ZIG WHEN THE OTHERS ZAG

Zig when the others zag was an expression often used in advertising by admen trying to persuade clients to separate themselves from squabbling competitors, all with similar products fighting for consumers’ attention.

As we edge out of lockdown and think about marketing again this approach seems relevant especially for banks.

Banks deservedly get a bad press. They mostly seem to dislike their customers and would much prefer to operate in the headier space of investment banking and stuff like collateral instruments and derivatives. To be fair NatWest, with whom I bank, seem to have their telephone banking act much more together now, maybe because their staff are working at home and not in call centres.

As others close their branches why not open a bunch of micro banks in those high street sites emptied by the impact of Covid? Become the friendly face of banking providing financial advice to the elderly, less well off and to the mystified young. Work with government in helping them talk to those difficult to reach with helpful advice. Be great at customer service. You’d be alone whilst others chase the big-dollar business. 

Not everything inevitably goes in one direction as Justin King, one time CEO of Sainsbury’s discovered when he said in 2012: "the high street is dead, out of town hypermarkets will take over". Think again about those soulless warehouses, Justin.  

The High Street is in a parlous state now for obvious reasons but in a world where we’re trying to reduce the use of the car and where local councils need the income from high street shopping to increase isn’t it time to be more creative? I’m irritated by the view that market forces matter most and by people saying “let the market decide.” The reality is the market (aka consumers/the general public) have little voice before landlords offload prime sites to betting shops, discounters and charity shops.

We need more bookshops like Daunts, more small upmarket cinemas like the Electric Cinema in Portobello – clean, with comfy chairs and no fast food and popcorn – I’ll never go to a filthy old Odeon again. 

We need more exciting pre-loved clothing outlets done well, more wine bars, more stationers, more examples of retail brilliance like Richer Sounds or delicatessens like relaunched Dean and Deluca and Wholefoods. We need more of those wonderful hardware stores which stock everything and specialist shops that sell board games, hats, gloves, shirts and bagels. We need more colour and fun. 

Which brings me to the king of online. Amazon. They’ve reshaped our expectations for speed which is great but maybe now it’s time to zig again. When you’re as good as they are any blemish shows up. Recently a few errors have happened with us. A food supplement normally available overnight isn’t available for two weeks. (We got next day delivery from another supplier.) Deliveries are occasionally abandoned on the doorstep. Amazon is beginning to smell big and lethargic rather like Woolworth did as it reached the crest of its growth.

A delivery service to match Amazon should be easily arranged on a local basis in places like Brighton, Chester, Tunbridge Wells and Marylebone in London where the spirit of enterprise thrives. But overall  has there ever been a better opportunity for all the high streets to come out of the restrictive lives we’ve led with a blaze of colour, a fanfare of excitement and the ability to display and, also, to deliver to your home?

What we most of all need is pizzazz. In the lockdown so many already have cracked logistics brilliantly.

WHY SHOWING YOUR STRATEGY ISN'T ALWAYS SMART

There’s this constant tussle between transparency and effective management. We see it daily with the cabinet describing the need to keep their cards close their chest in Brexit negotiations as though they were tremulous poker players. Everything has been reduced to process.

My focus is on three companies this week. They are Pepsico, VW and Royal Bank of Scotland.

Pepsico has a female Chair and CEO, Indra Nooyi, who in a radio interview described a research-finding about their brand Doritos.

She said, in brief, women were put off by the loud crunching sound they made when eaten and that their dusty residue meant fingers had to be licked. Women wanted a cleaner, quieter Dorito and that’s what was going to be given to them. A piece of careful consumer research leading to a targeted segmentation of the brand. Sounds OK; sounds like Pepsico is listening.

But all hell was let loose with women on Twitter frothing with rage – “Doritos for ladies? Ridiculous” …”I will eat my crisps however I damn well please and they will no longer be Doritos”….”How can you gender-type crisps?”

Indro Nooyi is a unusually smart CEO who speaks thoughtfully. She’s a model of restraint. No doubt she was surprised that you have to be so incredibly careful nowadays about whatever you say.
And whatever you do. Step forward VW.

They have admitted to funding a research study to test the effect of diesel emissions on caged monkeys. It didn’t take long for people to describe this as a German company creating gas chambers in which to gas little monkeys. These tests took place 3 years ago and Chief Lobbyist Thomas Steg has since been suspended. You couldn’t make that one up.

Next RBS whose Global Restructuring Group (GRG) had been castigated by the Financial Conduct Authority for mistreating thousands of small and medium-sized companies. The RBS Chairman Sir Howard Davies agreed these were the findings but disputed the conclusions. This one will run and run: “we’re not guilty…not…not!”

And another thing….Andrew Krepinevitch (no me neither). He’s a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and he’s regarded as an expert on strategy.

He identifies the ten biggest strategic blunders. Here are just four of them:-
-  Failure to recognize or take seriously the scarcity of resources.
-  Making false presumptions about one’s own competence.
-  Insufficient focus on strategy by trying to satisfy too many different stakeholders.
-  Failure to understand the adversary.

