We all like to trim the fat at the beginning of a New Year. We all try to consume less, get fitter and cut back on unnecessary luxuries. What about in your organisation? Think optimisation rather than reduction.

There are many challenges and looking at the year ahead there are some big decisions to make (carefully).

Return on Investment

Instead of just cutting back on marketing activities to reign in your budget before the fiscal year end, it pays to think strategically about how you are spending your campaign allocation.

Are you focusing on promotional activities or on brand building ones? Whether at the end or the beginning of a campaign, analysing return on investment is a smart strategy to ensure that your efforts are reaping the most rewards and a good way to build your learning for next time.

If short-term results are important to you tactical initiatives are a good way to reach your goals providing they consider the bigger picture. Select targeting with an offer and call to action with efficient measurement can do wonders to deliver quick ROI.

Longer-term programmes will require deeper investment in time and resources to ensure your research and planning provide the robust platform for a strong brief. This time and process is critical to ensure that sales and marketing outcomes are aligned with your forecast return.

Re-evaluating Your Competitive Advantage

Why not spend the first few months of 2011 re-evaluating your competitive advantage? You can do this by looking at your market, your customers, trends, your product, offer and key messaging making sure that you haven’t taken the easy train… making sure that you are maintaining your position in the market and keeping the revenue flowing in.

One thing is for certain, at least one of your competitors will, as a minimum, be looking to creep slowly into your point of differentiation having redefined their own competitive advantage against you. It’s never too late to make a slight change moving forward, to invest a day in a workshop to step back from your business or to try something new.

Get on the weighing scales

A helpful cleansing exercise is to take a look back and review what you said you needed to achieve and what you actually did achieve. This can be done statistically, financially, visually and even by actually doing some simple research to sense check. Are you slipping back into old habits? It’s easy to eat takeaway when it’s convenient, and there’s nothing wrong with it in moderation, as long as a quick and easy solution isn’t taking over your well-intentioned strategy or plan. Use this exercise to plan out where you want to go, and to ensure you keep doing what’s good and change what’s not so good.

Best wishes for gaining a competitive advantage in 2011.

In daily decision-making, when weighing alternatives and selecting the best options, having relevant data at hand makes the process of making a decision less variable, more secure and will lead to a more profitable outcome.

From an integrated agency perspective, when evaluating a brand or planning a campaign, it is extremely important to be able to make decisions based on data. Your customer data is important, but so are internal statistics such as sales measures and industry information. Who are your most profitable customers? Which products or services have the highest margins? How do your services or products compare with those of your competitors?

Data not only assists in decision-making, but allows the tracking of campaigns to demonstrate results. Data is also important in understanding how you compare with your competitors. Once your competitive advantage is identified, how can you benchmark yourself against your competitors without a strong grasp on the industry?

Consider the following data cycle:

Each of these steps is important in managing data. Firstly, the collection of data is critical including knowing what to collect and understanding what is important. The editing of this information is equally important, including ensuring that formatting is consistent and that information is collected in its entirety.

Secondly, the review of data is important. Understanding what you have and constantly analysing if what you have is what you need to have. If not, what changes can you make to your data collection and creation process to ensure that you are capturing what you need to?

Thirdly, managing the information is critical. The quantity of data you have, along with how important it is to you will determine how you manage the data. Also, does the software or other applications you are using allow you to extract the information you need?

The fourth step or consideration is training the software, system or human resources in the analysis and manipulation of this data. It is important that both the people using the data understand what it means and that they can either manipulate it or that the software can manipulate the data in an optimal way.

Finally, it is important to use the information. Use the information in daily and periodic decision making but also use the information to streamline processes and to baseline marketing efforts. Keeping an eye out for trends and making full use of data is an extremely valuable resource that could potentially be your competitive advantage!

As with any large city, tourism is a big business and with vast landmarks and royal palaces to see, Lord Sugar sent the Apprentice candidates out to run a London bus tour company for one day.

Stewart and Joanna were project leaders and Stewart’s team decided to offer a Cockney tour, after Stella expressed how passionate she was about Cockney tradition. With Joanna as project manager, Jamie was the champion for the Ghouls and Ghosts of London tour.

