Shooting the sugar plum fairy. Why advertising isn't to blame.

The headlines from the report into childhood obesity published today will be all about taxing fizzy drinks. A pretty daft idea that targets just one source of sugar on the basis that in one place, Mexico, a 'soda tax' managed to reduce consumption by about 6%. There's no evidence that this tax reduced obesity, which was the main reason for introducing the tax in the first place.

Others will explain better than I can why all this is pretty daft. Not least because childhood obesity is falling in the UK - as the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) reported recently. More to the point, the problem with all this is that there's precious little evidence supporting a link between being overweight or mildly 'obese' and mortality:

There is now extensive and convincing evidence that the greatest life expectancy is experienced by those who are classified as “Overweight”. In addition, there is no reliable evidence that there is any reduced expectancy even in those who are mildly obese (5). It is true that those who are seriously obese do have an increased mortality but the picture changes when the effect of physical fitness is incorporated.

I suspect there's little or no chance of the current government introducing a tax on fizzy drinks - the prime minister has ruled it out more than once and the dissenters to the proposal from the health select committee report were both Conservatives - here's Andrew Percy:

Andrew Percy, the Tory MP for Brigg and Goole who sits on the health committee told the paper Oliver’s suggestion is “patronising nonsense”.

“This is a classic nanny state reaction and it won’t work.

“Slapping 10p or 20p on a can of sugary drink won’t make people change their behaviour.”

However the committee's report makes a whole load of other proposals that target advertising and marketing activity - that shoot the messenger.

Promotional and marketing techniques for specific products or brands have the aim of achieving one main goal—increases in sales. This is achieved through old (eg TV advertising, programme sponsorship, cinema, radio and billboards) and new methods (eg social media, advergames and internet pop-ups), which are designed to influence our food choices by, for example, overriding our established eating habits, and taking advantage of others such as our desire to reduce costs. The intent can be to encourage us to switch between brands or products; or there may be an additional consequence of getting us to buy and consume more.

Now this argument - from Public Health England and unsupported by evidence - flies in the face of everything that we know about advertising, choice and the way communications shape our preferences and decisions. Firstly, it just isn't true that advertising's purpose is to increase sales (I'm taking this to mean increasing the size of the market - to sell more sweets or fizzy drinks rather than more of the advertisers sweets or fizzy drinks). Here's the most well know study into the effects of advertising:

This paper is concerned with testing for causation, using the Granger definition, in a bivariate time-series context. It is argued that a sound and natural approach to such tests must rely primarily on the out-of-sample forecasting performance of models relating the original (non-prewhitened) series of interest. A specific technique of this sort is presented and employed to investigate the relation between aggregate advertising and aggregate consumption spending. The null hypothesis that advertising does not cause consumption cannot be rejected, but some evidence suggesting that consumption may cause advertising is presented.

In simple terms, advertising doesn't create new demand and there's some suggestion that the reverse is true. Indeed advertising effects on demand are persistently weak:

Advertising effects appear to be so weak as to give little, if any, support for the Galbraithian view that advertisers exert powerful, manipulative effects upon the allocation of consumers' expenditure between products.

As a marketing professional this is pretty depressing - we've all watched Mad Men and read Vince Packard's 'Hidden Persuaders' and kidded ourselves that advertising somehow created the consumerist world we live in. The prosaic truth is that, as we knew in our hearts (and those famed ad men of the '50s and '60s knew), advertising is a mirror held up to society and merely reflects the changes in our fads, fancies, preferences and choices. Don't get me wrong, advertising works but not in the way people who aren't marketers think it works.

And if you think about this for a second, it becomes clear. The advertiser has absolutely no interest in promoting his competitors' products, which is what he would be doing if what PHE says were true. And the effects - or objectives - are no different if it's cars, chicken or chocolate we're advertising. Or indeed if the audience is children or grown-ups (although there's some evidence showing children are more believing of ads this still only makes them choose one brand of breakfast cereal instead of another).

