The best brand doesn't remove the need for a good product.

If you manage to create a great brand, says D'Alessandro , CEO and president of John Hancock Financial Services Inc., the last thing to do is relax. The pressure to sell a product that protects and enhances brand reputation has only begun. The worst thing is to become arrogant and removed from your customers.

"You can have the best advertising in the world, but once you turn off a customer, he won't want to come back to you. The best thing that you can do for your brand is to execute well. Customer service is our biggest struggle -- that and making good products and answering the phone on time."

(www.fastcompany.com)

An All Too Frequently Ignored Pearl of Wisdom : Think Positive

The way you think affects the outcome of your actions.

When I was working in the beer industry, I was intrigued by our top 10
successful bar-and-hotel owning customers. The majority of them, to put it
tactfully, did not seem to be particularly sophisticated business people.
In other words, they did not seem to have any kind of business training or
acquired any qualifications.

I asked my boss how these people had become so successful. He said : "They
don't know they can't do it. You and I see the pitfalls, we know about
business and we see all the ways we can fail. These people only see how
they'll succeed."

This was a powerful message - these successful owners were talking to themselves in a much more positive way than less successful people.

Top sportsmen know that they have to talk to themselves in a positive way
to be successful. Research has proven that the success of the world's top
golfers is determined by 20 percent physical ability and 80 percent mental
ability. In you day-to-day tasks, you should be no different from sportsmen.

Try it!

Alan Fairweather, d'Oz Consultants (UK)

Corporate Brand, Architecture & Interior Design

In "Apples, Insights and Mad Inventors" Jeremy Bullmore states that the
contribution of architecture to corporate brands is widely debated but
infrequently practised. At a time when all are agreed that corporate brands
need to be as clearly differentiated one from another as repeat-purchase
consumer goods, tens of millions can be committed to buildings and interior
design without a single reference being made to the likely effect on the
ultimate customer. It is as if senior management believes that creating a
competitive reputation can safely be left to the hired hands in the
marketing department and is nothing whatsoever to do with them.

These are wasted opportunities : contacts between brand and brand user
which have to happen; but because their primary function is other than
brand communication, are thought to have no brand effect. The majority of
marketing companies do not think of them as media; do not monitor them as
media ; and therefore make no attempt to integrate them with the more
conventional media. Their customers, however - their buying public - make
no such distinction. And so substantial sums of money, which could have
reinforced brand values from unexpected directions, are at best
under-utilised and at worst counter-productive. There are many more brand
encounters of this kind - all essentially anarchaic in nature. By failing
to confirm the brand's true spirit, they challenge it; and so brand
authority is needlessly diminished.

Do You Know what Your Customers are Buying?

Always a good question to put to marketing : We all know what you make -
but are you as certain what your customers are buying?

Simple as it sounds, it's a constructively difficult question to answer.

As Theodore Levitt pointed out many years ago : people don't buy a
quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter inch hole. And for every product or
service, there's an equivalent distinction to be made - though seldom so
easily or elegantly.

Adapted from "Apples, Insights and Mad Inventors", Jeremy Bullmore

Manifesto for Marketing : Create Value

Marketing must realign itself to the priorities of business, and to create
exceptional value for both customers and shareholders. Marketers must adopt
a new role in the organization, exhibiting new behaviours and acquiring new
capabilities.

New roles :
- Customer champions
- Business innovators
- Growth drivers

Marketing has a unique opportunity to drive business, to move to the heart
of strategy formulation, to understand and engage customers more deeply, to
privide the fuel and focus for colleagues, and reposition itself as the
engine for value creation.

This would reaquire marketers to :
- Be accountable
- Act collaboratively
- Develop new capabilities

Quoted from "Marketing Genius"

Illustration : www.emergencemarketing.com

Marketing performance & Accountability

One of the most perverse attributes of boardrooms is that directors
typically spend less than 10% of their time focusing on where 90% of their
success comes from. Little time is spent on discussing where the revenues
come from, and how they could be improved, before the conversation quickly
progresses to operational performanceand cost management.

Marketing performance should be included and ideally lead the agendas of :
- Board meetings
- Quarterly business reviews, for managers and staff
- Investor relations briefings for analysts ad media.
- Annual reports available to all shareholders.

Imagine the CEO standing up at the next board meeting and marketing being
the focus of commentary, their current performance, and the investments
that are currently being made to secure and enhance future results.

This might seem as an obvious place to start in reviewing a business, yet
the vast majority will start with costs, processes and supply chains.

Why are business leaders so reluctant to focus on marketing, or at least
the customers it focusses on, and the revenue it drives? While supply
chains can be measured in all sorts of units, and the costs of them are
real and influenceable, understanding the dynamics of brands and
innovation, communication or distribution is much harder without numbers.

Marketing performance, short and long term, should be a key part of all
business reporting and, while conventional accounting may not do it
justice, there are increasingly more opportunities for directors to
articulate non-financial, forward-looking information for stakeholders to
help them make more informed judgement about the future prospects of the
business.

Marketing should ensure that the internal and external value contribution
of the following is fully articulated :
- Return on marketing investment, both short- and long-term.
- Key differentiating initiatives, e.g. Time-to-market, store interior.
- Strategic initiatives, e.g. New market entry, new innovations.
- Intangible assets such as brands and customer relations.

Marketing reporting should therefore be both quantified data and
qualitative statements. Ideally a balanced scorecard of metrics could be
used to drive marketing decision-making and performance measurement. In
this way activities that have most impact on business performance can be
focused on and reported.

As the source of future cashflow - marketing - struggles to articulate
itself to non-marketing audiences caused by the language it wraps itself
into, thereby creating resistance from financial and operational people.
Marketing needs to articulate its performance in a simpler language and go
back to where we started : boardroom directors spend less than 10% of their
time talking about customers and the revenue that comes from them.

Quoted from : "Marketing Genius" by Peter Fisk

Juicing the Orange

When developing a campaign
- Always start from scratch
- Demand a ruthless definition of the business problem.
- Discover a proprietory emotion
- Focus on the size ofthe idea not the size of the budget.
- Seek strategic risk.
- collaborate or perish.
- Listen hard to your customers (Listen again)

(juicingtheorange.com)