Both teams pitched to a tourist board near Trafalgar Square, to win the organisations’ support for the day. Stewart’s team were charging a steep £35 per adult, and offered the tourist board a 25% commission on tickets that they sold for the team. Chris headed out to negotiate on behalf of his team and project manager Joanna. Chris offered 20% of the profits from the entire day, not just for the tickets sold by the organisation.

While watching the episode, it appeared as though Chris had made a mistake in offering the tour promoters 20% of all profits, and that he just wouldn’t admit the mistake. In the interviews and in discussions with the team, Chris didn’t justify this decision and subsequently Joanna returned to the promoter and asked if the offer could be retracted. We are unsure of how good a decision it was to secure the promoter, but Joanna’s team had lower prices and what seemed to be a better product.

With all due respect to Lord Sugar, I don’t entirely agree with his opinion of the tour bus business. Aside from the fact that he thought Chris’s “20% of all profits” mistake was a shrewd business strategy, he also indicated that the quality of the tour that the teams ran did not matter. Lord Sugar clearly indicated that the task was primarily about sales. Yes, of course sales are critical and if the selling is poor and the tour meets audiences expectations, success isn’t guaranteed, but as old fashioned as it may sound, we believe that having a good product is paramount.

Having a good product would have increased the interest in the tour from word of mouth. Also, Jamie mentioned having received tips and there was no mention of tips for tour guide Stella on Stewart’s team. In this challenge the difference between the winning and losing team was less than £300, and without a doubt this amount could have been made up by tips alone – especially with a great product and a low ticket price.

It is sad to see Liz go, especially considering the fact that she didn’t say ridiculous things, make outlandish claims or really do anything wrong at all. Yes – she wasn’t the perfect candidate for Lord Sugar’s apprentice, but she certainly would be trustworthy and dependable… two words that do not describe Stewart. Stella escaped unharmed, mostly due to her winning record and the fact that she took Lord Sugar’s advice and went outside of her comfort area.

Lord Sugar has an interesting strategy and one that obviously works in his personal business life- one built around prices, pounds and profits. Perhaps in other instances short term aspects like maximizing daily profits should come as a second priority to a longer term more sustainable strategy.

Do you think Lord Sugar set a bad example this past Wednesday evening when he indicated that the quality of the tour was not important whatsoever? A one day success strategy, perhaps. A long-term successful strategy? Definitely not.

We all know that Facebook is an influential global company, and even if you don’t have a Facebook account, you’re probably the only person you know over the age of 15 who doesn’t.

Mashable announced last week that 25% of all web page views in the United States are views of Facebook pages, which also equates to 10% of page views worldwide.

What kind of experience has Facebook created online, and how does this attract more customers than Google? Google is the largest and most used search engine on the Internet and does receive a significant number of searches and page views but is certainly not as high as Facebook’s global 10%.

While Google provides great value to their customers, Google’s business is in connecting searchers to the information that they are looking for, in the quickest and most efficient manner possible. Although Google has many other business functions and makes its core profit from advertising revenue, Google and Facebook will soon be even closer rivals. Facebook is launching a messaging/e-mail service similar to that offered by Google through Gmail/Google Mail, an established popular free e-mail service.

Facebook has a very different business model than Google, even though their revenue streams are predominantly based on pay per click advertising.

Facebook gives value to users by providing a platform that intelligently manages and promotes user generated content, an example of the most fundamental of web 2.0 philosophies. Facebook’s business is diversifying and now includes social gaming. Over 11 million daily users log on to a social game and engage with their friends, relatives, colleagues and most importantly, click on ads and spend money on earning higher game status.

In the end, Facebook and Google have very different core business strategies. Although Google provides tools to help manage daily online business and communication, Google directs people to content that they are looking for. Facebook on the other hand does not create any content, but provides an online environment that most of the world chooses to spend time in.

While taking a mental break from the Apprentice over the weekend, I read that Hugh Hefner is re-opening London’s Playboy Club. In case the Playboy-merchandised store on Oxford Street wasn’t enough to fulfill your Playboy needs, the revival of the London establishment will be located in Mayfair and is scheduled to open in 2011.

