brand sells for less when the company goes up for sale, because they are just one part of the bigger brand, not a brand in itself.
You have to ask yourself, what if we put the same effort into a brand that could exist in it’s own right that fitted that market gap? Would we do better over the long run if we launched an original brand instead? What does your professional marketer’s hat say to you about that? Are you just going along with the ride because the board suggested it? Or do you really think the public needs it in this form?
Cop-Out
I’m not anti-brand extensions, but I have to make the point that their launch invariably displays very little imagination – you are trading on the public’s perceptions of another brand. You are milking the cow of human kindness, not pushing the human race forwards.
Yawn
The reason most people don’t greet these product developments with enthusiasm (except the new little promotion agency who needs the work) is that they often demonstrate zero new thought. They add very little to the world’s intellectual space. They are therefore not remotely inspiring. The accountants on the board may think they are a great idea, but those guys think wearing a pink business shirt is living dangerously. You are potentially boring the world. The upside is that some of these products work very well. Cadbury’s Ice-cream tastes great. Caterpillar boots do look tough, do last well.
How To
Educate the board
They always think these launches are as easy as an against-the-wall screw with a recently-divorced drunken ex-squeeze at a wedding reception.
There are great risks attached, particularly in loss of face if it fails, and keep in mind most do. Take your time to do a presentation that covers both the advantages and the risks. Don’t be tempted to gloss over the problems – usually this gives you an opportunity to get more budget for the project anyway.
Choosing which way to jump
Most of the academic research discusses developing core brand values and testing their extension into other products using proxies or fake brands that emulate the possible new line. I guess they mean by that you should research what the public thinks of the idea, but who am I?
Create Guidelines
Regardless of which new product/extension you want to do, for whatever reason, it’s best before embarking on spending your shareholders hard-earned, to decide on and get agreement on a set of guidelines that could work across any associated product. Can it fit in our warehouse? Can we make it in OZ? etc.
Make sure the connection is right
Just cause it sounds like a good idea on paper does not make it work.
It should be very relevant IN THE CONSUMERS’ MIND (your’s doesn’t count). It should make sense to the public. It should sound exciting to the retailers and the target market. They ought to salivate. Not just say OK, but truly want it.
Value/brand add
The new product must add something to the original brand’s standing. And it should re-inforce both. Do Caterpillar boots reinforce the brand values of Caterpillar Dozers? I’m not sure. But I’ll tell you something for free – if they tore easily and only lasted a few weeks, they would definitely damage the perception that Caterpillars are an invincible machine.
Sell them through to partners properly
Go see your distributors with the baby almost finished (a few things still uncertain, location for info on pack, the TVC not yet finally cut, the media budget still not locked down or whatever story you can swing) for their input/comment on promotions, twin packs or whatever. It’s always important to ensure your channels are on-side, but even more-so when they are already carrying a few of your main lines.
Check damage reports regularly
Many new lines cause damage in channel relationships (we don’t have the space!), and with public perceptions of your capacity/brains etc. I recommend monthly tracking of major launches, at least.
Protect the Original Brand
Make sure that you are not putting all your efforts into the little sister brand and not the main cash cow. Protect your main brand with appropriate spend, with the normal amount of effort and make sure that the new product isn’t eating away at your main brand’s credibility. If it is, fix it somehow.
Spread the marketing budget
Of the launch and on-going campaigns across the whole range of products. I’ve seen some clowns expecting a new product to generate all it’s own money/cover it’s own costs, when it’s clearly promoting the original product as well – if you’ve got the same name and livery, surely you’re deeply connected from the public’s point of view. Make the old product carry some of the costs of the new. The new one is promoting the old one.
Give yourself a sensible pay-back period
Most big companies work on pay-backs of investment of 4-7 years, depending on the purchase category. You or your board can’t expect to be covering costs and reaping profits in six months. Treat this like any other investment and you won’t be disappointed and your board will be far less likely to be hounding you in a year.
Launch in similar media
If your core brand is always in women’s mags, shouldn’t your new one? It’s targeting exactly the same audience isn’t it?
Launch with similar budgets
If it’s going to be too little, too late, why bother? Make sure your team are armed properly or you’ll fail. Get adequate budgets for the task. Don’t expect miracles or favours from people just because it’s a bolt-on. Expect the reverse.
Expect a negative reaction, or a yawn
Most people are embarrassed to work on an obvious copy or addition to a brand mix, so much so that your ad agency will often want to launch it with something naff like say a sales promotion with it actually attached to the original product – you can see a Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate Bar glued to their new Cadbury Dairy Milk Ice-cream in the freezer can’t you? Do you think the agency put a lot of thought into that? Reckon the chief art director would have worked on that? Gone for an award? No, they would have got the work experience team to do that.
Try and try again.
If the first one’s a success, brilliant, you could do it all again next year. But if it’s a failure, so what? Same story. Richard Branson’s Virgin is not a success just because the brand’s values are right and they are a good organization when it comes down to the nitty-gritty. Virgin is a success mainly because they don’t give up. Sure, they have wins and losses and recognise a failure and move on. But they don’t stop launching and take off a few years to lick their wounds. They just keep launching. They learn a bit each time, but they are always there, punching away.
If you want to be a success in this life, it’s not whether you win each battle that counts, it’s going in there again and again and again. Bloody nose, broken arm, having another go anyway. The people with a real commitment to anything are those who stay in it and who eventually succeed.
I’m on my couch, with my back against the window, sun streaming in. I can see over the park to my left. I’m looking out the window, frankly, in total disbelief at what I’m hearing.
My mind starts to wander. So here it goes. What my fat, squishy middle-aged arse is sitting on, is presently a 1950’s structure, all fly-away curves and bought for $100.00, including the arm chairs, in 1993 in Hampton, sort of a half-way suburb. Not Aristocracy, not down-and out. Typical of middle Australia – unsure of where it sits in the great scheme of things. And full to the gunnels of divorcees and people who wish they were.
Hampton is plastered with people wanting to be chiropractors, who can’t be bothered to sit 7 years of exams and have three kids to support anyway. People who’d like to be I.T. experts but can’t download the latest copy of word without calling assistance, or corporate drones who want to own their own business, but can’t be bothered with planning, executing plans or chasing money.
This is your future, fellow marketer. Your mission, should you wish to accept it, is to take these punters on a ride through the skies of life. To inspire, to cajole, to manipulate, to move to action the entire public of the globe.
Yes, you can vote with your feet. Your behavior. Vote for mediocrity and ordinariness and we’ll never see you. But go for the least popular, the anti-market, the road less traveled and I’ll (and the rest of marketing land) will be standing besides you screaming GO ON YOU FUCKER like the cheer squad your lazy step Mum and boring Aunt Katriona never were.
We in marketing land want to be inspired. We want to be given stories that excite us. We want people around us who will fight for the right, go for the hard, bite into the bitter apple of life and at spitting it out say, fuck you! I wanted a better deal for my fellow humans you bastards can get stuffed!
So here I am on my couch, not being inspired. Not able to concentrate, cause it’s so mind-bogglingly hopeless. I’m talking with a person who wants a job in an ad agency, who has no life experience, no working background whatsoever, but because she’s managed to pass a few exams at Uni, she feels she’s in a position to dictate to clients how things ought to be done. And she tells me how she’ll tell them and what she’ll tell them. My politely delivered (sure) advice?
