Following last night’s Fellows Dinner with Nicola Horlick, CEO, Bramdean Asset Management our chief executive shares his first thoughts on how marketing can represent itself better to the City.
1. We need to distinguish between the views and attitudes of FD’s generally and “The City”. FD’s may often be responding to what they see as the short term demands of the City, but some people in the City do get the role of marketing and brands, and value it. Martin Deboo at Investec, whose job is to follow the publicly quoted top consumer companies like Unilever and Diageo, went so far as to say that the City is conducting an “irrational love-in with marketing”… Martin’s view may be a bit rosy because of the companies he studies, but I do know that Diageo are particularly good (and unusual) in both measuring and communicating the value and health of their of their brands both internally and to the City. They are a particularly good company for us to follow and hold up as an example of best practice to the rest of the City.
Taking time out of our Question Time Debate last week, Paul Eaves, Deputy Director Head of Behavioural Evidence at HMRC tells us what book is currently on his bedside table.
Last night the Seligman Theatre within The Royal College of Physicians, London, played host to an enthralling Question Time Debate where Google’s director of external relations for Europe, Peter Barron, played the role of David Dimbleby and was joined by an illustrious panel.
The line up included Harriet Lamb of the Fairtrade Foundation, Simon Gulliford, Lord Tim Bell and our very own chief executive Hugh Burkitt. Members of The Marketing Society listened intently, and tested the panel on topics including the London riots, The Big Society and the importance of digital communities. Read the rest of this entry »
How do you feel about your name on LinkedIn being worth $100?
That’s its current value on the New York Stock Exchange, according to last Friday’s FT. LinkedIn shares are trading at $94 a share, making the whole company worth nearly $9 billion. Turnover last year was a rather more modest $243m – so buyers of the shares are valuing the company at about 37 times sales (no, I didn’t say anything about profit), and each user is worth $100.
I find it very hard to believe that I am worth $100. I am no longer on the list of fast track marketing professionals that advertisers might wish to reach. I am not really a LinkedIn “user” at all, but rather a passive participator in LinkedIn, because a number of friends and acquaintances have asked me to be part of their network, and I have wearily agreed because it is so easy to click on the “accept” button and then one can delete another email. And in truth we have found it easier to have a Marketing Society LinkedIn group than to start a group of our own.
Notes from the CEO, by The Marketing Society’s Hugh Burkitt
The sight of John Lewis staff jumping into the air on hearing that they are to receive a bonus of 18% is a delightful good news story. But it’s not only the staff that should be jumping into the air. Every member of The Marketing Society should also jump – or at least raise some part of their anatomy – an eyebrow will do – to celebrate this good news story about marketing.
Notes from the CEO by The Marketing Society’s Hugh Burkitt
To a posh Advertising Association party at Unilever House last week. There an engaging young man called Ed Vaizey, Minister of Communication, Culture and the Creative Industries, told us that this government thinks that advertising is absolutely marvellous so long as you don’t spend any money on it.
This has a familiar ring. We will build expensive aircraft carriers, but we can’t afford any jets to put on them. (Incidentally has it occurred to anyone else that you could get a lot of deck chairs on an empty aircraft carrier, and noticing that in Green Park serious money is paid for sitting on government deck chairs, why don’t we anchor the carriers off Southend and solve the deficit in no time?)
Ed made a charming speech in which he made all sorts of flattering comments about the size, importance and quality of the UK advertising industry, but then made it clear that this government are complete Philistines when it comes to understanding what advertising can actually do.
Like many misguided company CEO’s before them, they think that they can simply save the money and the net result of not advertising is all pure profit to the bottom line.
A strange thing happened to me last night for the first time in my life. I was asked to remove my tie. Not by an attractive lady, nor by a man from the St John’s Ambulance wishing to massage my heart, but by the chap on reception at an achingly trendy club on the edge of the City of London – Shoreditch House.
The experience was particularly odd because I don’t normally wear a tie during working hours, but had just come from a lunch at the RAC Club where, of course, ties are de rigueur.
The significance of being asked to remove my tie, was heightened because I was in Shoreditch House to listen to that distinguished marketing thinker, Mark Earls of Herdmeister fame, speaking at a Marketing Society digital dinner about connectedness and our compulsive habit of copying each other.
Mark observes that modern fads – like SuBo – happen with frightening speed, because we copy other people’s tastes. Mark also points out that digital communications, can lead to the fragmenting of our society into smaller groups.
But, I note that whatever tribe we belong to, we continue to find the visual signals we send to each other deeply and primitively important.
When groups of people are gathered together, fashions may be different between one age group and another and between one side of London and another, but the desire to conform to the norms of the group is strong, and the group itself clearly feels more comfortable if outsiders do not signal their strangeness.
I know that I’m a difficult customer, and I know that I don’t always give my own customers the service they deserve, but my experience in the last week of Avis, the car hire company, has been a sad reminder that advertising promises are not always delivered.