I was struck by these as being pretty much the current Brexit negotiating team’s issues. They constantly overstate our national and their own importance and intelligence. They try to keep too many people happy – a hopeless quest since many are never going to be happy whatever goodies they get. The last one is obvious.

Strategy is about knowing what to do, what’s possible and how public opinion can disrupt a seemingly  logical move. Easy? No it’s not. So pay attention. Even you the highly esteemed Ms Nooyi.

WHEN BIG BEHAVES BIG IT ALWAYS GETS IT WRONG

When you move house or office or anything like that a fair amount of disruption follows. For me the most intriguing thing has been the array of tradesmen who’ve been to call checking a variety of utilities, mending the broken and quoting eye watering sums for the potential beautification of the house.

All of them real craftsmen, impressively knowledgeable and attentive to our needs - including BT when they got here.  My concern about beastly BT is they’ve constructed an unwieldy and commercially crass structure until a real human being, the BT engineer comes to call. He was smart, assiduous and all is well - I’m back on line. But here’s the odd thing, the maddening thing - before he arrives I’m called by BT saying I can set myself up without an engineer (no I can’t and yes I know having an attack of rage so early in the morning can’t be good for me) and then even whilst he’s here I’m being texted to say he won’t be coming now for another two days. I show him this and he says “take no notice” and carries on working.

My dispassionate and utterly serious point to you BT is you cannot afford to carry on wasting time, money and talent doing the little stuff so badly. Please can I tell you how to solve the problem?

Be as big as you wish but behave as though you were small. When your customer interface parades your scale you are doomed. Thus with the banks. I bank with NatWest - I always have. At a branch level (yes I go to branches ever since being told by a banking friend that bankers never bank online - “are you insane?”) the service is brilliant, charming and helpful. Out there however beyond the phone, in the call centres life gets trickier. Thus with the retailers. Tesco suffered in part by seeming so huge. Wherever you went that 1970s logo reminded you that “every little helps”. Pretending to be little when they are really big and beastly. Thus with big government, it doesn’t work. Only small, can-do fix-it-it people can solve things.

It’s time to put human faces back into customer service like B&Q have done employing retirees who are D&Y fanatics and who really know what they are talking about.

And it’s time to break down the myth that big is better when it’s usually confused. In the case of BT left and right hands belong to completely different bodies. Imagine a left hand whom you don’t know and isn’t yours trying to blow your nose. My BT experience has been that bad.

Oh and it isn’t over. They called to say could they fix the TV by sending an engineer? Suspiciously I agreed. Then the paperwork was emailed. They are planning to go where we used to live. The trouble is I can’t get through to them to say don’t go there we’ve moved.

THE CUSTOMER IS RIGHT EVEN WHEN THEY ARE GOD DAMNED WRONG

That’s what Charles Orvis said - he who founded the legendary high-end fishing, hunting and outdoor retail and mail order business. Most of us have taken this pretty well for granted as the byword in customer service. Marketers worldwide have sought to meet what they think theirs customers want. If Fawlty Towers is the paradigm of how not to do it then Orvis is the complete opposite.

But then along came Steve Jobs to turn all the arguments on their heads with his refusal to do consumer research and with a fixed view on the need to create consumer needs rather than just fulfil them.

The trick is surely to give the customer what they hadn’t imagined they’d wanted but when they get it they realise it’s exactly what they wanted all along.

It’s the Heston Blumenthal trick.

Which brings me to NatWest. I bank with them and I like them. Their refurbished branch in Brighton is well run, smart and with bright and charming staff. (Yes boys and girls this is a a bank not a fairy story although being Brighton there are eccentrics around.)

Well they get a bit busy in there so they introduced a ticketing system whereby rather like in the delicatessen area of Waitrose you’d get say ticket 345 and seeing that there were 20 people ahead of you you’d go for a coffee, do some shopping and then come back and lo and behold you were now five away from the head of the queue. Great idea? Well they’ve canned it. The staff in the bank are disappointed because it made their life easier and more ordered and I am as mad as hell. Why did it go? “Customer survey,” I’m told “they did a survey and our customers didn’t like it”.

So Nat West has gone back to a system we all like – queuing in hope and ignorance in a long line.
Either the research methodology was wrong or they asked the wrong customers or they are lying and merely want us to give up and bank online.

I’d have asked the staff not the customer- day by day they feel the pulse of their customers. If the staff preferred the system that’s been abandoned maybe it was because they understood the effect it had on customer behaviour whilst the research only asked about customer attitude. Customer attitudes would, incidentally have shown that most people have been conditioned by the media, politicians and the economic crash to hate bankers. That’s their attitude towards them. This does not mean they want them to shut up shop and commit suicide.

In Room 101 recently Joan Bakewell said how she loathed customer surveys especially the kind that ask “were we good, very good or excellent?”

Agreed. But I’d go further. Most customer research perversely tells you the wrong things because (would you believe) customers don’t actually know what they want any more than patients in hospitals do.

Except to be made better and that’s our job.

Be nice to your customers, listen to them but be firm about giving them what they need (really, really need) not what they say they think they want.