Go get a real job before you want to work in ad land. Don’t be another mindless wanker in an industry packed to the ceilings with them. Go find out what it’s like to get up at 3.30 am and load milk cartons in a dairy for 10 hours straight. The only person in the whole factory who hasn’t spent at least 12 months in jail. Go dig fence posts into freezing ground for weeks and pull hi-tensile steel with your bare hands cause your gloves have torn to shreds. Go put thousands of price tags on bikinis. Or stand for days on a street corner asking people their opinion of Vegemite’s latest cheese mix monstrosity.
I had hundreds of jobs in lots of industries before I got to ad land and I still don’t feel qualified to tell clients how it goes down. You can only sit in a client’s seat when you have done what they do day in, day out. If you haven’t experienced their pressures, their customer’s problems, you are simply being a wanker if you tell them how to do things. Now what was it you wanted to do again?
Career paths
Nice segway, hey? Should I be more generous? Should I think that people with the right core training ought to be running business in Australia just cause they have the degree? No. There are no prisoners taken in the business world today, regardless of how nicely people smile to our face. People get the jobs they win by what they say, but only keep them if they deserve to. A degree is the start, not the end of your learning cycle.
But aren’t there ways I could ensure I’ll be more successful in the future? Well, you’d like to think there were career paths, like being a lawyer:- you study law. You do the professional year, either in a law firm or with a group like Leo Cussens Institute, you work as a scummy low lawyer dog for say 10 years. You become a partner. You buy a yacht and an apartment in Albert Park. If you know how to select a good red and which shoes to wear with which suit, you might even become a barrister or a QC. You work another 10 years and then get appointed as a judge after sucking up to the right blokes and shaving your golf score. You end up on the Federal Court, ruining the plans of several governments before you die, in a frigging ugly, smelly old horse hair wig, which nicely hides your ugly, smelly old bald head, still on the bench. Then they make a brass plaque with your name on it that hangs in a big hall in Canberra and the only people who remember you 10 years later are the poor crims you put away and the guy who has to clean your plaque once a year.
There are no established career paths for great marketers. You can go via sales. You can go via academia. You can go via the seat of your pants and many great marketers have gone via the weird and wonderful, like accountancy or law, doctorism or politics. Best, to be taken seriously, to go through a degree like marketing at Monash or Deakin, Swiny or Melboring. Next step is something you can get your fetid teeth into, I’m hoping you can spend time in product marketing, research, media, bit of creative, prahaps even costings or finance, before you end up as a senior marketer or on a board tossing your gism on the scrap heap of other people’s lives.
There should be solid career paths. There are some career tracks, but many of them peter out. It’s easy to get lost and stray into areas you would never have dreamed, like owning companies, going bankrupt or becoming a squillionaire, being on the UN food for drugs program, running guns to Somalia and all the countless other interesting gigs people I went through UNI with have done. I blame the professional bodies, several of which I am a member of, for not establishing and promoting career paths for younger marketers.
One career step idea I do like, and I’ve recently been involved with, is the AMI mentors program which is essentially the AMI finds a bunch of middle-aged marketers and makes them sit through lunches and/or coffees with young kids just out of Uni who want to drill the old buggers for ideas, contacts, tactics of how to get a raise and other useful stuff the Uni’s would have absolutely no idea about and most older employees don’t not want to arm you with. It’s similar to teaching a starving person how to fish – if you do that, they might not buy fish from you again.
Experiences versus careers
A career is just a long period of time doing similar things. This is not necessarily what will make for a great marketer. A great marketer has worked with a lot of different people, knows lots of different things and therefore understands how the full gambit of our community thinks. That’s how she can hopefully think up strategies that will work to get them to do things.
We are a career that is ultimately judged on our ability to change people’s behavior for a reasonable cost. For this you need experience. Experience in things you think have nothing to do with marketing, like flipping burgers or washing windows. If you are ever taking a brief for a window spray or trying to win the maccas account, you’d be grateful you’d done those jobs.
Get a perspective on time
Time is an ephemeral thing. If you are running the 100 metres and aiming for ten seconds, say in the Olympic finals, you would remember those ten seconds very clearly. Ten seconds while you’re driving to our Mum’s place will fly past so fast. Ten hours or even ten days in a dreary job can go incredibly slowly. Time is a relative measurement, the more fun you are having, the quicker it goes, but the sweeter is the memory. My point? There’s nothing wrong with spending a few months or even years doing something that you enjoy or are learning lots from, that isn’t necessarily ‘full-on’ marketing. It probably won’t hurt your career and it may really add to your ability to do part of it very well. Also keep in mind that you will be on this planet for some 90 or so years, most of them will be working, given there’s almost no retirement age anymore, so you might have 60 or 70 years of working life ahead of you. Who gives a fig if you spend one or two of them fishing for prawns in the Spencer Gulf or walking across the Chilian Glaciers as a tour guide?
And who the fuck are you?
People smell experience and career path. They smell success, and they smell people with potential. It’s not about what you say, it’s often how you carry yourself. When you smile, what you put with what, how you shake a hand or if you wink at a stranger to say hello or ‘I get your point’. Look to develop character traits that make you stand out, help people to remember you. One of my favorite clients has hair that is just wrong. Wrong era, wrong color. He does it very intentionally and no-one can forget him.
What to do to get the Gig
Know people
This is not as hard as it sounds. Socializing in Australia is the number one best method of getting good jobs. It’s also the best way to generate new business, but that’s a whole other article. People know other people. Everyone knows of at least one company which needs such and such a person. You only have to talk about yourself, and most marketers love to do that.
Be proactive
You can sit around hoping Ford will put ‘Marketing Manager’ on Seek, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. Lots of the best jobs never get to the public space. If you don’t find the job you want through your own networking, decide what it is you want and go out and get it.
Select a range of companies
In the same or similar industries. That way you can know what you’re talking about when the interview hits the fan. Look for players of a size that will suit you. Some people do very well in smaller companies where they can throw their weight around and get into every issue, but small companies are often vulnerable to market swings and you never have much budget. Other people blossom best in biggish companies where they have more resources and more safety nets. Some people might kid themselves they are business-like, but really need the disciplines/ restrictions of the public service or major international corporates to operate at peak efficiency.
Find out about them
Do some research. Go on their web site, read their press releases etc. Everyone wants to employ someone who’s keen enough to know lots about the company they want to work for.
Use the force
If you know what you want register for those sorts of jobs on seek, my career and whatever else you can find that will notify you of the gigs. Similarly, see the relevant head hunters and register on their databases.
Drop in
No-one has the balls to drop in to an office and say hello. Tells you a lot about whether you actually want to work there, whether you really want to drive the 35 k’s every morning, and makes you instant besties with at least one person.
Relevant/courageous CV
Put in the quirky jobs. Don’t listen to those dumb as dish water people who type up CV’s in personnel agencies who tell you to only put in your glamorous jobs. If they had any brains they’d be running clubs or flight-testing fighter jets. They are typing fucking resumes. They don’t know a thing. Put in the interesting jobs you’ve done and give them really colorful detail. You’re a marketer, not a frickin accountant. Sell yourself.
Put in a picture
If you are not as ugly as a cats bum, use it. It is much easier to like a person if you see their face. A name is just another bit of the human virus. A face is a person.
Write in long hand
No-one does, most people can. Makes you human and a bit ‘creative’ without even trying.
