As a new business developer I am constantly chasing and generating leads. And when you boil it right down, that’s the focus of most of the clients we talk to in the business to business world. Leads are everything.

We work on lead generation all the time, targeting major accounts with targeted campaigns. More and more the way we approach lead generation for our clients and the way I approach our clients resembles each other – because increasingly, targeted and bespoke approaches are the ones that are working best, and most importantly bringing in the best ROI for our clients.

When you approach a prospect, just as with a lead generation campaign, there’s three key words to bear in mind: research, research, research! Building a complete picture and background is essential if you’re going to create a profile and use that to create the most effective first contact. With lead gen campaigns and with approaches to prospects, after all, you only have one chance to make a first impression. The key is to use that research to create something meaningful, powerful and relevant to the contact personally.

In prospect campaigns of course we look to a one-off hit that attracts attention and creates noise. It doesn’t matter what that approach is. It could be a guerrilla tactic that disrupts and grabs attention, a simple DM or a one-paragraph email with a single point that’s honed and crafted to perfection. The point is that it needs to mirror as precisely as possible the needs of the target, their mood and their world. The same rules again apply to campaigns for clients. You don’t go for high-end DM approaches simply to do them; you do what has the best effect.

The point is to make the best use of the resources you have. You don’t need huge budgets (though they’re nice to have!) – and in times of reduced expenditure, sometimes it’s more inventive to think of simple approaches to potential leads. For example, we’ve just had fantastic reaction to a new business approach to a major children’s retailer, simply by sending a key contact (research, research, research!) a letter from my infant son outlining issues his mummy found in their store. This was simple, cheap, incredibly fast – and showed depth of understanding in a way the contact hadn’t seen before. It was funny as well – and humour shouldn’t be underestimated as a tool in the box (though like a lot of other tools, you only use them when you need them).

We create our lead gen campaigns for our clients with the same invention, economy and flexibility. We research. We build the perfect approach that’s creative from every angle. Everything feels personal, feels right – and feels in line with what they need.
And that’s when people pick up the phone or follow a link. When they know they’re hearing from someone who understands them. It turns a campaign into a personal communication – and that leads to success.

Brands and branding are responsible for many of the world’s problems today.
Capitalism and globalisation in the form of homogenised corporate monsters rule ok. They get inside our minds and make us do things that, left to our own devices, we would avoid like the plague. Surely brands are therefore clearly evil and almost Orwellian in their ability to change our behaviour to suit their own ends, know our thoughts and actions and brainwash entire social and cultural groups.
But hang on a minute. This view, held high by the anti globalisation, anti capitalism lobby misses one or two rather important points.
Don’t all of us, ‘brainwashed’ and easily manipulated consumers in the free world make our choices BECAUSE WE WANT TO? Isn’t it us who create brands and have the power of life and death over them? No one forces us to do what they want and no one penalises us when we don’t. We choose to pay premium prices for a Nike or Lacoste branded T-shirt but probably couldn’t be paid to wear an HSBC bank one.
We make purchasing choices about almost everything from food to clothes to batteries and insurance and it is brand that allows us to have choice – without it, how would we know what our choices were? How could we differentiate between products? How could we express a preference? How would we know whom to trust? Even the ‘No Brand’ brand has become an influential and recognized…. well…brand.
Brand is now so influential that it is used to promote choices that go well beyond purchasing decisions. Some support football clubs because of associations of style, glamour and success rather than a local affinity or allegiance. We donate to charities because of the worthiness of their cause but also because of our levels of trust in them based on our perception of their brands. The Red Cross is still one of the worlds most recognized and respected brands. Many people in democratic countries base their voting decisions on the brands of politicians and political parties rather than on a good understanding of policies.
Everything from people to countries are described as brands and as individuals we make choices based on how we believe others will perceive our unique brand as a result of our actions and decisions. The word itself is used (and misused) by almost everyone in the free market world
These behaviours are not new, however the positioning of them as brand building activity is. The business of deliberate, planned development in order to change and influence peoples views has, over the last 30 years, become one of the most important and considered aspects of business strategy.
Business owners, leaders and managers, regardless of their organisations size, scope and markets have become the primary custodians of their brands. There is a recognition that although successful brand positioning still impacts heavily on sales and marketing activity, all parts of a business can benefit and improve as a result of carefully constructed brand change and direction. More importantly, brand building is now understood to benefit the smallest SME as much as the largest multi national.
So is brand evil? Definitely not, so long as brand development is carefully and responsibly conducted and implemented and if it creates real change within an organisation and in the beliefs and minds of the people who are exposed to it. If organisations are able to differentiate themselves from their competition in a genuine and believable way and if consumers, donators and information seekers are able to make real choices or gain real benefit, then everyone wins. The trick is to embark on brand activity in the right way and for the right reasons.