My primary experience with the Playboy brand stems from the popular reality show “Girls Next Door”. The show first became popular in 2005 and launched the celebrity careers of Holly, Bridget and Kendra, Hef’s girlfriend’s. The reality show offered a glimpse into both the celebrity filled lives of the bunnies, Hefner himself, and also a glimpse into their curfews, schedules and professional development. Bridget for example, hosted a radio show while Holly was trained in editorial and post-production work. Now that the girls have grown up, Kendra is married with a child and now has her own reality show and Hef has moved on to new girlfriends including the Shannon twins plus blond bombshell Crystal Harris.

Although Hef and the Playboy brand doesn’t offer the same appeal it once did, it still has amassed incredible awareness, and is undoubtedly a topic of household discussion at certain dinner tables.

The opening of the London restaurant, casino, and lounge extravaganza comes at a time when the company must need to diversify. Increasing levels of free online porn, and the appeal of a busty lady no longer racks in the cash it once did. The success of the club will be heavily dependent on the celebrity intake, and we certainly know some ex-bunnies who will guaranteed red carpet places.

There were certainly be a plethora of tourists to fill the seats, but we will have to wait and see how many stars show up on opening night. The opening of the venue certainly comes at a time when people are taking fewer vacations and there will be ample unemployed curvy ladies from all parts of the world vying to dress up as a bunny.

I wonder if the event organisers will let Hugh glide across the red carpet on a mobility scooter?

Did you catch last week’s episode of The Apprentice? If you did, I would imagine that you would agree with us that it was somewhat of a joke. Neither Apollo nor Synergy performed well, no matter how experienced these professionals are.

The episode opened with the teams meeting at Fortnum and Mason, and were tasked with selling bakery goods to large clients and to individual customers around London. In addition to selling the baked goods, the teams also had to produce all of the goods that were to be sold.

One team was led by Melissa, and she was chosen as project manager due to her background in managing food distribution and food production. The second team was led by Shibby, a surgeon and business owner. As the episode progressed, Melissa’s team fumbled and were almost unable to provide prices to the large clients, while Shibby’s team were much more comfortable in the pitches but ultimately fell short on the production side. Christopher, the military expert led Melissa’s team in the bakery, ensuring that the operations were as efficient as possible.

There were a few critical aspects to this task. The first aspect was pitching and negotiating with large clients. The second aspect of this task was in managing production and ensuring that the team could produce the supply to meet the demand. The third aspect of this challenge was to sell the product around the streets of London. Melissa’s team ultimately won by a small margin, even with her poor performance in the pitches. Both teams did an acceptable job selling on the streets, both teams had strengths and weaknesses in terms of their pitches to large clients, but Melissa’s team won in the end , thanks to efficient production in the capable hands of Christopher.

If Team MTD were competing in Lord Sugar’s Apprentice, we would have been more focused on strategy. Now strategy in this instance is less about the product to sell, and more about the flow of the business. The competitive advantage of the team that ultimately won wasn’t in their image or their sales technique but was about being more efficient as a team. The winning team had far better internal communication, resulting in lower costs by actually meeting production targets. Shibby was a poor project manager, unable to produce the committed amounts and was ultimately fired.

As we expressed in last week’s Apprentice blog, hopefully the challenges will be more encompassing in the coming weeks. The tasks are variably testing different skill sets as follows:

Episode 1 – Bangers: teamwork, deciding on an appropriate product for a certain market, selling.

Episode 2 – Beach Accessory: Innovation, creativity, pitching/speaking.

Episode 3 – Bakery: Pitching/speaking, production, communication and selling.

The tasks are getting more complex, and we are looking forward to applying the MTD process to future Apprentice tasks. We’re holding our breath for the branding, integrated marketing and advertising tasks!

Welcome to our new mini-series of blogs where we look at each episode of Lord Sugar’s The Apprentice and discuss the differences between how we, the integrated marketing agency Marketing Team Direct (or MTD for short), would have tackled the challenge using our effective approach.

In case you missed the first episode of this sixth series, the new candidates meet at midnight and they embark on a seventeen-hour overnight journey to buy, make and sell three kinds of sausages. They have to purchase the ingredients from a London meat market, have to create sausages in their own sausage factory, then sell their sausages to make a maximum profit.

