Overheard in a private members club

One of the privileges of the way we work is that we can often work where we like.

As a result we sometimes find ourselves in the proximity of other Marketing people.

We are amazed by the indiscretion people display and by how hilariously some people discuss their businesses.

So we decided to create a blog to celebrate some of the finer examples of the lighter side of the marketing world.

You can read it HERE.

We can't decide what to call this.

'There's always one?'  
'A bad day?'   
'Perhaps we should have tried harder?'

We run a number of Panels. We recently changed software supplier which meant we needed to re-invite people from the existing ones and we also had new contacts from clients, and so invited new respondents to join.

One of the Panels is in a high interest category and the incentives are relevant to the category, and so we expected quite good take up amongst the new respondents. As it turned out, the unsubscribe rates are less than half that of an 'average' panel, so that all went well. We understand that some people don't want to do these things though, even in an area of interest, and that is fine.

We felt the invitation to new respondents made the benefits to the respondents and to the clients clear.  We didn't want to 'entrap' people into joining, which would irritate, and so we made the unsubscribe option very clear. We stated how often we would contact people and made it clear the surveys comply with the MRS Code of Conduct.

The invitation went to 33,000 new people. For the majority our invitation was either of interest or they simply unsubscribed.

However one of the 33,000 was unhappy with us. Very unhappy. Very unhappy indeed.

Of the 33,000 he was the only one who used the option to write to us. This is what he said: (We've changed his name and the Panel name to protect confidentiality.)


Subject: GET LOST > Re Introducing Muse Urban Survey THURSDAY 20 AUGUST 2010    |   15:10

Dear Collective Panel of unamed Cowards hiding behind this soporific drivel, allegedly, about "Urban life",

DON'T EVER,  REPEAT,  EVER, SEND ME THIS UNSPEAKABLE GARBAGE AGAIN.

In irritation,

Yours faithfuly

Mr Gordon KARR
15:10


We don't mean him any harm by publishing this, which is why we have kept it anonymous. We understand that some people don't like receiving these things, let alone participating in them, but this seemed unusually extreme. We'll assume that he's a normal well balanced person most of the time but we caught him at bad moment.

(In his rage he forgot to Unsubscribe. We did it for him, and sent him an email of apology.)

If anyone else would like to send abusive emails please feel free to do so at: rickbutler@musestrategy.com

We'll give a prize for the one that causes him the most offense. Criticism of Man Utd should put you in with a chance of winning.

Or if you would like to find out about our Panels you can do so HERE.

We have syndicated Panels on Cultural venues, Books, Premium brands and Investments. We also create bespoke Panels.

Creativity in advertising

                          Picasso at La Colombe D'Or

All of us have been involved in the creation of advertising as clients, in ad agencies and in our current lives.  It is perhaps immodest, but nonetheless true, that we have been associated with a number of the most creatively awarded and commercially successful campaigns that have run in recent years. Whilst we think that great advertising is simple we also think people often fail to realise just how hard it is to create great advertising.

Advertising is an almost uniquely constrained creative process: there are few creative environments where what you have to communicate, to whom it is to be communicated and the tone of voice with which it is to be communicated are so defined. And it is often evaluated by people for whom creative evaluation is not their core strength.

All very difficult.

But on the other hand, despite the desire of creative teams, it is unfortunate that there is very little genuinely innovative advertising being presented to clients, let alone produced and finding it's way to the public. And one of the further difficulties is that often creativity is inspired by what has gone before, or what surrounds the creative mind, but the advertising industry seems reluctant to acknowledge this.

Bob Dylan says he is inspired by Woody Guthrie, Willie McTell and Jack Kerouac.

John Galliano seeks inspiration from stage and cinema, referring to how Brooke Shields looked in Pretty Baby, and the films of Bollywood.

Inigo Jones changed the face of London architecture inspired by the classical styles of the Italian Renaissance.

And Martin Scorsese refers to the influences and inspiration of Caravaggio and The Rolling Stones.

All of these will go down in history for their creativity and all of them acknowledge that their work has been inspired by what has gone before, or what surrounds them.

By contrast, two of us were heavily involved in the Stella Artois 'Reassuringly Expensive' TV campaign. We saw a long lecture from one of it's authors on it's creative originality. You may recall the early executions bore a remarkable similarity to 'Jean de Florette' and one of the the first featured an artist swapping his paintings for a glass of Stella Artois in the South of France. There is a hotel in Saint Paul de Vence, above the Riviera, called La Colombe D'Or. It is a beautiful place and notable because impoverished artists used to swap their art for meals. Some of the artists went on to do rather well and so the restaurants walls are now covered in the early works of Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Miro and Leger, amongst others. The hotel is so well known in the upper echelons of the advertising world that it once had a UK ad agency cricket team. We are sure however that the author of the 'Reassuringly Expensive' TV campaign had never heard of Jean de Florette or La Colombe d'Or, and his work was every bit as original as he said it was.

