Archive for January, 2011
agency clients can be sexist too
There’s obviously been a lot in the UK press recently about sexism in the workplace. Back in 2007 I blogged about the difficulties in finding an agency where the culture fits you. To be honest, that post was more about the dinosaur agency cultures I’d encountered that thought the local lap dancing club was an excellent venue in which to entertain clients and that regular mealtimes were merely an impediment to alcohol consumption.
There’s probably an element of that kind of behaviour still lurking in almost every agency in the UK. The difference is that the older and more senior I got, the more I wasn’t afraid to speak up about it.
In an early role I’d fake headaches mid-way through an evening of client entertaining so the guys could wander off in the direction of a ‘gentleman’s club’ with the client in tow.
Fast-forward a few years and I don’t think I won myself any brownie points by refusing to be seated next to a notoriously sleazy client at an awards do (sample meeting banter: “who’d shag [his female account manager, sat in the same room] wearing that?”). But pointing out that that kind of behaviour was inappropriate felt pretty empowering, even if I was kicked off the agency guest list for the ‘do as a result.
I’m not suggesting that people aren’t entitled to their own opinions and can think what they like. They just need to be told that voicing some of those opinions in the workplace is no-longer appropriate. Even if they are clients. And they (and our agencies) won’t get the message if we just roll our eyes a lot.
great insight isn’t just about what people *said*
I watched the next episode of Mary Portas: Secret Shopper last night. Not really a good idea because she winds me up, but this week’s focus was on the sofa industry and since one of the agencies I work for has a client in that sector I thought I’d better tune in.
What really set me off this time was Mary’s assertion that customers don’t want Sales. All the people Vox Popped for the programme (and Mary too) merrily declared that they were sick of sales and didn’t believe the deals anyway.
Well, that’s what they said. Like researcher Simon blogged the other day (in a post so good I’ve now linked to it twice), what people say and what they do are often different. People are inconsistent, frequently irrational and their underlying motivations are difficult to uncover.
I’ve done quite a few furniture focus groups myself recently. When you ask people what they don’t like about furniture stores practically the first thing they talk about is the never ending sales. But dig a little deeper and ask them about the stages they go through in buying furniture and stage one is nearly always “see who’s got the best deals on”.
This is where the difference between DIY research and using a trained researcher really becomes apparent. If clients start to think all they need to do is head down the local high street with a video camera for some Insight, they’re going to come to considerably different conclusions than an experienced researcher might. And yes, the same applies to agencies sending the account exec out to do some quick and dirty research as pitch fodder. As an old boss once said to me, “good researchers tell you what people meant, not what they said”.
Mary Portas persuaded CSL Sofas to move to a ‘best price permanently’ pricing model with no sales at all. I’d love to know how they’re planning on shifting their slow selling stock…
let’s play Hunt the Brief
There’s something no-one told me about life as a Freelance Planner. You need to be a bit of a detective.
You’d be amazed how often I turn up at an agency to find that the person who booked me to come in and work on Client X isn’t there and has left no instructions for me.
Now if I was working in an agency full time that wouldn’t be a problem, I’d just move on to the next thing on my To Do list and leave emails, voicemails and post-its until whoever had a brief for me eventually turned up at my desk.
But when you’re freelance you tend to have a limited time frame in which to complete something and nothing else on your plate that day. So you have to get all Sherlock Holmes about it:
1) check if Key Contact is actually hiding somewhere in the building
2) ring Key Contact’s mobile and leave message
3) speak to Client X’s account director
4) get him/her to check with the rest of the Client X account handling team
5) ask the creative director
6) ask the people who sit near Key Contact’s desk in case they overheard something useful
7) start looking for Something Else To Do
My record for being in an agency and officially Briefless is 6 ½ hours. But by that time I’d written three promotional marketing briefs and a mini desk research report…
When Inserts become Binserts
My Dad’s subscription copy of The Dalesman arrived on Saturday (circulation 36,428) . It’s one of those magazines where you can pretty much guarantee that the majority of readers are over 50, like things like nice country drives that end up at nice pubs and think that everything was much better before this internet lark came along and speeded the world up.