The most depressing part of all this - apart from the wholly unjustified attack on sugar as a macronutrient - is that the select committee conducted a review of and recommends regulations affecting advertising and marketing without taking evidence from any marketers. Yet again - as we saw with tobacco, with alcohol and with financial services - the messenger is machine-gunned by MPs who start off with no knowledge of marketing and finish with no knowledge of marketing.

In nearly every circumstance, brand advertising doesn't create new demand. Yet we see again the lie that banning or restricting its use will somehow reduce demand. This simply won't happen. The committee is just shooting the sugar plum fairy.

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Offering folk stuff to buy isn't enough for a place to work - you have to entertain them too!

Retailing as entertainment

The long-term transformative effects of ICT cannot yet be fully appraised in part because technology uptake is rapid and unpredictable. Nevertheless, in one aspect – urban design – a synergy has emerged between bricks-and-mortar merchants and planners, in reaction to virtualization. Their complementary efforts, when successful, imbue commercial space with interaction-based vitality. The human instinct for sociability further supports these efforts, evidence that there is no substitute for many of the benefits cities offer. Lives are arguably better in proximity, a point supported by decades of agglomeration and anthropological research. The challenge for planners, therefore, is to create space for meaningful experiences inimitable in the virtual realm.

OK it's a little bit wordy (as we'd expect from an American academic) but the point being made is central to the business of regeneration and the future direction of 'place-making'. The critical issue is that the 'field of dreams' approach that tended to dominate town centre development no longer applies - just because I build a shopping centre doesn't guarantee that people will flock to its hallowed halls. If all I offer is stuff to buy, the consumer has the choice of sitting on her step with a smartphone flipping through a vaster and more exciting range of stuff to buy.

Pay a visit to a recently developed shopping mall - say the Trinity in Leeds, for example - and check out the shopping. Isn't the most striking thing just how little of this there actually is in the new mall? There are dozens of places to eat and drink, there's a cinema, and there are shops - run by brands like Apple, Bose and Superdry - that are as much as branding and market positioning as they are about actually selling you stuff. We were in the Bose shop getting a demonstration of their TV (unsurprisingly the sound quality was beyond awesome although this didn't make up for its lack of smartness) and, in chatting to the sales assistant, we discovered that she wasn't incentivised to sell us stuff. No commission, no sales bonus - because the shop was there to promote and position the Bose brand.

If we want places to succeed then there has to be a reason for people to visit them - if what they offer can be perfectly replicated on-line (or, in some cases, imperfectly) then the chances are that people will access the offer through the web rather than by visiting some place. What places need to do is threefold.

1. Offer those things - chiefly around 'human sociability' - that can't be done on-line (even if they can). 'Live' music is only really live music if you're there - yes someone could stream it live to the smart TV in your lounge but is that the same? I would argue it isn't - we want the live because of the whole experience, the beer, the slight crush of the crowded venue, the sense of sharing a great experience with others. The ability to say 'I was there'. Just having a bar or foodstop isn't good enough - it needs a purpose beyond that mundane fact, a presence that can't be replicated with a bottle of wine from the supermarket and some home cooking.

2. Connect with the on-line world. We went to the Prado in Madrid and, unplanned, bought an offer to guide us round from a smartly dressed gentleman. He showed us 10 - just ten - pictures from the thousands in the gallery. And these pictures taking us from the middle ages to the 21st century told us a story of art down those ages. We could have hired one of those clunky electronic gadgets as a guide but wouldn't it be more interesting if a little smartphone app could replicate the sort of offer that gentleman made for us?

3. Focus on the occasion, the event and the demonstration rather than just the sale. It's true that the value of the place comes in part from the value that consumers invest in that place - and much of this is, inevitably, a cash value. But, as Apple, Bose and many other brands have shown, the value of a public presence needn't be about selling you some stuff. Rather it's about showing you what that stuff can do, reminding you that the stuff in question is popular (why else would there be a big shop fill with other people looking at that stuff), and reinforcing your decision to buy it.

