I don't know why this is happening but it is. A number of people have pointed out to me today that the VISTA launch is being compared with Windows 95. (note this misses out 98, ME, XP).

I am sure there is a reason to position it against 95 but it seems a bit odd.
FINANCIAL TIMES: What will the impact of Vista and Office be, both on the computing environment, and on Microsoft itself?
If you take it in the context of the overall technology landscape, the PC is the smartest device most people have.

Now people have more intelligent devices than they did. People ask "how does this compare to Windows 95?" Frankly there’s a lot more innovation, new content in this release than there ever was in Windows 95 and Office 95.

But the environment has changed. Twelve years ago about the only technology experience most people had was the PC. Cell phones were still relatively nascent, and smart phones didn’t exist.

Mp3 players were either non-existent, or relatively nascent, most people didn’t know what the internet was, let alone had a favorite website, or set of websites. Digital cameras hadn’t really taken off.
When I engage with customers I decompose the way people make decisions.

Two of the components are "Frame" and "Observations". Seth Godin wrote a great post (called ) where he discusses what he calls World View, I call these Frames.
A Frame colours the way that you perceive the world and how you interpret and give meaning to the things you observe - what's important about the information around you and why.

Changing a Frame is a difficult and time consuming process. As Seth says:

One thing you can do as a marketer is rail against worldview. You can whine and complain that your service or product is better, pays for itself, saves lives, improves democracies, whatever.

Whining, as we see over and over, has little impact.

In industrial marketing this is sometimes called the "Better Moustrap" problem - even if you have a better product (and can "prove it") people just don't care. Unless you can change the Frame or Re-interpret the situation you are pushing a dead-weight up hill.

Then we had the deep-seated desire (and big budgets) associated with the Y2K problem. Like most worldviews, this was a worldview that got there before most marketers arrived at the scene. Smart marketers used the opportunity to start a conversation and then tell a story and sell a product that companies actually needed in the long run.

...

If you don't have the energy or the time to change minds, though, what should you do? You need to realize that changing a worldview requires you to get your prospects to admit that they were wrong. This is awfully hard to do.

I think that tapping into a worldview almost always requires more than a new title or a new wrapper or a new ad. I think it requires rethinking the product itself, starting from scratch with the worldview in mind.

according to Tom Peters, 100,000 Americans check into a hospital every year… and don’t check out.

Because of infections or other illnesses caused by the system, not by their condition. There is no outcry, no big budgets.
All I predict is more of the same - companies not getting the strategy right, fretting about the color of their logos and doing no research or strategic thinking - unless, of course, they are one of my clients!

.
If you want some B2C insight - have a look at the Trendspotting list of a lot of B2C trends will translate into B2B trends too.
Normally I tend to shy away from using the word "BRAND" because it is very often mis-interpreted to mean iconography - and then a whole day is wasted with inane, unresearched comments and opinions about color and symbology when we should be talking about values and meaning.

In the industrial marketing world that I inhabit I have taken to referring to "reputation", if you are pedantic you may start to point out the differences but actually when it comes to questions about: How long does it take to build? How do you build it, what damages it etc. then I can usually move the conversation away from graphics and onto something more productive.

Seth Godin writes about creating - and has some good observations. A friend of mine, David Lightbody -who is of the thespian persuasion- alerts me to one of the oldest brand in the world. Shakespeare.

It's true. I can't remember any other playwrights of that era (and precious few from any other) and there is something "special" about Shakespeare. Why, after all these years, are his plays still relevant?

David tells me that academics think it is because Shakespearian plays were the first to incorporate ambiguity. Up until this point every play told the audience what to think and what situations meant. They were like a newspaper, strong on concrete information but had a very short shelf life.

Shakespeare on the other hand, did not.
He left interpretation of meaning to the audience. You and I could go to a Shakespeare play and take away a different message.

We would find hooks to our own experience within the play and use our own knowledge to colour the scene and find meaning from general emotions, tensions and truths that could not have been predicted when the play was written.
Apparently, in the theatre, there is a notion that a play is only a play when it is performed. It changes.

Every night. It's in the moment. It must include the audience and their thoughts in order to exist.