It’s one of the big clichés – certainly in B2B marketing. We toss it out there without really thinking about it. Adding value, added value, or even the dreaded ‘that’s a real value add’ are everywhere.

Right now, however, value has never been more important. Leaving aside the different definitions of value, the essence is that it means the ‘effect it has on the life and work of whoever’s receiving your product or service’. In current economic climates, where price is no differentiator at all, the temptation is to simply enter into price wars without thinking; this is the watchout of course for the retail sector, which essentially has to prove its model as a whole in 2012 (http://www.just-style.com/the-just-style-blog/uk-retail-sector-under-pressure_id2039.aspx).

If you can’t differentiate on cost without cutting your feet from under you, you have to look at value – in the broadest sense of taking care of and ensuring a higher quality of experience for your end users and of course the consumer. Services must be available, apparent, simple and obvious. Everything must come together through every platform. Products and (for retailers) stores must be easy to use; that means welcoming, safe, and above all full of knowledge, insight and helpfulness.

All of which, combined with the need to cut costs, plays to the strength of businesses that cover multiple areas of their respective spectrums simultaneously. So supermarkets, who are increasing rather than divesting their vertical integration activities, of course do very nicely while niche players or those who have boxed themselves in somehow tend to implode. Which is why we haven’t seen much from Wax Lyrical lately, and why if you look at the Centre for Retail Research’s ‘Who’s Gone Bust’ index, it’s the specialists that suffer: http://www.retailresearch.org/whosegonebust.php. There aren’t many ‘completists’ on this sad list.

But it’s also the businesses, one suspects, who didn’t know the real meaning of value. In the wider world, it’s akin to ‘trust’ and more and more they’re used as one thing: http://randomactsofleadership.com/2011/11/07/the-value-of-trust/. It’s increasingly vital as business and consumer worlds worry more and more about what they’re getting and how much care is being given to them.

Businesses that truly care for their end users, and businesses that can show they do this at as many ‘touchpoints’ (to use another cliché, sorry) as possible, are therefore the ones who can adapt best in today’s environment. So long as they do it well and demonstrate the care that is essential if you are to bring in new customers, re-educate customers who may have left you, and keep the ones you have – with customer retention increasingly the focus: http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/customer-retention-top-marketing-priority-17975/.

So…take a look at what you do. Are you doing as much as you could for your customers? Are you making it as easy as possible for them to use what you provide? And are you missing opportunities to tie things together? If you aren’t, you’re not providing real value in the best way possible – and you will be overtaken – no matter what your legacy, and no matter what you do to your prices. Because you don’t want to be on this list either: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/22/brands-disappear-dyingus-2012_n_881911.html#s296069&title=10_Nokia.

2012 resolution: don’t betray your brand; tell the truth, stick to it and don’t try to ‘manage’ your consumers!

So 2012’s just around the corner. Pictures of the year are de rigeur. Two lists of pictures here. Some are worth a thousand words. Others aren’t. They’re here only partly for their worth as pics; mostly for what they tell us about truth and lies.

The first purports to be a list of images free of the taint of photoshop – here www.pxleyes.com/blog/2011/12/these-50-photos-will-blow-you-away/. But as an audience we’re inured to picture manipulation, so we question the pictures on this list from the start. They look too perfect. They look potentially manipulated. The setup, and the relationship we have with the pictures, is tarnished.

The second list, here, http://blogs.reuters.com/fullfocus/2011/11/21/best-photos-of-the-year-2011/, is different. Simply images from our frequently awful 2011. And our relationship with these images is immediately and fundamentally different. They have authority. They are genuinely moving. Because they are true.

And, in a 2012 where we’re looking at a lot of economic stress and business crises are inevitable, telling the truth and sticking to it in a crisis is going to be vital.

