Advertising and manipulation

Still on the subject of obesity and advertising, here's a thought provoking section of a report in yesterday's Evening Standard (London evening paper).

The ultimatum came as extraordinary new evidence emerged of how food companies and advertisers seek to "infiltrate" children's culture to by-pass the protective influence of parents.

A submission from advertising agency Leo Burnett to the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising for one of its "effectiveness" awards boasts how its campaign for Kellogg's Real Fruit Winders "entered the world of kids in a way never done before" and "managed not to let Mum in on the act".

Sugars make up a third of the product which won a Tooth Rot award in 2002.

The committee report quoted one industry publication saying that an eight-year-old boy was the perfect target for advertising as "he had 65 years of consumption ahead of him".

Have you ever had the experience of being with a friend in a restaurant or shop and seen them be nasty or manipulative to the staff? Or tried to do business with someone who brags about how he squeezes suppliers or gets more money from customers? Doesn't that make you a little more cautious about your relationship with them?

I think of this whenever ad agencies brag about how clever they are at manipulating people.

It strikes me that agencies who are proud of manipulating children will surely revel in doing it to their supposedly revered clients.

I don't trust those advertising effectiveness awards as proof that agencies work. But as evidence of their values... they can be very revealing. Perhaps they also provide insights into the values of their clients?

Obesity, sychophancy and consistency...

There's been a lot of coverage for a report by MPs slamming our food industry for its role in the growth of obesity in the UK. The big food companies are fighting what looks like a rearguard action against government intervention to stop them advertising to children.

I was intrigued to find this quotation from Niall Fitzgerald, the Chairman of Unilever, in this context.

The power of business, as opposed to that of government, is grossly overrated

How does this square with the following highlights from Unilever's own website (Unilever introduces new corporate brand). Their golden words, my italics, by the way.

The new Unilever brand was introduced today. It will support the launch of the company's new Vitality mission, announced on Feb 12, when Unilever set its future direction.

Unilever’s new mission is to add vitality to life. We meet everyday needs for nutrition, hygiene, and personal care with brands that help people feel good, look good and get more out of life...

Antony Burgmans and Niall FitzGerald, the chairmen of Unilever said: "The new Unilever brand is a powerful symbol of our new Vitality mission, demonstrating that we stand accountable for the difference we make on a daily basis to our consumers, our employees and the communities and environment in and around which we operate."

I'm confused. Is Unilever powerful when trying to impress investors, but powerless when asked to take responsibility for the consequences of its advertising?

Perhaps I should cut Niall some slack. The press quote has obviously been manufactured in the PR department. (Just try to imagine the two Chairmen both saying the same thing like some strange male voice chorus). Perhaps he's so tired of their sycophancy that he's given up trying to get them to speak for him with anything resembling authenticity.

But you know, he's going to need to be more careful because these days it's so much harder to get away with being one thing to one group of stakeholders and something else to another. Never has the phrase "want to have your cake and eat it" seemed more apt.

While I'm on the subject, let me quote a bit more of this press release

The new logo tells the story of Unilever and vitality. It brings together 25 different icons representing Unilever and its brands, the idea of vitality and the benefits we bring to consumers and the world we operate in.

For example:-

The Sun is our primary natural resource. All life begins with the sun – the ultimate symbol of vitality
The Heart represents love, care and health – feeling good
The Shirt represents fresh laundry – looking good
A Bird is a symbol of freedom. Relief from daily chores – getting more out of life

I don't know about you but this stuff just makes me cringe.

Is there anyone in the neighbourhood of Unilever's Head Office willing to play the role of the small boy from Hans Christian Andersen's Emperor's New Clothes? I fear that the generally rather smart Niall Fitzgerald has let loose a bunch of branding sycophants in the tailoring department.

Abundance and scarcity

Piers Young writes about Abundance and the Wish to be Spoon-Fed.

I searched online, in library catalogues, and spoke to various people to see whether they knew anything that could help. Nothing turned up (or at least nothing of which I was conscious). So on Day 3, I spent half an hour in Cafe Nero with pen and paper and a so-much-nicer-than-Starbuckscoffee, doodling and thinking. I may not have solved the problem, but I made substantially more progress than I had done on the previous two days.

I had, I still think rightly, assumed that the truth was "out there". But I'd forgotten that there were ideas in (tap tap sound of hollow knocking) here. There are probably several reasons for my forgetfulness, laziness among them, but one - and the one I want to stress - was the quantity of possible ideas I thought I might have access to. Abundance stopped me thinking.

The moral?
A) As a much better man than me said:

Reading furnishes the mind only with the materials of knowledge;
it is thinking that makes what we read ours. - John Locke

B) Maybe I should have tried to say that in my own words.

I especially like the ironic ending. This also makes me reflect on how it's very easy to experience scarcity amidst abundance, just as it is possible to feel acute loneliness most strongly in a crowd.

On bad days, I find it easy to feel intimidated by the amount of cleverness now available to me online and thus experience myself as stupid. On good days, I can revel in it and experience myself as... connected.

I think I'm getting better at detecting what I'd call "high status cleverness" where I suspect people are more interested in impressing; this is the sort that can trigger an attack of inadequacy and resistance on the part of the reader. Then there is genuine sharing, where I think people are genuinely playing with ideas for the joy of sharing, and risking the vulnerability that goes with it.

I hope I'm getting better at knowing which of these games I'm playing, too. I think that much of the difference between effective and poor facilitation lies in this territory.

And Piers' entry definitely fits the second category.

Emergent Organisations

Chris Corrigan orginally pointed me to Peggy Holman and Anne Stadler's thinking on Emergent Organisations. This is rich material, and Chris provides a good summary as a way in.

In their paper, Peggy and Anne look at three case studies and then draw some conclusions about the practices that support emergent form and leadership coming out of spirited large scale change events.

Essentially the practices that support emergent form are:

*Center in the organization's higher purpose by bringing it consistently into the daily work of the organization

*Open the circle -- the organization's boundaries -- for all the diversity to flourish via a self-organizing marketplace (involve all stakeholders)

*Open system-wide avenues for communication and reflection (Practicing transparency).

Practices that enable emergent leadership are

*Make it easy for individuals to take responsibility for what they care about (unleashing the power of individuals to contribute).

*Invoke spirit by creating shared vision and values, opening unanticipated possibilities.

*Stand for "yes" and reflect regularly on what is being learned: individually and collectively.

*Steward: Care for the whole community of life (sustainable, systematic).

*Design simply from natural, universal patterns

Their paper goes on to give three practical examples of organisations that follow these sorts of principles.

