WE NEED MORE COCKTAILS

 Every year the OED nominates a word-of-the-year. Disappointingly this year it was “toxic”- the shortlist was worse. So I’m discarding these and choosing my own.

 “Cocktail”. Because it sounds fun, variegated and intoxicating.  And mixologists are becoming as famous as football stars.

We decided to have a “cocktail of events” on Friday in London. Yes, I know, but no one told us it was Black Friday. We passed through John Lewis, parts of which look absolutely fabulous - women’s clothes and the Christmas floor – wonderfully ho, ho, ho and slightly silly. How many new brands of gin and gin cocktails concocted into Christmas presents can there be?  You should see the array on offer and countless flavours like raspberry, quince and ginger. Really useful presents like £30 collections of miniatures of port or liqueurs. Meanwhile they have an ice rink on the roof selling exotic cocktails and hot gin. Hot gin? Yes, hot gin and tonic!

And next the National Gallery where various exhibitions are on offer. Mantegna and Bellini intrigued us. Bellini. How great to have a cocktail named after you. Who else can claim that? Rather briskly my wife replied “Tom Collins and Alexander”. Neither of whom, when I checked it out, seemed to exist as a direct link from a person to the beverage.

More exotic even than the Bellini cocktail were the paintings as we shall see. The cocktail first:
* Just peel and blend your peaches, whip up your peach puree then strain it and refrigerate until cold.
* Mix 2 parts of peach puree with one part of sugar syrup.
* Add about 20ml of the peach puree mix to your Champagne flute, then gently pour Prosecco into the glass. 

“Giovanni  - get me another one … subito ”.

So who were these Bellini’s? They were the royalty of Venetian art it in 15th century Venice.  Jacopo the father ran the biggest painting workshop there.  His sons were Gentile and Giovanni. Today it’s the latter that’s considered to have been the biggest creative influence on Venetian painting. Interestingly the family workshop was  probably the first in Venice to use oil paint seriously whilst it had been in use in Northern Europe for nearly a century. Mantegna married Giovanni’s sister Nicolosia – smart move. 

The paintings are fascinating but also  have conversations with each other – clearly Bellini and Mantegna got on. The cocktail theme continued in the National Gallery as we went on to see the Impressionist exhibition. Was it because we were tired or because we were intoxicated on Bellinis?

We disliked the obsession with technique, flat colours and the boring scenes – more people sitting in a park or another lily pond.  These were not cocktails; they were alcohol free lagers of paintings after the spiritedly colourful religious works of the brothers in law that preceded them.

The Impressionists just left us with artistic hangovers.

But we are committed to living a cocktail life with lots of variety and flamboyant fun.

IT'S OUR VALUES THAT COUNT

That’s perfect. But is it true of many/any larger companies? Is she in fact living in an idealistic dream world?

As a writer of many business books I’m sometimes asked if I’ll ever write a “proper book” i.e. a work of fiction. To which I’m always tempted to say that I already have - all those books on marketing, presenting and decision making…but that is to use irony to the disservice of all those kind people who bought and read my books. The temptation to do it is there because the world of stories is somehow seen by many as more important than the world of data, trade and customers.

Increasingly even the best companies like John Lewis are struggling to retain their lustre. When I talk to people who work there (which is as often as I can) I’m increasingly getting a “yes but” response. The biggest issue is “it isn’t like it was and management don’t listen like they did.” But, overall, it’s still a good company with, yes, some respect and trust.

But I have this sense of values being, like patriotism, the last refuge of the scoundrel or the lazy executive - they are more rewarding to talk about than prove useful. In GE, in its Jack Welch pomp, the first question anyone asked of a colleague was “are you hitting your number?” In Michael Lewis’ wonderful book “Moneyball” the story of the remarkable success of the Oaklands Athletics Baseball team in 2002 was about statistics and proven performance not style, potential or values.

