Innholdsfortegnelse for October - November 2019 i Marketing

Everything’s a little bit upside-down. As we industrialised, manufacturing and transport became more affordable and manageable. Big business grew; big business leaders grew complacent. Soon they were able to visualise items ordered, manufactured, shipped and sold as figures on a piece of paper, so it’s no surprise they started thinking about products and the people who bought them as numbers too. As making the numbers on the page look better became their job, they lost touch with the people and started getting a little risky. Cutting corners, slashing costs, losing that commitment to quality and reliability. Face-to-face service was replaced by hold music, long waits and customer dissatisfaction. The numbers began to look very nice indeed. But these heady days weren’t to last. The risk didn’t pay off. Challenger brands…

MELANIE PORTELLI While an in-house advertising team will generally stay clear of all things risk, tip my hat to the gang at Koala mattresses. Since at least 2017 its ‘Aussie battler’ tone of voice has stayed true, and it has been upping the ante on the provocation meter. This year it launched its ’How good are sickies’, campaign which caught my ear during a well-timed morning radio slot. From my perspective, the concept shines in its simplicity: “Koala mattresses are so comfy you will want to take a sickie, and that’s OK.” The film feels like a Meat and Livestock Aussie tribute with a dusting of Vegemite and I would say does a decent enough job in execution. Koala is almost normalising the sickie as evidenced with lines including “The…

There is often a gap between what we say and what we do. You, for example, may say you are going to take up dancing lessons and find that six months have miraculously passed and you still haven’t Googled ‘tap dancing for adults’. This is nothing new – for years, psychologists have documented what is known as the intention-behaviour gap and sought strategies to better align what we say we are going to do and what we actually end up doing. In the same way, organisations intent on innovating are stuck in an intention-behaviour gap when it comes to a customer-driven approach to innovation. This is not for lack of trying. Most organisations do truly want to create better solutions that actually meet their customer needs. The problem lies in…

No,” says Adam Ferrier, chief thinker at Thinkerbell, “I disagree with the premise”. Upon asking the question – ‘is marketing an inherently risky practice?’ – to marketers on both the agency and brand side, it became clear that every one had a different interpretation. According to Ferrier, marketing as a practice is at least not as risky as it used to be. “Marketing used to be a lot riskier than it is [now],” he says. “Back in the day, marketers used to look at agency people” and they would say “‘trust me’, and that was the end of the conversation.” In the past 10 to 15 years, however, marketing sciences began to “infiltrate”, arming the industry with demonstrable tactics, strategies and bullshit detectors. According to Ferrier, marketing’s enlightenment period took…

On a recent long haul flight, I was scrolling through movie options to find something to help me sleep. I ended up choosing a documentary. Unfortunately, as the movie progressed, it felt more likely that I’d never sleep again. The movie was Free Solo , which chronicles Alex Honnold’s 2017 attempt to climb the El Capitan peak in Yosemite National Park with no ropes, harnesses or protective equipment. My palms were clammy for more than an hour as I watched Honnold scale the 915- metre vertical granite rock face, where the tiniest slip would result in certain death. I couldn’t get my head around Honnold’s unnatural tolerance for risk. Deaths in the free climbing community are common, yet still these climbers search for greater challenges and riskier climbs. To me,…

As a kid I was always a risk taker, I was a sucker for peer pressure. “Jump over the hedge Chris, you’ll be right”, and so I would, and nine times out of 10 I was alright. Don’t get me wrong, I was scared, always scared, but the adrenaline and excitement would take over and outweigh the fear. Then came the time it did go a little wrong. We were jumping off a garage roof on to a mattress, and each time the mattress would get further away. As I went for the final leap, I knew I wasn’t going to make it; my body froze, and I panicked. Rather than put my hands out in front to try and break my fall, I forgot and cracked my head on…

Providing advice about collection, processing, interpretation and meaningful deployment of data has become a common discussion between clients and agencies. However, more than a real necessity aiming at addressing a specific challenge or embracing an opportunity, gathering too much data will often turn an asset into a liability. First things first. Information (or data) is not power, knowledge is. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the more information a company or person possesses, the harder it is to create, manage and use knowledge for their competitive advantage. This begins with the fact that our brains were made to think, not compute. We are explanation-seeking creatures. We tend to think that everything has an identifiable cause and we grab the most apparent one as the explanation. From overstretched correlations to imagined…

NEOBANKS – UP AND COMERS NEW NEOBANKS ARE POPPING UP EVERY WEEK IN AUSTRALIA WITH DESIGN-LED, YOUTH-FOCUSED STRATEGIES.  Neobank – a form of direct banking that relies entirely on digital technology; customers interact with neobanks solely via smartphones and personal computers. the big four banks pull $30 billion in annual profit Source: The Sydney Morning Herald WHO’S PLAYING? 86 400 the first to operate in Australia owned by Cuscal XINJA Australia’s first independent neobank plans to launch home loans in 2020 UP debit cards designed to be ‘Instagrammable’ users may enable all charges to be rounded up to the nearest dollar, with the excess automatically transferred into a savings account FACEBOOK IS SORT OF OF A BANK NOW... Libra currency planned to launch in mid 2020 backed by a pool…

As I ramp up an effort to refresh our report on top technology trends to watch, one of the things I find most interesting is how technologies build upon and accelerate each other. For one thing, we have to wrestle as a society with a number of moral dilemmas that I consider part of digital ethics. Facebook Inc (inclusive of the Facebook app, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook’s Audience Network, and its other apps, services and hardware) is the best example. It has become a new world superpower, but instead of nukes, it combines technologies in order to accelerate disruption and expand its influence at a scale we simply can’t grasp. This is forcing us to pay attention to digital ethics and wonder what the new reality that Facebook is helping…

While ‘no risk, no reward’ has become an axiom of creative thinking, the behaviours that we would normally associate with such an approach have never strongly filtered into the modern marketing mainstream. Local brands, for the most part, throughout this decade have tended to take a conservative approach to their actions, conscious that constant scrutiny through new media means that smaller, incremental changes are safer and easier to navigate. When was the last time a major Australian brand took a significant marketing risk? That is, a genuine leap of faith, that came with some danger. While some of the advertising has raised eyebrows from time to time, it appears an inertia to not offend, signal virtue and regress to the relative safety of the mean dominates contemporary strategic thinking. Our…