It's the same with Brands. Brands are not plans, they are not pictures, they are not mission statements or positioning texts - they are experiential. They are now, they involve the audience.

You've got to be there, you've got to perform but without an audience, and without their reaction - you've got nothing. You can't inflict your brand onto people, they've got to interpret it in ways relevant to them. You've got to hint but not dictate, let them discover don't demonstrate - it's about them willingly suspending their skepticism to allow you to pique their interest and let them dream.

Brand managers - think of youself as an understudy-playwrite, a director and as a producer - now what would you do to ensure your play went well and your theatre's were full for years to come? Well what are you waiting for then? Go do it!

I have lost count of the number of industrial companies I deal with who get hung-up on the details of their graphics and miss the big picture. Especially in Industrial sales elements like iconography, while important, should be a way down the list - make sure you know what you want people to understand and why, what they think now and how you are going to influence that. Then, perhaps, iconography and colors will be important.

Here is a made by one agency highlighting what it's like for them.
Thanks to for putting me onto this.
I've been following this campaign with interest for a number of months now.

The first time I picked this up was in MAy - I blogged about it in June well it's all over the place now.
I know that Microsoft l aunched its live! services on Nov 15 in the USA but won't be going into BETA in Europe for a couple of months.

The advert below ran in all the Sunday papers yesterday (or at least the ones that I bought). It is everywhere.
You can see the positioning as very "boss" oriented.

i.e. not very much technology, print-outs on the wall behind.

Talking over a paper copy with a lap-top in the background.
It's also not at all obvious who is the boss and who is the employee. Who's in charge in this picture?

I think that this will score high perceptional resonance with the owners of SME's who are, frankly, not that interested in browsers, AJAX, APEX, on-demand etc. They are quite happy with a piece of paper. The fact that it's all organised and on computer is a way to keep their workers productive (and replaceable).

Compare and contrast this with Salesforce.com. In my circle of friends there are only a very few that have heard of them.

Even among the iTunes fanatics and gadget freaks. But most of them have got the message that Microsoft is going after SAP in small businesses.
It's not just me!

There is an article in the Sunday Times (Nov 19th, Page 10) with some startling stats:
in November (still not finished) Postini detected 7Billion emails, up from 2.5Billion since june.
For the last few months I have been receiving a lot of (what I think is) Japanese Spam.

It's got lots of "characters" so I guess it could be Korean or Chinese. I've also been receiving Russian spam and today, for the first time, German Spam.
I have yet to receive a Frensh Spam.

Perhaps they are too cultured for that sort of thing.
John Humphrys (he of Today programme fame) here he attacks corporate BS and tells us to say what we mean. I agree fully.

Thanks John.

That was a recent promise from Sainsbury's contained in one of those irritating flyers that fall out of the newspapers every morning. What can they possibly be offering that's so exciting?

A chance to do your next big shop for free? Or a case of vintage champagne with every purchase over a fiver? Or even a guarantee that you won't have to wait for more than an hour at the check-out unless you do your shopping at 3am on Sundays?

Not exactly. It was this: "Ever wished you could use your Nectar points in more than just one Sainsbury's store?" As it happens I've wished for many things in my life.

I could probably offer you a list of a hundred things right now - everything from world peace and an end to poverty to a really good pint of bitter. But, if I ever gave it a thought, I suppose I assumed that a giant supermarket chain with computers powerful enough to map the human genome had probably already made it possible to use my points in more than one of their stores.

Those are the words of Stuart Rose, the man who took over Marks and Spencer when it was on its knees and put it back on its feet.

But "great product"? Great knickers, maybe. Or great skirts or even great fish cakes, but has anyone in the real world ever said to anyone else: "I really must nip into M S.

I'm told they've got great product"? And it's not as if Mr Rose is one of those executives who seems incapable of speaking plain English. Here's how he described a disastrous revamp of the big M S store in Birmingham: "We screwed up big time.

We pissed off a lot of customers." Not, perhaps, the language he might use in polite company, but it doesn't half tell it like it is. And I'd imagine that anyone who'd had an unhappy experience in the Birmingham store would greatly appreciate a bit of plain speaking.