Great values set alongside poor results is widely regarded as unacceptable whilst great results set alongside rotten values used to be regarded as OK. Until recently - until Weinstein, Travis Kalanick and others were stopped in their tracks. The King of Hollywood and the Emperor of Start-Ups dethroned on moral not financial grounds. The world and the importance of values have changed. So is my cynicism justified?

I was intrigued to discover what people thought who are in the front line so I emailed about 50 people and asked them if they thought “respect and trust are the foundations for any company.”

Well cynicism loses because the overwhelming response was “yes” and to my greater surprise nearly all thought this was true where they worked now. One of them said this “Respect and trust are the foundation of all relationships and companies are a collection of relationships”. 

But this isn’t simple – as someone noted several factors are fundamental not just two. But here’s an atypical response that made me giggle:

“Most companies have a very mixed set of foundations ….  these could just as easily be 'fear and suspicion'…. I have seen some pretty non-respect-and-trust places work quite well for a long time if they provide sufficient personal benefits for those who are critical stakeholders”. 

So overall my own guess that cynicism would win was wrong. I've seldom been been so glad to lose a bet.

THE WORLD OF THE NEW COULD BE EVEN MORE THRILLING

I’m not against big businesses. They’re full of people who are smart, civilized and charming. I like Google and Apple (who couldn’t?) I used to love the spirit Nike had in the period of their pre-21st-century glory. I love the confidence with which companies such as John Lewis, Heinz (now 3G) and BMW go about what they do.

I enjoy seeing challengers like Aldi disrupting the market and behaving small when they are actually the 90th biggest company in the world - quite a lot bigger than Tesco with twice as many stores in 18 countries. I ‘m thrilled by the narrative of British Airways and the problematic relaunch of Coca-Cola. But there’s something about big companies that’s beginning to worry me quite a lot. It’s that being big can make you a bully and turn you prematurely deaf.

Being big makes you think ‘There’s my way and then, of course, there’s my way.’ Most of all, being big makes you an enemy of marketing. The big decisions you make will be about cost and margins, about downsizing, consolidating and acquisitions. They should be about people and what they want and need. They should be about marketing but they won’t be. And when you get too big to focus on marketing, you’re going to die. Big, old companies often get trapped in their own legacy with an out-of-date business model and old fashioned products. They get uncomfortably stuck with a redundant overhead too expensive to write off yet dragging the minds of the company downwards and backwards. New businesses are about the future. They are about risk and about change. They are now and next. They are where innovation thrives. They are about learning. They are busy doing important things. Like visualising how the world might be in the future. Thinking radically and being inspired.. New businesses are lucky. They generally don’t have shareholders. They don’t have a lot of out-of-date plant and property they don’t need. They don’t have a huge workforce or a lot of bureaucracy. But what else don’t they have? They don’t have enough money to have much wriggle room. So they need to be very smart or lucky to survive. 

In a recent conversation between Professor Clay Christensen and Marc Andreessen (Silicon Valley entrepreneur) at Startup Grind Global 2016, Clay Christensen said there was capital everywhere looking for a home. Unfortunately return on investment was virtually zero overall and there was an astonishing $6 trillion in negative yielding bonds. So why isn’t more of this money being invested in start-ups? The success rate of start-ups is improving and starting from zero is recognised as a great place to set off from. The world of the new and disruptive is amazing. Consider. The biggest media company in the world is now Facebook, the biggest Hotelier is Airbnb, the biggest producers of films are India and Nigeria (Hollywood comes third.)

Excited? Well I think we should be.        

THE WD40 EFFECT

We’ve had major domestic renovations here culminating in the installation of a new kitchen, the loss of cooking facilities and, thus, extensive experimentation with the improved 2016 food concept called Cup-a-Soup. I’ve lost weight but my wife is coughing badly from the dust clouds that come with building work. And something else has happened…all the doors in the house started creaking.