My own interest in this is in seeing brands as emergent. Traditionally, "experts" claim to know how to build brands, following "proven" formulae, as if a brand can be made to happen according to a preconceived plan. Needless to say, the construction of such a plan generates a lot of income for such experts. Having worked in the business a long time, I realise that a lot of these experts paint a very flattering view of how they have made brands happen in the past.

More and more, I see brands as things that don't follow these plans. If that is so, the real skills are not in the planning but in the ability to respond creatively to shifting circumstances. That's what "opening the circle" means to me.

Peggy also shared with me a presentation: "Whole Systems Change" which you can download if you like (pdf file). Regular readers know how phobic I am to diagrams and there are a few in here; but I think this document is rich in meaning and it's worth persevering. It argues for a much more fluid approach that allows participants to create their own meanings.

The other side of Coke

I know I keep linking to it, but hey, I think The Nub is a pretty good site. Lots of information and a good dollop of well-expressed attitude.

Tim Carter there points to an exhibition here in London,

that's designed to help make "(Coke's) run of bad luck continue and showing the brand for what it really is". The "what it really is" refers to Coke's links with Nazi Germany.

Whilst the "bad luck" they refer to is far from convincing, nevertheless, I would like to thank the organisers for furthering my education. Until today I didn't know Coke sponsored the 1936 Olympics and I didn't know that Fanta was born in Nazi Germany.

Tim is sceptical and takes the opportunity to put the positive side of the Coke story.

In fact I am inspired to consider an exhibition of my own. One that shows just how many lives have been improved by Coke's existence. I'd like to show all the thousands of parents around the world that have raised kids on salaries from Coke and improved the quality of their lives.

Well that would be fun wouldn't it? Two competing galleries giving two alternative Coke realities. Personally, Tim, I think we can leave Coke to do their own spin with their vast marketing budget, especially now they're not wasting millions trying to flog us our own tapwater.

I like a bit of controversy but I don't really buy Tim's "but look at the jobs they created" argument. Partly I think it's a description of work that is inherently company-centric. A person agrees to work for a company and together they create some value. Why do we say that the company "created" the job? Didn't the worker create it too? I distrust the notion that the worker would not have been able to create value in some other way but for the company coming along. Quite honestly, if Coke didn't exist, I think the human race would manage to get by, somehow-or-other. And it might conceivably do so with a bit less of a caffeine addiction.

Is the exhibition unfair? Possibly, I haven't seen it. But let's face it, it's not as though Coke has been a model of shyness and reserve for the last 100 years. They've not exactly struggled to present themselves as a modest organisation that shuns the limelight. So I don't feel enormous pangs of compassion if their multi-billion advertising is countered by a little sharp satire. And that, by the way, is an understatement of my view.

High status BS

Branding is so often mired in the Land of High Status. Why, oh why, are agencies so grandiose in the way they describe their clients and themselves?

The other day, I picked up the promotional brochure of Incepta Marketing Intelligence, entitled "Demystifying Solutions". Here are few fairly representative highlights. The italics and the blahs and rhubarbs are mine; the ludicrously smug self-congratulation is entirely their own.

Imagine an agency whose passion for knowledge extends far beyond the boundaries of research; a broader perspective informing every aspect of our work.

A vibrant mix of science and art; qualitative and quantitative imagination... where busy imaginations are always working for your advantage... an agency that compounds creativity and practicality, delivers imaginative solutions...

No need to imagine. This what we do every day. And it works.

Named Marketing Agency of the Year blah blah via flagship agencies blah blah proven reputation rhubarb rhubarb truly actionable outcomes blah blah enviable track record rhubarb industry awards blah blah thought leaders rhubarb rhubarb clear deep thinking and a sharp sense of commercial reality blah incisive analysis rhubarb rhubarb blue chip clients blah blah

Words (almost) fail me. If you met a real person who introduced himself in such a laughably narcissistic fashion, I'm quite sure you'd fall over laughing. I can't imagine such an organisation seeing anything much beyond its own reflection in the mirror of its vanity.

Responsibility + Helplessness -> Abuse

Another gem from Richard Farson's Management of the Absurd. He talks about the difference between training and education. I don't want to get too hung up on those particular words but I do like the distinction he draws between the approaches.

Training... leads to the development of skills and techniques. Each new technique implicitly reinvents the manager's job by adding a new skill requirement, a new definition of the task, and a new responsibility... but because techniques don't work well in human relations, the manager is often unable to adequately discharge these new-felt responsbilities... when people feel responsible for handling some situation in which they are, in fact, largely helpless, a dangerous combination of feelings is created: responsibility plus helplessness leads to abuse.

I'm taking a breath here and revisiting that line: responsibility plus helplessness leads to abuse. Those six eloquent words on their own handsomely repay my investment in this book.

Farson continues

When teachers cannot get their students to learn... when parents cannot control their children, they usually do not become compassionate. They become abusive. The same is true for managers.

Saddled with responsbilities created by the growing body of management techniques, managers become frustrated and likely to resort to abusive methods to try and control the uncontrollable.

Training, says Farson, makes people more alike, because everyone learns the same skills.

Education, because it involves an examination of one's personal experience in the light of an encounter with great ideas, tends to make people different from each other. So the first benefit of education is that the manager becomes unique, independent, the genuine article.

This is wonderful, insightful stuff that makes me feel more alive. I think his thought about helplessness and abuse is very powerful. I think a lot of the time people feel helpless but act in denial of it and yes, they then become abusive, of themselves and/or others. I know I find it challenging when feeling helpless not to lash out. Sometimes the most powerful thing to do, paradoxically, is to admit feeling helpless. Mind you, I've learnt to be prepared to deal with the abusive responses of others who can't bear to be in the presence of such feelings.

I really like the point that the overwhelming barrage of techniques in the world of organisations paradoxically make things worse by increasing the potent mix of responsibility and helplessness. It's rather like beauty magazines that make people feel ugly. And branding has done a lot to contribute to the generation of false ideals in a way that is also abusive.

Trivial fun

I couldn't restist adding a clock to this site (in the right hand column) courtesy of Clocklink, on a tip from Learning Movable Type.

