It hasn't gone viral....it has gone awry....

For the past 3 weeks of the Apprentice, I have experienced a wide range of emotions – rage, frustration, resignation (that it’s just entertainment) and having watched episode 4 I now curiously feel pity for them.

This week it was about creating a video for You Tube with the plan to make it enticing enough to go viral.  Things didn’t get off to a great start when shortly after proclaiming it was a “21^st century” task, Lord Sugar was referring to one of the candidates as “the internet man”.  I honestly thought I had travelled back in a time machine to 1986 and doing an online video was some sort of novelty.

Both teams instantly decided on humour as the basis for their videos.  Team Tenacity produced Fat Daddy Fitness Hell, featuring vaguely podgy Felipe intentionally failing to imitate exercise routines. Team Summit’s offering was Dare to Dine, which saw “comedian” James doing such farcical things as creating vampire fangs out of dough and waving rubber chickens around.  It looked like something out of the Muppets.

I feel pity as this wasn’t about 21^st century digital marketing.  Two rooms of 20-somethings trying to figure out what would be funny was about as far away from marketing as was possible to be – digital or otherwise.  There was no direction, no objectives, no strategy and so the tactics were always going to be off beam.  This was perfectly illustrated by Team Summit’s time in front of a potential hosting client.  They’d apparently targeted “18-30” but the client clearly thought they meant months, so a spell on the naughty step was clearly in order.

The only thing that made it 21^st century was the fact that Lord Sugar had to add in some reality TV drama by firing not 1, not 2 but all 3 “dead wood” (his words not mine) Tenacity candidates who were brought back into the boardroom for the final drubbing after they lost the task.  All hope is gone for me now and I fear I will add boredom to the above list if they’re not careful. 

Steven “hissy fits” Ugoalah and Sarah “short skirts” Dales (Apprentice’s authentic panto villain) provided the entertainment.  Ella-Jade Britton was the third casualty last night.  Her business idea for Lord Sugar was TV productions apparently although she blankly stated “I don’t have experience in YouTube,”  Her fate was also sealed when her team had even failed in the most basic of tasks of adding titles and descriptions to the videos so that people can actually find and share them.  She was a worthy casualty for that alone and I would have pressed the delete button too.  

The Apprentice - Episode 3

This episode began with the disturbing image of one of the male candidates blowdrying his armpit, probably to counter Sarah's previous comments about the girls putting on slap and heels to sell; business grooming applies to chaps too, don't you know!

Team Tenacity kept their name this week although it sounds like an incontinence pad to me. But the teams were mixed up with Roisin, the accountant leading Summit and Katie taking on Tenacity. Their mission was to create a home fragrance product and make the most profit so we were repeatedly reminded - it's all about the margins! Having watched previous challenges, I was expecting it to be all about how the apprentices fail to measure ingredients correctly which wasn't far wrong.

Roisin managed the team strongly when it came to product creation and brand design coming up with a credible high quality product called Beach Dreams; it looked worthy of a high price tag. Katie made the first market research blunder of the series by calling one brief chat with one lady in a shop robust research and then proceeding to ignore the findings anyway. British Breeze was therefore created in a fabric conditioner yellow with paraffin wax instead of a no colour, soy wax candle as suggested by the candle shop lady.

When it came to selling, the whole task fell apart for Team Summit. A variable approach to margins meant the average selling price was £9.50 and some market trading offers made it look like it came out of Del Boy's suitcase. James had an interesting approach to misleading sales practice labelling it as previously sold at £45. Although the team managed to sell in volume to business clients, they sold out of reed diffusers at a low price and failed to deliver on a more lucrative order to a high quality hotel. Team Tenacity stuck to their guns and focused on selling at a higher margin. They didn't sell out of candles but still managed to win the task with £1,584 profit to Summit's £1,569 which as Roisin pointed out was the price of one candle...

Roisin's team in the boardroom was quickly depleted as Lindsay fell on her sword and admitted she had done little to help the team and was out of her depth - she was quickly fired and made her way back to her swimming pool, her natural business habitat. Roisin still had to return to the boardroom with two further members of her team and Nurun was the second candidate to go as she lacked experience and failed to add up or sell much at all.

So what did we learn? The apprentices are mostly rubbish at maths and have no idea how to set a pricing strategy and stick to it, or listen to what their team leader tells them to do and their market research is pretty ropey too. Steve is proving to be a liability when it comes to sales negotiations and Sarah, an unpopular member of the team who is playing the blame game and failing to sell at the right price. Sarah and Steve are predicted to be the next candidates to leave the boardroom. At least Lord Sugar's approach to firing in bulk is clearing the decks so we may be done before Christmas!

