HEAD BLOG

It was the last place you might expect to experience marketing in action but really, it should have been amongst the first.

When I think of the word “marketing” I think of companies such as Nike or Coca Cola. Companies with millions to spend on advertising. I think of acronyms like ABTL and AIDA. I think of (and this is probably where I’m completely alone) ads directed by John Woo and the high production values of London agencies.

I also think of Head First of course.

Every time I think in that way I know I’m making the same mistake many agencies make. The same mistake many marketing people make.

I’m thinking marketing is somehow a profession.

So back to the first place I ought to have expected to experience marketing in action.

Back to my local butchers.

At the weekend I had gone to buy a cow-full of meat for a barbecue. I needed just enough burgers to pay my way into the party and gain me access to whatever booze other people had brought along.

The butcher, however, had other ideas.

It began with a simple request: “let me just show you our special offer in the cake section”. After that I was hit with a fast patter of friendly sales talk, low key enough to not be pushy and yet slick enough to make me salivate with everything those cakes could offer me. He was friendly, he was chatty, he was inquisitive. He was more than counter staff, he was a marketeer.

Two minutes later I was walking out (after paying) with far more than I’d intended to.

And I felt great about it.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. These kind of shops, rare though they might me, are the heart and soul of what marketing is. True to the origins of the concept they remain rooted in the traditions of the ordinary market place. They are fuelled by the spirit of patter and bargains, of quick deals and friendly banter. They are expert in knowing the customer and adjusting their pitch to remain appropriate. In an age where marketing companies claim to herald a new age of social marketing, they practise it on a personal level the likes of which social websites spend millions of tech dollars trying to emulate.

If you ever want to write an ad or plan a marketing campaign, my advice is to butcher it.

Rocking the grass verges and lowland passes there is nothing your intrepid reporter will not do to bring you the very latest in marketing buzz.

This week we are in Grasmere, enjoying a short break with my family and yet still finding time to be chained by the eyeballs to the world of marketing.

Grasmere, as any walker under the age of seventy five will know (and those older will just ignore) is as heavily branded a place as Paris or New York. The locals know what draws people to its grassy shores and willingly regale with tales of rushbearing and fellrunning (the closest to which yours truly gets is when stumbling arse over hat after his lunch bag). A shop selling ‘Herdy’ the latest mascot for these parts offers tourists a more modern, branded slice of Lake District life and locally made jams and chutneys line the mouths of children.

Everywhere you turn is a piece of slate engraved with that damn daffodil poem (I’m more of a Coleridge man myself) and only the garden centre seem to stand against local custom with their admirable range of Japanese shrubbery.

Walking through the graveyard on the sunniest of days, I even overheard a teacher giving her charges a masterclass in branding by pointing out the reasons why Sarah Nelson’s Gingerbread was so successful. No, not taste and customer service but a face. A wizened old lady lending her increasing senility to the promotion of spiced biscuits has done almost as much for Grasmere as that Wordsworth hack.

Of ocurse marketing is hard to escape from. If we are to keep our villages as History intended then they must suffer the attentions of the marketing agency in order to draw people in to spend their money. The trick is not letting the marketing overtake the actual charm a place has to offer.

Then, as the sun began to set beneath the postcard hills, a sales assistant in authentic black dress, white apron and Top Shop bag trekked home just as she would a hundred years ago.

You just can’t escape to the country anymore.

Collaboration, not crowd sourcing, is the future of advertising.

Crowd sourcing is directed from a brand manager or agency creative.

And that’s an important word: directed. The Doritos campaign was directed and the ‘public’ did as they were told, expressing themselves beautifully, wittily but doing so in a controlled, managed, directed way.

When a client approaches a number of agencies to request ideas in the form of a pitch it is, in essence, crowd sourcing ideas from a limited pool of creativity. The advantage an agency can have over others (and the public) is experience.

Each agency can draw upon its experience to respond by building a compelling argument as to why their ideas are better, regardless of whether their ideas are, in fact, actually better. It becomes a game of personalities in which ideas are judged on what is likely to win with the client rather than succeed with the consumer.

Collaboration, on the other hand, is freer, more open and more targetted at the end result. The process is fluid enough to change according to that end result. What might be perceived as key selling points are open to change under the process of collaboration.

Personalities are focussed on producing something that works for the consumer rather than satisfying a predefined brief.

Collaborators, removed from the competitive process, are focussed upon pooling resources and figuring out how to get the best results (and even agree how those results ought to be measured).

It’s all part of forging a great relationship with the client and, whilst I accept that crowd sourcing has a certain energetic pleasure, it’s in the relationships that effective work will be produced. The energy offered by crowd sourcing is akin to the enjoyment of a pub wit. It’s fun at the time but makes very little impact in the long term and social marketing has to be about the long term. It has to be about the relationships over the casual acquaintence otherwise there is no depth, no substance and no loyalty.

Society functions effectively in true, deep rooted communities.

Not crowds.

We fought bravely

Any agency will tell you that pitch work is a mixed blessing. On the one hand it offers a great opportunity to get ideas in front of a client and, if done correctly, can result in a juicy job and a long relationship filled with equally juicy jobs. On the other hand, pitches are a gamble which need resources and money in order to do justice to the brief.

But that’s business in a nutshell. Read more…

It gets me every time a new business approaches us for a website or a piece of packaging or even an advertising campaign. “We’re open to ideas but our logo designer has created a brand guide for us so there are certain things you can’t do.”

A what? You have a what guide? Ok. Let’s take this from the beginning. You have a product and you have a logo. You may have some awareness of that logo and that product; you may have lots of awareness. But you almost certainly don’t have a brand. Coca-cola have a brand. Nike have a brand. EA Sports have a brand (we’d love to, thanks for asking) but you, do not, have, a, brand. Spend another couple of hundred million, wait twenty years and produce work that is consistent and then you might own a brand. For now, let’s get people just noticing you and let’s sell your apples shall we?

Ok, maybe the initial meeting shouldn’t go down in quite that way

The point, however, is to be honest about a product’s position. There is no point straight-jacketing in its own “brand” guidelines when a less restrictive approach could lead to something far more exciting with with more potential for the product to actually become a brand way down the line.

Tuesday 6th January 2009.

To many nothing more than a typically dreary day, that point in the week where you have got over the despair of having to go to work on Monday morning, realising that the next weekend is one day closer. To me this particular Tuesday, the evening in actual fact, was the last time I actively played a game on my X360. Hardly Earth shattering news to most people I know, 16 weeks of not playing video games, for a 32 year old adult? “About time” many a detractor may shout. Now, I would never describe myself as an addicted gamer, merely an avid gamer. Whilst I thoroughly enjoy spending time online with friends, taking down terrorist cells and destroying zombie hoards, I know where gaming sits in the order of things. Despite putting in numerous hours over the years I have great personal hygiene, I wash daily, I sleep, I don’t eat junk food (often) and I do set foot outside into the Real World of sunlight and fresh air. I know where gaming sits, it rides back seat to my personal life, work and responsibilities. Read more…

Leading the way for the ad campaign.

Read more…

I don’t think this can be said often enough: leaving a problem can often be the best route to solving it.

My train journeys to and from work can often be my most productive. Last night I solved a coding issue I’d been wrestling with all day whilst walking to the station. Half of me wanted to rush back to the office and try out my new routine, vividly coded in my mind. The other half patted me on the back and allowed for a calmer walk knowing that tomorrow would see everything come together. Read more…