Fix your image
It has to fit their culture. Find out about their dress code and reflect it. The number of people who come to me in suits who don’t know how badly dressed/casual we are really scares me. What do they think ad land is, Banking? On that subject, fix your facebook up. Most people hiring today check your face-book/linked-in/xing etc. presence as a matter of course. If they are conservative and you’ve got shots of you rogering chickens and setting fire to police cars, it’s not a good look. Conversely, if you’re a secret born-again Christian but you’re trying to get a job with a condom supplier, do yourself a favor and dirty up your act.
Be proactive in the interview
You don’t want to scare them, but there’s nothing wrong with being interested, not just begging. Ask how they got started or ‘Tell me what an average day is like in here’ may be enough…
Be careful to pick your cultures
Some cultures are slow poison – seem nice enough on the first sip, but look around. If they are all going slowly downhill, don’t get involved. If they are happy and relaxed, it’s probably worth really fighting for the gig.
Lie, a little
I don’t mean totally, but if they ask you if you can do something, and you’re pretty sure you can, have a go. Nobody can do everything, but also, nobody got to try something unless they gave it a shot. Keep in mind you better study it up/practice – cause they’ll find out soon enough.
In the right place, take anything
There’s an old saying ‘If you’re prepared to do anything you won’t have to do anything very long’. That means if you will do lots of stuff, you’ll never get bored and you’ll learn way more. They may not have a place for an account manager, but if you’re prepared to do the filing, the selling or the phone answering, they will probably slot you into the better job when they trust you can do it. That may only take a few months. In my humble opinion, you’re way better off to be in the right group of people, but doing the washing, than in the wrong group of people, doing the marketing role. It’s much easier to switch tasks, by demonstrating ability, than to switch to companies that may be hard to get into.
I like having the last word. It feels as if I’ve said ‘So there, tinkerbell’ and you don’t have a chance to reply as the phone goes dead in your hand. On that, phones are going to play a much bigger role in retail marketing in the future. With GPS and Google maps we’re now finding our way to stores with them, being sent ads via emails on them; getting messages about specials and deals on our phones as we meander down shopping strips.
Is the phone the ultimate retailer accessory? I recall ‘database or die’ was the catch-phrase of marketing conferences and functions during the early 2000’s. Maybe it’s going to be ‘phone or fucked’ as we enter the 2010’s.
Is it a technologically driven industry, retail? Will the web and phone next dominate retail or will physical retail retain the principal role? I can’t help but think basic physical retail (ie. Not home delivered) will remain core to our shopping behavior for one key reason. We need things to do with our days that don’t involve sitting on our bums on a couch. We need to move around and bump into other humans. You know how boring it is to stare at the same four walls and the same four members of your nuclear family.
But, as they say about advertising, half of retail works, half is stuffed, I just don’t know which half. Part of the problem I feel is that professional marketers are similar to doctors. We try to rescue and give life back to an ageing lung cancer patient while he’s still smoking. Because we are creative and strategic at the same time, we’re often suggesting things that will work, but only to prolong the brand, not fundamentally change it. Half of retail today needs radical change. Technology is passing it by. Can phones fix retail? They may be able to assist with some of these core issues.
Product. If you’re carrying that which is needed but can’t be got, you’ll do brilliantly. Likewise, if it’s the same as the next shop, you are a slave to price. The selection of which products to carry is rarely today a marketing function, but ought to be. In many circumstances we poor marketers are being asked to help sell stodge that some under achieving ‘professional’ buyer has bought on a whim and we’re being told it’s our fault if the damn stuff isn’t wanted by the public. Just because no-one can cook in Britain and they all live on their own because no-one can stand them doesn’t mean all foods should come in pre-cooked single serves here. Buying needs to be done with as much marketing input as advertising is. Phones won’t help here, except to call other suppliers. Not a bad thought – why don’t you start buying for the firm?
Location. If you’re the only shop in a small town, you do fine. If you’re within walking or driving distance and a convenient left-hand turn off the main road, you do fine. The fact is, if you are too far from your punters, you won’t get the sale. Which is why critical mass matters so much in retail. Not only do you need to be a certain size before you can buy at the right price to compete, you need critical mass for convenience; to open stores every few kilometers across suburbia is to be really significant. Phones might help the punters to find the store.
Timing. If you’re carrying t-shirts and we are heading into winter, you better quit them. All retail goes through timing peaks and troughs and blind Freddie will be able to tell you when to have what stock, but so many retail management can’t get their act together to stock the right product for the time or to open when they should. If we are all working longer hours when on earth can we shop for accessories or car parts? How often have you been to the supermarket and it’s been crowded at 7 pm? And no other shops open in the street. Lots of people, but no service. Not that you need it, but a phone based survey would prove the point in a blink.
Yes, there’s sales staff training, branding, pricing, they are all marketing issues. But the key thing is simply bringing the marketing function into centre stage in retail. Making retail work requires power placed in the hands of marketers. And yes, it’s a two edged sword. Retail is the ultimate test for marketers. You either get it right and they love you, or you don’t, and it’s back to phoning up someone like me for a job.
I climb in. It’s bubbleish, if that’s a word. The windscreen almost touches my face, but the air blowing up from the air con goes right into my mouth and just a light, soft flow over what used to be my forelock, which is now as bald as Uluru.
The turning schtick is soft and flexible and feels like my favorite friend.
I squeeze it and I can hear the heart beat of the engine pick up, the excitement throbbing in the electric rotors. I push forward a little on the schtick. She moves instantly beneath me. Lifts a little into the air, I feel this sense of power rushing through me, like the first time you discovered expresso coffee or took a mouthful of pure oxygen. The Apple Air moves forward, almost pulling me along, a comfortable rider in a plastic Mermaid. I push the schtick, a bit up, a bit to the right and in split seconds we blend seamlessly into the traffic above Toorak Road, just one more commuter rushing to their office to start the day. Oh, riding to work in the Apple Air, it’s so close, isn’t it?
Do you see the future? Can you visualize what could be as much as what is now? Do you hunger for change? For improvement? For efficiency? For diversity and freedom? Want to disrupt the status quo and insert a new being, a cleaner set of values? Find the same just so boring? Want to help the planet and move these doddery humans forward like the sheep they are?
I do. So I’m stuck at a cross-roads in life. One of the big ones when you weigh up the pros and cons of your career, your marriage, your car. Should I get a wanky red sports car, a hair transplant, new teeth and chase women half my age with promises of riches, career advancement and Viagra? Yes, it’s the mid-life crisis. How they can call it mid-life when I’m 50 is beyond me, but it does give me a tiny bit of confidence that somebody somewhere thinks I might reach 100. God knows how you could if you do what I do day in day out. Little exercise, wrong foods. Stressful job. Bad attitude. Must scream heart attack to the average cardio surgeon reading this. Surely there’s at least one who picks up the mag at a newsagency thinking he can slum it with a business read for a few hours? Might get something witty one could say to those handsome young chaps on the golf green this Sunday.
Why am I at a cross roads? Cause I’ve been thinking about Innovation. Do we push the boundaries of the marketing world? Or do we just watch what the greats do and follow meekly behind, emulating every little step the leaders take? Do you?
I’d like to think we are leaders, but I’m not so sure. This very simple thought has rocked my world. I’ve always thought of the Starship’s troop of soldiers, our crew, as a hardy bunch of pirates prepared to scale the world’s battle-ships and take on all comers, but do we really? Or do we just do little things. Then I say to myself, does that matter? Even little innovations are still innovations aren’t they?