But plain speaking is to hype what garlic is to vampires
I suggest we all read this article, buy his book and start saying what we actually mean. One of the things that I believe is most misunderstood is the concept of a survey. I receive a number of surveys each month for various places, but I rarely see ones that are any good.

I just had a great survey from Skype. One simple question, with one simple explanation. On it's own that won't tell Skype much, but in combination with thousands of other responses (and over time) it will build into an immensly valuable resource.

Take satisfaction as an example. I am fed up with receiving 1000's of questions where the questionaire assumes they know why I am dissatisfied and what causes it. Questions like "How long were you kept waiting before we answered 1-10".

What are they going to do with that information - and why do they think I care how long I was kept waiting?
1. How happy are you with the service.

1. The telephone was answered quickly

2. The options presented were unclear

3.

I spent too long in the queue waiting for an operator

Is there anything else you think we should know?
With a survey constructed along these lines it is possible to get genuine information about what's happening so that you can make decisions. When you've got limited resources (always) you've got to decide what you fix next - this method will tell you.

Do not, however, conduct a survey unless you are prepared to act on the information you uncover...

To lighten the mood around a rainy, windswept London fall - Alastair sent me a link to the . Great!
Actually the title of this post is a rip off of one of the best money can buy - with a forward from Edward de Bono, who always looked at the world sideways too.

I find it interesting that more and more activities are being set free from the constraints of geogrpahy - internationalisation, working from home, tele-commuting, offshoring etc. These are having interesting consequences for cross-border law enforcement (see party ) as well as tax.
In this respect consider the implications that geography is seen as a mark of quality, distiction?

Terroir as the Frech call it. Champagne, Parma ham, Stilton and now even the word local .
Tesco was recently hauled up in front of the advertising beak for using the word local in an advert in its welsh stores.

But Welsh customers have taken offence at the advert, with the Advertising Standards Authority upholding a complaint from a customer that said local should only mean food from the immediate surrounding area and not from across the whole country.

Councillors for Gwynedd complained that the advert propagated an old-fashioned view of Wales as a region, not a country, with some of the food advertised travelling as far as 175 miles away.
When I'm buying spanish strawberries, dutch bacon, malaysian kumquats and carribean bannanas - 175 miles sounds pretty local.

I guess not.
On the subject of annoying pop-ups. I really hate my computer making unexpected noises.

Pop-ups I can deal with. But talking heads, movies etc. I really only want when I say I do.

Every time I go to Craig Skinner (Vodafone New Zealand) pops up to tell me how great Dreamforce is going to be.
When I am working I either want Vivaldi gently wafting through my headphones, Black Sabbath beating out some base or I'm skyping the USA. In no situation do I want to unexpectedly be played a loop-tape of how great Dreamforce is.

I'm going already!
Then the other day (when I learned how much the crowd meant to Andrei Agassi when he bowed out of professional tennis) I realised that this image had replaced 21 years of hard graft. In my mind I said - hey look, Andrei Agassi looks like that bloke of Salesforce.

com ...

.. Surely it should have been the other way round?

Please stop the audio and put a play button on.
[I am not sure if I should post this here on my Salesforce.com blog.

So It's going on both]
We all know how many thousands of impressions we experience each day. How many posters we pass, adverts we see and hear, etc. etc.

Today I saw an advert (actually two) on the tube that made me go WOW. I was standing on the platform on Waterloo station, waiting for the train to London Bridge. Nothing unusual there.

I was absent mindedly staring across the platform at the posters on the opposite wall. Nothing unusual there. Then WOW it hit me.

3D.
I was looking at an advert for Strong Bow cider - but the arrows were jumping out at me. Really 3D.

It was spooky. Then I noticed that not only were they jumping out at me, but the poster was not dirty, wrinkled, dog-eared etc. It was pristine, and 3D.

What is unsusual about the Jubilee line extension (Westminster and East) is that the Track is walled off from the platform by a glass screen, and doors only open when the train comes. Someone had the BRILLIANT idea of projecting the poster over the glass at an incident angle of 45 degrees. It's a head's up display like a fighter jet.

WOW. This means that not only does the poster appear to be on the opposite wall, by using stereo projection you get 3D.
And - this means that the poster could be a moving projection, changing the poster can be done remotely, it can change by the hour.

...

...

...

