Some Friday fun here especially for those football fans who are having premiership withdrawal symptoms. This is an excellent use of associating the star with the brand. Video Stream.
Featured Posts
Finance For Buying A Business Raising finance for any purchase is never easy, but the current climate makes raising large amounts of cash particularly difficult. With banks very risk averse, finding £100,000 + loans at a reasonable rate is a struggle. The main way out of the challenge is to recognise that risk is the concern and...
Getting the Contract Right When Buying A Business Ask any professional advisor involved in buying businesses and they will tell you that the contract is of critical importance. Of course the size of the transaction means that you need to make sure that your interests are well represented in the formal expression of the deal. You also need to know that...
Business Advice When Buying A Business Our team at the business advice blog has just finished our weekly review of the post bag and the most popular topics this week has once again been buying a business. We havev received over a hundred queries this week with people looking for advice on all aspects of this theme. I guess it is not surprising...
Getting Loans For Buying A Business As we move out of this recession (we hope!), some business leaders are starting to think about investing in expansion again. Still others are loking to get back into the market in new businesses. One option that is a shortcut to both of these objectives is to find a business to buy. While it does offer...
Three Men Were In A Bar......(fiction) Martin took a moment to look closely at his two friends and he began to wonder how things had ever got this bad. Anyone looking at the three o them would assume that they were three wealthy businessmen enjoying the end of a day’s golf. Certainly they all looked the part, but things are not always as...
I met another marketing consultant last week and he spent a LOT of our time together telling me about his frustration with a current client. This gentleman runs a small trading company which is moderately successful and has lots of potential. He is working with my friend to expand his business into a new product market and they seem quite close to a launch date. The frustration comes from the fact that the client is obsessed with the name that they give to the venture. This is holding up the launch project, hence the tension between the two of them.
I have come across this problem before in marketing consultancy projects and I naturally empathised with my learned colleague – the customer is not always right. We spent a long time discussing how the brand was much more than a name, and how it was better to launch and improve later than to delay things forever. Give me sufficient resources and I can make something named Cilit Bang a household name as a cleaning product, said we. Fatigue set in eventually and we moved on to talk about the Lions tour to South Africa, which proved to be a much more invigorating subject. However I was left with the feeling that we had somehow not fully cracked the marketing discussion by focussing on brand versus name. The business case did not seem compelling enough.
Then I came across a post by Randa Clay on the 80/20 rule in which she described our situation perfectly. The argument with the client should be about the time spent on each element of the project, the logic being that the product name can have some dedicated time, but only in proportion to the other elements that needed to be completed. The client may have an inflated view of how important the name was, but it could never justify being in the 80% of the resources category. Now that is a business case that you take to a non-marketer. Now is there anyone out there as happy as me to see Paul O’Connell captain the Lions again next Saturday?
We are constantly reminded of the issue of greenwash, as an audience of activists and green journalists watch businesses make green claims about their products and services with mounting scepticism. In some cases the resulting scorn is well deserved, while in other cases the intention is genuine, even if the effect is not perfectly sustainable.
So how can the public evaluate a green claim by a potential supplier? The obvious answer is the endorsement of the claim by a credible third party. Some potential providers have already stepped forward and they are starting to get set-up to offer such a service, but the attempts so far are less than convincing. Certainly, none of the current consummer surveys indicates that any of these people have gained any traction with end users as being credible sources in the way they would need to have.
Part of the problem is that offering an overall green claim certification is extremely broad. One organisation needs to cover areas as diverse as recycling of materials, polution, engine and process efficiency, sustainable agriculture, forestry and mining. Surely the task is too broad for one, two or even five organisations. I would prefer to see a model which is much closer to the FSC, which has dedicated itself to the preservation of forestry and has established itself as a credeible source in its niche. With a narrower brief, it has been able to become not only an effective campaigner for change in the furniture and the office products industries, but it has also helped to boost recycling and sustainable practice in those industries through it’s chain of custody program and FSC marque.
Faced with the problem of how to become established in this market space, I think the smart money will be on becoming an expert in one of the aspect of green and then moving into other sectors once you become a recognised brand. I also think that the market for this type of claim support is too immature to support one or more super players and that they will emerge through consolidation later. For now, we need strong focussed businesses with some consummer credibility.
Category : Business In General, General Thoughts, Marketing Advice, Small Businesses
It is interesting that in the midst of all the fuss around the integrity of UK politicians, that the fact that BA CEO has led his senior team in taking a months pay holiday to save the business money. Quite a stark contrast to the behavior of MPs, you might think. So how have the traditional press greeted this news?
Well there are several voices in the choir of commentries, but the overall melody has been soundly negative. The shrillest shriekers are those who pronounce on the downfall of the flag carrier and then reveal their motivation by mentioning “that time when they were stuck in Amsterdam.” Baser tones come from competing airlines, who have been quick to announce the demise of the business and then begging the government not to step in. The atonal journalistic chorus chime in with a variety of motifs which can all be summarised by “what a way to run an airline!”.
Now I personally have run several businesses, but I should add before I go any further, that I have never run an airline and all further comments of mine should be taken in that context.
British Airways is a business with a history of difficult industrial relations and of bitter disputes about pay and conditions which are always played out in the summer months. Specifically, the strikes usually start in mid-July. Add to that background the extraordinarily difficult trading conditions that the business is faced with, the last thing that BA needs now is a strike. I think that the managment at BA have show good leadership and foresight by leading by example, and by anticipating any problems that may arise next month by communicating the business conditions to employees well in advance. I also think that almost every other commentary that I have seen in the mainstream press has been either truculent, ill-informed or both.
Whether the management team succeed in averting a strike and minimising losses at the airline or not, I think they deserve more credit than they have had for their foresight and integrity. The alternatives are not pleasant:
- massive job losses for employees
- proof to fatcats who take the money while employees take the pain that the alternative will only get you criticism, so why not just get rich?
One of the features that has emerged in the business press, blogging sphere and seminar circuit is the pandemic of “How to thrive in a recession” features. Now I generally find that I have an internal compulsion to avoid such obvious bandwagoning, but after several weeks I recanted and read a few. My sample size is now over ten articles and I can confirm my dissappointment.
My conclusion is that most authors just wrote what they have written for several years and have just added the words recession and downturn a few times at the beginning and end of their pieces. You are probably familiar with the formula: start with a good plan and then implement it well. In this case it is start with a plan to survive the recession and then implement it well while preserving case. Call me a cynic, but that seems to be hardly worth a twitter, never mind a paid seminar. However there are people out there who are surviving the downturn by chargin others money to listen to this stuff.
The main problem I have with this is I believe that the approach is wrong. My experience is that the more trouble that you are in, the shorter your timeframe should become. If your business has three months operating cash left, then a review of your strategic plan is not a good way to spend your time. I have worked with several businesses in this position recently and the best approach has been to assess if there is anything wrong with your current focus and your approach to the market. For established businesses the answer will generally be “no”.
After that the emphasis should be on business development and cost saving. In business development you need to focus on finding as many ways as possible to generate leads. You need to make bold claims about your business and you need to shout about them as loudly as possible. You also need to find new ways to demonstrate your value added that are specific and impactful. You need to convert these leads by showing them that if they spend money with you, they will get a good return on their spend, whatever that return is in your market.
In these conditions any marketing consultant worth his salt will help you to focus on tough sales actions that produce a return soon, rather than on planning for the future.