This is thrilling stuff – marketing. I can’t imagine why all bright creative people don’t want to play. Just don’t let the grim-faced money-men put you off being you and enjoying it too. The consumer is not a statistic, she’s your mum, he’s your dad – we’re talking friends here, we’re talking a diversity of people, but we’re talking about people, not just about numbers.
How to create momentum
The single most difficult thing to do in life is to make things happen. Achieving momentum involves enrolling popular support, doing things that get noticed and persuading people to think about you and your company differently.
Momentum involves something changing. When M&S changed the look of their stores and the prototype store got pages in the papers, reviewing it rather like a film is reviewed, they acquired momentum.
The same with the launch of the new Kindle … something new was happening.
And, on a smaller basis, the queues outside Le Relais de Venice in London, where they don’t take bookings and only serve steak (great steak) asking, when they come to take your order, ‘How would you like it?’ not ‘What would you like?’ – the queues say it all.
Rihanna took her top off to film a promotional video in a field in Ireland, enraging a farmer and hitting the headlines. That was real PR momentum.
If your people are slowing down, find a reason to celebrate – throw a party and create momentum.
The concept of ‘party’ was brilliantly explored by Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of the Ogilvy Group UK, when he speculated the £6 billion spend on high-speed Eurostar rail-track might have been better invested in supermodel waiters and waitresses serving Chateau Petrus – ‘people would have wanted it to go slower if we’d done that and we’d have had about £3 billion left over’. There are more creative things to do than get there 40 minutes sooner.
Get the right team
Good marketing people have one thing in common – they enjoy people, the stories they tell, and they love advertising. The best advice in finding the right team to work with is to ask these questions:
- Will they fit in and make you better?
- Can you get on with them?
- Do they share your energy levels?
- Are they positive-minded? (I personally can’t work with cynics.)
- Are they restlessly ambitious?
Oren Jacob, who used to run IT at Pixar, says the sort of people you should be looking for have these characteristics:
‘Three traits: humor, the ability to tell a story, and an example of excellence. These aren’t unique qualities to assess in applicants, but how excellence is defined is not that common. It doesn’t matter what you are excellent at, just that you have reached a level of excellence. It’s important that you know what excellence feels like and what it takes to achieve it. It could be gardening, jujitsu, or cooking. The main thing is you’ve had a taste of excellence and will know how to get there again.’
Learn from the best
Listen to the best, read stuff that inspires you and if it doesn’t inspire you stop reading it. Who are the best to listen to or read right now?
Seth Godin – author of Purple Cow and maybe the best thinker around
Rory Sutherland – Ogilvy’s answer to Stephen Fry
Professor Sean Meehan of IMD – marketing guru
Dan Cobley – marketing director of Google
Adam Morgan – author of Eating the Big Fish
Sophie Patrikios – Lego CRM director
‘Why don’t we talk more about B2B?’
Sorry, we should have, or should have stopped you getting the perception that I was ignoring B2B, but I don’t think there’s such a big distinction between B2B and B2C. People are people, after all.
I’ve spent my life in journeys working between breakfast cereal, hi-fi, beer, car parts, trucks, cars, insurance (personal lines and corporate), hotels, professional services, government services and foods such as sauces and ready-to-eat meals, and as they say in ‘Will it blend?’ – check this on Google – the answer is ‘Yes – all good marketing thinking blends into one question’:
How do we make our customer – whoever they are – do what we want them to do?
That’s the essence of marketing.
The only difference is good B2B marketing is often more to do with business consultancy and tailored problem-solving than marketing techniques. It’s where the best salespeople morph into marketers, and the concept of the lifetime customer becomes the Holy Grail.
How to keep on running
- Speed at work and in marketing matters because ours is not, despite Roy Sutherland’s winning words, a leisurely society. We are all demanding next-day or even same-day delivery. We want it great and we want it now.
- Part of everything we do now is related to perception – adding apparent value. That is the magic that marketing can weave. We can take a sow’s ear and ‘Hey presto’ here’s a silk purse … actually it’s still a sow’s ear but a branded one and we now see it in a silky light. Thus it is with speed. There is no role for the slow.
- So apply the art of marketing. Party. Celebrate. Enjoy. Tell great stories and be incredibly fast in what you do.