.
Really good idea, and that's rare these days.
By the way, did I say it was 3D?

well it was. 3D !!

! WOW
Something's afoot here. Today's sunday papers have two stories topping the bill.

The first is the rising number of people entering Individual Voluntary Arrangements IVA's (100,000 is the forcast for this year) - put this simply it means running up huge credit card debts, then paying a small amount back over five years and walking away scot free. There is also predicted to be the highest housing reposessions since the early nineties (8000+ since the start of the year).
The second is a story about the large number of people who are being caught by inheritance tax (when an estate has over £285,000).

Are both these phenoma linked to the housing market? It seems to me that a lot of young people are living far beyond their means and spending money they don't have, while the retiring generation are booming with wealth that they have made from their houses.
The FT ran an article by Phillip Coggan on Saturday that spelled it out.

If you are currently 36 and save £100 a week from now until you are 60 (thats £5000 a year) you will get a pension of around £6,600 when you retire (assumeing 3% real growth in assets). Wow, that's not much. No wonder the pension funds in the UK and USA are in trouble.

Is the current baby boom generation who are in their 50's and just entering retirement actually going to be the peak of our wealth as a society? Are they spending their children's legacy?
Same seems to be happening in the US, makes the point that there are more than 8Million people with over a $1M while on average most households have $8,000 of credit card debt and are spending money from "equity release".

I keep hearing people say that marketing is no use unless it leads to more sales. Well duh!
But how and in what time frame?

What I think people normally mean by this mantra is that marketing's job is to broadcast to the world about the product you have so that you sell more of it. Well yes - it is the job of Marketing to make people aware of your company and what it does. But it is not the job of marketing to CONVINCE people that they NEED your product.

(well rarely anyway).
What is normally forgotten is that Marketing should be (one of the) voice of the customer inside your organisation. It should ensure that you make products that people want and that you change they products you have to better fit the needs of customers, understand the value that customers place on your products and your position relative to competitors.

Yes promotion is important but it's only the output function. There's more to marketing than output.
Orange, the UK Mobile company owned by France Telecom, has devised four new .

These come with the bizarre titles of: Dolphin, Racoon, Canary and Panther.
While I've always admired the brand work of Orange I think this campaign is a bit odd. I've used the what type of animal would XYZ be routine, along with car names and others as a way of getting projected attributes to emerge during Depth interviews.

But I had never considered actually using this as a brand naming tool. Frankly I don't think it works - but I am sure that Orange knows its onions and has therefore done all it can in terms of research.
So we'll have to wait and see what the effect is.

I am not sure what I'd be - probably a beached whale I guess! - at least they don't have SKUNK as a option.
I've blogged before about how this company really is changing the face of marketing - now I see Clive Humby turning up as a contributing editor of the Marketer (CIM Magazine).

Well done - great article (and judging by the structure - he's also a mind mapper!).
His article is all about the strategy of using real information to change how an organisation works.

He summarises it all with a re-statement of Michael Porter's Generic Strategy. As Clive states it:
When it comes to business there are just two models that guarantee success. Either you are the cheapest in the marketplace, or you are completely customer-centric and respond relevantly every-time.

There is only one slot for the former and it's under constant assault. The latter, based on a sound data strategy and an in-depth understanding of your customers, not only secures your existing position, it also equips you to join that assault .
Mr Porter called this either cost-leadership or differentiation.

Note he said cost leadership (not low price). In my world that's irrelevant its about being able to charge a premium for my services - that's only possible if I can deliver something different and better for my customers. That's exactly Cive Humby's point.

In my opioin Humby will soon be regarded in the same way for data-driven insight-based strategies as we regard Ogilvy for advertising or Kotler in marketing managent or Porter in strategy. He certainly deserves a huge amount of credit for the success of Tesco in the last decade! Watch this space.

When I studied for my MBA I elected to take all the Entrepreneurship courses. One of the first lessons was about the types of businesses that would be discussed. MBO, MBI, BIMBO etc.

etc. and LIFESTYLE. Although lifestyle was never really discussed as it was not a real MBA option.