Consistency:Hobgoblin ratio

Fouroboros continues to write great stuff, and it's hard to keep up with him sometimes. Here's a snippet of one of his recent posts

Education author Eric Jensen, in Arts with the Brain in Mind reveals that "America is a feeling-phobic society." This goes in spades for subgroups filled with "Professional Adults" called corporations. Of course, the feelings are still there and very active. They're just non-sanctioned, unofficial "elephants" taking up space and sapping oxygen. And this reveals a paradox for most businesses interested in moving product: many have no firm idea what moves people. Nor do they have processes to share this knowledge. That's hardly surprising. Most organizations are configured to hard facts, heavy analysis, and predictable results. Bureaucracies define themselves by their aim for consistency. What is surprising is that that bland paste of "consistency" equates to figurative "death" to our R-complexes. If there is no challenge "I am dead and useless" goes the brain imprint. And people shut down. Or they move on. Or they fight.

I would relate this to the Richard Farson quote in my previous post, and to that quote from Emerson - "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". Emerson was being a bit harsh, but he had a point.

Management of the Absurd

On a tip from Tim Carter (of Nub fame), I'm reading Richard Farson's Management of the Absurd. I'm really enjoying it so far. The blurb on the back sums it up quite well

In organisations, as in life, human behaviour is often irrational - and problems do not easily lend themselves to the simplistic answers and gimmickry offered in the myriad business "self-help" books and management training programs available today.

Farson's response is to talk about the paradoxes of humans and organisations, which is wonderfully rich territory. His style is thought-provoking and steers away from how-tos. Here's another tasty snippet

It is the ability to meet each situation armed not with a battery of techniques but with openness that permits a genuine response. The better managers transcend technique. Having acquired many techniques in their development as professionals, they succeed precisely by leaving technique behind.

It is such a relief to find that kind of thinking expressed so eloquently.

Context

Seth Godin (On Thinking Big) compares a roomful of credit card execs with a roomful of CPAs. He concludes:

The difference, i think, was that a long time ago, the people in the second room had made a decision about what they deserved, or what they were capable of, or what they were going to stick with. And it was a bad decision.

Wow. What strikes me are the sweeping assumptions that Seth makes here. I enjoy Seth's writing and I've said before that he seems to have a very individualistic worldview: so he ascribes the different outcomes in these people's lives to an individual decision. He also appears to see the guys in the first room as the more successful, a view which Tim at the Nub eloquently questions:

According to Seth, the advantage the credit card execs had over the CPAs was better food and handouts. But these are things we can see with our eyes - what about the things we can't see like stress levels, family situations, personal life satisfaction? Who is to say the CPA's weren't a happier bunch of souls than the credit card execs?

Seth's "it's up to you" perspective is interesting and familiar; what I feel it lacks is a sense of context and taken too far could leave us all feeling rather lonely and isolated. I wouldn't argue with Seth's conclusion

In a world where the past matters a lot less than it ever did before, where it's easier than it ever was to hit the reset button, it's sad to see someone choosing to be stuck

but I think it's a big assumption to say the highly paid execs aren't stuck and the CPAs are.

Unjobbing

Robert Paterson is in the toppest-of-top form today in his entry Unjobbing. A few snippets:

All the rules of the old culture are based on the assumptions that the most important activity is control. The extension of this assumption is that if only we tried hard enough, we could control everything. This illusion seemed to work when we did not operate in a global society. But when we began to operate in a global economy, the complexity of controlling everything has overwhelmed us. As we talk about being more responsive, more customer-focused and more flexible, let’s look at the real rules that govern most of our organizations. They work against these objectives.

The budget process is the most important process in the traditional organization. Budgets, not value, determine who has the power. Controlling large budgets, large numbers of people and large physical plant is what gives you power. At a time when the jargon is all about being close to the customer, the traditional reward system values being a bureaucrat. The further you are away from the customer, the more powerful you become. Career success is determined by obtaining and using good bureaucratic skills. The result is a managerial emphasis and a bias against creativity....

The external stakeholders, be they investors, bankers or governments, view the enterprise through only one aspect of a balance sheet, financial capital. As the bigger is better approach has taken hold, the financial balance sheet has grown geometrically thus driving up the hurdle rate for earning an economic return. The purpose of the organization tends to become obscured as the pressure to meet the investment hurdle increases. So schools and hospitals are increasingly evaluated in terms of their budgetary impact rather than on any criteria of whether they are educating our children well or not. Businesses cannot afford to miss an operational beat because they have to run their system at full tilt all the time to meet the returns on a large capital structure. Executives are being measured quarter by quarter rather than being given a more appropriate time horizon.

When Rob talks about the relentless drive for efficiency, I think about the City's panic when Marks and Spencer dared post less than sparkling returns in one set of figures. A snapshot provokes demands for resignations. Crazy.

Rob is arguing for a paradigm shift and says the old-style organisations will be highly resistant. I love this kind of full-on, radical thinking.

I believe that the power of the old culture makes it almost impossible to change our organizations from within. The reasons for this failure are not lack of effort or lack of vision but the nature of the cultural reaction to the new. The rules of the old culture operate like an immune system seeking out new and dangerous ideas that threaten the old way of doing things.

I'd like to cheer the almost word that Rob included. Because I think organisations are not as rigidly bound as they think they are. They may attempt to run themselves in the control-freak way Rob describes, but the non-rational and the kind periodically cut-through. More often in some organisations than others, I grant you.

Individuals within systems can find ways to create good relationships despite constraints, and I'd like to believe that the cumulative effect of us each, individually, speaking authentically helps undermine the old paradigm Rob sets out.

They don't create these brands, we do

Ultimately, organisations and brands are not real things, they are figments of our collective imagination. We can imagine them differently.

For instance, my default setting is to loathe the Tesco Metro store at the end of my road. Shopping there is a good sign that my self-esteem is particularly low. The Tesco brand mantra is not very convincing in this cramped shop. If I go with this, I can shop sulkily and resentfully and ignore the human beings working there.

Alternatively I can make the effort to chat to them and engage, and create the outside chance of us both having a more human encounter. In that fleeting moment, they and I both collude to create a different brand of Tesco. And, boy, do I prefer this one to the default. Not least because I am the conscious co-author of it, not Mr Tesco.

Improv Freebie

Here's a good free offer. My friends Alain Rostain and Terrill Fisher are giving a free one-hour teleclass this Friday.

Using improv principles and tools over the telephone to help make teleconferences more effective

Alain Rostain and Terrill Fisher will lead a free teleconference
Friday, May 21st, 12:00 - 1:00 PM eastern time
(9 - 10 am Pacific, 5 - 6 in the UK...)

No registration required.
Dial 1-866-239-0711 (If you are calling from outside North America dial 1-937-530-1205).

At the prompt, enter 1 Enter Meeting ID 7350

I warmly recommend this, even if you're new to Improv it'll be worth joining.