I’m also shamed by recent events in the Southern Ocean. Peter Bethune of Sea Shepherd who was Captain of the Ady Gil, rammed and sunk by Japanese Whalers in February, had the guts to try a citizen’s arrest of the opposing Captain and was clapped in irons, taken to Japan and is now being tried for piracy, terrorism and trespass. What a dude. What an innovative, gutsy, bloody stupid thing to do. In comparison, I feel like I do nothing exciting anymore. That we’re a bunch of wimps in Melbourne’s adland. Poofs with pretensions of grandure.
I entered advertising cause I thought it gave me the best opportunity to do wild stuff at work other than being a member of the SAS, but for that you’d have to be talented, disciplined, youngish, fit and prepared to kill whole villages of non-Australians without a second thought, most of which I’m not. So I went into adland, where everything you touch is new and if it isn’t, you get fired by clients. Good creative is by definition, innovative, I think.
Let’s just define innovation. It’s doing things new or differently. That could be anything. It’s not necessarily developing the new i-phone or a square wheel. It can be as basic as a new media plan or a new way of talking to disgruntled customers.
This is relevant in the magazine that leads marketing thought in this country for one very small, ugly fact. Innovation to marketers is not simply a nice idea we can expose on a Sunday to the other chaps on the golf green. (‘Whoops, look, my silly pants have dropped and I’m afraid to say, if you look closely, you’ll see I’m as hard for you Peter as a five iron on a frosty morning. Let’s go over to the rough there and get all rough with each other’.) Surely there are some gay golf-playing Cardiologists?
If we marketers don’t innovate, we die.
We are intensely vulnerable to those who do. The communication landscape, the market place, every-body in marketing land, is violently trying to get the attention of human eye-balls and have them move to their side of the street. To buy from their company. That’s our job. Those of us who regularly innovate and do things differently, hopefully better, typically get more attention than those who follow. Why? Cause they get watched and derr, get eye-balls.
We live in a vicious, unforgiving business world where the main game is keeping customers on the tap and everybody is fighting for the same share of credit card. Yes, we are all friendly chaps on the surface, but there’s a dark side of competitiveness that lurks just below the surface, a bit like our cardiologist’s ardent penis. To be a cardiologist you must enjoy seeing people of the verge of death, wavering between a weak light in their eyes and the grey still pallor of it gone out. You must enjoy playing God, bringing them back or sadly, letting them slip from this mortal coil. In the Cardiologist’s world innovation is an OK thing as long as it’s been tried by lots of other Cardiologists, cause one really big innovative leap, that fails, is one really big law suit. And a history of dead people due to experimentation means no Personal Negligence Insurance and thus, no work. No playing God no more.
Innovation must be constant
This is where we are fundamentally different from other professions. Innovation in most professions is a small, well-tested nudge forward, not a bloody necessity. In cardiac medicine, it can lead to disaster. Neither do Lawyers innovate. They prosecute people who do half the time. They use old laws as ‘precedents’ to prove the veracity of the ones they are trying to apply.
In Marketing, everybody is trying new stuff. New media, new creative, new models, new customer groups, new deals with channel partners, new this, new that. It is a constant thing. It’s also usually multi-faceted. If you don’t innovate on several fronts almost at the same time, you get hit by one catastrophe or another. If your competitor innovates in media, they get a real edge on you. If you don’t counter with a new brand promise or a new product or something, they get the sales, the money and you lose your job. Bang goes the Golf Club and/or the red sports car.
Scary for the other professions
This of course flies completely in the face of the accountants and lawyers on your board. They want proven tactics, zero experimentation. They want absolute certainty that every cent they spend will get X result. They are petrified of change, of innovation. They even say things like ‘are you keeping everything on track?’ They are, after all, people who spend their lives looking backwards checking what has happened via the rear view mirror, not driving. The marketers have the wheel. It’s the marketers who have to seek out new customers, new systems for getting to them, new ways to seduce them into buying the widgets of society. It’s just so sad that the accountants also have the accelerator – the money button.
This inherent desire for sameness, reliability, that under-pins most professions, is the reason we are looked upon as charlatans by our professional peers. At the core, they don’t get the most fundamental aspect of business. That business is about markets and business lives or dies on attracting customers and customers are like fickle children in a lolly-shop, always tempted by the next bright thing their eyes land on. So business needs to constantly innovate and change (like an cuttle-fish on the sea-floor – one second clear, the next a mottled weed-like pattern, the next black as coal as it passes a shadow. Cuttlefish can actually work out what you see behind them and blend in so you cannot see them at all except for the ripple in the light as they change. How for fucks sake?)
Innovation is a culture
Good companies who innovate regularly (think Google, Apple, 3M, Ikea, Virgin) have this strong set of values permeating right through their operations. From the kid getting lunches to the CEO, they are encouraged to suggest improvements.
Give your people thinking time
If you keep them stamping out shoes, and not allow them to dream about how things could be done better, you do not innovate/move forward. People only have so many minutes in the day/week and they need free time to consider how to make improvements. The important innovator companies all set aside ‘me-time’ for employees and reap the rewards ten-fold. In Google’s case this is a day a week. I’m not kidding. Do they have innovations happening in Google? Do they have market share? Does it work? You tell me.
Why are people so scared of change?
Change scares the crap out of most people. I think this is something to do with survival. Innovation at grassroots jungle level is fraught with serious danger.
If you try jumping from a big branch to a small branch and the little one breaks, you also break an arm, so you don’t do it twice. This means most humans are happier with routine than constant change. Which is why most people do the same thing year in year out. We are not most people, us marketers. I guess if you’re happy stamping out leather soles in a shoe factory for years on end. Ie. Left arm picks up bit of leather, both arms place it under press, right foot goes down on trigger, leather gets cut, foot is released…Then you probably don’t want to be in Marketing.
It’s not normal
Normal is not innovative. That’s basically the definition of it, put another way. Normal people are not innovators either. Some body I really respect says that if people think you are ‘normal’ when you’ve passed 40, you have failed life. So normally try to be different.
Be prepared to fail
Get over it. Some of the time you’ll fuck up and look like a turkey. This is why it’s good to try major innovations in test marketing scenarios, rather than ruin the entire year’s turnover. The likes of Coles have ‘concept stores’ – they can get it wrong and it doesn’t affect the main cash-flow generating businesses. Nobody who achieves anything can do so with a perfect track-record. All science is based on experimentation, which means they try 50 ways of doing something and 49 of them don’t work.
Be scientific
I know this doesn’t sound as romantic the stuff I said above, (or for that matter the two doctors now humping in the metre high grass on the edge of the 14th fairway) but it’s best try to innovate or experiment with a minimum of factors changed. If you can get the innovations down to one or two at a time, you can really see how they impacted on sales/the brand. It’s actually your job to experiment effectively, not recklessly. What works on a small scale can be easily run out on a larger one. One good reason why most web banners or even old direct mail usually has several executions in early phases, or why most players try several bits of creative in research before launching into a mainstream campaign.
Sexy innovation areas
Customer interaction
Get the buggers talking to you and you can seduce them, you wicked heart-doctor you. This of course requires different subjects, different media, different promises, different budgets.
Dream making
Giving them more exciting dreams. Gen Y, Gen Y not, Gen X all the bloody Gens and the thousands of occupations/psychographics have different hot buttons and they are usually not yours. Certainly not the dreams of some corporate whacker who might control your budget from Munich or London. Get their dreams right and you own their hearts.
Media combos
Combine things you wouldn’t normally, like Readers Digest with Girlfriend. Say on the theory that Granny talks with Grandchild about Xmas presents?