I later understood that Lifestyle business is really focused on the operational side of the business - as Seth Godin says it is about being able to Polish the business, to be proud and involved in output of the company - to love the impact it has on its customers. A lot of MBAs will be internally focused on the finance, the operations, the HR. The stuff that happens in all businesses, but not the product and its impact on the customer.

The reason for this is that if you are looking for external money the financiers are very unlikely to understand what it is your business actually does and why it is unique. They need to compare it to others. This is why they are financiers and not marketeers!

The problem with the term Lifestyle Business is that it conjures up images of grannies in rose covered cottages making Jam and weaving baskets. What if your lifestyle involved 3 Ferraris, a Super Yacht in Monaco and a house in the Hamptons?
While it's true that a large business can make a lot more money (in scale) it is also true that it is normally distributed among many more people.

I put the above to a good friend of mine who is a Director of . He told me a story about one of his investments. This company was owned by a Chinese gentleman who paid himself a dividend of $15M every 4 years.

Why did he want investment? He was 65 and wanted to retire - he came to 3i asking for help to establish the management systems and structures that would allow him to withdraw from the business and ultimately realise its value in a sale.
I'm sure he will succeed but I am also sure that the business will become bland and boring afterward.

We all know what the phrase run by accountants means - it means lack of passion, safe, boring, bland. The following adjectives will not be used: Unique, Fun, Amazing, Out-There, Impact, Love ..

...

.
I guess there is a role for everyone to play in this game. A I read on this topic was Boot Strapping Your Business by Greg Giofante [CEO Rightnow technologies] and Marcus Gibson [CEO Gibson Index].

But give me a founder that loves his work and you will see true passion. Without that nothing great is ever achieved.
Me: Yes I do, and I also subscribe to the Telephone Preference Service
Orange: Yes, well we have a fantastic deal for you today Sir
Me: That's interesting, what's your name and number?

I'd like to prosecute you since you just broke the law
Interesting huh? You'd think a telephone company would at least know the telecoms laws? But obviously not.

TPS, cTPS and (in the USA) Do Not Call. This is how to stop intrusive telephone calls. Recently there have been a number of prosecutions - the SNP (Scottish National Party) was fined for direct calling here in the UK.

This month (June 23 issue) Precision Marketing reports that The People's Benefit Service - who sell health service discount cards - were fined $300,000 when their agency (Phase One Marketing) repeatedly called people on the list.
We really are in the age of permission marketing. So what are you going to do about it.

While I applaud Microsoft for their great Dynamics adds (which are now appearing almost daily) and their really understated phone OS adds - there are a couple of campaigns which must be inspired by too many narcotics!
The Dinosaur Campaign: Basically this consists of pictures of people with dinosaur masks on claiming to have been overwhelmed by [substitute problem: spam, in tray, calendar, mobile device] and claiming that the Era of xxx is now over. Basically saying to existing customers that they are dinosaurs and really all their problems have already been fixed.

Mmm not very subtle - perhaps it's the distribution model for software that is wrong? If I were salesforce.com I would run the same adds saying the era of on-premise software is over, welcome to the on-demand era .

Another two really bizarre mail shots arrived recently at our offices: One was a letter addressed from ourselves but sent in the year 2012 by Microsoft time travel mail. It congratulated us on our wise choice that we made in 2006 to upgrade to Microsoft Volume Licensing. Weird!

(and I note that the UK had adopted the Euro for postage, and that the exchange rate was 2 Euro = 1829.37 UKP, so obviously we had suffered a bit economically by our choice as well then). And the address is Thames Underwater Level 3, so I guess global warming did result in sea level rises then.

The other was a bit more sinister - in a fairly blatant threat (and an extremely environmentally unfriendly act) Microsoft sent a brick through our window with a note attached. Well not exactly but it was a cardboard box that contained a stone. Not sure why, but basically it asked us to help them tracking down software pirates, and that a Microsoft rep would be visiting us soon to ask for our help.

Well bad news boys - not only do we not pirate software but we don't know anyone who does either. And by the way good work on the CRM since you sent it to an address we moved from 2 years ago, and we are a certified MS partner - so you should know, your other division does.
On this score (using their own CRM well) Salesforce.

com does not score much better - I keep being told that I didn't turn up for events that I did and being invited to others that I have already registered for. So not full marks there either - but at least they don't through bricks throw my window!
[PS I heard a rumour that SFDC were about to start using Demand Tools software for survey response management in a bid to change this - if they do, then full marks for waking up to the issue]
Just received the CIM ( ) magazine The Marketer from April.