Frequently, businesses underestimate the importance of truth to brand perception and overestimate how they can manage their way out of problems. Marketing, PR, campaigning etc can achieve a huge amount to shift, guide and direct perception. But it can’t change things if a business breaks the covenant they’ve made with their consumers and the public. No matter how much they try to spin. Sometimes things are beyond spin, a point made clear here http://colleensharen.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/trust-betrayal-and-brand-positioning/.

Businesses that have broken that covenant in recent times are obvious. They’re all typified not only by a catastrophic event, but by mealy-mouthed attempts to weasel away from the truth.

BP and News International, amongst others, have failed to understand that marketing, PR etc can’t stop us making up our minds. It’s not that these brands will fall. But their relationship with us will never be the same again. Because these businesses imagined they could ‘campaign’ their way out of a problem, rather than truly opening up, admitting colossal error, and engaging in reconciliation.

There are other stories of brand betrayal out there. In the runup to Christmas, we all get a bit too focused on gratification, and businesses that can’t fulfill are always likely to take a kicking http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/1108574/.

There’s plenty of meat at www.mallenbaker.net too – some excellent analysis of how brands that play fast and loose with their reputation and try to gloss over major problems face worse ones down the road. And take a look at how Moleskine managed to annoy most of its loyal base here http://appliedpoetics.com/2011/10/25/betrayed-by-the-brand-how-moleskine-made-enemies-of-the-people-who-loved-it-most/. And who could forget the Netflix debacle? http://thechrisvossshow.com/netflix-failures-and-lessons-from-betrayal-of-brand-loyalty/

Of course, there’s a distinctly different point here. There’s a big difference between companies that annoy their fans (who, through new social channels, have new ways to gripe) and businesses that truly blunder in the wider world and break a much deeper moral (and legal, or even global) promise.

But the warning is still there – truth and telling it, whatever the pain, is enormously important. Everyone, after all, still talks about the Tylenol recall of 1982 – and how it the reaction enabled Johnson & Johnson to stay on top – as seen here http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/fall02/susi/tylenol.htm. It’s given J&J a reputation for truth, and the strength that comes with that, ever since (though they’ve done their best to undermine themselves with more and more product recalls…). Again, a lot of great work has been done on www.mallenbaker.net to look at good, as well as bad, crisis management.

Telling the truth is increasingly important in the very ‘interesting’ times we’re facing. Especially with the tools and awareness consumers can access and which mean that dirty laundry will always, always be found. The effect is to make us both extremely cynical and on the other hand, desperate for truth. Because truth is something we’re desperate for. In business, marketing, and everywhere else. Because 2012 is looking like a year where a lot of chaos is going to play out.

In the debate over truth, we keep talking in the strange, unreal business-speak way about new norms, changed landscapes and ‘constant dynamic change’. And we do that because we want to be able to codify the chaos we’re in. Read order into it. But maybe we just need to think about, tell, and embody the truth. That doesn’t mean we expect the chief executives of businesses to us a lie detector all the time (though not a bad notion). But we want to believe.

In 2012, we can expect belief to be of increasing importance to everyone; in the wider world, in economies, and in business. As a species, we need to believe. So businesses that find a way of expressing simple truths will become even more important. And those that break their covenant with us will be more likely to pay the price.

So really, there’s only one New Year’s Resolution for brands who want to thrive. Worry about cost, productivity and agility as much as you like. But tell the truth, not just in what you say, but through what you do – and if you screw up, tell the truth about that as well. It might just what makes you different, and what lets you survive.

Came across this list.
http://www.zenwebsolutions.com/blog/2011/best-and-worst-marketing-tactics-for-2011-and-beyond-1368
It’s interesting that on this list of good and bad marketing ideas, there’s significant crossover. Of course, it underlines that the results you achieve vary – so you can’t say that direct mail or email don’t work (as lots of people have tried, and failed, to prove either way). It all depends on your approach.
But what it really says is that only one thing matters, ever.
And that’s the idea.
We’re more awash in buzzwords, technology and advice about best practice than ever.
The key is to get above the noise. Look at what’s REAL. Don’t worry about the fact that a competitor’s not doing email at the moment. Or that everyone’s banging on about social media.
The right question – the only question – is what fits? What works with your business, your brand and your strategy?
Don’t be seduced by a social strategy if you’re not going to maintain it or it doesn’t fit your brand.
Don’t worry about doing an email campaign in the most basic, simple way if it’s what’s going to work.