Reciprocity

Chris Lawer has done a good summary of the latest Yankelovich report on the shortcomings of marketing. The findings aren't that surprising - we're all becoming more resistant to marketing messages. The report focuses on four principles for the future. Precision of targetting, Relevance of message, Power for consumers and finally...

Reciprocity Providing value in all interactions. This means paying consumers for their time and attention. Consumers want immediate value from the ad or marketing itself, not the promise of value in a product to buy. This value can be information, entertainment or compensation, but something to demonstrate appreciation and respect.

Whilst the Yankelovich findings support my general position that marketing is often wasteful and irritating, I notice that I have misgivings. First, I'm wary of findings like, "59% say that most marketing and advertising has very little relevance to me". It's the faux precision of the 59% that bothers me. And the Aunt Sally quality of the statement means I'm surprised only 59% agreed. Do you detect a sense of the research being used to prove a point?

Second. I notice the repetition of the "power to the consumer" mantra that doesn't quite do it for me. The first three principles seem to be saying, never, ever waste the consumers time, only say things the consumer considers relevant, make the consumer all-powerful. And then it talks about reciprocity in similar absolutist language: "providing value in all transactions".

That's not my idea of reciprocity - or "give-and-take". Nor does it conform to the real world of conversations and relationships. In the real world, not everything we do can be calculated to please or placate the other. I notice their use of the word transaction here. I think we demand mere transactional efficiency when our expectations are really low. Like when we lose our patience and say "Just give me what I want and get out of my way". Relationships, however, require more flexibility on both sides.

I don't want to live in a world of mere transactional efficiency. When I go to a shop I don't want the staff merely to cow tow in an effort to make my life fractionally more efficient. I don't want every communication I receive to conform merely to some anxious guess as to what I might want to hear. I am willing to be suprised, provoked, and engaged... I don't expect to be placated. I don't expect to be treated with precision by a company as I'm not a cog in a machine but flesh and blood. I don't want to be the cause of unnecessary anxiety... I'd quite like to be treated as the fallible human being that I am, by others who are willing to admit some fallibility.

The tyranny of the explicit

I think that business suffers from the tyranny of the explicit.

Its desire for measurability and proof makes it focus on the explicit element of what happens in human relationships. There's quite a lot of evidence that this is like the bit of the iceberg that shows above the water... interesting, but very far from whole story. The best book on this is Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind which documents the extent to which what the author, Guy Claxton, calls the Undermind is at work in our everyday lives.

Just today, Curt Rosengren blogs a report from the Wall St Journal Career Journal on Intuition on the Job

Professor John Mihalasky and his associates at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark tested hundreds of business managers for intuitive ability. They are convinced that effective, superior decision making correlates highly with intuitive ability.
For one of their experiments, they chose 25 managers who had held top decision-making jobs for five years. All were from small manufacturing companies (less than $50 million in sales) to ensure that their decision making hadn't been diffused by committees.

The results were remarkable: Of the 25 men selected, 12 had doubled their companies' profits in five years. Eleven of those 12 scored high on the intuitive test.

So intuition is key, yet many business processes strip the intuitive out in favour of the explicit and rational.

I'd like to dwell on one manifestation of this. The problem with a lot of standard marketing practice is that it reduces the bandwidth in conversations between a company and its clients, and thus risks reducing the scope for intuitive learing.

Market research puts a researcher between the company and customer, so that customer feedback is pasteurised. Researchers see it as their job to expertly interpret what they hear; they may be using their own intuition but they also risk reducing their client's experience of the customer to the explicit and reduce the bandwidth.

Likewise, the subsequent marketing relies on expert middlemen to refine the organisation's message the other way.

I'm not saying that these practices are inherently wrong, however over-reliance on them may be toxic.

In their wonderful book, A General Theory of Love the authors describe an experiment in which a baby interacts with its mother via a live video link. Although this reduces the amount of communication between them, all seems well. Then, however, they introduce a 2 second time delay in the pictures in each direction... and the child becomes very distressed. They argue that synchrony is a key element in the bonding.

I fear that marketing strips the synchrony out of relationships by its desire to average out the multitude of attitudes and expressions and by introducing long delays in communication. Ad campaigns are crafted over months, often in a desire to avoid risk, and companies lose the ability to respond spontaneously.

I also suspect that often the investment in refining communicaton to the outside world becomes a useful distraction from difficult, unspoken difficulties in communication inside the company. That's another failure of human bandwidth.

Fuzzy brand boundaries

Rob at Business Pundit points to a Forbe's article, The Slipper Solution

Pick up the phone to book a flight with JetBlue and you might reach Margo Canaan at her rented home in Salt Lake City. While the single mother helps fliers pick their seats, her five children, ages 4 to 16, occasionally sit in the same bedroom-office doing homework. They know to keep quiet so Mom can do her work. Her uniform: everyday clothes, plus a pair of fluffy white-and-blue slippers shaped like airplanes.

As Rob says, a nice alternative to either/or thinking about outsourcing.

It's also another sign of the fuzziness of the boundaries that define a brand. And kudos to JetBlue for a bit of smart, high-tech:high-touch thinking.

Rambling thoughts about brands and complexity

Jennifer's post also quotes a reader called Patrick who emailed her thus:

I start to believe that no one really knows what works – when it comes to sales, or more specifically, branding. The world out there is just too complex to really figure out how those millions of people internally and externally will respond to which ever message you put out there.
My premise is quite radical: nothing works by design – everything emerges out of chaotic, self adaptive patterns / processes. I am living with this hypothesis for a while. I am trying to understand what the implications for marketing and management need to be if we have to admit that we don’t know the answers.

Sounds like a fellow traveller to me. I've had very similar thoughts for a while now, and I believe the world of branding is far too full of the noises of false certainties.

The story of branding is often told by narcissists

They say that history is written by the winners. Well, the story of branding seems dominated by those who claim to be winners, making it even more questionable. Since success has many parents and failure is an orphan, and since marketing has always attracted more than its share of narcissists, you can see the problem. What I see is human beings collaborating together in less than ideal circumstances and not according to the grand designs of the experts.

I usually quote the Gallup surveys showing how few people feel engaged with their work. When I look at the grandiose or cringe-making things they are being asked to engage with, I think their reaction is postively healthy. Someone told me that a well-known chocolate company spent a modest fortune with consultants to decide their mission was "To make the little things people love". (That spluttering noise is me choking on my Dairy Milk). Can you seriously expect someone toiling on the chocolate production line to engage with that? On top of which, I can't help thinking that the high-ups who strike this pose are also trailing the corridors of the City explaining that of course what they're really all about is making large amounts of what the analysts love... I wonder if the two are being skilfully reconciled?