So advertising wise, it’s a pretty handy publication if you need to flog stuff like holiday cottages, stairlifts, pubs that do good food and gardening gadgets. But the ad team at Dalesman seem to have also enthusiastically embraced the Insert. In fact this month’s pile of inserts were technically some kind of Outserts as they were bigger (volume wise) than the magazine itself and just popped in the same plastic mailing bag:
I can’t imagine that any of the advertisers above (or their agencies) had this in mind when they signed up. It makes it very easy for readers to pick up all those leaflets and minimags and chuck the lot straight in the bin without even seeing what’s in the middle of the pile. Meaning you’d miss out such delights as a device to safely remove earwax and an extra-small garden tiller…
FYI Mary Portas: great customer service costs money
I did warn you I wasn’t a big fan of Mary Portas, so I suppose it was inevitable that I would end up muttering darkly at the TV this evening when the first episode of her new series Mary Portas: Secret Shopper aired.
pic taken from interview here
Mary has a new bee in her bonnet about poor customer service on the UK high street and the first episode saw her turn her wrath on Fast Fashion retailers. She started by singling out Primark for criticism on the basis that they made healthy profits but had rubbish customer service; with clothes on the floor, untrained and uninterested assistants, enormous queues and so on (see your local Primark on any Saturday afternoon for details).
But what Mary failed quite spectacularly to grasp was that creating a great customer experience costs money. Cost which has to eventually be passed on to the customer. Stylish, spacious changing rooms require extra rent for floorspace and changing room refits don’t come cheap (I recon around £20K per store for the MTVtastic Pilot changing room refit shown in the same episode). Having enough staff working on the shop floor so that someone is free to go and find you that dress in the next size up means more salaries to pay. Training staff to be super smiley and helpful takes time, which again costs the company money.
You can’t have all that AND expect to be able to buy a complete outfit and still have change from twenty quid.
I’ve blogged before about how, when it comes down to it, you can have to choose two of fast, good, and cheap. In the case of Fast Fashion, Good (service and customer experience generally) and very Cheap appear to be mutually exclusive. There’s no question that Primark is Cheap. But that isn’t the same as offering Value, i.e. a Good shopping experience at the right price. Because just like every other kind of quality, you get what you pay for.
Retailers aren’t charities. They have owners or shareholders they have to deliver returns to, so “putting profit before customer’s needs” (thank you, Mary) isn’t necessarily evil. After all, if you don’t like the service, vote with your purse and shop elsewhere.
Radio 4 plays spot the movie
Via AdAge comes this lovely film by Fallon for BBC Radio 4’s Film Season. A simple idea, but really nicely executed. I think I spotted ten movies but couldn’t work out three references, how did you do?
simplifying the Agency Process Chart
In almost every agency credentials meeting I’ve ever been in a Process chart has been pulled out. You know, the ‘our unique approach to reaching marketing solutions’ chart that renames every process, procedure and department to bring it all in line with the particular agency’s positioning.
They come in all shapes and sizes, from flow charts, road maps and triangles to butterflies and I even once saw an agency Process visualised in cartoon form as a bunch of agency types hanging off a motorbike, display team style.
Some clients seem to like buying a Process, rather than just a team of talented and experienced people. I suppose it’s something they can use to help justify why they chose Agency X instead of Agency Y and something has to justify all those agency fees after all.
But it strikes me that every single agency process chart ever could be summarised into three simple steps:
If you really want, you could add a feedback loop in, or make the whole thing a continuous circle, but I think perhaps it’s time agencies spent more time talking about effectiveness and less on window dressing.
Morrisons fresh lab gets the wrong end of the celery stick
I was working at an agency within walking distance of Morrisons today, so I was rather looking forward to lunchtime and one of their help-yourself salad boxes of mayo drenched pasta – with a couple of my five-a-day veg sneaked in for good measure.
