Grammar and Business Development

I was doing an exercise to create a guideline on how to structure a business develop plan (for the records, it’s not finished). Doing a research I found a very interesting, well-layouted and comprehensive website/blog by Kilian Nakamura (www.kilian-nakamura.com). Among much useful information, there was one that particularly drew my attention.
Japan’s society is aging fast: By 2025, more than 30% of the population are going to be 65 or older. Japanese seniors are:
The most affluent demographic in Japan* Spending large sums on education, recreation, transport and communication
And so I started to wonder about grammar and how it could help business developers to go beyond the sentences above.

Subject: Japanese seniors
Descriptive sentence: most affluent demographic in Japan
Verb: spending
Direct object: large sums
Indirect object: on education, recreation, transport and communication

What could I ask myself to make a complete sentence and help me to develop a new plan to approach these people?

How to increase their expenditure?
Should they be pummeled more?
Should I offer new packages?
Should there be new ways to sell?
Should new products be introduced?
If so, which ones?
Should the company go vertical and offer new categories?

And this is just the beginning

Think "development" in business

Once Peter Drucker said marketing and innovation are the matrix forces of any business. Today I kept myself thinking by the thousandth time how the marketing world simply ignores this statement these days.

I see a constantly increasing difference between marketing and innovation among some companies. As a matter of fact, I see 2 types of marketing innovation for 2 different types of companies regarding marketing innovation:

Marketing innovation

On demand – when marketing is sparkled through a demand, necessity or anything that didn’t start within the ones responsible for marketing strategies (department-structured or not);

Natural – doesn’t need any “outside” encouragement or reason to start. It comes from an idea, an insight or simply a suggestion not necessarily attached to a situation. Unlike many people and marketers think, this initiative doesn’t have to come from the marketing staff.

Companies’ marketing

Whole flow – companies which lack a marketing department. Sometimes salespeople and/or administration personnel are responsible for marketing strategies. In this case they manage the whole flow of analyzing a demand by the market/customers, creating a strategy/solution, and implementing. This situation might happen either on new markets/products/plans or existing problems/gaps. It’s informal, it’s almost entirely concentrated on 1 person, it’s not all the time professional, but it’s marketing.

Total recall – big, fat, stiff marketing departments. They’ve got the money, the means, the structure and the professionals, but are not starters, only follow instructions from other departments. This is quite common to the big players, companies, and businesses in the market. This is also common to marketing companies (consultancies, media and advertising agencies).

How many companies do you know in the second category? Probably hundreds. Companies with a formal marketing department are frequently hostages of product departments. I wonder how close they put “create” and “innovate” together.

Hajimeru. This is the Japanese word for “to start”. Many meanings follow “to start”, including “to make”. But the best one I found for this case is below.

Allocate and then initialize
www.millennium.berkeley.edu/docs/mpi/gm_manual/gm_18.html

Reason why? Innovating is not only initializing something. Innovating is above creation and more complex.

Gal. Marketing

My first year at university was marked by many new lessons. One of them I remember the most was being or not being a generalist in marketing. Having the ability to understand and dominate different disciplines is the key to plan and execute marketing. I totally bought the idea.

But time’s passing by and every day it seems to appear a new and more specific position within marketing departments. You can find among others business analyst, marketing assistant, marketing administrative, marketing specialist, manager of new markets, online manager etc.

For me it is especially annoying to see companies are going so specific on marketing HR. Customers should be segmented, that is true, but for marketers too? Have they ever thought about the implications of creating a marketing Babel Tower?

It is clear specialists have wider control over their environments, but the general overview of marketing strategies loses a lot with such segmented professionals.

Unless...

I saw a very interesting quote on a website the other day, allegedly by David Ogilvy (one of the foremost people in creativity matters ever):

"It isn't creative unless it sells."

Just for the records, I totally support this.

Marketers, intelligent life and close encounters in marketing 2

This is a continuation of the previous article. I just meant to compare the movie and marketing for many reasons:

