You will be familiar with MECE, mutually exclusive – collectively exhaustive.
And if you have read the blog, you will be familiar with Stellar®, the identity tool. Stellar was created MECE.
It consists of a circle of 12 nodal points such that each two adjoining nodes represent the proximal, mutually exclusive, non-redundant, logical concepts in a collectively exhaustive, functional circularity defining organizational identity.
Highly condensed but hopefully rigorous. Give us your feedback.
IBM it is of course one of the great iconic brands, once the world’s preeminent company, still a global force and with refreshed aspirations for the 21st-century as it approaches its centennial in 2011.
In November 2009, their chief marketing officer, Jon Iwata, one of the most distinguished marketers in America, gave a speech to a distinguished gathering of professional marketers in New York. In his speech he laid out not simply his thinking but the actions and purposes of IBM, the thinking and strategy that he explained that they were engaged in. It is important content, and claims to be, because it does more than simply describe the strategy, it claims to recognise a new role for marketing, and indeed for HR, a new profession.
This is entirely in line with the thinking that the Centre for Integrated Marketing has been standing for since 2002. In the inaugural lecture of the first chair of integrated marketing in the world, Prof Angus Jenkinson, he spoke about a new vision. For example, speaking about the launch of the newly merged Lloyds TSB bank, he said: “Truth to say, the idea and its resonance is worth billions; the investment question is how far such advertising would and could be effective in implanting this idea [ the new bank's commitment to care for its customers]…it matters to all stakeholders, and in particular customers and employees. How they subsequently think and feel will translate into commitment, behaviours and equity. I want to emphasise that I particularly include the employee here alongside the customer as an audience for this communication.” He went on to say that, by itself, the advertising would not work: “…the advertising needs to be backed up by the substance and truth of the brand and its products and organisation”.
In the speech, and subsequently in the research of the Centre there has been an emphasis on the tools and ideas that enable this to actually work.
IBM’s marketing leader articulates how IBM is approaching this, with an agenda that aims to engage the hearts and minds of more than 400,000 people globally. The new profession explicitly engages with both marketing (and marketing communication) and HR related issues and also articulates a new possibility for agency contribution.
It is a vindication for the importance of ideas as organising and leading principles within the organisation, a vindication of the idea of the brand as more than simply a communication device, but rather a force whose home is in the system of the organisation, and of the unique values of the organisation as core to the creation of unique value.
Do read it, and more importantly reflect on it.
The content is entirely Mr Iwata’s, and you can read it elsewhere online too, but here it is formatted as a very readable pdf.
One of the most potent aspects of Stellar is the way that uses value or organising ideas as a new leadership tool. Considerable support for this is provided in Margaret J. Wheatley’s influential book Leadership and the New Science. Amongst other statements, she quotes Robert Haas, former CEO of Levi Strauss & Co, who calls these “conceptual controls” and goes on to say: “It’s the ideas of the business that are controlling… not some manager with authority”. That is precisely the principle that we adopted in the development of Stellar.
As Wheatley confirms, this has the effect of both channelling or guiding the organisation and liberating its creative ability.
According to Margaret J. Wheatley, “Companies organized around a strong identity provide a good example of how self reference works to create greater stability and autonomy (see Collins and Porras 1993; Blanchard and O’Connor 1997). When an organization knows who it is, what its strengths are, and what it is trying to accomplish, it can respond intelligently to changes from its environment. Whatever it decides to do is determined by this clear sense of self, not just because a new trend or market has appeared. The organisation does not get locked into supporting certain products or business units just because they exist, or following after every fad just because it shows up. The presence of a clear identity makes the organisation less vulnerable to its environment; it develops greater freedom to decide how it will respond.”
Source: Wheatley, Margaret J. (2006) Leadership and the New Science — Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. Berret-Koehler Publishers, Inc, San Francisco. ISBN 978-1-57675-344-6
Service in Integrated Marketing/Integrated Service Marketing
Premise: there is no feature of the integrated marketing model that is not dependant on the service principle.
The core principle in Integrated Marketing is service:-
We all know that we need research to give us insight. We also know we can’t always trust the research.