The first key difference between teams Synergy (the men’s team) and Apollo (the women’s team) is that Synergy is going for a 40% meat, low cost, low quality sausage while Apollo is going for a 70% meat gourmet sausage which has higher associated costs and will ultimately sell for higher prices. Appropriately, Apollo sells in upscale Leadenhall Market, while Synergy opt for lower prices at Portobello Market.

MTD’s first step in working with clients is immersion, where we understand the vision, values and culture, market dynamics, customer relationships, current positioning and propositions. Both Apprentice teams did follow a similar process for a short while, as they considered who their target audiences were in their respective markets. As both groups are only in the bangers market for one short day, many of the immersion aspects will be more applicable to late Apprentice episodes when the teams work with real, established companies.

Interestingly enough, the show did not feature any of the teams discussing their competition. What are the market stalls next to them selling? The teams do consider how their packages of bangers will look to customers, and teams do realise the value of having the sausages cooking at the time, sizzling, having an appealing smell and being able to offer potential customers a taste. Using the grill becomes especially important when a local restaurant owner would like to taste the sausages before making a bulk purchase.

Team Synergy also missed a valuable opportunity in selling to those managing the other stalls. Neither team thought of other channels or outlets in which to sell sausages other than aimlessly running to businesses and restaurants, and finally neither team identified a story that they could rally behind and communicate to customers.

If team MTD were competing on the Apprentice, we would be looking for competitive advantage, not only in relation to our nemesis team but from the competing market stalls. How could we make a sausage so much more?

Very much unlike the environment created on the television show, we would insist on taking more that seventeen hours to learn about our new client and understand their place in the market to deliver true competitive advantage that brings increased sales and profitability for much longer than one day.

Unfortunately we do not all retreat to a fancy large West End townhouse at the end of the day, but we do get great satisfaction from the work that we do. Hope you will enjoy our upcoming blog posts on the Apprentice, and follow our live Tweets on how the teams are handling the competitive advantage!

In an effort to sustain sales levels, Harley Davidson are now officially targeting women specifically. Of course they have always had loyal female followers, but they are now targeting the thirty-to-fifty something female demographic who have high levels of disposable income.

After hearing last week that the Milwaukee family home of the brand will be staying open after unions voted to accept a seven year pay freeze and move from full time to more part time and seasonal employment, Harley Davidson are being frugal and are saving money through user generated promotional content.

In contrast to one of the brand’s recent extremely edgy, masculine commercials appropriately called “The Cheater”, here is the winning video from one of Harley Davidson’s newest targeted demographic.

Harley Davidson are being extremely smart in harnessing the devotion and cult culture that the brand have already established, and getting those same customers to create content for them in their spare time. The user generated content may not have high production value, is admittedly slightly on the cheesy side and may not appeal to the wider older woman demographic. It does however belong to a collection of content that increases top of mind awareness and fuels increased customer passion for the brand as they and their troupe of supporters vote for their favorite video.

I read in a blog that the brand have started to send out rings specially designed by one of the founders’ grand daughters to new and loyal female customers, but I couldn’t find any official word on that. The cost of a ring is a small price to pay for user-generated content and the development of long term brand champions.

As I lay in bed last Monday morning listening to the radio, there was someone on BBC One talking to Chris Moyles about going camping with the Beckhams. I asked aloud “Who goes camping with the Beckhams? (I also meant, the Beckhams go camping?). I then heard someone say “It’s Gordon Ramsay” from the other room, and I replied that I didn’t recognise his voice because he’s not swearing.

I have had limited exposure to Gordon Ramsay outside of his “Kitchen Nightmares” franchise, where his favourite language of choice is profanity and where he displays an unwavering passion for food and cooking. On the radio, Ramsay was plugging his new book, as well as the new grill at the Savoy, where radio host Chris Moyles was very upset at the fact that they wouldn’t be serving chips. Ramsay also spent a very long time talking about his £110 truffle pizza at Maze.

After being hurt fairly badly in the recession, and even before the recession, he seems to be continuously beating his drum like the energiser bunny, who keeps going and going and going. He has been selling off restaurants and rights to telly programs to remain profitable.

What is he up to now, and how are these new ventures going to save him?