“Lights, Camera and………Shoulder action”

As if it wasn’t blindingly obvious in episode one, the second instalment of the Apprentice makes it clear this is (as we all know) about entertainment and not boardroom brilliance.  If it was about the country’s elite business people who effortlessly glided through the tasks making thousands then it would be as dull as dishwater and probably not lasted two years, never mind 10.

The entertainment this week was about wearable technology so of course the apprentices came up with “products” that won’t have the directors at Apple worried anytime soon.  Having decided on a marginally better team name than their first which meant “decline”, Team Tenacity’s ladies were determined to go for an all-singing-all-dancing jacket that would do lots of things – light up, warm up (and cool down) courtesy of solar panels in the shoulders and charge up (the mobile in the pocket). 

The latter idea had legs.  The ability to charge up a phone whilst on the move (literally) is a great idea.  Instead of sticking to one new product development idea and do it well they opted for a mishmash of bits of technology which essentially paid homage to Dallas with a dull jacket with a couple of fairy lights in the lapels and the Sue Ellen shoulder pads with a curious nod to Red Dwarf by virtue of some stripy solar panels on the shoulders.    

The New Product Development (NPD) process has a vital stage in it called screening.  There you weed out dodgy product ideas the same way that Lord Sugar weeds candidates.  On the plus side, at least including the heating system did allow Sarah 'get your make-up on, girls' Dales the opportunity to allow two men touch up her stomach during the pitch.

Team Tenacity won the day by a slim margin – about £200 in orders.  It was really only a victory because the Summit team gentleman failed to get any orders at all with their creepy grey jumper with a camera. 

Of course the boys weren’t so dim-witted not to realise there was “summit wrong” and the prototype looked pants but the show must go on and you believe in your product and sell it to your market.  Right?  Wrong!  “I wouldn’t personally go out in it” exclaimed Daniel the dreadful salesman in the pitch.  In fact Daniel agreed with all the criticisms levelled by the clients – so much so, that he would have replied yet again “that’s a very good point” had the client stated “we believe you’ve wasted our time today with such a stupid product”.  Reckons he’s “sales sales sales sales” but I think it’s more like “fails fails fails fails”.

In his pathetic defence of this grey sweatshirt with light-up writing and a pervy camera, Scott, the PM who was fired, said it was not for secretly filming girls in nightclubs but for sports.  The post-mortem show “Apprentice You’re Fired” debated this and sarcastically laughed that lots of sports require the player to wear a big baggy sweater.   Hang on, stop laughing there are two small target niche markets of darts players and fishermen that I can think of.   I am sure a premium pricing strategy would work a treat here as there are countless darts players out there wishing to record every mind-numbingly boring throw. 

The other firing this week happened before the boys even got to the losers’ café for some builders tea.  Robert “high end fashion” Goodwin bottled at being project manager and it cost him dearly.  In response to concerns expressed by John Lewis about the secret filming, he exclaimed “privacy is history” so I am delighted for him that he has left the competition.  If the News of the World was ever re-launched, he would have missed out on the job of a lifetime and having his name up in lights.    

The Apprentice - Episode 1

I’ve tried to resist all day but here it is, The Apprentice blog, episode 1. So it was an immense surprise to all of the candidates when 4 even shinier, strangely job titled business people appeared like apparitions from the other side of the wobbly walled boardroom. Who knew? Clearly the faceless PA on the telephone… surely Amstrad has a live chat thingy on their intranet? And anyone who read the Radio Times last week… but apart from that, huge surprise!

The value in having 20 candidates was so Sir Alan can fire them in multiples which he failed to take advantage of – I had my eye on 6 to take out in one fell swoop saving myself weeks of shouting at the television at their complete ineptitude to undertake any form of practical marketing activity.

But anyway, we soon discovered that their task was to sell random objects from previous tasks and to make some profit. Let’s add value they all shouted while proceeding to spend a lot of money to do it.

Frankly, I'd have found myself a pub in that supremely edgy part of the world they call Clerkenwell, served some hotdog bangers and mashed high quality spuds and chopped up the lemons to make £500 worth of  happy lunchtime gin and tonics. But of course, it’s much more fun to sell bog brushes to penguins and all travel glued to the hip around London in an expensive cab stuck in traffic. But what, we forgot the SEED CAPITAL? Yes, let’s show everyone we're an accountant by using official accountancy terms to describe an envelope of tenners. Did anyone else notice Sir Alan’s eyes and ears only counted sales at the end and didn’t take off what they spent? Or did I miss that? I might have been bashing my head against the wall by then.

I haven't even ranted yet about the blue suited Sarah – former PA and hypnotherapist who thinks as long as you have a pretty frock and some lippy on, you can sell to poor little men like feminism never happened, that’s if you can hobble fast enough across the cobbles in your heels. The only candidates I rate so far are the ladies who raised their eyebrows at her and asked if she was kidding.

