Innholdsfortegnelse for April/May 2015 i Marketing

COVER BY RE, THE BRANDING CONSULTANCY OF THE M&C SAATCHI GROUP. “Our response to Marketing’s design thinking issue had to be an iconic, confident provocation layered with relevance, detail, narrative, artfulness and surprise. If you had made it here, reading this description, connecting you with the power of effective design thinking is unashamedly deliberate and blatant.” CONTENT PARTNER: a Marketing Content Partner is an organisation with which we’ve entered into a non-commercial partnership to collaborate on content for the magazine (see page numbers listed for each), as well as exclusive content only available to Marketing Advantage Members. Marketing would like to recognise and thank the members of its Editorial Advisory Board for their invaluable guidance: Michael Valos, chair; Brook Carter, AustralianSuper; Cameron…

Noun: 1. A plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment or other object before it is made. 2. A decorative pattern. 3. Purpose or planning that exists behind an action, fact or object. Verb: 1. Do or plan (something) with a specific purpose in mind. 2. Decide upon the look and functioning of (something) by making a detailed drawing of it. Origin: Late Middle English (as a verb in the sense ‘to designate’): from Latin designare ‘to designate’, reinforced by French désigner. The noun is via French from Italian. The Oxford English Dictionary “The three magic words are simplicity with standardisation and beauty.” – Andy Lark, CMO of accounting software vendor Xero, explains to Marketing why beauty is an essential element…

TIM BROWN – CEO of IDEO, arguably the world’s best-known design thinking agency. Watch his TED Talk titled ‘Designers – think big!’ ROBERTO VERGANTI – Italian leadership and innovation professor and author of Design-driven Innovation . HASSO PLATTNER – the billionaire German co-founder of SAP, who helped found the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (also known as ‘d.school’) at Stanford University, which integrates business and management training into more traditional engineering and product design education. In 2011 he co-edited the text Design Thinking: Understand, Improve, Apply .…

Four days into the job in late January, Alvaro Marquez was in the middle of meeting with key teams at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and starting to form a long-term vision and plan. Fresh in the country after a three-year stint in China, Marquez has been given the task of pulling apart and examining a whole organisation’s systems in order to aid the transition of the ABC to a more audience-centric service provider. A true global citizen, who has delivered projects on nearly every continent ("except Africa and Antarctica”), Marquez came to service design from a range of backgrounds, including fine art, graphic design and brand marketing. Most recently he was Asia Pacific creative director at service design agency Frog, based in Shanghai. In his words, he was “delivering…

• CMOs must not confuse business strategy with marketing strategy, but must view them as complementary. • CMOs must use business strategy as a framework and align marketing strategy and marketing tactics within that framework in order to be relevant. • CMOs must share the business vision among a range of diverse stakeholders and influencers. • CMOs, possibly more than any other functional leader, must succeed as an internal influencer in order to overcome the issues of credibility and relevance facing marketing. • CMOs must leverage their role as custodian of customer need and the emerging role as key decision-maker regarding marketing and business technology in order to increase their influence within organisations.…

Our most powerful tool in the 50 years after World War II was mass media. Brands with big budgets generally won the pop culture war through sheer weight of voice. Great advertising, in some ways, became a substitute for great product. Average things designed for the masses could masquerade as objects of desire because our exposure to the possibilities was so limited in a pre-internet age. Availability was a function of what we saw on TV and in-store. The model of product development was a simple one. Make more of what you made before, and create great packaging and advertisements. It worked. But in the 20 years since 1995, our marketplace – that place where we do that thing called marketing – has had a radical redesign. Experiments in marketing…

Facebook has announced yet another update to its News Feed algorithm that will impact how promotional content from Pages is distributed. Since the update started in January, users now see fewer promotional posts in their News Feeds, meaning Pages “that post promotional creative should expect their organic distribution to fall significantly over time”. This is a direct result from a user survey Facebook conducted to determine the impact of content in News Feeds. According to Facebook, people indicated they want to see less promotional content. Facebook’s official announcement: “According to people we surveyed, there are some consistent traits that make organic posts feel too promotional: • posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app • posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with…

When the theme of this issue of the new-format Marketing (which, by the way guys, looks awesome) was presented to me, it raised a number of thoughts and ideas – but one stood out more than the others. As marketers, design and the ability to design, is a core element of our DNA. Whether that is designing campaigns, products, value propositions, competitive strategies or (and most importantly) how to drive sales – the marketer of today needs to be an innovator, creator and designer. An area that has always intrigued me, and one in which Effective Measure is regularly asked for assistance, relates to brand identity. More specifically, in what ways does the design have an impact on customer behaviour? In research and audience measurement, we are often looking at…