• The core of marketing is not advertising a product (is it clear ad agencies?). Neither is promoting, pricing or distributing. The core of marketing is to sell a product. Sell more, sell better, sell frequent. Get used to it. A true marketer is not an artist in essence, but a salesman;
• Remind you: without selling to a customer, either “B” (business), “R” (retailer), “S” (supplier), “I” (individual), “P” (peer) or “C” (consumer) there’s no marketing.
• Being effective in marketing has little to do with big budgets, and has more to do about management. A wealthy bank account helps a lot, but don’t fool yourself with the idea one needs to be rich to make marketing;
• Don’t think just because you’re a marketer every single plan you put on the table will work. Deal with failure possibilities before they knock on your door;
• Selling a plan to the senior management once (“the money owners”) is easier than selling a product to a customer twice;
• Your loyalty as a marketer is to the customer, not your boss; it can also be read as “the customer is your boss, not your manager”;
• Spend more time with customers than computers who tell you an amount of data. Machines are very important to compile data, but your final target is actually human and won’t tell everything so easily. Besides, computers don’t make decisions (yet);
• If you have a fabulous idea for a marketing plan, great! Now prove it before putting it into action. Searching for market information is a good start;
• Hiding behind communication-only strategies is marketing cowardice; “the ends will justify the means” (Machiavelli), not the opposite. Communication is part of a whole. There’s no reason to desperately advertise without a purpose, a strategy and a plan.
• Watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s worthy.

Marketers, intelligent life and close encounters in marketing

Fortunately for marketers, customers are not the same anymore. There are thousands of ways of reaching them. And yet, we’re getting distant and distant. I’m talking specifically to companies or individuals who are responsible for elaborating marketing plans. If you or your company doesn’t prepare a formal plan (yearly, quarterly, bi-annually etc) jump this and the next posting.

Being a marketer and trying to understand customers is becoming very similar to the Close Encounters of the Third Kind movie. We, humans (marketers) know there’s intelligent life (customers) outside of our little planet (companies), but we’re not 100% confident yet. Some are sceptical to search for answers, others to accept the fact. We, humans are superior to anything outside our planet. Our planet rocks and we, humans know everything.

However, we have had signs of the intelligent life existence (prospects), some people even made contact with them (sales), but the out-of-this planet forms of life barely expose themselves. Now we’re curious, and must go after answers.

Then, after finding scientific bases (planning and strategy) and collecting enough samples (quantitative research and focus group), we, humans elaborate colourful and musical gizmos (print, TV ads, jingles etc) to attract them to our planet. For those who watched the movie, you know how it ends.

Initially the intelligent form of life shows interest for our gizmos (products). They can do whatever we tell them do to do (response, direct marketing). They experiment (free sample perhaps, giveaways), and even let some of us to go with them and understand their culture (customer services, ombudsman etc). They threaten to leave. We insist (pummel, up-sell, cross-sell etc). Suddenly, they close their spaceship doors and leave without a trace (churn).

Will they ever come back (reactivation)? We, humans will never know. Will they ever remember us (recall)? We, humans will never know. Will we ever get to deeply know them (segmentation)? We, humans will never know. Do we care? We, humans are apparently learning (CRM).

What we, humans know for sure is that our initial questions haven’t been answered. Worse, they will remain, instigate our curiosity, and soon restart the vicious cycle of not understanding the intelligent life outside our little planet.

Planning with Pivots

MS Excel has a fabulous, easy and fast tool for planning: it’s called PivotTable. I discovered it a couple of years ago and hasn’t stopped using ever since. But now I decided to turn PivotTable into a standard procedure for planning. I posted an article a while ago about the necessity of using data from different sources and a 3-D comparison. Pivot tables are great for concentrating large chunks of data segmented into different fields.

An example.

I wanted to map and understand purchase behavior of 30,000 customers. The client didn’t know anything about it neither used it properly. They had all the data, but didn’t plan anything over it. Some of the fields in the 27 MB-file were DOB, Postal Code, order amount, customer number, gender etc.

To find the pivot table control, go to the Data tab and select PivotTable and PivotChart. There, Excel will ask you a few details of your selection data. I often used the first option Microsoft Excel list or database, but you might have other options. In the end, create a PivotTable.

After your command, the computer will create a list with all the fields your data contains. From there you can control the most different comparisons. It allows you to sum or count quantities, among other features. This is perfect for any kind of data, from sales (you can have a total breakdown) or people (total amount of customers for instance).

I crossed and compared everything I could. My own data feast. In my case, 10 minutes after starting, results showed me male customers spend more than women and that some regions are more profitable than others. The table also told me how old my customers were and how much each age band used to spend. Guess what I’m going to do with all these conclusions?

Pivot tables are all about what computers were built for: concentrate on strategy and let the machine does the “dirty” work for you. Maybe I’m becoming a marketing geek, but looking at all that privileged information had a terrific impact on my planning beliefs.

A little of philosophy: results will never be new because they’ve already happened. However, the way you discover and how you will use them is what transforms regular marketers into masters of strategy. Dig deeper to find the treasure.