Getting away from scriptwriting

Is this to say that brand managers and business leaders don't influence brands? No, that's not what I'm saying. Clearly their interventions have major impacts; but very often not ones they intend. I think what I'm moving towards is the idea that brands are shorthand for ideas people hold. Those ideas are shifting and can't be rigidly defined. If branding tries too hard to instruct us what our ideas should be, it becomes obnoxious and deserves to fail.

In Improv theatre, success comes from a goodwilled exchange of dramatic "offers" between players. The story emerges moment by moment. When one actor tries too hard to drive the narrative, they'll be accused of "scriptwriting". That's the sort of thing too many brands and brand consultants try to do. They try too hard to make things follow some ideal of their own, and don't allow the stakeholders to create the brand by themselves, for themselves, moment by moment. When Barclays Bank batters me with the idea that they are "Fluent in Finance" they are scriptwriting. But the result is that I reject their script and make my own meaning about their brand. And it's not a positive one.

Let's not go all Punch and Judy

I'm hoping not to throw out the baby with the bath water. Of course we want organisations to maintain standards, to do things consistently; we don't always want to be surprised. I'd just like them to ground their thinking in reality and not false ideals; to practise greater modesty; and to interrupt me less often with their own bright ideas.

The John and Jennifer Experience

Jennifer Rice has been talking about our meetings in Malmo. Modesty (the False brand of it) prevents me from quoting the very flattering things she says (but do take a look for yourself). But I'd like to dwell on this observation she made:

In our conversations it became clear that we see the world from two quite different perspectives: Johnnie's approach is quite fluid, flexible and evolving, whereas I look for boundaries and structure. Two quite complementary viewpoints

As one who delights in paradox, I've enjoyed trying to work this out. It came as a bit of a surprise to find that Jennifer thinks we have two quite different perspectives; if you look through our many blog conversations there's a lot of common ground.

One of my dogmas is the importance of context. I can be quite a structural thinker myself but when someone else is doing structure, I tend to want to play against it. With Jennifer, this seems to lead to a good double act. That's largely because she's such a positive-minded person... and also because a bit of testing sometimes creates more effective structures. So both structure and freedom can work together. And we both like a bit of Zen.

The flaws of focus groups

Continuing my thoughts on the downsides of focus groups. I'm not saying they are inherently wrong, but that there's a lot that's not good about the way they are often used.

Leapfrog Research had a good article in the MR industry magazine recently. Here's a copy (word format). I love the descriptions of what goes on in the client side room (the room where the clients sit, watching the group take place)

The viewing facility as business centre

Mobile phones recharged, laptops plugged in ‘the battery’s a bit flat and I need to check my emails’, ‘can I go somewhere quiet and work?’, ‘ring America’, ‘call the old man’, ‘send a fax’ oops forgot to watch the group.

Friends reunited

A great chance for everyone to catch up with office gossip, crack open a few bottles of wine, send out for pizza instead of the hot buffet for eight that was ordered last week, by someone who isn’t there… group?... oh well there’s always the video for later.

The empty room mystery

It’s a dark and stormy Thursday night and there’s football on the telly. Only one person turns instead of the six catered for and feeling a bit Nobby-no-mates, quietly tiptoes away halfway through the first group. ‘Anything else I can get for you………oh’.

The private reality TV show

Here, safe behind a glass partition you can laugh at the real people, mock their dress sense, be amazed at the lack of sophistication and grip on global strategies.

This chimes in with my own experience. I fear that if we're not careful, focus groups simply become another half-experienced bit of stimulus to entertain. Instead of creating a connection with customers, they become part of a culture in which customers are seen as objects to be operated on, rather than people to be engaged with.

Leading?

I see the word "leading" used all the time to describe organsations. Nearly always, it means that the company is not the biggest in its sector but desperately needs us to believe it is important.

Interestingly, the word "leading" has another definition (pronounced ledd-ing) - from printing, where it stands for extra empty space between lines of type.

When I read about a "leading company" I can't help thinking of that meaningless empty space...

Opining for Money

Last night I was paid to take part in a panel of experts (who, me?) to give feedback to a financial brand about the trends we saw, their future strategy, blah blah. I met some interesting people and we talked and talked. Most of it was conducted focus-group style behind a one-way mirror and the best bit was when we came out and actually met the client at the end.

This allowed me to vent my concerns about the excessive amount of mediated communication in marketing. Too often, companies experience their customers at one remove, filtered through professional researchers, and then communicate back at one remove, through professional communicators. This has its uses but I think often just deadens the relationship and is responsible for a lot of very dull advertising. Sometimes these "communications professionals" just get in the way.

In a way, the format of the evening was a symptom of the problem. Although I'm perfectly happy to be paid to talk, I'd much rather have a real conversation than be dealing in abstractions through a one-way mirror.

NBC Universal brags

Over breakfast yesterday, Jennifer Rice and I looked at the double-page spread in the FT from the newly merged NBC Unversal. Which seemed only to tell us how very big they were. As well as a couple of vacuous taglines that you usually get on movie trailers. (You know the ones, with the gravelly American voice) "And the future begins now" and "Imagine the possibilities". They say life imitates art, and here are two nominations for the art (parody) this calls to mind for me.

First, the Very Big Corporation of America from Monty Python's Meaning of Life. (And I wonder who will play the Crimson Mutual Assurance to NBC Universal?)

Second, going back a bit, Shelley's Ozimandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away

It's a bad sign that this company has nothing to tell us except how important it is.

Relationship or transaction

Good post by Chris Lawer: Overseas call centres damage the brand. Suggests that the cost savings of outsourcing are often negated by loss of customers. (And that's not taking account of the impact on customers who don't actually leave, which is easily measurable. What about the lost goodwill and enthusiasm of customers who stay, but with apathy or resentment, which is harder to measure). I agree with Chris' conclusion:

It seems that many businesses today view their customer interactions as a COST TO BE REDUCED rather than as a potential investment in service, dialogue and learning

Malmo

Just a quick post from my hotel in Malmo, Sweden. Have spent the day in meetings with fellow blogger Jennifer Rice. It's been great to meet her and have animated conversations inspired by each other's past conversations online. Even better to doing some work together... a very exciting sign of the potential of blogging. Back home tomorrow...

Blogging... the agony and the ecstasy

So I've been blogging for about 9 months now, and it has taken over a large chunk of my life. Some of my friends keep journals; I always thought this an extraordinary thing, something I would never have time to do. Now here I am keeping one and exposing it to the world.

Exposing is the right word. People really show themselves in blogs, they can't help but do so. They tell us about themselves, both in what they write, and what they don't write.