No such luck. Morrisons seem to have tried repositioning their whole ‘To Go’ offering as Fresh To Go and got all healthy in the process. As far as I can tell from a bit of googling, this particular Mozzas store is a ‘lab’ for new ideas and innovations to test fresh food ideas prior to roll-out. Hence, a new dedicated front of store area with salad bar, fruit bar and make-your-own-hot-sarnies.
it doesn’t look much like this anymore (pic by jezarnold on flickr, CC applies)
There seemed to be half as many salady choices as before, some of which I didn’t even realise were legitimate lunchtime foodstuffs (quinoa, anyone?). The experience was not exactly improved by the aroma of raw fish which was emanating from the fish counter nearby and half my healthy but tasteless and disappointing lunch ended up uneaten and in the bin.
You’d have thought that Morrisons would have put a lot of thought into something like this. But then they aren’t exactly known as market research fans. And even if they did do some research, perhaps they made the mistake of believing what respondents said.
Simon recently wrote a great post reminding us that what people say and what they do are often different. In an ideal world I’d like to eat healthily at lunchtime, but at 12.30 I really want something tasty, filling, energy giving and quick to eat. And I suspect Morrisons’ customers might feel the same way. It will be very interesting to see whether this particular innovation ever makes it to roll-out…
Update, 25/02/11 – field reports this lunchtime indicate that mayo drenched pasta salads have returned :-)
28/02/11 – just remembered that I bumped into an old research mate the other week…at Morrisons doing accompanied shops looking at various aspects of the Fresh offering. So it would appear they *do* do research – but only once it’s into a trial store.
there’s something that really annoys me about Mary Portas
There’s an interview with Mary Portas (who regular readers will know I don’t always see eye to eye with) in this week’s Sunday Times (sorry, paywall, but she’s also been interviewed by just about every other major news outlet). Mary has a new series starting on Channel 4 called Secret Shopper, where she goes undercover to name and shame the businesses in Britain who “couldn’t give a monkeys” about customer service. But I’m afraid the contents of the article set me off on another micro-rant across the breakfast table.
If we are to believe the piece, Mary thinks it is hilarious that the editor of Vogue believes “most people are happy to look like Kirstie Allsopp in wrap dresses and kitten heels”. What’s wrong with that? Kirstie might not be at the hip and happening end of fashion, but she dresses to accentuate her best bits and always looks well turned out – and crucially comfortable in herself.
Dressing to make the most of what you’ve got and feeling great about the end result is a pretty marvellous aim for us all, whatever age, sex or income bracket we might be in. If every forty-something woman in Britain had a Mary-style stick-thin figure, colour blocked designer clothes and high maintenance haircuts as their ambition there would be a lot of uphappy women around.
IMHO, style is not about some arbitrator deciding what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s about people having the confidence and skill to make the most of what they’ve got. I’m all for giving people the knowledge and advice to achieve this and even empowering them to enlist the sales assistants of Britain to help. Just don’t be a snob about it Mary.
some interesting stuff about Stuff
I stumbled across some interesting stuff about, well, Stuff recently while I was working on a project.
It seems that Stuff can be a key barrier to making decisions and taking action. Having too much Stuff literally overwhelms our ability to make logical, considered decisions. House full of decades of clutter? Moving house becomes a much bigger deal. Wardrobe bursting at the seams? Choosing an outfit for work gets complicated.
It seems that only by organising and streamlining our Stuff can we start to organise and simplify our own lives. Of course, there is a huge industry out there offering storage solutions but this I’m not talking about having places to put Stuff, it’s more about deciding what to do with it all.
Ebay, car boot sales and freecycle have all done their bit over the last decade to help clear out domestic clutter, but it seems to me that there must be a lot of households buying more Stuff they don’t need because they actually already own something similar. We had a mini clear out at home last year (only two draws and a couple of cupboards) and unearthed five staplers and 13,000 staples.
I would like to point out that this is NOT my house
From an environmental impact point of view, obviously buying less new Stuff is A Good Thing, but from a marketing point of view, we obviously have clients with their own Stuff they’d like help shifting more of. I think perhaps we need to find a way of diverting communications resources to finding new homes or new uses for unwanted Stuff, so that we can give people the head space to decide what they really need or want.
Trendwatchers have been talking about Simplifiers for a couple of years, who are looking to collect new experiences rather than more Stuff. I think there are a lot more potential Simplifiers out there who might need a helping hand on the path to simplicity.