So, I’m not sure that this list, and others like it, do anything but scare something quite obvious to the surface…
Lists don’t matter.
Fashion doesn’t matter.
Mechanics are just stuff.
Ideas.
They count.
Everything else is meaningless.

Running a tone of voice session soon. Because like many in our world I am obsessive, it’s made me dive into one of those discussions (mostly internal) about ‘what is marketing for’? Admittedly, that’s just like when a small child keeps asking why the sun works: after enough recursions, we try to ally marketing to curing world hunger or defeating gravity. All you need is one too-enthused conversation with the mirror about how you’re a ‘tone of voice tiger’ and you think you’re changing everything. However, voice is critical to the way we do our jobs and it’s worthwhile looking at how changing your tone changes your marketing potential.

For many in the corporate world, marketing doesn’t mean attracting interest or pulling attention closer to what we do. It means ensuring materials are checked off and out the door as soon as they can be put together. The original idea is the same – to ensure we have ways of talking about the things we do – but the system has lost its life. The measurements are nothing to do with how effective something is – because that effect is only felt far, far away from the people and systems that produce the materials. Instead, the measurement is what have we produced.
At least, that’s how it can feel to the people stuck in a large corporate structure: they can feel utterly divorced from what’s really happening. They haven’t got any real tools to change anything. And they can’t talk clearly about it anyway; they’ve been strangled by a massive root-growth of corporate speak, business clichés and technobabble. Marketers hate this, because most of them didn’t get into their jobs to chuck stuff out there: they like getting close to ideas and understanding them; really helping people.

But instead of marketing, they’re in a factory. A system that, for the marketing team living in it day-to-day, is dead: and they REALLY hate that – they want to work with sales teams, put brilliant plans they all have to open up opportunities to work. NOW.

So when a major corporate really makes a serious decision to change the way it talks and looks, it’s genuinely exciting. A complete rebrand is a chance to clear house, start putting everything in order and get something done.

BUT!…a lot of the time, when companies ‘rebrand’ they basically mean ‘redesign’. And that’s fab. You get the designs through and go ‘hey…they’re really serious about this. Great!’ But often the words aren’t treated the same way. Brand agencies might rethink words, but mostly as typography. The actual language and tone gets left behind and, in a 100-page brand manual, left to page 98.

That can be too little, too late – because the marketers in any major company are producing immense amounts of material, with the same speed and budget constraints that they had before. There’s an argument that you can’t be prescriptive with an emerging and evolving brand – just create ‘seed material’ to grow the brand language and let it breathe. Which is true and all very nice. But the marketers still need to cope with seemingly infinite content owners, all of whom have very different and complex ways to describe extremely complex solutions. They have to have the way to treat words, not just pictures and typography, to be able to channel those resources – and meet the demands of content without losing control of that brand through undirected, disconnected language.

Creating a coherent, absolutely certain tone of voice does not have to take hundreds of pages of acceptable terms, keywords or ways of saying X amazing business benefit in Y material. In fact, that’s probably going to kill it stone dead.

But it is going to take more than a couple of paragraphs about writing more colloquially or simply tagged on to the end of a typography guide the size and weight of a bison. Marketers need concrete advice, real ‘attitude’ about how their tone of voice can be used. That means working with them, ‘workshopping’ (to use a horrible business word) with them: because that’s how they feel confident enough to use, own and defend that tone against legions of materials and business owners.

When you’re running this sort of workshop (yuck), don’t act like you’re Martin Luther King, but do interact with a bit of preacher-like call and response. Get them to attack the lead-lined, impenetrable materials most businesses use as copy. Open up old brochures and redo them. Find absurd clichés and make them write copy with them in, just to get the poison out and make them sensitive to nonsense. Make them write like they mean it, and forget what the content owners say, and not worry themselves to death about the rules of grammar. After all, their business is expert, insightful and poised – isn’t it? It’s a leader – isn’t it? How many business giants made their name through using the word ‘synergise’ ten times in one sentence? How many times have you heard Steve Jobs say he was ‘across’ anything?