I'm quite excited about the future for town centres, malls and other shared places. Partly this is because the domination of public space by retail is nearing its end but mostly it's because the evidence right now is that successful places are places where the special stuff - the things that make them work - are made by the people visiting rather than for the people visiting. A new generation of entrepreneurs are creating new approaches to public fun and games - from political debates in a pub to cheese tasting and street parties.

And where there are lots of people having a good time there's the opportunity to enhance that good time by selling them the stuff they want (even if they didn't know they wanted it until just a minute of so ago). For public authorities there's a difficulty because of an instinctive discomfort with things that disrupt existing markets and existing expectations. Excuses will be used to prevent or slow the initiative of these new ideas - the street vendor or market stall undercuts the shopkeeper, selling alcohol in the street encourages anti-social behaviour and your funky flea market needs a "markets licence" for some bizarre reason.

What we know is that many of the best examples of this new place-making reflect this development. I prefer to call this consumer-led but, if you're uncomfortable with the idea of being a consumer, citizen-led works just as well:

Authentic urban transformation relies more on citizen initiative than the influence of global capital, and may be facilitated by ICT but not defined by it; this can be seen in the quiet regeneration of urban neighborhoods. Global capital may underwrite loans for acquiring properties and developing land, decisions in such neighborhoods are often made locally and in the type of fragmented manner that generates a bricolage of uses and styles. Examples in the United States include East Nashville, Kansas City’s Crossroads district, and Oakland’s foodie Temescal and KoNo districts. None displays the architectural shock-and-awe of emerging global mega-cities, but each embodies a citizen-level developmental determinism that shapes their design and atmosphere. They are literal incarnations of the unique priorities of citizens at that time and place, independent of global trends that often result in regression to an aesthetic mean.

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So what makes a brilliant marketer?

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Economist Tyler Cowen remarks on marketing:

The people who are really good at marketing in this new environment are typically not formal marketers, they are not called marketing agencies, they have (not) studied marketing.  They are people who know some areas very well and then they teach themselves a kind of marketing on the fly.  A good examples is Facebook.  Mark Zuckerberg is not in any formal sense a marketer, but he’s actually one of the most brilliant marketers that the world has seen in the past few decades.

Now I don't know enough about Zuckerberg to assess whether he is worthy of joining the pantheon of marketing gods but, as a text, Cowen's words are interesting. Especially to someone like me who was (perhaps still is in a sort of way) a marketing professional.

The first thing to understand here is that marketing agencies never did marketing. Oh we pretended that what we did was 'strategy' and so forth but what we were really doing was applying creativity to tactical aspects of the communications mix - advertising, PR, direct mail and sales promotions. As to studying marketing things may be different in the USA but I don't recall working with many people in the business who had a formal qualification in marketing - my boss and DM guru was an English graduate, my colleagues had (where they'd got a degree) qualifications in domestic science, philosophy, economic history, politics and - by far the most dominant - assorted variations on graphic design, technical drawing or art.

The thing with marketing is that it isn't about the flash stuff at all - indeed the arrival of the web has reinforced this - but rather about detailed tactical considerations. As my former colleague (and now mail order company chief executive) John Hinchcliffe put it 'marketing is 99 per cent boring routine'. Today this fact is buried deeply in grand talk of 'metrics', 'data mining' or 'SEO' when the reality is that the very best marketers eat, sleep and breathe the information that their business generates. Yet we think of the game as being about great ads rather than ace spreadsheets.

Moreover the successful marketer is focused - punches the bruise as that great marketing genius Peter Mandelson so aptly put it. The objective is clear and the emphasis is on banging away at that target again and again and again. There's a view out there that somewhere there's a marketing magic wand or advertising fairy dust that will transform your small little business into a world-beating global colossus. Indeed marketing consultants have traded on there being some sort of occult secret over available to a select band (and you if you pay us a couple of grand a day). Sorry to disappoint but there isn't.

However there are some important things you need to know.