I am of the generation that remembers the famous ‘We’re number two, so we try harder’ campaign produced by DDB in the 1960s when Avis’s Chief Executive was a brilliant leader called Robert Townsend who wrote one of the best books on management ever, called ‘Up the Organisation’.
Renting a car from Avis at Cork Airport last week, I noted that they still have a ‘We try harder’ badge attached to their logo, but at the end of my renting experience I am left thinking that if Avis are trying harder to do anything at the moment, it is to make more money rather than serve their customers.
If you are still with me gentle reader, my gripe is as follows.
A helpful sign on the Avis desk in Cork Airport had told me when I rented the car, ‘Drop your key back here’.
Thinking to myself, “Ah! That’s a good simple system, I’ll do that,” two days later I returned the excellent Ford Focus which I had hired at the agreed time, parked it in the agreed place, having filled it up with the agreed diesel fuel………but unfortunately forgot to drop the key into the box and flew back with it to London.
The next day I called Avis and explained my plight. The bottom line was that they said they only had one spare key and couldn’t hire that car out again to anyone until I returned my car key. By now it was Friday morning and a courier company very helpfully offered to return the key for £300. The Royal Mail, rather more helpfully, offered to return it and track it for £6.20. Read the rest of this entry »
Business leaders are much in the news at the moment – mostly for the wrong reasons. Shareholders think they are paid too much. Their workers are striking because they think they are paid too little. The entire population of the United States hates them personally for being responsible for one of the greatest environmental disasters ever. It all makes being a football manager in the World Cup seem relatively straightforward.
Watching Tony Hayward being made to squirm publicly in front of a US Congressional hearing at least demonstrates why top CEO’s deserve to be highly paid. Most of us would pay quite a lot of money not to become the US people’s public enemy number one.
Writing in the Telegraph Mark Borkowski (a “PR Expert”) pronounced that Tony Hayward of BP had “the communication skills of a tax inspector; dryand arrogant. It’s incredible that one of the most important corporate jobs in the world has been entrusted to him.” Hmm, well it may be incredible if you are PR man, but having watched a number of our great business leaders talk over the last seven years, I am tempted to say that there may well be an inverse relationship between speaking skills and success. The more boring you are, the more likely you are to be relentlessly successful in a big organisation. Being funny may be a real mistake. Who can forget the cost of Gerald Ratner’s little joke at an IOD Conference? It destroyed his brand and his business overnight.
But the media need to have heroes and villains to help personalise companies that are often hard to understand and relate to from outside. The result is that CEO’s probably get both blamed too much and praised too much in the media for what they do. A recent Harvard Business Review report which objectively reviewed the financial performance of 2000 CEO’s over their entire length of time in office found there was very little correlation between visibility and success. From a shareholders point of view it may well be that the quieter they are the better.
But there are times when all leaders need to lead from the front and stand up and look and sound like leaders. And we have assembled a brilliant list of inspirational leaders for you to draw strength from on November 18 at our Annual Conference. Read the rest of this entry »
I was impressed that those elderly cool cats, Stephen Fry and David Hockney, were singing its praises in my free Evening Standard last night. And earlier this week when I called on the delightful Camilla Harrison at the uber-cool offices of M&C Saatchi there was an iPad left on the coffee table in reception for visitors to play with. (Camilla incidentally is in part delightful because she is doing a grand job on the publicity material for this year’s Annual Conference & Dinner at a very competitive rate.)
Picking up the iPad for the first time, I was able in seconds to play the John Lewis commercial from You Tube (which is nothing to do with M&C Saatchi but, is in fact from those young upstarts at Adam and Eve).
I wanted to see the commercial because so many people have been mentioning it for some time now and I kept forgetting to check it out. In terms of ease of access and clarity via the iPad it was most impressive. The commercial itself would not win any prizes for originality, but it is pretty daring for John Lewis mainly because it doesn’t show a single store, a single piece of merchandise or a single smiling partner. Its very on brand for John Lewis - though it has been pointed out already that the oldest its “seven ages of woman” hero gets is around 65. So we never get to the care home stage – or as the bard had it: “second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
But I digress. I was seriously impressed by the iPad and I’m sure that it is one more step on the road to the replacement of traditional print media. Although here I have to correct myself because Professor John Naughton taught me a couple of years ago at our Annual Lecture that old media never die, they just learn to adapt to the new ones. He cautioned us against media ‘endism’.
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Top presentation on how to win in 5 years by @brucedaisley http://t.co/omZXhrPq Would you share more at our digital lunch at the Gherkin?February 22, 2012 6:50
The fashion industry directly puts £21bn into the UK economy. #LFW http://t.co/J8bfq5jaFebruary 22, 2012 4:57
#BookClub: Marketing Planning by Malcolm MacDonald & Hugh Wilson reviewed by Karen Davies from Triniti Marketing http://t.co/QLu06ZGMFebruary 22, 2012 4:54
Following last night’s Fellows Dinner with Nicola Horlick, CEO, Bramdean Asset Management our chief executive shares his first thoughts on how marketing can represent itself better to the City.
Last night the Seligman Theatre within The Royal College of Physicians, London, played host to an enthralling 