So get in with them, mix it up and show them how that simple voice guidelines can be used practically to give them infinite ways of using words. Instead of one tone of voice tiger, talking to a lonely mirror, you’ll have a roomful talking to each other – and when they get back to the office, to everyone else. After all, if you teach a man to fish you feed his entire family; if you teach a marketing team to talk with clarity, sense and purpose, you might have a rebrand that matches powerful pictures with precise, smart words.

That way a rebrand can be complete, be compelling, and rejuvenate the business.

Can we do it? Yes, we can!

The phrase “the New Normal” gets used a lot. It just serves to remind us (a) that business has changed at a fundamental level, that the world is more complex, etc. and (b) that this is a new set of rules and (c) that people are happy with cliché.

But even if we leave aside natural disasters, recent events have revealed that a new set of rules is exactly what we don’t have. There are no real playbooks, currently, to interrelate the changes in the way we live, the changes in the conditions we live under, and the changes in the tools we use to live in and understand the world. We’re not looking at a narrative we understand any more.

As the riots last week demonstrated, all it takes is one factor of life stretched and twisted to warp others out of shape. And globally, locally, and in every area of life, we are being assailed by multiple changes to the fundamentals. This isn’t the New Normal. And we aren’t just looking at the Squeezed Middle. This is the Squeezed Normal: where all the rules are permanently changing and the forces that govern us are mutating at every level. And unlike a “New Normal” you can’t really predict when or whether it’s going to snap back to something you understand.

So, what can we do to help the businesses we are here to help to forge their way through a world of permanent chaos? The only way, really, is to make a stab at emphasizing what the real ‘permanent’ changes will be.

Technology isn’t a permanent change. Or rather, it is, but it’s going to mark you out as different or help you survive. It’s a weapon you need and it enables everything you do – but the same’s true of the other guy. The same goes for social strategies, mobile. They’re all great. We need them. They’re operationally critical. But they aren’t fundamental. The big lessons are twofold, and they apply to us and to every client we have:

(1) Not every challenge is balanced by opportunity precisely. In every conceivable piece of marketing collateral or web bumph I’ve read on the subject the tired old saw is “The challenge is great, but the opportunity is greater”. This is not true. There are opportunities, of course. But we live in a world that’s a closed system – and potential opportunities are, in general, roughly the same as they always are. Let’s fight this idiotic cliché and look at what’s real: you want to stay competitive, and it’s likely that you will be (if you do everything right) just a bit more successful than others – not a game changer. And you know what? That’s OK. Most businesses do not change the world or the market or the industry. Constantly telling clients or customers that opportunities are infinite, after a while, is promising the earth and you can’t deliver.
(2) The world of the future is a world of individuals. Every technological change and every behavior change is showing us that if businesses want to survive (let alone ‘seize the opportunity’) they have to act more like people. That means having a real personality, not simply a brand. It means treating customers as people of equal importance to you. And it means having real values that you can defend – and that you believe in. Because it’s easier and easier for you to be found out if you don’t. The future belongs to businesses that treat customers as citizens, not just customers.

OK, essentially that boils down to just one rule that’s best expressed as another dated cliche. In the current state, where all else is in flux and everything from global markets to business strategy to individual behaviour in the street is chaos, businesses will do best if they keep it real. It keeps you ahead of the technology, keeps you plugged into your customers, and ensures that you are always the moral lead. And morality – or at least good behaviour and manners – in a world where normality is being squeezed out of shape, could just be the differentiator you want.

Phone hacking might have been pushed off the radar a little last week, with events that were more immediate and serious. But as the (carefully timed) revelations about Sara Payne’s phone prove, it’s not going away.

Everyone at News Corp is no doubt using the time to grab purchase on the rocks and look for some spin to control. Only James Murdoch, just confirmed as BSkyB’s head again, seems to be making any headway. It’s been a media frenzy of blame, shame, and power games – and one in which as Alex Batchelor wrote a few weeks ago, none of us are thinking clearly. Right now, it wouldn’t matter if Mulcare, Brooks and the Murdochs saved a kitten from a house fire, we’d chuck them back into the blaze.

It’s been an unpleasant frenzy, with the rest of the media (many of whom don’t exactly have the cleanest of hands) slashing away at News International in a campaign that’s moved from justifiable outrage to a witch hunt. However, it does demonstrate neatly how even the best communicators can forget the importance of facts, truth, and honesty.