Brands with attitude/quality copy
Read the ‘Guarantee’ copy that comes with your Crumpler Bag, if you want to know how to do attitude. Note: We did not write it, I’m sad to admit. (Scan and run in article?)
Multi-web-based presences
So many ways to say ‘thing you want to buy’. Often real operators are running several front ends, many ways to find the sting at the end of the long tail.
Competitions, but interesting
How to make winning something emotionally compelling.
Joint partnerships with other cos
Maccas are in bed with Bega Cheese, Ingham Chicken. You could be in bed with half the companies you compete with for share of wallet, if you plan it carefully. Sexy way to save on media costs and get wider distribution.
iTune Apps to Changed realities
Heaps of Australian businesses are adding to the iTunes app store in the hope that some of the iPhone’s marketing magic rubs off on their brand.
Bigger opportunities may exist in location-based marketing, mobile coupons, barcodes and augmented reality.
Be bold
This is a naked way of thinking, not taking off your pants and running down the corridor at work. Gillette launches a new product each year that does the same thing but eats the last innovation.
Fit
Successful innovation is also about fit. Everything still needs to fit with your brand. When Apple has launched things that weren’t Applish, they’ve invariably failed. Would my Apple Air fit?
How to sell Innovations best
Innovations are power. But can blow up in your face. Done as an ‘exciting idea I had last night’ will get you derision and no money.
It needs to be sold through well. And this means you have to be sneaky. The best thing to do is use it as a motherhood philosophy in corporate mission statements and raise it in meetings as a regular subject.
After a few weeks of feeling like they are being persecuted for not being risk-takers, the operations or accounts department will turn on you and say ‘well what’s marketing doing that’s innovative?’
You now have control. You can get up and write on the white board what it is you’ve been wanting to do. If you can fake fear, seem reluctant to spend, build in tests etc. (they’ll smell potential disaster and in an effort to undermine you, will approve the idea) you’ll get the money and off you can go, to ride the thrilling, experimental Marketing roller-coaster once again.
Fostering Innovation
Nine practices with the potential to produce a new idea: (stolen out of the Australian 22.6.09)
- Build Scenarios: use diverse perspectives to create complex scenarios of what future markets may look like.
- Spin the web: Web = a marketplace of ideas.
- Enlist lead users: Ideas and insights from lead users can be the starting point for new markets, products and services.
- Deep dive: describes the approach of market research that uses detailed, first hand observation to learn more about consumers’ needs or wants.
- Probe and learn: study opportunities in segments of markets the company is not active or strong in.
- Mobilize staff: engaging more staff in the search for innovation broadens a company’s vision.
- Cater to entrepreneurs: Employ practices that favor innovation development. Ie: reserve blocks of time for engineers to explore their own ideas, establish pathways to make sure the best ideas get taken forward.
- Start a conversation: Get different departments talking, encourage employees to share knowledge and skills.
- Breed diversity: seek innovative partners with whom you wouldn’t normally work, recruit staff with different perspectives.
I’m sitting at my kitchen table, discussing the difficulties of digging a pool in my back yard with three men from the pool company and the conversation is getting heated. Incredibly, even though they do pools in Hawthorn, on our hill all the time, (and haven’t hit rock) they did not calculate in their quote the time it would take to dig out the pool and now want another 10 grand to finish the dig.
I say, what about the quote? They say it’s taking longer than they anticipated, so they want more money. There is no meeting of the minds. I have a backyard looking like a moonscape, mud everywhere, and I mean 3 inches thick, kids and dog can’t get any exercise and I’m being blackmailed. Then the new boss drops the one bit of information that makes sense. He tells me in his time as boss of one of Australia’s biggest retailers (guess who?), this sort of thing happened all the time. Things blew out, they had to pay.
My problem is that the new pool company boss comes from a corporate culture that expects to treat people and arrangements purely as negotiations. They are big, they can beat up the punter, and because you have to get your groceries and cheap t-shirts somewhere, and they’ve killed the little guy, you have no choice. They can be as arrogant about it as they like and it shows.
Back to the pool. They had us over a barrel and knew it. They knew how emotionally upsetting it is for a family with young kids to have a dirty big hole in the back yard and they could just hang us to dry until we caved in. I had to swallow my pride and pay the extra to get the job done. As one of my less delicate mates put it, you have to close your eyes, bend over and hope it’s quick…just put as much lubrication back there as you can … Ever forgive them for it? Not on your nelly.
Culture. A culture that is happy to screw over customers (as it’s calculated you won’t ever get another pool built by them, so it’s their one and only chance to rip you off) as versus a culture which values customers and that closely connected thing, word of mouth. (I’m using a turbo-charged type of word of mouth here, I guess.)
You see, we bought the pool from the ‘old’ management. The old management had a great reputation for honesty and quality, but we’d only bought the brand name, and the ‘new’ management was now in charge. And in just a few months, they’d run like a wrecking ball through all the good work of the previous owners and stuffed up the culture. Here we were, stuck with the new.
It’s natural that cultures develop in companies. All companies, big and small have different cultures. Any group of humans does. The way you speak to people, the language you use, the attitudes you display, the values you cherish, the humour you use, the type of person who flourishes, all are affected by and for that matter, make up, the culture.
You can’t run a great company without having a great culture. Where companies fail it’s most often because their culture is out of alignment with their customer base, their business environment or their legal frame work. When you think about it, if you hire a corrupt accountant and he rips the group off for $100 million and the shit hits the fan and you all lose your super and have to get another job, it’s partly because your culture let you hire him and your culture was such that he thought it was OK to steal from you.
And the culture of a company often affects deeply what you do as a marketer. The culture is happy for you to develop certain products, distribute in certain ways, price at certain levels, run certain ads and spend certain budgets. Often when you are trying to get a company to move forward in a marketing sense, half the problem is the inherent culture is not going to accept your new idea, your new approach. You will hit a very subtle, brick wall.
How culture affects marketing
You’ve heard it before – even in your current job – ‘they didn’t fit in here, we had to help them move on’. For a marketer, it’s critical that you can either fit in well with a culture, or that things you do can change it for the better relatively quickly. Or you will die like a plant plucked from the ground. Marketers are by their very nature sensitive creatures – well aware of their surroundings, in tune with their environment. And because of what we do, we are also inherently much higher profile than other divisions. (You could hide in an engineering department for years before people picked you as a cross dresser or a homophobe, but not in marketing.) Which means it’s more obvious to other people in the company when a marketer doesn’t fit in.
This inevitably gives rise to conflicts. If they don’t value humour and you need it for a campaign, it’s a problem. If they don’t support a campaign right through from top to bottom, because none of them believe marketing can help at all, it’s a problem. If they don’t really want to invest in new products… etc.
Boards appoint marketers to wave a magic wand
Which brings me to one of the biggest problems of all, over-expectation. Boards often appoint a marketer who on the surface should be able to fix up a lot of their problems, but fails because their inherent skills and personality does not fit with the cultural mix. If you don’t have people in a communication who are open to what you are on about, the communication just can’t work. In the case of boards, they will often just hope the marketer they are appointing can do something magic for a company that’s actually in deep doo doo and often they expect marketers to turn around the Queen Mary with a paddle. If you ain’t got the resources, you just can’t do the job.
Selling through a concept to a culture
The way you sell something to a culture is critical. You must consider first the culture before contemplating how to go about getting your budgets through, before briefing the agency. Who do I talk to first in the company? How do I put the request? Which tactic do I use to get them to take me seriously about this? How do I show them it will work? I have no way of telling you the best tactic here. Whether you fail or succeed will tell you how well you fit with the existing culture and also whether you can change it. Remember the old saying “Change what you don’t like and like what you can’t change!”.