So I’ve been going round with my WD40 and the creaks just go with one spay. This is a magic product; invented in the mid 1950’s by the Rocket Development Company, California its formula is a trade secret. The name stands for Water Displacement, 40th formula. Mystery surrounds the magic.

On the can it says it, amongst other things:-
-          Stops squeaks
-          Frees sticky mechanisms
-          Shines stainless steel

This is a miracle multitasker we’d trust to do anything from curing constipation, headaches, pimples, debt, mathematical problems and so on. Would we trust a company called WD 40 Marketing Services, WD 40 Home Repairs or the WD 40 Bank? It’s quietly goes about its business and it never lets you down. It’s earned our trust by delivering….quietly.

Like hairdressers.

They’ve unobtrusively swept up the Ipsos Mori Veracity League Table 2015 to sit alongside vicars and judges. Business leaders languish down with Estate Agents and Bankers. The least trusted are politicians… (how would the WD 40 Party do?) As Jack Welch said: “Forget about technology – worry about who trusts you.”

Trust is at its most vulnerable when we encounter major change. In writing my book on marketing I’m coming to realise the changes we saw a few years are accelerating. We are in marketing literally witnessing a revolution.

When we ordered bathroom items from John Lewis online at 10pm and they arrived at 9.30am the next day we could see that Amazon is no longer the only game in town.

When Guinness launched their new commercial (they call this their “champion creative”) on Instagram rather than mainstream TV some of us blinked before thinking – “how wonderfully novel”.

Those who worry most about all this change tend to be concerned that we now live in a world where figuratively speaking Chateau Petrus is available to everyone at affordable prices.

On Saturday I compered a Celebrity Cricketers’ Question Time Session in Brighton with ex County Cricketers reflecting on current developments, most notably the World Cup being played in India. They and the audience all expressed anguished concern about the threat to Five Day cricket by this “Fast Food” version of the game.

Sadly for this mostly retired audience the concept of five day Test Cricket seems to belong to a different world to the fast moving one we live in where people are too busy to take lots of days off in the sun. Technology changes everything…more powerful bats, day-night cricket under cover, computerised umpiring and it only takes a long as a film.

We are in a new world where nothing squeaks.

WD 40. It’s the future.

TICKLING FEET OF CLAY

Peter Lederer used to be Chairman of Gleneagles and was the most impressive thinker about customer service I’ve known. He described the circle of doom in which however hard you try to make amends to a discontented customer you manage to make it worse. You know the sort of thing …the waiter carrying the complimentary glass of champagne to Mrs Grumble trips up and soaks her.

I think it’s what used to be call the feminine argument…”and another thing” - because it seems true that when one thing goes wrong the victim becomes a Victor Meldrew list-maker of errors - “typical, just typical”.

My feet of clay award goes to the John Lewis Partnership. The organisation is one I admire and Charlie Mayfield is the most impressive CEO I know. I once made an observation to him about something Waitrose had done which struck me as wrong. He replied carefully, courteously and signed it. Brilliant stuff.

Recently Waitrose, my Waitrose has been unable to put a foot right. I got rotten, stinking asparagus twice and was a sent a rotten response by Customer Service Bracknell (“Thanks for letting us know that one of our products was not of the standard you expected”- no the standard of reeking rottenness was well below par!) I bought some tea and most of the bags were split (Twining’s fault but I blamed Waitrose); Mr Sheen no longer stocked (black mark); they never bother to replenish the cups of green charity vouchers at check-out (meanies - don’t care about charity); a chicken on sale on August 29th with a sell-by-date of August 23rd. I told them to remove it from sale and they looked at me as though I were a troublemaker (which is just what I’d become). And the guy at checkout was sullen and unhelpful.

John Lewis Oxford Street fared just as badly. I queued 20 minutes for coffee because the 4th floor café was understaffed); the queues were worse and impenetrably slowed down by the jolly conversation of the staff in Greeting Cards and, finally, an American shopper in household appliances who was puce in the face screeched her outraged complaints with ripe language for being ignored.