In B2B marketing, we’re further from the light than the above the line types currently (and deservedly) in the dock. So drawing a direct parallel is virtually impossible: we generally aren’t saying things that directly affect what Gordon Brown called, with calamitous silliness, “the ordinary people”. But we’re still professional communicators, whose business is all about playing with ideas, facts and arguments. We select facts. We edit, whether we like it or not, the truth. It’s surprisingly easy for marketers to face a nasty little choice: tell the truth, or sell the proposition.

Client propositions are full of inconvenient facts marketers would like to shave off and forget. Too-complex business ideas, contradictory expert opinion, evidence that (when looked at closely) doesn’t help the business (but you have to use it anyway), and of course the ‘me too’ offers. So maybe…just leave out that bit of the truth. Can’t hurt.

But like bad plastic surgery, the more marketers slice off wafer-thin elements of fact, the more risk there is of strategy and campaigns falling apart. Campaigns undermined by ‘bad’ facts can easily prevent prospect engagement or erode consumer trust. Marketers, therefore, owe it to clients to keep the facts right at the front of their minds, rather than edit them to keep the client happy in the short term.

Which is great for us. It means we can value and express truth more than ever. Defend the facts and point out where they might be weak. Demonstrate where a client’s proposition doesn’t match up with their idea of themselves. Show where client thinking is flawed and doesn’t make sense – and help them express something that does. Even if they ignore us, we’re doing our job. Telling the truth lets us address the real issues, come up with real answers and be more creative.

It would have been easier, once the hacking had been found out, just to come clean – properly – about everything, however bad. They might even have avoided arrests, pies, paper closures and the market turning on the Murdochs as a whole. It’s a good lesson: In an economy made of trust, telling the truth will set your marketing apart, and like it did for Dominos, set you free.

As for the hackers? Witch hunt aside, they’ve given hacking a bad name – so it’s rather fun that they’ve been properly hacked themselves.

I read a great newspaper article, in the Sunday Times business section I think, about Lagships – businesses that deliberately sit back and watch the mistakes that others make before defining and committing to a new strategy. At the time, despite years of being an advocate for change and fresh thinking I thought there was some strategic merit in this approach for some businesses.

I read the article only 2 years ago and am amazed and excited about how much the world has changed in this time.

In today’s world there is great opportunity but increasingly only for businesses that adopt an attitude and culture of new thinking, responsive planning and, most importantly, decisive action and communication. There is no time now for Lagships. There is barely enough time to be dynamic.

I text, you text, we all text. Although most of my communication happens through Facebook and Twitter, I don’t foresee the day when I won’t text. Texting, no matter how primitive, instills a greater sense of importance than an e-mail, but in a way that isn’t as intrusive as a phone call. You don’t need to have a smart phone to participate equally in social texting, and when the recipient looks at his or her device, the awaiting text is the first thing that they see (see the hierarchy of digital distractions, but that’s for another blog).

More than once I have been rudely awoken at 7am on a Saturday morning by Orange to remind me about something that I certainly don’t care at all about. We all have received unwanted text messages the same elements of text that make it so attractive have the potential to make it as equally annoying. That sense of casualness mixed with a sense of urgency is addictive and overpowering.

GroupMe (not to be confused with GroupOn) are developing a new form of texting, in a 1998 chatroom-esque kind of way. It allows group conversation in exactly that, one conversation on your mobile.

It sounds like a genius idea, especially for pre teens planning an evening out on the town. Does it sound a little like Google Wave though? Will group chat be compelling to users who are accustomed to communicating with one person at once?

Just wait a minute… can’t you already do this in Skype, BBIM and iChat on your smartphone? It is only in the US for now, so relax, you can continue to have group conversations without it.

Considering the negative points, GroupMe is providing a unique service. You can register for a unique group number on their website, and voila you have a conversation group. If I were located in the US I would try it…

How can companies use this feature in the future? One of the main potential revenue streams identified is from advertising, but this chat app could also be used in a massive way like a giant Facebook wall. That’s a lot of web 2.0 conversations. An organization could be found by their unique handle, whether by name or number as an additional medium of connection.

It looks like they might have found a unique selling point after all, but do we need another medium of connection?