FIRST OVER THE TOP GETS SHOT!

Even the originators of the FMA theory (“First Mover Advantage”), Lieberman and Montgomerie, seem to have had a change of heart. Last week I heard the eloquent Professor of Marketing at IMD, Seán Meehan, define Apple as a fast follower and not an innovator as such at all.

Hurray!

At last the dumb truth about innovation is being laid to rest. Be best not first. That ‘s also what Jonathan Mills, Director of the Edinburgh Festival, said in laying into “premieres” in the arts.

The secrets of success lie in listening to the customers who use the products, fixing the problems that exist, constantly improving the product (iPad2 looks like being a bigger triumph than iPad1 just 8 months later) and being totally clear about the promise - in Apple’s case a confident “thinner, lighter, faster.”

I loved this assertion about clarity. Most mission statements are a confusing mish-mash.

Better to be a Ryanair saying “we are the cheapest” – and reacting with surprise and indignation to the question “do you do customer satisfaction surveys?” No, they focus all their attention on their core promise. They are living proof that it is better to be respected than liked.

So the message is to nail down brilliantly what you have in that box before you think of getting out of it. Stop trying to be an “original.” Focus on getting better and better and better.

And this is a tough new world.

Motorala’s global market share in mobiles fell from 45% to 9% between 1994 and 2008 whilst Nokia’s rose from 20% to 40%. And now Nokia are facing a near death experience. Brands are not immortal. Not Nokia. Not GM. Not Toyota. Not Apple.

Which is why life is so exciting.

Anyone out there who wants to be the next Steve Jobs might make it if they are as demanding about relentless improvement, brilliant design and speed to market as he is.

They don’t have to be first, though, just much better than the others.

Although looking at the Boat Race on Saturday I wondered if there wasn’t something in FMA after all.

OH MY EARS AND WHISKERS, HOW LATE IT'S GETTING

The white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, whose ears and whiskers these are, cuts a very modern figure, oppressed by the tyranny of time.

If you want to think your way though the problem time pressure creates, read Leon’ Kreitzman’s “The 24 Hour Society” or listen to what Lawrie Philpott  thinks – his shortly to be published book “2,500 hours. All you’ve got!” is addressed at time-short CEOs.

Leon notes cavemen used to work 15 hours a week and whilst clock-time rules now - the first thought modern man and woman have on waking is “what time is it?”-   more primitive societies lived by event time – like rice-cooking-time or pissing-time. They worked shorter hours in winter. Their lives were controlled by the frontier of night. Life was simpler.

Lawrie focuses on the need to spend time on the right stuff with the 2,500 hours at our disposal. Don’t work longer as you’ll burn out or, in your weariness, make things worse (“oh my ears and whiskers” – that white rabbit was a classic case of  workaholic.) This hypothetical CEO’s aim is to make their time ensure that their workforce’s time is used best.

Both Leon and Lawrie (who are beginning to sound like a music hall act) recognise time is money and how the speed of change in a modern world has created time-inflation…in other words each second is worth less than it was.

Three brief observations:

1.    What senior managers need are “Time Lords” – people who teach how to allocate time in their organisation. We have business plans. What we also need are “time-plans”.
2.    Saving time saves money.
3.    Whichever way we look at it, we know too little time is spent on thinking creatively about the future and about change….by anyone.

This is not just a narrative about “time-management”. It’s a story about a global world where the smartest are looking at ways to cut and reallocate time and simplify what we do.

All the research I’m doing shows time-stress is spoiling lives, performance and creativity.

It’s time to call in some Time Lords and start thinking afresh.

FOLLOW YOUR PASSION

This is what Oprah Winfrey said:

“Follow your passion. Do what you love, and the money will follow. Most people don’t believe it but it’s true”

Which sounds great until you look at your debt, your food and fuel bill and your rent or mortgage repayments…..But I don’t think Oprah was suggesting you followed your passion into bankruptcy, merely that you decided what you really wanted and that you went for it.

It’s like love. You don’t marry the first person who comes along. You don’t get hitched to a call-centre of a person – “I don’t enjoy them but they get the cooking done”. You marry for better, for richer, in health and in fun.

So here are three questions:

i)    Do you really know what your passion is?
ii)    What do you really need in life?
iii)    Do you actually want to follow your passion?