These unrelated incidents do not constitute a case for the prosecution. The organisation is great and does most of what it does brilliantly.  But I wonder if I’m getting a preview of incipient problems.

Lucy Kellaway wrote about the customer revolution recently:

“At Amazon, the customer wins — and the employee does not. The company may not have chosen the most morally acceptable trade-off. But it has laid bare this fact of economic life: when some win, others lose.”

At John Lewis the employees are partners and have a lot of power. I wonder if the smell of complacency and a slowdown in the mission to improve is what I’m detecting. I wonder if others are sharing my missing of delight in the place.

But unless this welling rage goes I’m going to have to shop elsewhere.

WHAT ARE MY MARKETING PRIORITIES IN 2011?

So should they have changed? Surely the strategy remains constant whatever else?

That used to be true, for sure, but no longer when all around us the landscape is changing so unpredictably – when there are earthquakes in Yorkshire and floods in Queensland, Australia. As John Maynard Keynes said:

“When circumstances change I change my mind. What do you do?”

I’ve changed my mind.

In the Times of December 28th Peter Stiff wrote “advertisers seek a brand new world where corporate identity is king.” It was about Procter & Gamble and Arla Foods doing advertising reflecting their corporate credentials and values. Something Unilever and Reckitts are working on too although Kraft think it may interrupt consumers’ enjoyment of its brands. I think Kraft is wrong.

My life in fast moving consumer goods was performed within the liturgical belief that the mono-brand was king and that Heinz, for instance, was an aberration.

Today I believe provenance, values and the degree of trust a corporation inspires is what really counts in engaging the support of the customer.

John Lewis and their culinary sister Waitrose breathe their beliefs about life, their people and their quality and value story in everything they do so it’s unsurprising they score so highly in surveys.

It’s time to re-engage fundamentally with people who buy or might try our products.

Back as they say to the drawing board to sketch and colour in with bold strokes the story of why we are in business and what lasting excitement we enjoy in creating, producing our products.

And if you want to be inspired read about the teenager Fraser Docherty and taste and study his brilliant “Super Jam”…all of the leaden footed marketers should read, taste and learn from him.

2011 is going to be the beginning of a decade of earning and retaining trust, engaging with the minds and spirits of our customers and in building relationships not just performing transactions.

The truth will be our strongest weapon – so we’d better tell it. And the great thing about the truth is you never have to remember what you said….

THE NEW WORLD OF BRAND VALUES

I’ve been spending time recently thinking about the brands of the future and what they’ll look like. This has been helped by a recent survey.

The Times of October 15th published the Populus/YouGov list of the most influential brands. I’ve compared 2007 and today to see what’s changed in the “top ten”.

2010	2007
Apple	Google
Google	Apple
John Lewis	Tesco
Amazon	John Lewis
Facebook	Microsoft
Microsoft	Virgin
Innocent	M&S
Co-op Group	Goldman Sachs
Co-op Bank	McKinsey
Twitter	BSkyB

In 2007 we were in the Vienna days of those good times before the economic war, so the reputational demise of Goldman Sachs and McKinsey since then isn’t so surprising. Virgin, M&S and Tesco are perhaps punished for their failure to keep up with the way people see the times and Microsoft and Tesco, I suspect, for being so big and bullying. But apart from John Lewis and the Co-op the “go-go” brands are young, all post war creations. Ten years ago half of them would have been establishment brands like Coca-Cola, Cadbury and Ford.

The big news is from the “we stand for an attitude to life and employees – employees always coming first” – John Lewis and the Co-op. Look at the Innocent website and you’ll see that they live in this same world of celebrating its employee/partners and its ethics (yes – good for them – they actually use that word).

The somewhat unworldly Co-op evoking as it has done a patronisingly sniffy “room-for-improvement” response from many marketers proves the power of staying true to principles and putting substance before style.

So welcome to real and sustainable brand values if you want to be taken seriously and maybe great product values too.