Month: September 2018

Marketing Misc.

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

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An A to Z of Modern Marketing

A is for Agile

So you want to get agile, right?

‘FMCG’ is a brand with bit of a problem. Whilst this term enjoys decent stature, it is currently experiencing a significant issue with vitality, as its reputation as the home of marketing thought leadership has been challenged by powerful retailers, disruptive tech, fancy start-ups and especially in recent times, the activities of grumpy shareholders. Nor is it surprising then, that many fast moving consumer goods companies have been fighting the marketing middle age flab and getting down the gym to pump iron or jump into the saddle in search – at least if you read their corporate statements – of greater agility.

Whilst ‘agile’ sounds lithe and sexy, it actually just means doing things quickly whether these are the right thing to do or not. Nimble is an altogether more interesting concept. It certainly implies speed and action but adds a dollop of mental acuteness, a promising whiff of opportunism and just a little hint of land grab which I think makes for a superior protein shake to sustain the old establishment. This is because in reality they need strategy as much as speed, and clever gameplay as much as action.

Isaiah Berlin wrote a famous essay on the hedgehog and the fox, drawing the contrast in human thinking styles based on these two familiar and very different animals: The focussed hedgehog who knows one big thing versus the flighty fox who knows many little things. The essay concluded by pointing to the dangers of making either/or choices. I am with Berlin on this. I have always preferred the both/and option, so please give me strategic nimbleness rather than off-the-shelf agile marketing every time.

Paul Christopher Walton

 

Marketing Misc

/ Paul Christopher Walton / Leave a comment

An A to Z of Modern Marketing

T is for Toxic

Is your brand really toxic?

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Toxic is today’s go-to word to describe a brand that’s in deep trouble.

 

Pay day lenders, football tournaments, political parties or even soap stars have found themselves in the brand doghouse with the now familiar screaming yellow hazard triangle flashing on the kennel door.

 

After all, the whole point of marketing is about creating and sustaining customer relationships, not destroying them. But toxic relationships are virulent these days: remember when Britney sang, “A guy like you should wear a warning. Don’t you know that you’re toxic?”

 

The word ‘toxic’ has ancient roots originating in the battles between Greeks and Persians when archers were prized for their long-distance offensive capabilities. To incapacitate or kill their opponents, archers often dipped their arrowheads in poison. Toxicon was the Greek word for bow-drug and so, by extension, toxic became the adjective that describes anything that is poisonous, harmful and dangerous. Today, think drinking water, atomic waste and industrial smog.

 

It is now often used figuratively as well: toxic can describe an asset with little or no value, for example a bad debt that is unlikely to be repaid. Toxic has also become a voguish word to describe the results of careless marketing where a brand or product causes unpleasant feelings or actual harm to customers, and thus succeeds in doing the opposite of what brands are supposed to do.

 

In the turbulent waters of social media, when a brand’s behaviour can be in the spotlight for what it’s done (or what it hasn’t done), being labelled a toxic brand can seem extremely dangerous. But whilst there are some examples of terminal self-harm, Ratners Jewellery being a case in point, most brands are remarkably resilient and can bounce back with surprising speed and strength.

 

So, to sound a reassuring note for brand owners currently under some toxic cloud, all is not lost. Antidotes and brand detox strategies are available. Like so many marketing clichés, the power of this particular poison is significantly lessened by its overuse.

 

Paul Christopher Walton

 

 

 

So, are we all officers now?

/ Paul Christopher Walton / 2 Comments

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Marketing Misc

An A to Z of Modern Marketing

O is for Officer

 

Marketing has not escaped the great inflation of titles that is such a characteristic of the modern business world. Far from it, marketeers have been in the avant-garde of such tactics for gentrification.

In the 1960s, as marketing became the hot new function (remember even then customers were big data), ‘marketing manager’ was a title that said it all. But as the onward charge of the brand stormtroopers described by Hugh Davidson in OffensiveMarketing became  irresistible, the resultant demand for career progression soon created a whole new hierarchy of titles: senior marketing manager, category marketing manager, trade marketing manager, marketing controller, head of strategic marketing and so on.

Before you could say ‘matrix’, the more successful branding folk were getting appointed to the board as marketing directors, often edge-ing out old-school sales directors: the science of fact-based demand management trumping the soft art of the trade marketing lunch.

This phenomenon is not particularly new of course. In the Middle Ages, harassed and/or hard-up kings of England found inventing new titles a convenient way of managing talent in challenging times. The old English matiness of Knight, Baron, Earl was supplemented in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the more continental and hence racy titles of Baronet, Viscount, Marquis and Duke.

We are still doing the same 500 years later. As we entered the new millennium, organisational bigwigs were crowned CEOs – Chief Executive Officers. The use of the word officer in this context was an innovation and an interesting one at that. Officers as opposed to other ranks, perhaps? Officeholders and functionaries; bureaucrats and dignitaries – these are the synonyms Susie Dent might discover for the word in her Oxford Dictionary corner.

Predictably, the Officeritismax virus began to spread rapidly through corporations. As ever, marketeers showed the least resistance and suddenly there was an epidemic of Chief Marketing Officers. But it didn’t stop there, and soon all other functional Grands Fromages in their C-Suite eyries wanted to get in on the act. Next minute, learned business magazines were telling us that the ‘CMO- CTO- CFO partnership’ is a key success factor. The virus is still virulent. We now have Chief Demand Officers, Chief Innovation Officers, Chief Customer Officers and even Chief Experience Officers

In the 1960s, just as marketing was diffusing through UK businesses, the British historian Lawrence Stone was writing about the counterproductive effects of title inflation in the seventeenth century and its negative impact on respect for the management régimes of the day, something he argued which certainly contributed to the outbreak of the English Civil war: “The greater the wealth and more even its distribution in a given society,” he observed “the emptier become titles of personal distinction, but the more they multiply and are striven for.” He called this Tawney’s Law. Those of us who care about marketing should remember Tawney’s Law and think carefully before we launch the next squad of marketing officers onto an increasingly sceptical world. We should recall that the title of my favourite episode of Minder featuring George Cole as the roguish Arthur Daley, was called An Officer and a Car Salesman.