At last - the need to measure is being recognised.
Tim Ambler (London Business School) said on page 22 - Most Companies I come accross lack a clear picture of their marketing performance, which may be why they cannot asses it. They prefer to fumble in the dark.

After all, fumbling has a lot going for it: more adventure, more creativity, more surprises, more fantasies. But you may not like what you find when the lights go on. Clear goals and metrics are what separate the professional from the amateur
You've got to agree with that.

But how can you go about it - one way is to go all complex and buy lots of technology - on page 26 there is a good case study of Rapid Racking which talks about how they used Viper from smartFOCUS.
Robert Shaw (Cass Business School, and author of Database Marketing (1990) ) has a great article - though a little hard to read - which stresses the importance of results based marketing. He stresses that you need to understand what you mean by Value before you can decide on how marketing adds any.

That understanding must be shared accross the board - otherwise you will be measuring oranges and taking decisions based on the price of lemons.
So what it comes down to is this: To get it right you have to plan it, do it and measure it. At all stages this requires the integration of Marketing, Technology, Data Analysis and Finance.

You need to know where the business is now, where it needs to go, what results marketing can achieve, what can be measured and track the financial return. ROMI - Return on Marketing Investment - rules again.
Or should that be Luvvies can't measure?

I ran into a rather odd characater last night. A Finance Director of a very famous marketing agency here in London. I asked him how he measured the effectiveness of marketing.

Well first of all he tried to make me feel like a twit for asking such a dumb question - the usual well what do you mean by marketing - I don't think he expected an answer to that !
First answer was well Sales . When pushed he came up with a story about rebranding a country - and hey look what the number of tourists are now.

When pushed further - how can you decouple the effects of different campaigns, what is the lag between performing one action and seeing a result. His answer Well you can't . That's why they expect you to come and spend big bucks with big names, make you feel insecure and live in their fantasy world of unaccountability.

What rubbish.
He's the finance director - I wonder if he'd accept a bill from me that said Came round, did stuff on your computer you won't understand, it was nice, not sure if it's what you need or if it works - can't tell I'm afraid, but I'm smarter than you so here's my random invoice .
No he bloody well would not - and neither should you.

We are no longer in the days where a simple advert running at prime time will move all the soap powder you could ever want. We are in the digital age, we can and should know what's going on and marketing should be a whole heap smarter.
When asked what the effect was, did he run surveys etc, does he do metrics in house - his answer was that was what media planners did and it was beneath them.

Well that's really good, carry on, but you wont be getting an order from me, or my clients or anyone else who has anything going on between the ears.
ROMI - Return on Marketing Investment. If you can't measure it, I don't want to know - if you don't measure it, you can't manage it and you will never improve.

Marketing - what an overused and misunderstood term!
When many people talk about marketing they only mean promotion - often over-promotion, hype or they may even link it with some form of subterfuge or deliberately misleading communication. They imply that marketing is something that is done to people.

That you can do marketing, or that you have been marketed to . This is bunkum. Good marketing is something different.

Marketing has three distinct pieces: Input, Output and Thinking.
Marketing is about understanding the needs and wants of people. By people I mean that they may be individuals or perhaps they are members of a group - such as a company, or a family or a club - and may have responsibilities to within that group, which modifies their personal preferences.

For companies, good marketing figures out how people perceive their world in the context of your business - both how they perceive it now and how this might change in the future, based on their changing understanding and experience.
Armed with such information you can think of ways to make their future world better than they currently think it will be. Do this by designing a product or service that they are 1.

able to pay for and 2. will value above the costs that you incur provide it to them. Your thinking process you must consider what other companies do now, or in the future, that would modify your plans.

If you are right and can create something that people think is good, and that their experience does live-up to what they expected and they really do receive the expected value from your product or service - then you can consider ways to make people aware of what you do, and how they will benefit from it.
In a nutshell that is marketing. Now it gets detailed, sometimes complicated - and if you're not careull - so full of BS that it all goes wrong.