Friday, October 29, 2010

Kinetic Typography + Stephen Fry = Savvy Communication

Actor, writer, journalist, comedian, television presenter and film director Stephen Fry narrates this very pointed poke at the political correctness of the self-styled police of grammar and language. Fry makes the most important point that the objective of language is communication and the rules need not always be followed to perfection. Enjoy.

Friday, October 22, 2010

Marketing - Big Business vs. Small Business

Over my more than 25 years of marketing experience, I‘ve come to put customers in two distinctive camps, and for lack of better terms - I’ll call then small business and big business. Now this may be a bit simplistic but it will do for the purposes of my thoughts on this issue.

Big business has always had an advantage, and it is not what you might think. Sure they have bigger budgets more people, etc. but, the long term view is the most telling advantage that big business has over small business.  Big business by its nature has to plan long term and, budget for those plans. Small business on the other hand doesn’t always plan as well as it should... usually a product of making a living; but for those that do plan long term and think big the rewards are great … you get to become a big business!

Small business tends to plan short term and not think in a longer time frame or on a larger scale. This short term thinking includes clients who choose to try and keep much of their costs for marketing initiatives, internal and by internal we mean using internal staff and resources. Now to properly frame the discussion we need to understand what the term, marketing can include. It can encompass sales, promotions, franchising, customer service, data management, branding, advertising, etc….. as you can see a very important part of any business.

While most small businesses understand the need, they often pay lip service to planned marketing and as a result long term planning of marketing initiatives for small business fall by the way side or we hear the all too often, “we can handle it internally.” This usually means handing over the responsibility to someone in the organization who is already overloaded with work, and whose skills are remotely related to the demands of the marketing initiative. The result is incomplete, slow and short term implementation… all the things that small business is supposed to be better at than big business.

Our suggestion is to consult with professionals, put a long term plan together, think big and then put a practical plan together that makes the best use of your internal resources and qualified external resource to get the initiatives in place and effectively monitored for performance. Don’t short change your company with short term thinking.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Where Good Ideas Come From

I am always on the lookout for fresh and fascinating books that can be applied to both my personal and business life. I recently came across Where Good Ideas Come From by Steve Johnson. He has created this wonderful book trailer video that encapsulates many of themes he discusses in his book and it is well worth the watch. On a marketing note, this video is a very creative idea and an excellent example of "walking the talk" in promoting his book.

Monday, October 18, 2010

Learning From Failure

We rarely learn from our successes and learn even less from our failures and that is real shame. I will relate a short story to give you an example. I was travelling to Salt Lake city to manage a live event for Mine Managers on behalf of Barrick Gold in the early 90's. I was fortunate enough to travel on Peter Monks'  personal Jet. For those who may not know Mr. Monk is Chairman and founder of Barrick Gold, the world's largest gold mining corporation and one of the world's wealthiest men. We had a chance to talk a bit about how he become successful in the business of mining (that's an interesting story too but we'll leave it for another time) and how he had come to be so successful in general.

He told me that he had bankrupted 7 different companies before he achieved his ultimate success with Barrick Gold. Each of his enterprises, as he explained had been successful but at some point, often due to outside influences, the venture had gone bankrupt. And to ad a little colour, most of these companies such as Clairtone Sound Corporation were multi-million dollar enterprises in the 50's and 60's (when "multi-million" meant something) . He talked about how each of these ventures had taught him valuable lessons for the next enterprise.

I guess the valuable lesson in all of this is that don't assume that failure is lesson in and of itself...it is simply a teacher that will provide valuable lessons for those willing to be taught.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Project Management is Underrated

 There seems to more and more emphasis on doing more for less in today's economy by using technology and an inexperienced younger workforce. The problem is that this younger workforce, who may be very skilled at social interaction just don't know how to manage a project effectively. The same skills that make them good users of technology make them impatient and myopic in terms of outcomes for any marketing or media projects.

We work with a broad  cross section of customers ranging from small professional firms right up to large national private and public sector organizations and we see the same issue over and over again, the inability of project managers to exercise control over the input in a project. Exterior firms like ours are asked to provide lean, firm budgets on a marketing project and then the scope of a project begins to expand as input is not managed for expectations.

There seems to be some relationship between the age in any particular management team, (this probably has more to do with experience than age.) The older you are the better you seem to understand the impact of an unmanaged project on spiraling costs and quality of workmanship. I also think management teams today are far less patient - they often do not understand or appreciate the creative part of the process in any media  marketing plan. There is no space or consideration given to excellence and that is why we see short lived marketing solutions that do not have a long term view in the marketplace and do not achieve the desired results.

I don't have an answer to what is a very complex problem ...but I can tell you that if you forge a closer bond with your supplier (after carefully selecting them) and work with them to help manage the process it will be a much more rewarding experience.