#marketing2025 My Future Forecast

After attending the launch of #marketing2025 in Cambridge recently with CIM, I ruminated on what the big issues are in marketing for the next 10 years - a suitable topic for a New Year's broadcast! And I found it fairly depressing because I could have said exactly the same thing in 2004.

So my marketing big issue remains the same - that marketing gets to the heart of every boardroom, both small and large. I still have too many of my professional students running departments single-handedly when they should have a team of 4 minimum. I still know marketers battling to persuade their professional services organisations that marketing can play a major role in bringing complex organisational structures together and providing a better experience to their customers. I still can think of a fair few industries where marketing plays very little part in senior management decision-making. And far too many directors who think marketing is just a fluffy press release or maybe a nice little drinks party, or that marketing is just about digital.

So my new year's wish is that marketing gets the recognition it deserves. Let's shout about our Chartered Status from the rooftops. Let's get a comfy chair at every boardroom table. Let's put the customer at the heart of every business. Let's explain what we do to every business and business person.

I hope this year will see #marketing2025 spreading the marketing message far and wide. Do join the debate online.

Happy New Year!

Preventing academic misconduct in Chinese students

As a lecturer for the past 10 years, I always think I've seen it all until assignment hand-in day arrives and another example of cheating, collusion or plagiarism hits the desk. More often than not, international students are the culprits and are surprised that we can spot suspect work from a mile off even before we've checked the score on our plagiarism software. If I see a draft that is suspect, I will remind students of UK policies on these issues to encourage them to mend their ways if they have done something they shouldn't have and it's that approach that has made me realise that in most cases, the students have no idea they are at fault.

It's with this in mind that I turned to a new book published in 2014 by Sage called Study Skills for Chinese Students by Mike Courtney and Xiangping Du. This is aimed at Chinese students studying in the UK and is a multilingual guide to developing independent learning skills and improving their chances of success in UK universities. It talks about how Chinese students often think that using large parts of an author's work without referencing is a compliment to the author, and that it's okay to get help from a friend with writing an assignment - something I see often. This is such a useful book for Chinese students to read to help them understand the cultural differences in the UK, but also for lecturers to understand their perspective and consider how to communicate guidance on cheating, collusion and plagiarism in a more meaningful way. It's definitely one I recommend.

Buy here:

Something for Christmas: WestJet Christmas Miracles Ad

So as it's Christmas, here's my favourite ad of the year - WestJet Airlines' Christmas Miracle. I warn you that it's heavy on sentiment but isn't that what the festive season is all about? It was a close run with John Lewis' ad - everyone loves a penguin love story, a cute kid and a nice tune but this one ticks all the marketing boxes and here's why:

• They actually rebrand Santa in their corporate colours. Yes, Coca-Cola did it originally and now WestJet has turned him blue.
• They've done this before so it's become part of the Christmas tradition with customers and people who like to share cute videos on social media looking out for it.
• Nearly 3 million people have viewed it on Youtube, with over 8,000 likes and only 232 bah humbug dislikes.
• Comments on Youtube are in a whole host of languages showing that this ad has achieved a great global reach.
• Although it cost them to create the ad and supply gifts, they fly to the location anyway and their staff did all the legwork - the amount of amazing PR and impressions they get more than pays for the expenses.
• Corporate storytelling is a powerful medium that builds stimulus for consumers and supports the consumer decision-making process.
• It aligns itself with traditional fairy tales and storytelling with a narrator and a link to a well-known Christmas poem. We know it's going to have a happy ending and it promotes good corporate values.
• It also promotes Christian values, which can be important for Canadian and US firms.
• It's a significant part of their CSR (corporate social responsibility) programme.
• It has changed people's behaviour - comments such as 'this would be my airline of choice if I'm in the region' have been posted.
• They fly to the Dominican Republic so it reinforces our understanding of their service and also encourages us to think about going to a hot country for Christmas.
• It is a universal message so works well as a standardised communication.

Finally, it leaves you with a tear in your eye (even if you try very hard not to succumb) and that's what good Christmas advertising is all about!

Happy Christmas from your No Balls Bloggers!

The Apprentice - did the right business idea win?

Our good intentions to blog about The Apprentice waned pretty quickly this series... far too many candidates and the same tired tasks throwing up the same issues as in previous years: the candidates can't count, can't navigate their way around London and market research is the work of the devil according to Lord Sugar. I found the lack of fundamental business skills frustrating. Surely this is a great way to encourage young entrepreneurs by giving them some entertaining yet educational programming in a primetime slot?

So we were left with two business ideas with big flaws... I shouted at the television a lot when Roisin left... if it was just about the business idea, why didn't they sift through them during auditions? Bianca wanted to do tights in all the sizes, colours and derniers for 20 quid and Mark wanted to create an old skool SEO agency; I never really understood why he was launching the business he worked in 6 years ago! I also didn't quite work out why he was going to be so much better at this than anyone else when as far as I can work out, only Google knows the 200 odd algorithms that determine SEO anyway.

Lord Sugar clearly felt more comfortable with a technology business and Mark's business idea was a better bet for making a quick profit even if it wasn't terribly original. Bianca's idea was interesting but would require far too much start-up cash to generate enough inventory. Stores would only have enough space for a certain number of pantones meaning customers would be faced with the same choice of nude, tan or nearly black anyway, meaning the USP would be lost. It seems the premium price point was a risk Lord Sugar wasn't prepared to take. Out of the two ideas, the best idea won but I was left distinctly underwhelmed. I didn't find it educational and I didn't find it particularly entertaining and yet it's going to return for a new series. The Apprentice: isn't it about time you were fired?

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.