Think. Story. Experience.

Off the radar

It's summer in New York City.

It's hellishly humid.

Manhattan stinks like an open sewer.

Anyone with the time and money to escape the city is long gone.

The rest of us are left behind, stumbling along sweatily.

It has been no time to keep a blog up to date.

Online/offline mishing and mashing

Without wishing to seem too Guardian-focused (or Twitter-obsessed)...a nice example of how online social media is most interesting when it has an impact in the offline world...

Some refreshing honesty

In a world where everyone seems to be encouraged to talk themselves up, it's great to read some really honest self-criticism. It gives you so much more confidence about a person's ability to grow and develop.

Stuart Pearce is a former international footballer who now manages England's Under-21 team. His name has recently been thrown around as a potential future England manager. Here's how he responded in a recent press conference...

"I'm a manager that has been in control of a team for maybe 150 matches over a four-year period. That is ridiculously lightly raced as a manager. Very lightly experienced. I've got a long-term plan that I keep to myself. The one thing I can tell you is that today I haven't got enough experience by any means. The England manager's job is the pinnacle of anyone's career. When I look at Fabio [Capello, the current England manager] every day and watch him work, I realise how inept I am as a manager."

Internal tribe, branded behaviour, and customer experience

Zappos.com is a company I find fascinating, and a great piece in Inc. Magazine gave me some fresh insights into its success story...

NARRATIVE. Everyone at Zappos gets a copy of a book of essays published every year. The essays talk about the company's culture and are written by each individual Zappos employees. Every year they all contribute a new essay to the book.

COMMITMENT. After a four-week training course, all new Zappos employees are offered $2,000 to leave. That's right...not $2,000 to stay, but $2,000 to leave. It's how Zappos weed out the committed from the waiverers.

EXPERIENCE. Zappos does not compete on range or price (although both are good), it competes on customer experience. From trying to get your shoes to you before you expect them to arrive, to empowering its employees to be themselves on every call, Zappos is building loyalty through experience. Like so much that is powerful these days, it's a low-measurability, high-pay-off strategy.  

INTERNAL TRIBE. When a company creates a culture that is tribal in its quality, where people intrinsically understand the brand and they way they need to behave to fulfil its promise, something extraordinary happens. Customers start to 'feel' the brand in every interaction. The emotional connection increases exponentially. The article in Inc. tells a story that sums it up for me...

"In his speeches, Hsieh (Zappos CEO) likes to point out that Zappos does not have specific policies for dealing with each customer service situation. He claims that the company's culture allows it to do extraordinary things. I saw him make this point earlier this year in New York City, when he told a story about a women whose husband died in a car accident after she had ordered boots for him from Zappos. The day after she called for ask for help with the return, she received a flower delivery. The call center rep had ordered the flowers without checking with a supervisor and billed them to the company."

Culture clubs

The more you engage with the ways the world has changed, the more you realise that the culture, spirit, ethos, behaviour, and drive of organisations and the groups of individuals within them are the only things that really matter. Whether you're talking about a hotel chain, an airlines, a search engine, or a political party, everything else flows from there.  

The more you shift your sights from promotion and persuasion (old marketing) to innovation and improvement (new marketing), the more you realise that it is people who will make (or break) the difference every time.

And the more that you sit in meetings with clients who boast of the dysfunctionality of their organisations, as if they are proud of the limitations their culture places upon them, the more you realise that the biggest favour you could do them would be to fix their culture.

This piece on Manchester United from the Guardian, in the lead-up to the European Cup Final next week, sums up the spirit that great sporting teams so often manage to create, but which businesses and brands so often lack. If you want to pick out one quote that tells you everything that's right about Manchester United's culture, and that's probably wrong with yours, try this line from Patrice Evra, United's French left back, talking about the importance of the United story to him...

"It is always hard to put on that shirt because every day when you do you are putting the story on your back."

That's so 20th Century...

The front page of the New York Times today carries a story about ConAgra frozen pot pies. In 2007, the product was responsible for 15,000 people falling ill with salmonella.

Two years later, the NY Times reports, ConAgra still haven't been able to figure out which ingredient was responsible for poisoning people, so their new packaging simply advises people to check the internal temperature of the 69-cent pie with a meat thermometer!

The paper puts it well, saying the ConAgra is making consumers responsible for the "kill step". I just find the idea of asking consumers to cope like this unbelievable, and so 20th century!

Killed by its own success? Probably not, unfortunately...

Interesting piece on The Times newspaper's technology blog about how Twitter is about to get assaulted by a wave of marketing-driven nonsense.

Given that Twitter appears to be built on nonsense in the first place (with rare, cute exceptions, like my local coffee shop in New York, City Bakery, which tweets to its community when newly-hot cookies come out of the oven), the addition of a layer of marketing bullshit will probably do it no harm at all.

Fighting back against the pollution that is outdoor advertising

I love this mission statement for the Public Ad Campaign...

Public Ad Campaign acts on the assumption that public space and the public's interaction with that space is a vital component of our city's health. By visually altering and physically interacting with the public environment, residents become psychologically invested in their community.

Outdoor advertising is the primary obstacle to open public communications. By commodifying public space, outdoor advertising has monopolized the surfaces that shape our shared space. Private property laws protect the communications made by outdoor advertising while systematically preventing public usage of that space.

In an effort to illuminate these issues, Public Ad Campaign chronicles the activities of artists intent on challenging these relationships, as well as other contemporary issues in outdoor advertising and public space.

Through bold acts of civil disobedience we hope to air our grievances in the court of public opinion and witness our communities regain control of the space they occupy.

Will honesty pay?

London's Evening Standard newspaper has realised that it has lost touch (socially, politically, tonally)with its readership, says Roy Greenslade in the Guardian. That's not the interesting bit.

The more interesting thing is how the Standard has responded...by very publicly saying sorry. It's a fascinating (and unprecedented approach), but surely can only be the start.

The really interesting part of this will be to see if and how they follow the apology with action...

Can't talk right now...

This is just a quick heads-up that, in amongst all the moving to New York business, I may not get to blog much in the next couple of weeks. Hopefully I'll at least be storing up plenty of thoughts to get on with when time and life allow. Plus I already have some material just waiting to get blogged...from how to 'do' strategy to the relevance of film production design to marketing. Oh and another rant about the problem with marketing's obsession with campaigns.

So stand by...I'll be back soon. With only a trace of a Noo Yoik accent.