Wondering if someone is listening...

Sometimes I write stuff that seems inconsequential to me and am pleasantly surprised by the quantity of comment/trackbacks. Sometimes I write stuff I quietly think is rather good and I see... nothing back. That's quite painful, though I may not show it. And I get to think about how important it is for me to make an effort to respond to what I read, and not merely get stimulated and go looking for more.

One definition of love is: to be willing to educate the other about who you really are. Deliberately or not, that's what's happening in blogs. And no, I'm not saying all we need is love. I am standing up for the extraordinary value of people sharing their experience.

Sometimes the honesty is overwhelming. For instance, John Porcaro wrote an extraordinary, heartfelt tribute to his parents a week ago. I just took a look, and saw that it has had only one trackback and no comment. I'm now getting round to responding myself. I still don't really know what to say about what he wrote, other than that I'm awed by it, and a little jealous.

There's something to be said for vulnerability

Please don't read this as an admonishment to post more comments to my blog or anyone else's (though don't let me stop you). For me, there is great value in recording my thoughts for myself, whether or not they're read by the world. I'd just like to share my experience that though this stuff may look easy, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes I worry myself with what people might think about me when I post. I could worry myself right now with what you might think of this entry. ("Good god, what's got into him, why can't he get back to good, solid, business stuff?")

If that angst is the "agony" part of being vulnerable, there is also the "ecstasy" side. For instance, on Friday I met Tim Carter, co-founder of The Nub. And from the moment we started it was a great, touching, conversation. And in those moments I realise the huge value of taking risks and saying what I think in here - because Tim already knew me before we met. We only met because of the blog, and we only connected with the openness that we did because of it.

Next week, I'm off to Scandinavia to do some work with Jennifer Rice. This is happening because we know each other through our blogs. We got to know quite a lot about each other without ever "pitching" or trying to make money from each other. Pretty neat... I'm in London, she's in Texas, and we're meeting for the first time in... Copenhagen. I feel a great sense of trust, and indeed obligation, in this working relationship because it's been forged in a quite public space.

Later this week, I'm taking part in a panel discussion on how brands can help change customers' lives. I'm sure that I'll want to talk about the need for authentic human voices in this; about change happening organically from the sharing of experience; and I shall doubtless be talking about blogging. One of the things I negotiated in advance was that I'd be free to share my experience of the panel in this blog, though I'm keeping schtum about the client and their own business.

Lists, continued...

For those who enjoyed my previous posts on lists, here's a kindred spirit. I offer a little snippet to lure you into reading more.

I wonder what Michele's return on investment would have been after reading the same post, rendered in bulletese?

• There are lots of books out there.
• Most say the same things.
• Some are kindling, some light the match.
• Pick one that lights your fire.
• Ask why it does
• Remember the fire, burn the books.
• Now go do business.

Such a good list that it almost negates its point. Almost. A bit like Chris Corrigan's. (See, some of the best stuff on here isn't even mine!)

If I find many more blogs like fouroboros, I may have to add a matching category to Dr Rant, called Dr Rave. In fact, I just did. I might go back and a few more posts to it, but as I write, fouroboros is the only one.

Tell me, why are you still reading me? It's kind of you and all, but really, you should be reading fouroboros. Ah perhaps you need more proof? Fair enough, how's this:

And that's just it. "My" bullet points are mine. You have to craft your own. From what you know and believe to be true: What you want, what you can do, who else wants it, and why they should care. We refine our own ideas about the way things ought to be. And then, we each help our customer discover their own unique set of bullet points, a process made easier thanks to the knowledge we gained in searching out and refining our own. We repeat for others what we've legitimately done for ourselves. Otherwise, we're just playing doctor, aren't we?

I recently got an email from a fellow blogger interested in how my company does what it does. You know what? What my company does, how and why, as well as more than a few examples of the work product, the result... they're all here, going all the way back through the archives to October of last year. Sure we have a process, but that could change tomorrow. What we have, what we share, what we recreate for others is a sensibility. Of possibility. That is constant.

Now that's what I call attitude. A bit like my own tirade, Process, Schmocess back in November.

Truth and religion

Old proverb which I first heard from Deepak Chopra.

God gave man the Truth.

The Devil saw this and said "That looks wonderful.. I shall organise this and call it... "religion"

This came to mind reading Katherine at Decent Marketing and johnmoore at Brand Autopsy today, on the idea of BzzAgents. I'm not sure about BzzAgents.. I don't want to pass judgement on something that's new and developing. And I know I feel sceptical about the tide of post-Tipping Point next big ideas of this kind.

Blogs can pay

I've just had a conversation with Ton Zijlstra, talking on Skype and seeing his face via Yahoo messenger and his webcam. He introduced me to his new Wiki. (Wiki: a website where a visitor can edit the pages). It includes a growing collection of stories of how blogging can help build business - well worth reading (and writing in!). Headings include:

The job interview
The business magnet
The business model
Hired as lecturer
The catalyst for self-transformation
Hired as researcher
Blogs can pay

I don't think of myself as a design snob but Ton has made his Wiki look a lot nicer than the plain text ones I've seen and it certainly feels more inviting as a result.

Meaning at work

Thanks to The Nub and Curt Rosengren for pointing me this report by Roffey Park: Research links the issue of 'meaning' at work, to employee motivation

According to the research, this quest for meaning can be triggered by changes in an individual's life, for example reaching a landmark birthday, the loss of a parent or loved one or through an encroaching sense of one's own mortality. It can also be prompted by changes in an organisation, if they erode the traditional values of community.

I certainly recognise this in my own life. I've been making a transition from being focussed on competition and achievement to looking for work that is intrinsically satisfying - which is what I think "meaningful" means to me. For me, this transition was kick-started by adversity, in the shape of a truly miserable experience of liitigation, and by losing my parents and hitting the inevitable signs of, whisper-it-not, middle-age.

The report continues:

"People need and want to belong to communities in which they can make meaningful contributions," said Linda Holbeche. "Work, for many people, provides a source of identity. People work such long hours that work is often their social outlet as well. However in some organisations, downsizing and restructuring changes, and greater emphasis on the 'dog-eat-dog' work mentality, have made relationships more transactional and mistrustful. This has negated feelings of community within organisations, with detrimental effects."

And here's the Ordinary Cow (the obvious thing that seems to surprise some people)

"People are turned off by work that is meaningless or unethical," said Linda Holbeche. "Without meaning at work, morale suffers, change becomes more difficult to manage and people start to look for other jobs or consider self-employment."