Most people say loosely I want to be …”fulfilled” and rather weakly flap their hands. What you need to identify is what exactly it is that fills your mind and about which you want to know everything, a focus for all your learning urges.

I met Nicholas Showam MD of Jaly Ltd. at an RSA conference on Saturday. His passion is machines and making things. He could talk forever about the latest bit of kit. He believes we can out manufacture the worlds if we choose to.

He’s followed his passion.

We don’t have to be passionate 100% of the time. We can earn what we need and be pragmatic about budgeting but we must follow that passion like the wonderfully talented Richard Crane, playwright, dramatist and  actor who observed jovially “I’m on the stage…I know all about austerity…and how to deal with it.”

He’s followed his passion.

On Friday I went to Birmingham to the great Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition in their Art Gallery. Birmingham is rocking. Great customer service; taxi drivers who tell you how wonderful the place is and the new Bullring…a revelation of 21st century quality retailing. I love positivism, art and great business. I want more of this and we all need more of it to break out of the austerity trap.

So on Friday I too followed my passion and I believe the money will follow.

UNLEASHING FEMININE POTENTIAL AND EMBRACING DIVERSITY

It’s been a week of two halves.

 

The first about “not getting it” – me, my e-mails as Orange, my provider, collapsed; Orange – not getting the restrained fury their laconic call centre is creating.

 

The second about being cheered up by a presentation from Kirstin Furber HR Director of BBC Worldwide on the power of women. On the basis of what she said the future will be better (and better looking than the past.)

 

USA data shows women have recently built twice as many companies as men;
whilst they find it much harder to get funded than men, that doesn’t stop them succeeding.

They succeed because:

 

1. Their motivations are huge…”I wanted to do something for me…but I realised it was also for the people who worked for me – which was better.”
2. They want to create a good, sustainable business not just get rich.
3. They tend to be kinder than men, looking to create a business that outlasts them.
4. Their sense of the zeitgeist is profound noticing gaps in markets
5. They are good at “pattern recognition”- a key barometer of success in business
6. When a female CEO is interviewed she’ll tend to have her top team there with her, in support and answering their special interest questions. (Male CEO’s tend to be seen alone – as the leader.) Women see themselves as conductors of an orchestra – they don’t make the noise.
7. Women in general want their company to be smarter than they are.
8. Women tend to be more right brain users but they really work at and try being good at left brain too – their male counterparts tend not to work much at their right brain.
9. Women have an “irrational love” of their customers whom they regard as part of their family.
10. Men are measurement obsessed and love doing plans and revising them interminably. Women are looser about possible outcomes saying: “No one expects things to turn out quite the way we predicted.”

 

The future’s bright if our managements and leaders – female and male - follow the “ten commandments” above but the future certainly isn’t Orange unless they start to have a more irrational love of their customers than they showed this week.

THE HELICOPTER WORLD OF MONETISATION

The occasion: The London Business School Summit on Technology and Media 25/02/11
The speaker: Dr. Bobby Rao, ex Vodafone Marketing Director, now founding partner in Hermes Venture Partners.

We’ve all had that moment. One of sheer unbridled hatred of the cleverest boy in the school. Who gets all the prizes; who gets all the girls. That’s Bobby. The coolest and most suave presenter I’ve seen.

1. We are living in the midst of a game where we are all asking “where’s the ball?” Because there’s been a collision of three markets: the internet; media; consumer electronics - between them worth $3 trillion.  And the legs of each has been kicked away.
   
2. Historically media has thrived on scarcity – now through digitisation, high speed Broadband and the low price of storage, scarcity is over.
   
3. You can fight scarcity by focusing on live events. Or you can go for quality (iPad and iPhone). Or you can monetise the new usage occasions there are.
   
4. But recognise this is a new personal market meaning advertisers must really understand individual people. So who has got the best information? That’s why Facebook is valued at c. $70 billion.
   
5. Yes that’s what Bobby used to see what was going on in Egypt via live video in Tahrir Square as it happened. BBC didn’t have a chance against what they now call “pro-sumers” (producers and consumers.)
   
6. To monetise all this  we must charge people in the right way and the right amount. It’s not about how many eyeballs any more it’s about whose eyeballs and what’s going on behind those eyeballs.
   
7. Yet marketers - an “avoid-failure”, in-transit-between-jobs bunch - are conservative and lagging behind the changes that have happened already.
   
