Know your enemy

One of the most useful tools in your marketing armoury is – your enemy.  And I don’t just mean your competitors, that almost anonymous bunch of companies who might nick some of your customers every now and again.  I mean your real enemy.  Liken it to a Derby match and you’ll see how it can galvanise the troops and raise a passionate head of steam.  People become more creative and work with greater zeal, the whole company develops a common sense of purpose.

This might seem a bit extreme, but just as I decided to write this blog I coincidentally read that Steve Jobs seems to have the same opinion.

I experienced this very effectively when I was Head of marketing at Flymo in the 80’s… we were at war with Qualcast.  “War” was the term that the press used as the whole spat become very high profile, in fact probably the origination of TV “knocking ads”.  The cause was simple.  They had the bulk of the lawnmower market, we came along with the hover mower and they reacted by nearly putting us out of business.  We reacted by determining to exact terrible revenge on them, which resulted in our effectively putting them out of business by the end of the 80’s.

I’m not saying that we let them distract us from our focus on the customer and their needs.  But the passion to win created a spirit of innovation which I’ve never experienced before or since. 

We avoided the temptation of making our own cylinder mowers (very tough to ignore 90% of a market, but worth it to defend a really unique proposition that hover mowers were quicker and easier, as our “Why slowmo when you can Flymo” campaigns demonstrated); we structured the company to provide rapid innovation in products, process and marketing, as if we were on a war footing (we were); and, you know what, we even analysed our opposition personalities until we believed that we could outguess their reaction to our own actions.

The outcome was that we ended the 80’s with around 50% of the lawnmower market and Qualcast went up for sale at a snip.

I read last week that Steve Jobs of Apple has also always followed the same mantra and never gives a presentation without referring the “enemy” (guess who), to provide a focus and reference for why Apple products are better (if you believe that).

 So make sure that your company has a common enemy – be it a product, or a company, or (less easy to manage) even your circumstances such as the recession.  Make sure they all know that they are fighting a common cause for their own benefit. 

If anyone wants to have a further discussion on any of these issues then please do get in touch 0191 250 4530.

Anyway, two other points in our presentation on Social Media last Thursday have been reiterated by Coke in Marketing Week this week.

 Firstly our Marketing Rule Number 1 relating to the importance of good customer data, because then you’re in control of how and when you communicate to customers and that one of the best ways to collect this data is online (along with exhibitions).  Coke Chief Marketing Officer speaking about the benefits of the My Coke Rewards site said “With My Coke Rewards we have 13 million names.  With that kind of database you can build relationships with consumers that are very different…” Going on “You start to evolve your thinking about how to engage them…”

 He then went on to talk about how “We’re pushing for a more aggressive digital presence. …developing compelling content.  Some will be consumer generated, some of it we’ll buy, some we’ll create ourselves.  The idea is to flex that content out over different digital endpoints.”

Apart from the inevitable corporate speak, the message is so simple and good – capture good data online, which allows you to control and tailor communications, using wide ranging platforms to develop a real internet “presence”, tailoring great content to suit where it’s displayed.

My pitch was intentionally balanced and it was clear from the questions at the end that there was still some doubt in the audience as to whether some of this stuff is really valuable to business.  So it might therefore be reassuring to see comments on Friday by Simon Clift, Unilever’s first Chief Marketing Officer and a Non Exec Director of the BBC, regarding the value of Twitter. Even the biggest companies are still trying to place the value of some social network activity for their businesses.  http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/to-tweet-or-not-to-tweet?/3003828.article

Interesting, but what amused me and others was that  the whole conversation was meant to be in Tweets, but that it clearly hadn’t been possible to communicate in 140 characters.  So they had to re.. take liberties with the truth!  That was one of my comments regarding Twitter and it’s great ability to communicate soundbites and news (what it’s designed for) but how it is less effective for real conversation.

By the way, in case there’s any doubt… I think that Twitter can be a very useful for business in a many ways.  As ever, it’s just a case of understanding the medium and deciding what your objectives are.

It’s the same in business. An ironing business recently did a leaflet drop to advertise their ironing service, this had no response and the manager realised he needed to do something different for people to read his leaflet from the thousands that are dropped on our doormats every day. He then did another leaflet drop that said ‘Is this how your clothes look?’ and posted the leaflet crumpled into a ball; needless to say the house owners took an interest in the crumpled ball and opened it. The campaign was a great success; they got noticed and gained more sales just by doing something different.

At MBL Solutions we like to stand out from the crowd, so this week we exhibited at the FSB Roadshow and along with our normal stands we took a two metre high metal Samarai, this is a product from one of clients Metallic Creations. This certainly gained a lot of interest and people stopped to enter our competition to guess how many pieces of scrap metal it was made out of, this then gave us a chance to engage the visitor and ultimately gain new leads.

We would love to come up with ideas to get your business noticed so please give us a call.

So on Saturday we decided to get up early and fish while the trout were more likely to be feeding.  Success, up to around 11.00 and then quiet again.  Usually we use live bait and my daughter (10 years old) suggested we use a spinner.  All the wise heads around us said it hardly ever works (which means they never try it), but I wasn’t going to argue with her.  So we moved position 100 yards and started spinning.  Immediate success!  The first bite was a surprise (and maybe a fluke) but when 5 minutes later we caught another good sized trout we could see the others around us reaching for their spinners.

The marketing moral?

1.  Test your campaigns
2.  The right timing is crucial – people aren’t in buying mode all of the time
3. Change your messages
4. Don’t just follow everyone else
5. Take notice of people with new ideas (especially 10 year olds!) 

Of course it’s really very obvious, but if you think it’s so obvious it doesn’t happen, have a good look at magazine advertising sometime.

Of course there’s lots of other stuff going on in the shape of design for print, email shots and telemarketing, but the above projects coming in two weeks seemed an interesting reflection of our clients.