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!

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!

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.

Apple’s release of the new, smaller Apple TV at the new, affordable price of £99 is scary. It’s only scary for me because now I’ll probably have to get one.

I must confess that I do purchase music, movies and too many telly shows on iTunes. My current telly transfer involves syncing the media with my iPod touch, and then using the television as an external monitor. I choose to enjoy the media on telly so that I can use my computer at the same time and multitask.

I could be classified as an early adopter, but certainly not for a product like the Apple TV. This new price is not one that will shy anyone away- it does not carry the same level of exclusivity of other Apple products and because it doesn’t fit in your pocket, it won’t make people drool while riding the tube.

Perhaps with the growing population of iPhone, iPod Touch, iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle owners, and with their growing need to consume the media they are purchasing, Apple are looking to new ways to satisfy this audience. The Apple TV could be strategically targeted to this audience to compliment their already impressive collection of Apple goods.

Are Apple secretly hoping that once you have an iPhone and an Apple TV that you will invest in a MacBook Pro for yourself and perhaps an iMac for the kids? This new lower priced strategy won’t be off-putting to the early adopters, and it certainly may draw more customers into the arguably upscale iTunes music market.

This new sub-business strategy will also strengthen the relationship between existing iTunes customers and the company, as music and media consumers find new ways to appreciate their purchases. Appreciating their purchases for example on a big screen, the once ultimate status symbol. The Apple TV also provides (limited) storage space for when your very large HD telly collection uses up all the space on your wanna-be Apple computer.

This may sound like a product review, but it’s very interesting that the price of this product has dropped so dramatically recently. Surely the cost to produce the item hasn’t fallen 100%, so Apple are clearly deciding to pitch the Apple TV to a new demographic. Competitive Advantage?

You either know how to use the Adobe creative suite or you don’t. I have spent countless hours trying to figure out the most simple of features in Illustrator, and can admittedly use Indesign as a word processor, but after many unsuccessful attempts alas I am not a designer. My sister on the other hand has a creative mind and the functionality of the Adobe programs came intuitively to her. She is self-taught and can handle the most complex design problem. She whisks through the range of design and layout functions with ease as if they were as simple as typing a Facebook status update.

Aside from the Flash/Html 5 debate (which admittedly is significant), Adobe has created the ultimate competitive advantage, creating a complimentary suite of design programs that are unrivalled. With their core business based on full-featured programs, they are innovatively turning their competitive advantage to bring design to handheld devices. Adobe are reaching their tried and true audience on their mobile devices in addition to picking up new supporters with their iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch app, Adobe Ideas.

Featured on countless lists of top free applications, Adobe Ideas is extremely simple to use. In fact I just picked it up in under five minutes, which means that you can too. I was pleasantly surprised as it perfected the curvature of the lines I was drawing, to correct for my unsteady hands.  Adobe Ideas also allows me to e-mail myself what I’m working on, or I can send myself a .pdf file.

There are other drawing programs available for handheld devices, but Adobe Ideas is a perfect example of a company being flexible enough to provide their customers what they want, and taking advantage of a new opportunity. Although Adobe Ideas is a free app, Adobe are suddenly widening their customer base as millions of users get creative and start looking into more power and functionality, and perhaps will become Creative Suite users.

Bringing design to the masses is also helping Adobe to maintain their competitive advantage by helping reaffirm their awareness among techies. Adobe is also demonstrating that although tools are important, that creativity and innovation cannot produce stylistic, cutting edge design. I once read a review for the Creative Suite 5 where the reviewer was describing all the amazing new features, and then noted that if you lacked creativity and vision, that investing in the next Creative Suite would not suddenly make you a better designer.

Although Adobe Ideas is incomparable to their Creative Suite of programs, any and all aspiring designers can test out creativity and vision on this new free app.

Yesterday Apple announced the release of Ping, the new music-focused social media site. If you’ve ever purchased music on iTunes, ever purchased or registered an apple product or if you’ve ever downloaded an iPhone application, you have an Apple account. Sometimes you might even forget that this account exists, as I did until I signed up for Ping some few hours ago. I downloaded iTunes 10.0 and it was magically there. Ping is far from perfect, most notably because it hasn’t yet approved my profile picture and there’s not yet an easy way to add friends or contacts.