Role of Marketing in developing culture
The positive side of this article is that in marketing you’ve got more chance of changing or moving a culture forward than in any other discipline. Because we are often called upon to provide internal as well as our normal external communications, we can adjust the way things are seen, we can put a slant on things that wasn’t emphasised before, we can motivate, we can educate and over the longer term we can even help hire people who fit in with our goals and will work to form the culture into something we prefer. Call it manipulative, but we marketers, more than any other company role (except CEO), can influence a company’s culture by creating the right atmosphere and recruiting people with the same values.
How many of you have hired an assistant who’s made your life easier, not just by how they do some of your work, but also because they might make the place happier? Or have you hired a team of old guns to bring sanity and capacity to a team who are too young? I once hired a Grandmother in her late 50’s to work as the cook in a mine in North Queensland, where I was assistant manager (when I was 21), because the guys were behaving very badly (most of them were straight out of prison) and in 3-4 days she had them brushing their teeth, combing their hair, going to bed early and not fighting any more. It was a truly miraculous change…they were more scared of ‘Mum’ than a prison guard.
As we all know, the key role of marketing is to make sure the public, or whom ever is your target market, sees your services and products as the perfect solution. In the case of adjusting cultures, it’s also critical to make sure what you are promising can be delivered by the machine you work within. If your efforts to make the culture a nicer place for you to work in, actually affects your potential sales and the growth of your brand negatively, you obviously shouldn’t be doing it.
But there’s where our job role differs from others. Most of us care.
I know of many an accountant who’ve gone into a company and imposed systems and controls that basically killed off the culture and strangled the brand, sales etc. This is because invariably accountants are insensitive creatures, (personally I’m seeing a Bull Elephant, but you might want to paint here a Wildebeast or a Rhino) who rampage through professional marketing efforts and stuff up almost any good plan put forth, mainly due to basic professional jealousy. Why should the marketers have any fun, if I can’t too?
But that being said, it’s beholden upon a good marketer to assess the culture (while you’re deciding on tactics for targeting markets and developing strategies, budgets etc) and work out how to sell through the things you need to do.
Battling the culture for better marketing
You may need to completely re-work your proposals before they go to the board, to sell them through. Don’t just assume the thing that worked at X corporation will work somewhere else. You may need to change the way your emails/ memos talk about marketing issues. You may need to change the dress code in the business to shake up the whole operation. Many a place is a lot nicer to visit/work in on casual Friday than it is on serious Tuesday.
Culture is more than just cars, dress or language
Culture is deep and very often unique to one company. All companies develop their own words and styles of communication. This goes from brands and memo’s right down to whether they tip at restaurants. It’s easily visible with the cars and dress codes, but it’s also hidden, complex behaviours, like the way they treat parking staff or the art they choose.
Cultures Wax and Wane
For those reading this who don’t sail or walk through the bush and hence have no idea about the use of the moon in navigation, waxing and waning are terms used to describe the phases of the moon. They come and go in strength, the shape goes from a thin crescent to a full circle over many days, then back again, but it’s still the moon. Many large companies in Australia operate this way from time to time. Sometimes the ‘Business’ culture dominates, sometimes the marketers dominate, the ones that survive go in cycles of about 3-4 years. Much more than that and the shit hits the fan. Either the marketing ‘experts’ they’ve brought in from the US drag it off into ga ga land, like Telstra is at present, or the accountants win, prices go down, service goes down faster and internal confidence dissolves. Like with all cultural issues, what works is a delicate balance. And getting it wrong is messy.
How does it affect you?
Your career can be affected for years by working in the wrong culture, or at least not recognising it for what it is. Many of us take our failures personally, when it was the culture that was not right. We blame ourselves for a plan failing, when if we knew it was the wrong fit, we would never have tried to sell it through in the first place. A bad culture can ruin your entire career. A good one can make it. I worked in a market research company for three years in the mid 1980’s that was so regimented, disciplined and anal it wasn’t funny. But it taught me how to write and how to be uncompromising in the science side of marketing. It was those disciplines, which I objected to strongly at the time, which probably saved me from becoming a shoes salesman or a banker.
A culture can create great stress. Many of the worst ones have, for this reason, appalling health records which you often don’t find out about until after you’ve been working there for years. Advertising as an industry has one of the highest rates of alcoholism, because many of the people are under high stress and they seek solace in the bottle after hours. Worse are those where they can’t trust the rest of their team enough to even go home and are often still working into the late hours, killing themselves and their family life.
You have to ask yourself, does this culture work for me? For my family? My friends? Am I growing as a person in this culture, or am I becoming someone I don’t like much? How many of you can honestly say they are happy where they work? Is this because you don’t fit the culture you are in? Should you be working for a charity? Should you be working in a smaller business? Should you be working with scientists?
When companies want to send you on a lot of training courses that you don’t see the point in, or are doing things you don’t feel comfortable about, you must ask yourself, is this where I want to be?
Can I change this culture and get my career on line, or do I have to move to a group where they see my worth, understand my vision and will give me the tools to bring it to life?
There are literally millions of cultures on this little blue planet. Here’ a few of the major ones:-
Manic Zealots
Think Apple, Google, anything sort of hip, nerdy and usually American. They are there at midnight, beavering away on some plan. Back in at work at 6 am. They live and breathe their jobs. Have no friends outside of the business. Often lead by mad fanatical types, this culture is one-eyed, non-forgiving and bloody dangerous to get into or upset, because they believe their own PR releases. Still, if you’re fairly plain, it can be a good place to get laid as no-one in there has any other relationships.
Business at All Costs
Usually run by very young, fresh-faced accountants, the business-at-all-costs culture takes no prisoners, has no conscious. If the deal does not stack up commercially in exactly one quarter, you are wasting your time. Fortunately these businesses usually don’t last long, because no-one wants to buy from them.
Benevolent Dictatorship
Running against all logic, this is the second–most successful cultural model in existence. The one guy in charge, everyone bringing his vision to llfe. Think Hitler, Napoleon, Australia under Howard. A good example is Virgin. Yes, his books make out he’s this wonderful, altruistic hippy that has brilliant vision and got lucky. But have you ever crossed him?
The Happy Family
The most successful of all cultures, the family-owned business does well because it has values that rely on people hanging around over the long term and they reflect that many different ages and kinds of people make up a family. Because it sits with family values, it also treats it’s employees and customers like family. Why do I say it’s so successful? About 50% of Australians work in businesses with less than 10 employees. There are literally millions of these businesses. They are invariably owned and run by a family.
Racial Divides
There are some companies who put people in departments according to race. Believe it or not, there are work places who have all Asians in the accounts department (because they are good with numbers?) all Germans in the Engineering Department (good with science?). Not only is this blatant racism, but it’s also very much small time thinking. Who’s to say your accounts department couldn’t do with some Italian charm or some German science? I remember working in an Advertising Agency in New York many years ago and being told that if the Italian Art Directors didn’t get you, the Jewish Writers would. And looking around the open plan office, yes, it was sliced up along racial lines. I don’t know if these racial stereotypes exist for any quasi ‘valid’ reason or not, but I’m pretty sure they are illegal in Australia under our equal opportunity legislation and rightfully so.