1 Remind yourself that most people don’t leave organisations, they leave their managers. Be compassionate, be accessible and listen and respond to your team needs and concerns. 2 Don’t be afraid to look in the mirror. Self-awareness is critical. Your actions, comments and behaviour will set the standards for your team, so make sure they’re congruent with the culture you’re trying to create. 3 Awareness of others – it’s important to understand the potential obstacles or circumstances that may prevent your staff member from being the best they can be in their role. The more you understand what drives your staff, what motivates them, what resources they need and respond accordingly, chances are you will drive optimum performance in people. 4 Awareness of the organisation and its purpose – there…

Designers are being released from the confines of the desktop and, more importantly, from the confines of the offi ce, to go out and seek inspiration from the world around them. Mobility, made possible by technological advances and, in particular, the arrival of the cloud era, is providing designers with access to a whole new palette from which to work, seamlessly. How designers utilise technology to fuel their creativity and evolve their designs will push the creative sector to new heights. There are five trends that have real potential to influence the future of design – and there are clear signs these trends are already starting to have an impact on cutting edge design. 1. THE PAPER NAPKIN HAS BECOME DIGITAL Designers want to do professional design no matter where…

Design, good and bad, is everywhere. When it’s good, you often don’t appreciate or even notice it because it just feels so right, but when it’s bad, it can be annoying and frustrating. I went to see a movie recently with my son. We don’t get to do this type of thing all that often, with school, sport and work making these occasions far too infrequent. So I wanted to enjoy the experience and get the most out of it… There we were at a local cinema ready to go. We had escaped Mum and the younger sister and it was man time. A good flick, loads of movie food, great seats – we were in father/son heaven. We had pre-purchased tickets and brought our own salty snacks, all we…

In Design Thinking: Understand, Improve, Apply (2011, Springer), Christoph Meinel and Larry Leifer write that there are four rules to design thinking: 1 The Human Rule: all design activity is ultimately social in nature “There are studies that substantiate the assertion that successful innovation through design thinking activities will always bring us back to the ‘human-centric point of view’. This is the imperative to solve technical problems in ways that satisfy human needs and acknowledge the human element in all technologists and managers.” 2 The Ambiguity Rule: design thinkers must preserve ambiguity “There is no chance for ‘chance discovery’ if the box is closed tightly, the constraints enumerated excessively and the fear of failure is always at hand. Innovation demands experimentations at the limits of our knowledge, at the limits…

COMPLEX CONSUMER EXPECTATIONS It’s no secret that marketers in the current digital climate face increasing pressure to deliver relevant, personalised and engaging experiences to consumers. The diffi culties include the general proliferation of channels and the speed at which customer touch-points are evolving. New platforms and devices continue to change the playing field. In addition, today more than ever, people are in control. In a world where everything is shared on social media, where brands and services are reviewed, rated and challenged if they do not deliver on their promise, organisations no longer have the same level of control. As a result, the Mad Men-esque times of simply promoting products and services to create customer engagement and loyalty are long gone, with marketers needing to now consider ways to create…

Marketing is crucial in order to stand out in any industry. The not-for-profit (NFP) sector is no different. Those who do it best attract the most valuable members, donors and investors. Recent reports show an ongoing surge in charities registered by the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission or ACNC (2300 new registrants in 2013, up from 1200 the previous year), putting the total number of registered charities in excess of 60,000 (estimate based on JBWere 2013 ‘Australian Giving Trends’ and ACNC data.) Eighty-four percent of NFP chief executives anticipate an increase in demand for their services over the next 12 months, yet are unsure of their ability to meet the demand (PwC-Centre for Social Impact Community Index 2014). With so many different organisations competing for the goodwill dollar – many…

Further reading: Survey of 4500 CMOs covering strategic, tactical and measurement issues. http://www.business2community.com/marketing/ http://www.business2community.com/marketing/marketing-trends-predictions-2014-beyond-0962666 marketing-trends-predictions-2014-beyond-0962666 Refresher on the hierarchy of goals, strategies, objectives and tactics. http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikalbelicove/2013/09/27/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikalbelicove/2013/09/27/understanding-goals-strategies-objectives-and-tactics-in-the-age-of-social http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikalbelicove/2013/09/27/understanding-goals-strategies-objectives-and-tactics-in-the-age-of-social understanding-goals-strategiesobjectives-and-tactics-in-the-age-of-social The important role of marketing in identifying and interpreting external change and customer need. http://hbr.org/product/when-marketing-is-strategy/an/ R1312G-PDF-ENG A process used by many companies to successfully transform. http://hbr.org/2007/01/ http://hbr.org/2007/01/leading-change-why-transformation-efforts-fail/ar/1 leading-change-why-transformation-efforts-fail/ar/1 Issues to consider when integrating strategic plans. http://www.theguardian.com/ http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2013/sep/19/how-to-strategic-planning global-development-professionals-network/2013/sep/19/ how-to-strategic-planning…