8. And of course we are living in the middle of a valuation bubble (what was later described by James Bromley CEO of Mail Online as descending from the “peak of inflated expectation” phase into the “trough of disillusionment”).
   
9. But be aware that this $3 billion game will not be played on the small market Euro stage (let alone the tiny market UK stage.) It’ll be played out between Asia and the USA.
   
10. It’s about customer knowledge, customer experience and a scale of population big enough to pay for the weaponry the big guys need. It’s a good time to be a customer and a spectator watching them - Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Omnicom and WPP. But remember - no one knows where the ball is yet.

Thank you LBS.

I’m off to look for that ball.

ALL THINGS MUST PASS

This was George Harrison’s song, quoted wistfully by Phil Redmond at a recent conference, “The State of the Arts”, as his lament for the cuts in arts’ funding by the government. Ed Vaizey, Minister for the Arts, tried the brazenly stoic “we are where we are…let’s move on” approach which from the prime culprit is a great try-on… use it yourself when arrested for drunk driving….”let’s move on Officer.”

“All things must pass”. Do you feel as though you were living in truly seminal times when the demolition of all we knew is changing? Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen – hallo tube…hallo toothpaste. Yes, just you try getting it back in.

And it’s not just the Middle East. It’s that naked King. Suddenly like Hans Christian Andersen’s little boy we realise that “he’s in the altogether – as naked as the day that he was born.” And it applies to everything.

Lying and calling it diplomacy, selling arms and praising it as  our export drive, supporting dictatorships, placing expediency over principal, pretending command and control works…all stark naked nonsense.

And this applies to our jobs too. The employee and consumer will no longer simply be told what to do. They are beginning to realise they actually are much more in charge than they thought and that the big corporations are scared stiff or should be….not of the Unions or Which magazine but of…people.

It’s time to tell it like it is.

Gavin Stride Director of that interesting creative centre Farnham Maltings, said at the Arts Conference I mentioned, and to general dismay:

“I don’t believe in partnerships…they are generally between people who don’t like or trust each other just to get something out of someone else…in the Arts it’s usually money out of the government. But I do believe in friendships.”

He also said:

“Under the previous government Arts Organisations were stabbing each other in the back. Now under this government they are stabbing each other in the front.”

At least the front feels more open and honest. At least it’s a change. You still die but you know who killed you.

All things must pass. All things must pass away. Don’t be sad or nostalgic. Be excited – we are entering new times and new times mean new opportunities.

HOW TO JUDGE THE POWER OF ADVERTISING IN THE DIGITAL AGE

When I was in advertising the word on the street meant more to most of us than Millward Brown tracking studies did because the loudest word was the word of our knowing and, hopefully, envious peers. Now the word on the street includes everyone.  All the punters out there are our colleagues too.

Twitter and You Tube have instantly changed the game. Now everyone’s point of view counts and is counted. No event or conference is a proper conference without a constant Twitter flow. Ditto advertising campaigns...instant judgements are made.

What’s interesting is that these qualitative reactions are being weighed more carefully than the more ponderous quantitative stuff. Welcome back to the real world…and I’d feared the researchers had hijacked advertising. Here’s what the guys in the business are saying:-

"The dialogue around Super Bowl ads has changed--it literally used to happen at the water cooler, and now, the minute an amazing ad hits, the Twitter world goes crazy," says Tor Myhren, chief creative officer of Grey New York. "I personally believe the YouTube view count is the single most important factor in judging the success of a Super Bowl ad."

"It used to be that you'd watch the Super Bowl spots played on TV and in the news right after," says Jill Beraud, chief marketing officer of PepsiCo, which monitors chatter on Facebook and Twitter to measure an ad's success. "Now, the longevity of these Super Bowl spots is endless between YouTube and all the digital tools that are available."

Jason Peterson, chief creative officer at Euro RSCG's Chicago office, believes a Super Bowl hit is more than just YouTube views or Twitter tweets. The most successful ads, he says, will not just be watched again online, but be reimagined. In other words, they'll not only go viral--they'll become Internet memes.

"The next level is: How many parodies are you getting? How many people are getting off their asses, getting video cameras, and actually interacting with the work you put out there? Parodies, to me, are the biggest gauge of whether an advertisement is relevant with the market."

Interactive, engagement and really getting into it…this new world of marketing is getting more emotional and it works.