Pirates
‘It’s there to be plundered’ is the modus operandi of this culture. Mining giants, tobacco companies, timber processors, some of the more radical banks sit in here. The dress is loud, braces and cuff-links glint, teeth are perfect and cars are sharp. Greed sells here, emotion doesn’t. If you are working in one of these places, make the deal work for the management on a personal, financial level. The good thing about some of these places is that the marketing budgets are often as big as the egos.
It’s Science, so it’s OK
Some people like working in an environment that takes a scientific approach – conducts experiments and has highly qualified people around the place. But it’s death for most marketers. (Many of the chemical companies, who actually should sit in the Pirates category, kid themselves that it’s all about science.) These cultures are based originally on academia, so you have no hope of being taken seriously if you don’t have a PHD. They will give lip-service only to markets and branding concepts or anything else that’s abstract and will invariably kill you (ie. like washing the glass plane under their microscope, that holds the living virus) if you can’t prove without a shadow of doubt something will or has worked. Forget that sales went through the roof. That had nothing to do with marketing. That was logical product development and was the research department’s doing. Can you repeat the experiment exactly and have the same outcome? You can’t? That proves it wasn’t marketing….
I’m twenty-five. It’s early mid-morning. I’m wearing a tweed jacket, grey flannel trousers, brogues. It’s the mid eighties, after all. I arrive on time. I’ve even combed my hair, God rest its soul.
I sit there patiently. I read through a Women’s Weekly. A No Idea. A BRW. I can remember Alan Bond’s face was on the cover. I’m warming a seat for a good 40 minutes.
Mr Bowll? I look up. “Doctor will see you now. Do you have your Medicare card? I forgot to take the number before.”
I’m ushered into a tiny office. There’s posters on the wall of skeletons, of blood flows. Charts showing what you should eat. Who could live on that much cereal and that little meat, I ask you? The desk is tidy. But covered in pads for prescriptions, for notes, all emblazoned with the brand of a pain killer, a beta blocker, an anti-inflamatory, Brufen I think.
He comes in, not that much older than me. May-be 35. Looks at his watch. Crosses his arms. “Right you’ve got ten minutes. Do your song and dance.”
Understand this is the first market research interview I‘ve ever tried with a Doctor. He’s been written to. I’ve had someone ring his receptionist and word him up about how important this is. He’s even charging me for the time on the bulk-billing scheme. Still, he couldn’t have been ruder. Wouldn’t complete the interview (only two questions to go) which made the whole thing pointless; throws out all of the other statistics. I was at minute 10 when he put down his glasses and said he had a clashing appointment. There was no-one in reception, I could see through the glass window in the door.
The culture lives for humiliation
This is what Phamaceutical companies have to put up with every day of the week.
Humiliation is the life of the drug rep. If you can survive this, you may get to be a product manager and one day a marketing manager in Phamaceuticals and the rest of this article will be useful, perhaps.
I’m told it’s getting worse, not better for the Pharmacy rep, at the bottom of the industry ladder. That the Doctors make them buy morning tea; cakes, focacias, coffee, the whole she-bang. Three of them in the surgery kitchen and they give you five minutes. And keep talking about their week-ends while you’re mid speech.
Here you are, knowing that your career depends on convincing some 20,000 doctors in OZ to prescribe your drug when they see certain symptoms, often hard to detect, often confusing. (When is a sweaty palm a sign of a fever, when is it part of a heart attack?) And the ‘market’ doesn’t want to know? No, I take that back. I don’t believe they don’t want to know. The ‘market’, doctors, simply don’t have the time. It’s because they are underpaid, due to down-ward pressure from politicians, so they need to squeeze in as many appointments as they can to keep the office turning over, which means they can spend scant time on your drug and your sales people’s presentations, and just as little time considering what a patient is presenting with.
Big, Profitable companies
Pharmaceutical companies do however manage to struggle through this problem relationship with Doctors with flying colors. Of the six or so biggest companies in the world, three are Pharmaceutical ones. Why? Because a patented cure for a common disease afflicting the planet’s population is intensely profitable.
Why so profitable? Because you can buy the chemicals by the tonne for say a few hundred dollars. A typical formula means you mix chemical A with C and Z, cook them for a few minutes then add a drying agent and put it into pills. Within minutes you’ve taken commodity inputs worth only several hundred dollars a tonne to outputs worth thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars a kilo.
Price big issue
Price is becoming a real hot potato; getting to the tricky stage. The patents system and its monopoly effect has to really come in to question when you consider pharmaceuticals. As is discussed in web chat rooms across the globe, why not a special arrangement for them? Say 20 years? How can you justify a longer payback period when the profits are so huge and the need so great, the suffering so widespread. But them again, do we really want the third world to be much healthier? Do we want a grossly over-populated world?
It’s interesting to note Merck, big US based manufacturer, after a lot of political pressure, recently agreed to reduce prices for African AIDS sufferers. To one tenth the price of the same drugs selling in the USA. (eg. Crixivan from $6,016 per patient annum US to $600 per patient annum for Africa. Stockin from $4,730 to $500 p.a per African.) Which demonstrates beyond doubt to everyone the margins being made.
Greed may be good for some, but the African’s making their own AIDS drugs is just the start. What will the industry do if poor countries go wholesale into knock-off drugs? The technology is on the web. How can you stop them? How can you stop them selling drugs back to the West? Think about pirated CDs. You can only make it not worth their while by sensible pricing.
System Out of Date
Couple the above with an antiquated, class-based system in the West, which is designed to keep the doctors in clover by insisting many drugs must be made available only by prescriptions, so you are forced to see your ‘family’ doctor, for anything. He/she always gets their slice, even for the umpteenth repeat of a standard drug with no known side effects. (Ignoring the value of the peasant’s, sorry, patient’s time or any other relevant efficiencies.)
As a marketer, I’m on a knife-edge here. I don’t know whether to laugh, cry or take a pill. I see an extremely efficient money-making machine, and I’m suggesting price control. Shame on me. I’m seeing an extremely inefficient health system, being rorted by its suppliers, and I’m suggesting wholesale reform. If someone suggested making advertising more efficient, I’d be furious.
But I still feel sorry for the Pharmacy companies. They are in the main producing things that make our lives less painful and often way longer. And so are Doctors.
But the Doctors hold a status position in our society which flies in the face of their often appalling day to day behavior. Doctors are in the main spoiled, sexist, big headed, schoolboys. Bright schoolboys who’ve never had to learn to deal with grown-ups. They’ve gone from school to uni to hospital to surgery; all closeted environments designed to keep their ‘important’ brains focused on saving lives – and away from the distractions of the real world. Almost none of them have had a job where they were not the center of attention. So they behave badly. In no other business can you be so rude to your customers and get away with it.
And they also do it because they are time-pressured and bored at the same time.
I think it’s a terrible waste that we have some of the smartest people in the country spending the bulk of their careers dolling out prescriptions for antibiotics all day. Wouldn’t we be better to put other folk in that role and get the really bright ones working in more productive occupations? I think this sheer boredom leads to mistakes, how can you care if you’ve seen it all before too many times to count?
Human Failings
Yes, I do need a Doctor occasionally, and I’m grateful when I find a friendly one. But I’d rather be using a computer into which I could punch my symptoms and get an accurate analysis, (like the program Medical Director) than pay a doctor to do precisely the same thing at $45.00 a ten minute session. Why? Not because of the money, but because of inaccuracies. I have little faith in doctors. For good reason.
Doctors are people, regardless of how they see themselves. As humans, even with the checks in place, they are capable of making mistakes. And they frequently do. There are some 1500 drugs available on the PBS list. They can’t know them all. They can’t get the ratios right, for body weight and age etc., with them all.
