What? No website?

It seems inconceivable to me that as we settle into the second decade of the 21st century some companies still don’t have a website – or if they do, they haven’t opened it and updated it for years.

Yet, over the summer holiday break when I had time to Google around looking for products and services, I was appalled at the virtual dead end streets and closed shopfronts I wandered past with my credit card. Given the cobwebs I saw and the lazy reliance on directories such as truelocal.com.au (great idea but no personality), I’m not surprised that the rapid growth in online purchasing went mainly to overseas retailers last year – at least they have 21st century websites.

Race to the bottom

It beggars belief that the ACCC continues to disregard the monopolistic tactics of Australia’s big two supermarkets when every supplier one speaks to tells a story about being “rogered”. If you think it’s an isolated phenomenon see the Sydney Morning Herald report here.

I was talking to an Australian winemaker this week who was wringing his hands about the latest treatment by Woollies. Having absorbed for several years a one case free in every 12 promotional deal, he was told last month (that’s right told)  that the new terms of trade were $15,000 upfront for every wine label he supplied (about $60,000 in cash in his case for the privilege to supply) and a double up of promo stock to one case free in every six cases sold. Take it or leave it! This highly respected company that I would rank in the Top 50 producers in the country, who has worked tirelessly for more than 20 years to build his brand and stretch his patient capital,  told the big supermarket to get nicked. But of course he now has more pallets of good wine to quit via cellar door or his online mail order system (which by the way delivers a 45% better margin).

Social media – it’s a worry

An IBM study has found that marketing managers are worried – not just about post-GFC sales – but social media.

“Only 26 percent of chief marketing officers track blogs and just 40 percent track any online communications, while 82 percent still rely on traditional market research to shape marketing strategies”, according to the study. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/11/socialmedia-ibm-idUSL5E7LA3JO20111011

Vale Steve Jobs – 1955-2011

I never met him but like millions round the world I felt I knew Steve Jobs.

In July 1993, on the day before I left my first career as a newspaper editor and embarked on my own business in communications I walked through the door of the only Apple store in Adelaide and was greeted by the most exciting range of technology I had ever seen. I wasn’t a luddite – I had been using PC based newspaper production terminals since the mid 1980s – but until then I had only heard about Mac.

Telstra Goes Psycho 



Look it’s easy to be critical of big brands. They sit there like constipated mammoths waiting for someone to poke a stick at them. And if they reach out with a back-hander they are damned.

But after another horror rollercoaster share market ride, it is only inevitable that there will be many emaciated shareholders asking why Telstra spent $3 million of their potential dividend on a re-brand last week.
We are all cognizant that a brand is not just a logo. But let’s start with that anyway. Mercifully DDB (the lucky agency which got the big gig) didn’t suggest a change to the wavy T which has become as familiar to Gen Ys as the old 1990s Telecom was to Baby Boomers. As we all know in the branding world, throwing babies out with bathwater can lead to deathly silences, polite coughing and sideways glances (remember the national days of mourning after the loved and trusted Commonwealth Bank decided to shove a black wedge into the side of a yellow square).

Where there’s smoke

There have been plenty of squeals from Australia's tobacco companies in the last few months and regardless of whether you love or hate a durry, they have had quite a bit to smoke about.

If the Federal Government's plan to introduce plain packaged cigarettes to the market goes ahead, it will be the first test case in the world where a political system can devalue a brand. No-one has had the courage in the UK, US, France or Germany - all countries where smoking persists and the health sector spends billions trying to stop it.

Sideshow and Spin

Gotta love President Obama. "We're not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers. We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We've got better stuff to do."

This is how he responded to the media hysteria a month or so ago which tried to prove Donald Trump’s proposition that the country’s First Citizen had been born in some place other than the US. Even when the birth certificate was found and displayed there were some doubters. As some commentators joked, most Americans wouldn’t have been exactly sure where Hawaii was geographically anyway (despite Pearl Harbour).  Anyway Obama did have better stuff to do – take out his nemesis Osama Bin Laden.

Integrate

It was I guess about a decade ago when the vague notion of integrated marketing communication became an acknowledged form of professional service. It was the late 1990s, about the time when many advertising agencies started gobbling up graphic design agencies and PR firms to build their competitiveness in an ad-weary marketplace.

As a former journalist and newspaper editor who had deliberately founded a strategic communications company (not a PR company) in 1993, it wasn’t exactly an epiphany. I had always felt uneasy about the one dimensional “media only” approach used by so many PR companies. I have no problem with acknowledging media (newspapers, magazines, radio, television) as an important channel in communicating with mass audiences but I doubted whether it was necessarily the most important channel or could stand by itself as a sole strategic tool. Apart from all the changes and threats to the Fourth Estate that have happened over the period of owning my company, mass media remains a powerful influence on people’s lives and there is no doubt that an acknowledgement of an organisation or product by a journalist (or even in an un-bylined column) has high credibility. But achieving that tacit third party endorsement is very much a hit and miss affair – as it should be if journos are observing their “without fear or favour” principles.

Surprise, surprise

Ever since Adam and Eve (or their evolutionary equivalent) it has become well understood that humans will always respond to positives rather than negatives. Apples and sex or boring eternal happiness? A no brainer.

Earnest psychologist Pavlov proved it centuries later when his eager canine salivated to the ring of a bell proving that even the suggestion of food is enough to elicit a visceral response. And of course every Saturday night in every city of the world pleasure is worshipped as a preferable alternative to pain.

Message in a Bottle

It’s elections which bring out the best and worst in high performance communications professionals.

I guess it’s like your local Holden motor mechanic getting a once-in-a-lifetime chance to work in the pits at a Formula One Grand Prix. You are on fire – Über-confident – with every bit of professional training straining at the synapses to be exercised. But sometimes you can just over do it, torque that nut a little bit too tight and snap!