                       One of the paintings swapped for a meal

We think there is nothing wrong with being inspired by what has gone before, or by what surrounds us, but it should be an inspiration for something new and different, rather than the source of something that goes on to be simply derivative.

In view of all of this we thought we would run an occasional series of entries featuring ads that seem derived, inspired, or genuinely original.

We'll start with this ad.

And here is the video for the OK Go track, 'Here It Goes Again'.

It looks a bit derived to us, but we'll forgive it, for it's undeniable relevance.

More will follow.

'Reaching out'

The Marketing world, like many others, has always had it's fair share of technical terms: 'proposition', 'positioning', 'target audience' and so on. Sometimes people know what they mean and sometimes they don't: we've lost count of the number of positioning statements we have been presented with that are nothing of the sort. And things are complicated further by some people using the same term to describe different things: 'Positioning' again.

But in the last couple of years the use of technical terms has been added to by the ever increasing use of vocabulary that isn't technical at all, but which simply replaces plain English with ever more impersonal Corporate vocabulary.

Does this matter?

Yes, we think it does.

We think it does because one of the things businesses find it most hard to do, is to stay in touch with how their consumers think and feel. And anything that can be done to retain a connection is a good thing. And anything that puts cultural distance between the organisation and the consumer is a bad thing.

There is one function that has the primary responsibility of remaining in touch with the consumer, and that is the Marketing function.

We suggest that any Marketing person, whatever their role, walking into work and using vocabulary you wouldn't use yourself outside work, regardless of whether it would be used by your consumer, creates the wrong culture: it puts distance between the business and the audience.

Our greatest current hate is the term 'reaching out'.

It's used to describe almost any form of communication.

'Reaching out' means making a gesture intended to strengthen a relationship, or to gain a cultural understanding between parties. Examples (taken from a dictionary) include "The Government is reaching out to the people" or "I try to reach out to my teenage son but he doesn't want to know".

Maybe one day Barrack Obama might 'reach out' to the Taliban?

We sat in a meeting the other day and it was agreed that the Account Manger from the design agency would get some information from the client's Packaging Manager, who was not at the meeting. A couple of days later a widely circulated email arrived from the Account Manger. It opened with the words "I have reached out to Mark and he has given me the data."

With no disrespect to either the Account Manager or Mark, the Packaging Manager, it was hardly Barrack Obama 'reaching out' to the Taliban, was it?

The Account Manager hadn't 'reached out' to Mark at all: he had simply 'phoned' him.

And we received another email about an international project from someone based in the UK telling us that "I have reached out to the German team for a list of local brands." We think the last person in the UK to 'reach out' to Germany was Neville Chamberlain. We think the email we received would have been more accurate if it had commenced with the words "I have asked the German team..."

And we were in a car with a client the other day. He was organising a drink with friends on the phone and he told one of them he would call one of the others. That seemed reasonable. But when we arrived at the meeting, he stopped 'calling' people, but instead started 'reaching out' to them.  We like him and know him well, so we pointed this out and to his credit he laughed and agreed it's not good to stop being human when you walk into work.

Corporate gobbledygook has always existed and endless and often rather witless translations of what it means in plain English are commonplace. But in the case of this new wave Corporate gobbledygook things decline further, as it is often used to ensure that everything is expressed positively and nothing negative is said. "That's a good challenge" is the finest example. It's usually followed by the words "my push back would be...". The use of the words "would be" are important, as it makes it clear that there is no actual 'pushing back' taking place, and so any debate, let alone disagreement, is avoided.

Have you ever heard a conversation like that in a pub? No, nor have we.

And it leads to endless delay, as there's no acceptable vocabulary to allow the incorrect to be identified from the outset, and so issues fester until there is no alternative but to confront them at the last minute, which usually results in delay. Or worse, and more common, the wrong things are simply allowed to happen, and after everything has gone wrong everyone acknowledges they know why. Very positively. After all, "it's a good learning".

Unfortunately though, the learning is rarely applied, because the requirement to be positive is greater than the requirement to act on the learning.

Before writing this we spoke to some other people about the subject. One suggested that "Isn't this just the evolution of language?"

We think the answer is 'No'.

Certainly it is the case that language moves on: Chaucerian English was replaced by Shakespearean English, and today text spelling is supplanting regular spelling in some quarters. But that is a very different thing. Our point isn't that language is evolving furiously now, with which we agree. Our point is that there is a growing disconnect between how consumers talk about things and how businesses do.

'Deep diving', 'good adds', and 'good builds' are also vocabulary that don't exist outside meeting rooms and conference calls, even amongst those who use them in the meetings and the calls.

We ran a workshop a while ago. There were two teams. One of the ways to get delegates to think like a consumer (and to inject some levity and light competition) was to say that if one team used any jargon when plain English existed, they had to give the other team a pound. £300 changed hands by the end of the day.

We don't mean criticism of the people we refer to above and we like them all. We are just trying to point out that using corporate vocabulary when plain English exists is another barrier to staying in touch with the consumer.