Apple’s business model has historically been providing computers at a higher-than-average price range that are reliable, easy to use, and attractive. Part of Apple’s competitive advantage was that having one of these products became a status symbol, something that millions of Apple fans are willing to pay a premium for. The iPod and iPhone have further reinforced the competitive advantage, with the business model shifting to provide attractive, higher-than-average priced, easy to use .mp3 players. The key factor that brings us to Ping, is that in order to use your iPod on your mac or pc, you need iTunes. ITunes understands some of your deepest and darkest desires such as when you listen to which music, what kinds of music you’re willing to pay for, what music you’ve purchased online and what music you’ll never listen to again. The Genius functionality in iTunes regularly sends Apple information on who and what you’re listening to (with your permission), and it both recommends new music based on your past purchases and it will also create a playlist based on a song.

If you’re in the mood to listen to a certain song, Genius will also scour through your music collection and pick out a selection of songs that will play seamlessly and that have the same beat and feeling. This Genius feature ensures that you’re listening mode doesn’t turn into “I can’t believe I own this music”.

With our increasing comfort with social networking, a social music system seems logical, reeking with MySpace influences. In the Apple keynote speech yesterday Jobs hinted in a slide that users would be able to integrate their Ping activity with Facebook. It apparently turns out that there will be no Facebook integration yet, and in the meanwhile users are left to find friends by name and/or e-mail (that’s so passé).

In terms of competitive advantage, Apple are strides ahead of the competition, integrating a music platform that everyone already uses with a logical place to interact with bands and musicians. In fact, it’s more logical a place than Facebook to interact with other fans and artists. Ping and iTunes are creating a unique environment by pulling more of people’s time into the Apple platforms, creating a stronger argument for them to be a primary host for all music and television content.

It will be interesting to see how the music platform evolves. Due to the fact that Apple’s revenue stream is derived from music and application sales unlike Facebook, whose revenue stream is advertising, there is a greater chance for fans and users to have a more organic and genuine experience. Being built into iTunes has its perks as well since users are already familiar with it and they already have it on their computers. Let’s also not forget that Apple reported having credit card information for over 124 million users in February of 2010, demonstrating the amount of trust and goodwill iTunes has already amassed.

If Apple and Facebook can agree on an integration deal allowing users to be connected to their Facebook friends in Ping, both will be further entrenched for success.

We all have an understanding of competitive advantage, but as we noted in a previous blog, it’s easier to understand than to put into practice.

What about for the hospitality industry? For the hotel and accommodation sector of the hospitality industry, which includes more than 127,000 businesses and employs 1.6 million people in the UK alone, the descriptive word is key – hospitality.

I came across a 2009 study released by Cornell University in their Cornell Hospital Quarterly publication that says just that. The study conducted research from 369 guests at 6 Norwegian hotels and found that hospitality was the most frequently cited reason for returning to a hotel, and the factor that was most responsible for a guest’s satisfaction rating.

The researchers identified four main categories of importance when rating satisfaction level of accommodation; distinctiveness, hospitality, relaxation and refinement. Atmosphere was also determined to have significant impact on a guest’s overall satisfaction with their stay at a hotel, but the atmosphere is subjective, as is dependent on the four categories listed above.

If you are interested, we encourage you to read the research document. When all considered, it is common sense to understand that perception of hospitality is a leading indicator of customer satisfaction, but in many cases in strategy and management, it’s easy to get distracted by daily problems and forget some of the core, strategic functions of your business.

As the report suggests, one of the easiest and simplest ways to improve hospitality offering is to offer an optimum level of training for your staff. Employees deal with customers at fundamental levels in the hospitality sector, and each interaction a guest has with an employee will significantly shape their experience. Tone of voice, attitude, and employee empowerment are suddenly not just considerations for the human resources department, they have a powerful impact on client satisfaction levels and could be part of your competitive advantage.

In improving hospitality, revisiting employee reward and motivation programs are important. Having a rewards system that is flexible and that encourages outstanding treatment for clients and customers that is above and beyond expectations allows employees to compete to provide the best service. If you are interested in seeing employee motivation in action, check out the rewards programs offered by Four Pillars.

Employee training and hospitality work hand in hand, and investment in employee training will result in return on investment in terms of customer satisfaction. Employee’s attitudes and the work environment also translate into the atmosphere of the hotel, and are also extremely important concepts to keep top of mind. Although increased customer service or hospitality could benefit any business, the article stresses the key importance it has on satisfaction. Maybe your hotel is the greenest, maybe it’s in the best location, no matter your current competitive advantage, increased focus on customer service is a guaranteed way to increase customer satisfaction.