In front of me is an unfortunate mess. A client’s brand strategy document created by their former agency – a very large agency that was shown the door soon after delivering this… ambitious ‘creative’ strategy. Some of the thinking is quite good; however, one small problem exists: strategic concepts and plans appear to ignore audience insights. As is often the case in both marketing and advertising, the people working on the problem or challenge assumed the customer/audience/user is just like them, with the same knowledge and view of the world. They aren’t. The same misstep is surprisingly common when designing branded experiences. With a wealth of knowledge in customers and channel innovation, marketers can still tend to see these things in ‘digital versus traditional’ or ‘most valuable customer’ segmentation. Adding…

Content. It’s such an ambiguous descriptor. What is it? Is Jean-Claude Van Damme doing the splits on top of two trucks, content? Is Hamlet content? Is a Jamie Oliver recipe tweet? What about Game of Thrones, is that content? Or a ‘How to’ clip on YouTube? Or Miley Cyrus’ latest shocking twerking Twitpic? The answer of course is ‘yes’ to all of the above. Content can be a map, a brand history, an information video, a game, an article, a blog post, an image, a joke, films, vines, a piece of music, a review, the list goes on… which still leaves us none the wiser as to what it actually is, or what a content strategy might look like? If I were to attempt a definition that describes all the…

Growing up in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, Umberto Mecchi clearly recalls how he discovered he thought differently from other people. It was way back in grade one at Glenroy North Primary School and the inevitable question was posed: what do you want to be when you grow up? While his schoolmates came up with the usual suspects: fireman, teacher or even astronaut, the young Mecchi wasn’t afraid to stand out from the crowd. “I responded ‘an elephant’ to the bemusement of the teacher, Miss Adolph and the rapturous laughter of the classroom,” he recalls. Clearly this was a child with an unfettered creative streak. Now, as executive manager of strategy and marketing at Host-Plus (stylised as HOSTPLUS), one of Australia’s biggest superannuation funds, Mecchi faces one of the greatest challenges a…

Personally, my parents and dad in particular. I failed my first attempt at HSC (Year 12) and I thought, “I’m not cut out for education, I’ll just try to get a job like most people have to do.” My dad suggested that over the summer break I go work with him at the Ford Factory to earn some money and to decide whether I was “cut out for work”. I was thrown on a dark assembly line and did non-stop manual repetitive tasks all day long. I felt like a rat in a cage. It made me want to get back to school. Dad was no philosopher but he had his own ways of teaching us life lessons. Professionally, l’d say Lisa Gray (ex NAB) in my time at National…

MEETING A DESIGN brief depends on a communicative client-designer relationship, so I doubt that this will one day be completely automated. Recently, however, we have seen tools emerge that give designers the ability to automate certain parts of their process. With the introduction of analysis tools to product development software, we are seeing the numbers of iteration cycles reduce, as we can more accurately validate digital design concepts. I believe design automation will bring three main benefits to designers: • the generation of potential design configurations at an increasing pace and complexity • the ability to simulate real world scenarios to validate designs with increasing sophistication, and • the ability to create the most efficient products possible, by automatically calculating efficiencies. The question of whether design automation will extend into…

Good design is good for business. Design creates shareholder value. The ‘Design Centric Index’ developed by the Boston-based not-for-profit Design Management Institute (DMI), is a group of organisations that are supposedly ‘led by design’. The 15 of them, which include Apple, Coca-Cola, Ford, Herman-Miller, Rubbermaid, Disney and P&G, outperformed the S&P by 228 percent in the decade to December 2013. Clearly, this is not simply a result of being aesthetically pleasing. To get beyond the limiting design-as-visual mindset, I’ve found the following model helpful, which draws on work by Sabine Junginger. The model comes from work on a ‘design value scorecard’ that DMI came up with in collaboration with Microsoft. The model can be best illustrated by considering the locus of design-driven value within an organisation and can be simplified…

Given design thinking is not a product but a process, what are the factors that could derail its impact? Gerda Gemser says companies need to have a purpose in mind. “If you are not interested in innovation, new services, new products, new solutions to problems, then don’t look at design thinking. “I’ve only been in Australia for two years and I would say we are in the initial phases of embracing design as a competitive force. In Europe, where I did my PhD, its benefits to business are much more established. It’s not yet ingrained here with companies that design can help them innovate and compete better and the upside is a lot here that can be done. Having said that, there are, for example, some large financial institutions here…

A version of the design thinking process for problem solving described by Cliff Moser in Architecture 3.0: The Disruptive Design Practice Handbook has seven stages in which problems can be framed, the right questions asked, more ideas created and the best answers chosen. The steps aren’t linear, can occur simultaneously and be repeated. DEFINE • decide what issue you are trying to resolve • agree on who the audience is • prioritise this project in terms of urgency • determine what will make this project successful, and • establish a glossary of terms. RESEARCH • review the history of the issue – remember any existing obstacles • collect examples of other attempts to solve the same issue • note the project supporters, investors and critics • talk to your end-users,…