The candidate I really hope will stay for ages is Steven who does a lovely line in hissy fits. But at the end of episode one, it was Felipe who always asked 'what Felipe would do' in times of angst, who nearly bit the bullet before Sir Alan swung back and forth and back to Chiles (not Charles or Giles) who wouldn't pick the t-shirts up because quite clearly everyone should all stay in the same cab the whole time and not, dare I say it, split up and get another cab so you can do two things at once?! No, that would be multi-tasking. 

Haven't they heard of couriers? 

Or had they left their cab money aka seed capital in an envelope somewhere in Clerkenwell? 

Argh… I can't watch but I will. 

Most positively, magnificently meaningless marketing mumbo-jumbo

As you know, our blog is about simple, straightforward marketing without buzzwords or waffle.  Today, I am pleased to announce I am adding “without gobbledygook” to that too.

I am doing some research at the moment (I won’t bore you with the specifics) and have found myself looking at marketing agency websites.

What has prompted me to blog today is this particular beauty:-

“Our unique, proven and collaborative approach of combining doctorate level theoretical analytics, strategy and world-class creative execution delivers ground-breaking, game-changing initiatives for ambitious brands.”

Why on earth put something so meaningless on a website?  It has caught my attention but for all the wrong reasons.  For what reasons did an agency try to bamboozle us with fancy, overcomplicated phrases?  Is it marketing?  I find it difficult to understand it’s about marketing.  At the heart of the concept, you put customers at the centre of what you do in order to understand their needs.  Call me old fashioned, but communicating with your customers is key to understanding those needs and you can’t do that effectively if you write in a way that they don’t understand you.  Worse still for an agency as they will be marketing to our customers too!  The mind boggles…..

Perhaps it’s showing their expertise?  Nah, I don’t buy that either unless it’s their expertise at writing daft sentences.  Obviously if my customers want a sentence lifted directly from a thesaurus, I will be in touch.

There are also lots of over-used phrases out there that are put about to “impress us”.  Perhaps some have almost a wallpaper effect that we don’t notice them.  An example is the prolific use of “very unique” to describe a product.  According to the dictionary, “unique” is “being the only one of its kind; unlike anything else”.  Why would someone therefore insist there are degrees of uniqueness?  A product may be different, slightly different or very different but, no, it’s very unique……

I would add “optimised”, “game-changing” and “finessed” to the list of words and phrases that really don’t mean anything at all.

Perhaps I am more aware of this issue today following the first airing last night of The Apprentice.  If ever there was a programme to show us the plethora of ridiculous-ness (as I am allowed a silly word too!) then this is it.  “A field of ponies” is coming my way (ref:  Stuart Baggs THE Brand).

What are your favourite gobbledygook phrases that belong in room 101?  Get “blue sky thinking” and let us have your favourites.

Waitrose, don't you know people are laughing at you?

Yet again, Waitrose is the butt of online jokes and viral posts about their extremely middle to upper class take on an 'Essentials' range. And it's hardly surprising when a basketful of Essential range items in this supermarket could include tinned artichoke hearts, bumper packs of avocadoes and rosemary and sea salt focaccia. It's like every night is dinner at Downton Abbey.

It's hardly the first time the joke has been on Waitrose. The Facebook page 'Overheard in Waitrose' posts amusing quotes such as this one heard in the Harborne branch: "this is disgusting, they've run out of fresh lemongrass and dried lemongrass is just the worse." With 342,693 likes (14/10/2014) and press representation, and probably a high level of shares, this is another example of how the word of mouth buzz about Waitrose is that of amusement.

In 2012, Waitrose's twitter campaign, 'Why I shop at Waitrose...' was hijacked by jokers who instead of talking about the quality of the food wrote quips such as "I shop at Waitrose because Clarissa's pony just will not eat ASDA value straw." Waitrose's management did respond to the tweets with:

Waitrose @waitrose: "Thanks for all the genuine and funny waitrosereasons tweets.We always like to hear what you think and enjoyed reading most of them."

They can take a joke (just about) but who wants to be the brand that is always mocked? And why put yourself in the firing lane repeatedly? Brands need to know who their target market is and how they should be positioning themselves, but sister organisation John Lewis manages to promote itself effectively without its campaigns being hijacked or its product ranges ridiculed.

This is not about whispering in the playground. Social media is accessible to read by customers, competitors and brands themselves. There is no excuse not to know what the buzz is about you. Social media monitoring and environmental scanning is time consuming but an essential part of the marketing planning process. Addictomatic is just one free tool that shows you the buzz about any brand online: http://addictomatic.com/topic/waitrose. You can examine instantly what customers think about you or your competitors and if you're not getting it right, you can adjust the tone or approach to your communications or your use of the marketing mix.

Be proud of what your brand values are Waitrose, and laugh at yourself if you wish - it is a British trait after all, but don't be a running joke if you have no control over the punchline.