We would like to suggest that we are given a pound every time jargon is used in meetings. And we will give two pounds if we use it. Any takers?

We suggest it might be one small step to keeping in touch with consumers.

Go Gos Crazy Bones, an unlikely love affair

It’s a funny old thing ‘love’. I’ve spent hours, weeks, months of my life researching what it is about a brand that encourages people to form that deepest of emotional attachments and yet I’ve never experienced it myself. Of course there have been a few mild flirtations: Levi 501s, ‘vintage’ as they’d be called nowadays, hunted down at American Classics in Endell Street; Freelance Chelsea boots, just the right curve of the toe, just the right level of shine; and more mundanely, Mentadent P, dentist recommended and a firm fixture in my bathroom cabinet for many a year. I’ve moved on from all of them now of course and they’re all remembered with a certain fondness. Last Friday, however, I fell in love.

It started off as a difficult old day as most days have in the last couple of weeks. My son has just started ‘big’ school and it’s been proving a bit of an adjustment from his cosy little nursery where he, as one of the eldest, had been reigning supreme in his final few months. Now finding himself back at the bottom of the pile I was leaving morning drop off to screams of ‘Mummy, please don’t leave me here, I hate this school’ - not quite the start either of us had hoped for.

Talking things through at the end of each day I got to hear the good, the bad and thankfully, nothing too ugly. The term ‘Go Gos’ kept rearing its head. At first I thought little of it but day by day I learnt that these were inch high plastic, collectible toys. I was informed by my son that “all the boys at school have lots and I don’t have any”. Apparently, they are squirreled away in trouser pockets, only to be half revealed at playtime away from the prying eyes of the teacher. At that point my indifference turned to anger: how dare the school allow toys to be used as social currency! How inconceivable that I would be subject to such secondary peer pressure when we’d only just set foot inside the school door!

 

Fast forward to last Friday and my son running off to his bedroom to find a toy to put in his pocket and pretend it was a Go Go. The horror that my little boy might suffer at the hands of more knowing children when he revealed his makeshift Go Go in the school playground made my heart break. I tried everything I could to guard against it but in the end I had to accept that this might be one of those lessons only learned the hard way. All morning I was on tenterhooks. To try and take my mind of it I ventured onto the internet. Much to my surprise I found myself entering ‘Go Gos’. I discovered that they could be purchased at good old Argos. I walked to the nearest one a mile away only to be smirked at by the teller who told me they sell out as soon as they come in. She looked online to find that there was one packet left in the nearest store just under two miles in the other direction. I looked outside. It was pouring with rain. My baby son was asleep in his pushchair. I thought of my other little boy battling it out each day in his new school environment. I pulled on my hood and set off.

Thirty-five minutes later and soaking wet the Go gos were mine. I could see how a little boy might covet them: small, brightly coloured, characterful, each with its own name and number. The only challenge now was to get back before the school bell. Hood back on, head down and fighting against the increasing rainfall I hurried back. The school pick up was the usual flurry of coats, scarves, lunchboxes and books. I told my little boy that I had a surprise for him. Once out of the school gate I made him close his eyes and hold out his hands. Into them I placed one pack of three Go gos – less than 30p a pop. He opened his eyes. They revealed nothing for a moment while he took in the gift, then a wide eyed delight, brighter and more genuine than anything prompted by any gift Father Christmas or anyone else had ever given him up to that point in his short life. He threw his arms around my neck and told me he would never forget this - EVER.

A six mile round trip in the pouring rain – worth every step. And Go Gos Crazy bones – heart-beating, butterfly inducing, firework cracking love.

Nuala

Brands we like 1: Streetcar

Simon's car developed a fault a while ago. It seems to be beyond the wit of of the dealership to fix it. In the mean time he needed a car. Hiring one meant finding his driving license and going to a hire location. Too much effort. Streetcar was suggested to him.

It has been a revelation. The best service experience I have ever known. Signing up was done over the phone. No need to find the driving license as they ring whoever it is they ring to check these things. Hundreds of cars are scattered all over London and beyond. There are about a dozen within five minutes walk of my house. There isn't a car hire location within an hours walk and I sometime have to park my car further away than the nearest of theirs. Just go online or phone and tell them when you want the car and they'll tell you where the nearest available one is. It will be near. It will be a new Golf. Fine for most things. It won't be covered in branding. I have a card to open the car and the keys are inside. I return it where it came from or to somewhere else.

Not only is it the most efficient service experience I have ever had, but when there is a need to talk to someone they answer the phone promptly with no options to be selected and they are personable, intelligent and helpful people who bear no resemblance to the typical call centre employee.

And for this premium service I pay a standard price.

There is only one thing I don't like: they give the cars names. I loath that. People and pets, fine. But not cars. They have number plates.

And they sent me a survey to complete the other day. It wasn't very well constructed. I think they are excellent but I doubt that was clear from the answers required of me.

But the survey did tell me their objective is to offer the best service a customer can experience.

They have achieved their objective for this customer.

Simon