Deadly Repercussions
The Society of Hospital Pharmacists put out a report the other day that indicates 5.63% of prescriptions (more than one in 20) have to be changed because they were plain written wrong by the Doctor. (Keep in mind this is Hospitals, staffed by young doctors, under incredible time-pressure and usually exhausted by ridiculously long working hours. I’m not saying these stats run across the board.) In 36% of those changed, the adjustment was to decrease the potential adverse effects of the medicines prescribed. In a staggering 16% it was to ‘reduce morbidity or mortality.” An independent review panel, worried about the results, found 1.1% percent of prescriptions would have killed the recipient. One in a hundred? I’ve probably been to the doctor a hundred times over the last 45 years. When is it my turn? Much sooner if the wrong one reads this article.
How do you market Pharmaceuticals?
First, get your focus right
As a marketer of Pharmaceutical or biotechnology in this country, you are essentially in the business of educating doctors, (dentists and vets for that matter) pharmacists and nursing staff about the purpose, use and complications associated with your products. It’s getting through the clutter that’s hard. But that’s why you hire creatives, like Starship, isn’t it?
Get your wonder drug
Find a good, constant human problem, like diet-induced diabetes or sex induced AIDS, work out how much it can pay by multiplying population by affliction rates by affordability etc. Got anything that might relieve part of that problem? Worth a couple of million punted on a couple of billion return? Yep, let’s do the final tests/ research…. (It’s a real boon if you can find another use for something you already have in the larder, like Carvedilol an old Beta Blocker, re-launched by Glaxo Smith Klein as a Conjunctive Heart Failure treatment.)
Do your tests
Work with the leading experts in a couple of countries to ensure there’s no culture cringe. (Humans, except for some genetic-related problems, such as cardiovascular, usually respond similarly when they present similarly, no matter which country, but the Poms rarely believe the French, the Chinese distrust the Yanks). Make very sure you get results that are statistically accurate. I’m talking thousands, not hundreds. Even if your drug only works in 20% of cases and has to be used in conjunction with someone else’s, if the trials are accurate and the results indisputable, the money is there for years.
Get your write-ups
Because you’ve obviously been working with people who can get a write-up in The Lancet or the Australian Medical Journal, this shouldn’t be hard, but it’s best if the paper is presented at a world-conference, making it inarguable news. Especially if you’ve had the TV crews and the newspaper journo’s attend.
Get your PBS registration
Funding via whichever country you are operating in is usually the biggest hurdle (after scientific discovery of course). Hire good lobbyists. Be extremely careful not to look like you are trying to influence too much.
Run your conferences
The ‘sexy’ issues are currently Aged Care, Degenerative Diseases, and Mental Health. Reflecting an ageing population, dare I say it for cash-flow reasons? Again for cash-flow, ‘alternatives’ are also a very sexy topic. Alternative medicines/practices now account for way over 30% of the medical spend in Australia. (Doctors are looking at the hippies down the street sticking pins into people, or massaging their feet and scratching their heads saying “How can I get a slice of that action?”.)
Public Relations
It’s a funny balance you need to make between really upsetting the Doctors by too much hype and still pushing them over the line with it. Too much and they’ll look for an alternative just to spite you. So steer away from Today Tonight, but try to get a mention, depending on the subject, on shows like George Negus’s men’s health program on the ABC, or on 3LO in the mornings etc. Just the right balance of media choice and presenter is important to add credibility, boost awareness and get the patients asking….
Websites
The Pharmaceutical companies have very in-depth web operations. Often all of their hundreds of products have their own site (see Bristol Myers Squibb’s site) – pages upon pages of scientific analysis, contra-indications etc. Doctors use the web more and more to run their practices; the web is living up to it’s promise of being the information hub of this industry.
Magazines
The best place to get frequency of exposure for a drug is still magazines. They are reading it, they can’t miss the ad. There are literally hundreds of magazines you could place ads in. From high-coverage, more expensive ones like The Journal of the Australian Medical Association, to obscure ones with a specialized focus and following, like Opthamology Times. And many of your targets read the international mags, like The British Medical Journal and the Journal of American Medical Association. If you’re a global business, it’s often cost effective to use these.
But do decent, thought-provoking, memorable ads will you? Bad puns and irrelevant images are so common in this industry it’s simply embarrassing. They come from weak briefs and badly trained creatives. I blame the incest-like relationship between the claimed specialist ad agencies and their clients. If you haven’t seen anything good for ages, would you wonder if anything better was possible?
Direct Mail
If you are going to get past the reception filter, you better have something in it that is either funny or very ‘important’ like a big move forward in efficacy. But it’s best if it’s so funny it goes on their wall for a month or two.
As they only get about one piece relevant to medicine a day, and most of them are boring, there’s real scope to work this vehicle. I get about 10 pieces a day from relevant sources. The average Journo about 57 according to a recent study by the Financial Review – surely the Doctors can probably cope with a lot more than one? Pharmacists are a bit busier with 2 or 3 a day, but this is obviously an area under worked by the industry.
Don’t forget to work staff as well as doctors. The receptionist and nurses are powerful influencers. And keep in mind the hierarchy. The head of practice wants to be seen as more important than the junior partner doctor….
Hire/Train Your Reps Well
If your people are going to be at the coal-face, treat them with the respect they deserve. Give them a great answer to every hairy question and more background information than any doctor they are ever going to meet. Make sure you hire bright, qualified reps (Degree Nurses, Marketing Grads). Dummies will be cut to bits. Good looking with it, if you want them to be seen for a second time.
Presentation tools; power point etc.
Nothing more powerful in a meeting than a quick, to-the-point presentation so your troops don’t have to appear to be doing the hard sell. Rarer than it should be. It’s just murder getting the meetings and being humiliated…
Reminder toys etc.
All the Doctors I interviewed for this article complained about the poor standard of current give-aways. They hate pens, caps, pads and dinky stuff. They want scales or disposable gloves or something else that’s practical. Reception and the front office are as important as the surgery. Phones, charts, reminder stickers, patient’s details pads, credit card machines, etc. If they are useful they’ll hang around, pushing your product.
Print/Brochures etc.
Print is still the vehicle most companies put major effort into, for good reason. It hangs around in the filing cabinets. It can be handed across the desk during a consultation. The market believes it is scientific, so it responds well to scientific-looking information, close typed, long-winded. But it is also very influenced by emotion. They are after all only human, so where you aim ostensibly at the patient, remember all the Doctors have to read the brochures, as well as the PI. (Prescribing Indicators.), because the patient is very likely to ask how to pronounce something on page four…What I’m saying is go for the dramatic issues in the glossy stuff, that you know they will read (the Doctors apparently love the little 3-4 page mini-magazines people are doing at the moment) and back it up with ugly badly type-set stuff to make the whole thing seem ‘scientifically’ more credible.
Career?
Should you contemplate Pharmaceuticals as a career? Yes. Pharmaceuticals are a great industry for a clever marketer – they’ll understand your scientific approach, your desire for best practice. And they have the money to make your projects really sing.
But it’s a complicated market. On the one hand, such important causes. On the other, gross inefficiency. I have to say, it was hard to decide what to say in this article. The scientific market researcher in me said, tell it like it was said to you. And what have I done in the process? I’ve alienated every Doctor and Pharmacy company I might ever contemplate going near. But the article is due. And it’s almost time I let a media rep buy my morning tea…