What is Ramsay’s competitive advantage? Well he’s not leading a food revolution like Jamie Oliver, no in fact he is trudging forward in the fine dining market. Even www.gordonramsay.com is pointed in the right direction, with the title reading “Fine Dining in London”. You don’t get more specific or clearly defined than that.

If the webpage is called “Fine Dining in London”, how do Ramsay’s new initiatives support that direction? Interestingly enough they do not in fact support that direction. The new Ramsay direction is in search of Ramsay’s best restaurant in England. The series on Channel 4 will follow Ramsay around the country as he tests restaurants nominated by the public, to ultimately crown the winner as Ramsay’s Best Restaurant.

I think the series is a lovely idea, and will get to showcase restaurants all over England. Is it a smart move for Ramsay? I still can’t wrap my head around how Ramsay is going to swear and pull horrible emotions out of the restaurant owners and workers in a best-of series. Where’s the conflict that Ramsay is best known for? Maybe this is all a part of his new image. Oh wait… there’s also a new book.

Ramsay’s Best Menus cookery book features 52 recipes from varied countries and is displayed in a cut-out style, where each course is in a section, so at any given time you can have a starter, a main course and a dessert open, all on one page. The webpage says that the recipe book allows for 140,000 different menu choices, but if you do buy the book, you’ll probably make 3 dishes from it and add it to your shelf of other Gordon Ramsay cookbooks.

I’m not even sure if Gordon Ramsay has a competitive advantage anymore. He obviously can’t compete with the Emmy winning, Ryan Seacrest backed Food Revolution, but it doesn’t seem like his new TV show and book are really anything new, anything different, or even anything remotely Ramsay.

Putting my cynical side away for the moment, I do hope that Ramsay does well and I do hope England embraces the new show…. but I don’t think it’s going to be the winning combination that he’s looking for.

Best Wishes Ramsay!

There are more dangerous and risky activities to partake in than posting a Facebook or Twitter update after you’ve had a few too many at the pub. We all understand the dangers associated with texting while driving, so how can we still enjoy our favourite pass time and stay connected while our mind is otherwise occupied on driving?

I bet the posh-sounding lady who speaks to me through my Tom Tom would sound extremely funny reading out my friends’ status updates, but that’s exactly an idea that General Motors has. An article from Advertising Age describes a potential solution very similar to that.

OnStar is a service offered by General Motors on vehicles sold in the United States, Canada and China. This service allows you to ring up an attendant or an automated system by pressing a button, depending on what kind of information you need. Primarily designed as a means of automatically alerting first responders in case of an accident, it is an upscale feature usually offered by subscription. This service will soon be upgraded, as described in “OnStar Looks to Connect Drivers With More Than Their Stolen Cars” in Advertising Age. In an effort to make the OnStar service seem less old and more hip, the company is looking to attract new audiences by modifying their core offering.

OnStar will be targeting younger audiences who would usually be tempted by practising unsafe social networking while driving, and will do all the hard and dangerous work for the driver and passengers. “The traffic on the M42 is a bloody nightmare” you say, and OnStar will automatically use it to update your status. This feature certainly brings new potential to the recent location integrations in social networking.

It sounds great in theory, and the automatic voice will also be able to read you the recent news or updates of your friends or followers. I do have some questions, which I’m sure will be answered and addressed before the service is launched in the future. For example, how will the service be able to confirm the identity of the user? Would you speak your password into the system? What’s to stop your friends from changing your status to something funny or embarrassing while you’re busy pumping petrol?

This is a very smart strategic move for OnStar, which has typically been a luxury service for those older than average or the extra-precautious with children. They will be opening up their target demographic, which will require fundamentally different marketing and communication strategies and messaging.

Although it is a new offering for OnStar and General Motors, is it a competitive advantage? OnStar has traditionally been a subscription-based service, so will they be able to convince their audience to sign up? Since this demographic already have a smart phone of some sort, what’s to stop the iPhones, Blackberries or Androids from offering the same service for free on the platforms that people already use? In fact, Facebook, Twitter and other social networking big shots could offer the service for free as a product extension, or could a social networking component to the already popular sat nav systems. All you have to do is listen to a 20 second audio ad and you could peruse updates and do your daily friending in the car.