The research highlights that people want to work for organisations they admire, where there is a fit between their own personal values and those of the organisation. They want challenging jobs, with clear goals, through which they can experience personal growth and in which their contribution is noticed and respected. They want an open, democratic form of leadership and they also want to balance their work with other aspects of their lives

Blindingly obvious, and yet I really think it needs stating again and again.

Ordinary Cows™ and how to deal with them

There are some things in life that are blindingly obvious.. and somehow I need to be reminded of them, either by me or (more embarassingly) by life.

In future I shall refer to these phenomena as Ordinary Cows™. In a foredoomed effort to be clear (and you'll see why it's foredoomed in a minute, if you can bear to read on): an Ordinary Cow™ is something that surprises me as if it's extraordinary, but of course it shouldn't..

In fact, as I'm in a playful mood and it's sunny in Islington this morning, I hereby grant a public licence to the IP in "Ordinary Cow™" so that it may now be used to refer to a thing that surprises any person that shouldn't really. Good, that means I can cut the ™ crap now.

This morning, class, we shall consider what I shall now refer to as Ordinary Cow (1a). (I am willing to open a public registry of Ordinary Cows should you wish to join in. Please think of a suitably important registry number eg 63(ii)(a) for your entry. The intial registry shall be the "comments" field to this blog entry. Try to remember, an Ordinary Cow is something surprising that shouldn't be.)

Anyway, Ordinary Cow (1a): Stimulus ≠ Response

I went and looked up the symbol "≠" for "not equal to". The stimulus is not the response. I feel slightly ashamed writing something that's self-evident, but I must publicly work through my shame on the path of repentance.

I often run into Ordinary Cows during facilitations and trainings, especially doing Improv. People have an amazing capacity to interpret what I smugly think is a simple piece of information - a rule for an activity, for instance - in different ways. And then they presume to experience the activity in different ways. Good heavens, some people find the activity fun, whilst others find it fascinating, challenging, mysterious, tantalising, mean, pointless, boring or oppressive or foolish.

Alarmingly, this extends to things I write about and speak about. I find myself being congratulated on insights that I never intended, and railed against for stuff I never thought I said.

Dealing with an Ordinary Cow(1a)

My extensive research shows that although my responses to this seem chaotic, they do fall along a simple continuum or spectrum. Along this spectrum are two extremes.

At one end, I may rail at the stupidity of other people who fail to understand or conform to my expectations. This has many merits, allowing me a full rush of self-righteous indignation, and let's face it that's sometimes a gift, isn't it?

At the other extreme, I can delight at the wonderful diversity and creativity of my fellow humans, and laugh, preferably aloud, at my own presumptiousness and grandiosity in expecting to control the responses of free human beings to things that I do or say.

There is no right place to be on this spectrum.. I for one continue to try out the moral outrage position from time to time, or the slightly hurt one, or perhaps the one where I roll my eyes to the ceiling towards an imagined friend, as if to say "People, what can you do with them?".

On the whole, the further towards delight and laughter I take myself on this continuum, the happier I get. That's why I keep going back for more Improv. It's simply the best training I know for practising delight in the face of the unexpected.

And I continue to reserve my right to respond in all the other ways if that's what I feel like. I commend this principle to you all.

A Purple Cow is also an Ordinary Cow(1a)

Responses to Seth's provocative Free Prize Inside, including my own, are all examples of Ordinary Cow (1a).

And yes, that also means that a Purple Cow tends towards Ordinary Cow(1a)ness. Indeed the more Purple the Cow, the more susceptible it is to being an Ordinary Cow (1a). Ah, the paradoxical world of quantum physics.

Or as a good friend of mind is fond of saying:

I don't know much about the future, except (1) stuff will happen and (2) meanings will be made.

Entrepreneurs: relationships come first...

There's a good article at the Knowledge@Wharton site - "Why Global Business Needs Kinder, Gentler Entrepreneurs and Leaders". Reporting on a panel session of entrepreneurs, it suggests that collaboration and relationship building get more attention than a hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners stereotype.

Panelists emphasized less the solitary aspects of the entrepreneurial life than the social ones. Forget genius, they said; what really counts most is building a strong network to turn to for help and advice, treating people with dignity, and serving your customers well.

Several bits of this resonate with me. For instance, it challenges the Big Idea fallacy of business:

One element that seems to be overrated is the so-called big idea. “In most settings, there is either someone who will pay to get it faster, or someone who will pay to get it cheaper. You don’t have to invent Xerox or the PC in order to be an entrepreneur,” said one panelist

Don't focus on image:

And don’t bother about the stationery. “The first thing is not to print the business cards and the letterhead,” advised the panelist

And do focus on relationship:

Manners, however, may be an underrated asset. “Friends come and go,” said one panelist. “Enemies accumulate. My ability to recruit in 2004 has everything to do with how I treated my partners in 2003, in 2002 - and in 1976,” he explained. In his experience, every action with every human – how you fire them, how fair you were, how much dignity you gave them, circulates. Those people “talk and talk and talk, and they’ll bring traffic in,” he said.

And it closes with this comment on a second panel:

Be careful how you measure success, said a third panelist. When you attend retirement parties, you’ll find that the most meaningful aren’t for those who made the most money or rose to the highest rank. Instead, they are for those who had the most positive effect on the people around them, through mentorship or by example. In other words, it’s better to be a Shackleton than a Skilling.

Amen to that.

189,000 tonnes of junk

Chris Lawer revisits Tim Trafford-Taylor's estimate of the weight of junk, sorry "direct", mail sent out in a year by the UK financial services industry. It comes to 189,940 metric tonnes of paper. Chris reckons

This makes a total expenditure on Financial services DM activity of £1 billion...
It turns out that the cost of sending financial services direct mail in the UK is actually greater than the individual GDP of the world's poorest 42 countries. These include: Swaziland, Congo, Sierra Leone, Mauritania, Lesotho and Burundi ..

You can quibble with details of the maths here but it's an alarming statistic.

I recently wrote about two typical examples of the dismal stuff I got in the post from financial services companies. There's a pdf of it here. (Published in Argent, journal of the Financial Service Forum)

Over- or under-Sethed?

So I promised to come back with my review of Seth Godin's new book.

First off, I like Seth. He gave me a free copy of this book and a plug in his new ebook. He gets into conversations, says hello and engages with the world with a lot of energy. I really like that. So I'm biassed in his favour.

Which is good, because I might otherwise not have read Free Prize Inside!. I might well have been driven away by its ultra-garish packaging and its hey-wow sales copy. I realise (now) that some of this may be done with some sense of irony, though I'm not sure how much.