Master architects shape the experience of all who interact with their realised designs through the arrangement of walls and the location of spaces. Marketers are also architects. Rather than designing the arrangement of walls, marketers design the arrangement of information. Rather than helping to construct a building, marketers help to construct a consumer’s choice. Information design refers to all of the small decisions a marketer makes in presenting product information to the consumer. Consider a restaurant menu: while the chef decides the menu items, it is the marketer who decides how to design the menu itself. The range of design decisions is broad; from how to order and group the menu items to the size and colour of the menu item font. Good information design is important because it is…

This is the second in a series of articles looking at critical success factors that determine the success of the CMO. Issues to be covered include: the CEO/CMO relationship, developing business strategy, integrating the marketing function, the relationship with HR and internal branding, teams (cross-functional and marketing) and finally measurement and accountability. The annual ‘Robert Half FTSE 100 CEO Tracker’ shows that 52 percent of current FTSE CEOs have an accountancy or financial management background, compared to 21 percent from engineering/natural resources, and eight percent with a marketing/ advertising background. This series of articles is highlighting the issues marketers need to consider when developing skills and competencies in order to ensure marketing is not marginalised. Part A: What is the role of business strategy in terms of marketing? MYOB is…

Mobile is not a new technology, but 62 percent of ebusiness professionals surveyed by Forrester in 2014 still treat it as one. Rather than leveraging mobile to do new things, ebusiness professionals are still using mobile as a scaled-down version of the web. This is myopic. In fact, mobile generates new revenue, improves customer relationships and reduces costs throughout all channels. Organisations that don’t embrace the variety of new opportunities that mobile gives them will miss out on opportunities in retail, travel, financial services, entertainment, insurance and many other industries. Mobile contributes to the business – not just through selling, but also beyond – because it can: 1. Drive spontaneous purchases. Mobile liberates buyers from stores and homes. It’s uniquely suited to flash sales, because it reaches people anywhere with…

Design-led businesses keep talking about the future of design and innovative wonders they can bring to the world. But have they stopped to analyse and understand the current state of the design market? A feeble attempt came from an opinion piece written by ‘Starvertiser’ Adam Ferrier and published by Mumbrella (‘Is the ad industry much of an industry at all?’, 22 December 2014). Although the piece does not target the design market specifically, it overlaps it by questioning the behaviour of different players in the creative industries and whether or not they constitute an industry at all. Despite some interesting pondering, it takes some serious analyses to be a market shaper, as recently mentioned by The Economist. This is my attempt to add substance to the discourse, contributing more with…

Marketing is fast catching on to the idea that consumers buy an ‘experience’ rather than a product or service. It is all about the ‘relationship’ with the brand and/or product, and with all relationships comes human emotion. When it comes to experiences with products and services (whether it be a blender, a new TV interface or an online budgeting app) marketers should know that certain elements can be tweaked to ascertain good responses to what is being sold. Functionality and aesthetics are two elements of the user interface that have often been in conflict. A stunning design serving no other purpose but as an expression of beauty is not going to help you find the enter button on a banking app. A dull, stock-standard but functional interface is not going…

CURRENTLY Group executive, strategy, marketing and growth, Host-Plus Director, EJ Whitten Foundation Director – risk and finance committee, Jesuit Social services PREVIOUSLY Executive manager, strategy and marketing, Host-Plus Executive director marketing, Industry Funds Management Director client services, The Shannon Company Strategy director, TrademarkDM Marketing manager business solutions, Zurich Australia Strategic marketing manager, AXA Australia Various marketing roles, ANZ…

Q: “I’ve read many biographies of successful people and one thing that regularly comes up is that the successful person has had a mentor in the past. Is it beneficial to connect with a personal mentor to be successful? How does one find a mentor?” Mentorship used to be a common practice in life, so much so that we barely noticed it was happening. It’s only by comparing how we now live, communicate and work, that it becomes apparent how much we previously relied on mentors. When I was growing up, I learned how to cook from my mum. I had teachers at school and university who guided me towards my career. I had managers in my early career who helped shape me and primed me for future challenges and…

Designing standard In Switzerland, my home away from home, just about every invoice you receive – be it from the plumber, phone company, rental agency or even a parking fine – comes on a standardised light orange coloured form. Want a new street number to put on your house? Then I hope you like silver numbers on a square blue background. At first, this and the many other conformist approaches, which are common throughout much of Europe, bemused me. Then I realised how easy it was to find houses, since the numbering system was so consistent – and not the hodgepodge of colour, size and styles we have in Australia. Similarly, bills became a breeze since the information was neatly presented in the same way no matter with whom you…