Both the Stella Reassuringly Expensive ads based on the Jean de Fleurette movie and the Heineken policeman’s feet ad (“refreshes the parts…”) had research that said they would not work. Of course, both worked stunningly well.
How do you judge research?
A common answer might be that you have to go with your gut instinct or experience. I think that dodges the issue. What informs gut instinct and experience?
I think you could have brought in some very experienced people from the four corners of the marketing and advertising world (including perhaps the researchers themselves) to look at these research results and asked them what their gut instinct said. Probably, you would have got a variety of answers and you would be no further forward. They might even have agreed with the research.
It’s not just a question of feel. I believe that the answer is that you have to understand the brand.
This is what informs feel, gut instinct, judgment.
True, the purpose of research like this is to help you to understand the brand and if you start out naive and knowing nothing you might have to use the best research you have and the best experience you have and proceed by trial and error.
But in more mature brands and with more experience of working with them, brand knowledge, brand feel becomes a reference point, a north star against which you can calibrate new research. All understanding, all concepts arise from the interconnection of different ideas and knowledge, just as a Roman arch holds itself up by its own structure.
That’s one of the reasons why I deprecate the rapid turnover of senior marketers in brands.
Mckinsey have recently added a new consultancy appraoch based on a research model called IPS. I think it’s flawed.
It is reported by Jens-Olaf Berwig, Nathan Marston, Lauri Pukkinen, and Lothar Stein who explain how it works: “we compare the revenue growth of the company to the overall market and attribute any out-performance (sic) to the company’s ability to innovate”. That is pretty much it.
That seems a little flimsy to me. In my work with clients I have seen many other aspects of great business management, like clarity of ideas and persistent focus and avoiding managing tampering and quality improvements that easily lead to faster than than market performance. That is what they are designed to do. You can call it all innovation if you want – it would be to some CEOs – but I don’t think it fits the general idea of innovation.
The authors also say they “…look for revenues generated by new reporting segments within a company—either from new initiatives or from acquisitions that go beyond mere geographic expansion. This is what we call market creation (if the segment is new to the world) or market entry (if it is only new to the company). We also take into account revenues from acquisitions that lead to new products and activities, even if they are not broken out as a new reporting segment.”
Again, that seems optimistic to me. Too many acquistions represent an absence of creativity inside the company so top management and their bankers turn to acquistion to provide temporary relief. You can buy innovation but that does not make you innovative.
I think this falls short of McKinsey’s normal standards – maybe it’s in the reporting, maybe the model.
Rajesh Chandy, Brigitte Hopstaken, Om Narasimhan and Jaideep Prabhu report from an outstanding study* of pharma innovation that focus in your core competence area on…
1. a moderate number of important ideas
2. with a moderate level of development speed
…is optimum. High speed can kill and too many ideas can yield less.
They found that the optimal speed is about nine years from idea patenting to drug approval and targets too far below or above this level can be detrimental. Also, firms that focus in technical fields where they have experience and expertise do better at converting ideas into successful drugs. Finally, firms that focus on important ideas have higher conversion ability than firms that don’t.
Two wise sayings straight from Buddha seem to apply:
* Rajesh K. Chandy, Brigitte Hopstaken, Om Narasimhan, and Jaideep C. Prabhu (2006) From Invention to Innovation: Conversion Ability in Product Development, Journal of Marketing Research (August 2006). Winner, 2006 American Marketing Association TechSig Best Paper Award
Joshua Bell, the violin maestro, played incognito for 45 minutes in a Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007 as part of a social experiment (organised by the Washington Post) about perception, taste and consumer priorities.
He played some of the most complex and beautiful pieces in the classical canon, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days previously, he had sold out a theatre in Boston with seats averaging $100 each.
While he played in the metro, only six people stopped to listen, all briefly. However, a number of children tried to stop, but parents, without exception, moved their children along quickly. About 20 people donated, but most continued to walk at their normal pace. Bell collected just $32.
The Post’s subsequent article won them a Pulitzer.
So what does this mean? Could it be any of the following…
Thoughts please.