On top of that, I've become weary of "how-to" books. Has it struck you that the bookshops are heaving with these allegedly definitive guides to life? But if many of them were any good, how come we seem to need more and more of them?

Yet I managed to read all of FPI. In part that's because it's mercifully short: small pages, big letters. That's an excellent start. Too many business books are too long, deeply repetitive and pompous. This one isn't.

In part, it's because Seth writes well, full of anecdote, humour and enthusiasm. For instance, Seth has reinvented footnotes. In many books, these amount to little more than ploys in a status-game (see how many boring books I slogged through so that you could slog through this profoundly boring book). Seth's are more like interesting side-roads of the highway.

But perhaps the main reason I read the whole thing is that behind the noisy promotion some serious thinking has been going on. I won't recapitulate the themes here. The boys at Brand Autopsy have done a good job of that already. But I will mention one thing that really hit me between the eyes: "Henry Ford's Bargain: The Source of Our Fear".

All of a sudden,we got used to being paid based on our output. We came, over time, to expect to get paid more and more, regardless of how long the line of people eager to take our jobs was... This is the central conceit of our economy. People in productive industries get paid a lot even though they could likely be replaced by someone else working for less money. This is why we're insecure.

This is the serious message inside the noisy packaging; that organisations carry deep structural biasses against risk-taking, experimenting and vulnerablity. That, says Seth, is what you're up against if you try to innovate.

As Seth himself acknowledges, you could use his Edgecraft thinking to generate superficial gimmickry. Or you can use Edgecraft to create meaningful change - that's up to you I guess. It does provide lots of suggestions on how get ideas through bureaucratic climates, many of which struck chords with me.

I don't necessarily agree that this is "The next BIG marketing idea". The strength of FPI is not that it contains a new idea. It's rather that it provides a well-thought out, resourcefully-built list of hints, suggestions and stories about on how to make ideas happen. It does this accessibly, with humour and insight. That would make this worth paying for - a tonic for those who want to innovate in stodgy environments.

(Mind you, Seth argues that you don't always sell things on the basis of their strongest real benefit.)

At the risk (certainty?) of sounding pretentious, the book seems to fit within a world view that celebrates invidualism and stimulation. It emphasises the heroic individual, championing an idea. Nothing inherently wrong with that. But it can be a bit monochromatic... I'd like to hear more about the sort of working cultures that foster creativity so that it isn't always the lonely man's struggle against adversity.

And when I looked at the amount of cardboard used in its promotional packaging, I did wonder about the sustainablity of a highly-stimulated, caffeinated culture that so constantly strives to entertain itself by with new stuff and excessive gift wrap...

That's partly my own sense of wanting to value relationships over ideas. And then again, Seth is a guy who clearly puts loads of energy into relationships which is how he manages to generate all this material.

So thanks, Seth, for an energising and thought-provoking read. Well done for sticking your neck out and promoting yourself without shame. And maybe one day you'll do a book on the joys of meditation - it would go well with your hairdo... but I won't hold my breath!

Darknet

Thanks to Wayne at Cutting Through for pointing to Darknet: Remixing the Future of Movies, Music and Television . Author JD Lasica is walking his talk. This is a Wiki site, where he is writing his new book and inviting us to write/edit it with him. And this book explores "the idea that digital technologies are empowering people to create, reuse and reinvent media." In his intro, he says

Feel free to dive in and make all the changes you think are warranted. I've opened this up as a public wiki, rather than a private space. Feel free to link to this main page from your blog, though I'll also ask at this early stage that people not excerpt material or dissect any of the material in detail because we're not at the public discussion point yet.

That's a tough rule to follow, because what he's written already cries out to be excerpted. I've just read Chapter 1 and loved it. It ranges from a touching anecdote (of how a group of kids in Mississippi remade Raiders of the Lost Ark, on a shoestring) to insightful analsysis of how we are entering a turbulent time when the paradigm of mass-media communication smacks into our innate human desire to tinker, embellish and co-create.

I'd rate this a Must Read. Or I would if I was the sort to dish out instructions. The phenomena Lasica describes reinforce my view that marketing needs to let go of many of its assumptions about how brands are created. Interaction is not about facile web polls and phone-ins..

Time for the customers to do the communicating...

Down under in Melbourne, Tony Goodson asks, why do monopolies advertise?:

Why are Connex advertising on the TV with an advert that has all the passengers on the morning train singing the Sheena Easton song "My baby takes the morning train...", and then cuts to Sheena Easton getting on the "Morning Train" and screaming! Nice idea for an advert, just a few problems
1.The morning train looks nothing like the sardines that are packed in from 7-30am (see picture in link, it's usually worse than that).
2. All the singing passengers are perfectly seated on every available seat.
3. Wouldn't it be better to spend the money on something else like making the "Morning Train" run at 7-33 and 7-48 so we're able to get on the next few trains.
4. Who is the advert aimed at? Car drivers? The rest of us choose to travel on the "Morning Train", we have very little choice.

Wouldn't it be better to give the money to the workers, or come up with something a bit more imaginative like handing out timetables, or painting something nice on the trains and trams.

I really don't see the point of addressing us with fantasies that are so utterly out of whack with our experience. It seems rather rude to me. But clearly it's a waste of time trying to change how Connex communicates with its customers. Perhaps it's time for the customers to communicate differently with Connex.

Maybe one or two of them could get together and make a handycam documentary about what it's really like to travel with Connex and stick it up online. I can see it now, cut to shots of jaded commuters and cue the music (track 16)....

Free customers outside!

Jennifer Rice (commenting on a post by Chris Lawer) gets the bit between her teeth (well, she is from Texas)

It's time for companies to learn how to let go of the need to "own" a customer. What would happen if we tried to "own" our significant others? Or "retain" them? They'd probably walk out on principle. The key in relationships -- whether personal or business -- is to earn trust and respect and affection. Customers are not objects to be acquired; they are free entities who make choices.

Yes, yes, with a side-order of yes... and could I have another glass of the vintage Yes with that? Thanks.

Let's mind our language marketing people and try to avoid these ways of talking that seem to strip the humanity out of us in the very uttering.

Managing or Coaching?

Another thought provoking item from the excellent ecustomerserviceworld newletter. It's well worth subscribing.

Fast Guide: Coach or Manager

So, which are you? Twelve clues to help you decide…

1. Managers believe that their job is to push people or drive them; coaches believe that they are there to lift and support people.

2. Managers believe that they should talk at people by telling, directing, and lecturing; coaches believe in engaging in dialogue with people by asking, requesting, and listening.

3. Managers believe in controlling others through the decisi