1. Test and learn.
2. Advertising doesn't do what you think it does
3. If you don't ask people to do something they won't
4. Think like a consumer not a producer
5. Collect responses, comments and feedback
6. Analyse everything
7. If something works keep doing it until it doesn't

There may be lots of other things. Indeed there are whole bookshelves full of other things (if you want the best book though read 'The Solid Gold Mail Box'). But those seven things are a damn good start towards being a brilliant marketer. That and being prepared to slog through the boring routine.

Finally Cowen is wrong - the best marketers have never been formal marketers.

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It's bad marketing to scare mailing recipients into opening a letter

First let's be clear that I'm not concerned here with the accuracy of Mr Miliband's letter to targeted voters. Nor with the inevitable appeal to emotions that goes with campaigning about health. And I'm not particularly picking on the Labour Party here - my party has committed the same sin.

Secondly I am - in so far as such things exist - something of an expert on direct mail having managed the mailing programmes for a large national charity and been Planning Director at a major direct marketing agency.

Let's be clear that scaring the recipients of your mailing is not good marketing. Even worse when you use what looks like an 'official' approach such as that in the Labour mailing. We should understand that people will open the mailing because they think it is important (you've told them that). The problem is that 'important' in this context means 'directly relevant to me'. And the Labour mailing (and the Conservative "mansion tax" mailing) fail on this latter point. I open the envelope only to discover a general message about unspecified 'threats' to 'your local NHS'.

What the Labour Party is doing here is deliberately deceptive and this is never good marketing. As indeed Labour has discovered:

‘I’m sure there will be people desperate for test results or appointments who will be opening the letter thinking they’ve got the information they’ve been waiting for.’

And so it goes. If the Labour Party wants to write to voters about health services then a much better approach would be to use to outside of the envelope to make some broad points - perhaps print some newspaper headlines about hospital or ward closures with a statement inside along the lines of: "Read Inside how Ed Miliband's Labour is the only party committed to your NHS".

This approach is not only honest but is also impactful - you know that the mail recipient reads the envelope while standing next to the recycling bin and you get the barest few seconds to engage enough to get the reader to open the mailing. You get a few seconds here to get you message across - the important one, in this case, that only Labour cares about 'your NHS'.

Instead the Party opted to con the reader into opening - some will be upset and angry but most reactions will be "pah, it's just a crap letter from Ed Miliband, not important at all" followed by it landing swiftly in the waste bin. As a result the Party has irritated thousands of people who thought the letter might actually be important and has upset a few more - some enough to get quoted in the Daily Mail (I'll point out here that no list is perfectly clean - I don't remember any large mailing where we didn't write to at least one dead person).

So here's so free marketing advice for political campaigners:

Be Proud of Your Brand - stick the logo and brand messages on the outer envelope

Tell People What's Inside - "an important message from Ed Miliband..etc."

Use a Real Return Address - not some semi-anonymous mailing house

Tell People Why You've Written - "you can help us save the NHS, read more inside..."

Merge Purge - run your lists against each other and against the most up-to-date register

There's lots more (but you'll have to pay me to get that). Above all please remember that deception, misleading folk and duping them into thinking something is important when it isn't - these things are bad marketing. You may think you're being clever by getting people to open the envelope but that's a waste or time if they then go to the newspapers to complain about your deception.

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If a Marxist can understand the difference between being pro-business and pro-market, why can't many Conservatives?

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I mean it's not hard is it? Here's Chris Dillow:

...we must distinguish between business and markets. Business is about hierarchy and control; markets are about dispersing power. Markets are about competition, whereas business tries to suppress competition and seek monopoly power; the last thing big business wants is creative destruction. A pro-business government would seek to protect incumbents through red tape that strangles small firms; tough copyright laws; generous outsourcing and procurement policies; and tax breaks. A pro-market government would do the exact opposite, and do everything it could to promote competition. Governments can - and should - be anti-business but pro-market.

I'm a marketer. My professional colleagues have a simple job - to assist our clients or employers in creating monopoly (or die trying). Sometimes the marketing budget is used to lobby governments or regulators to change rules to limit competition (agriculture, banking, energy) and sometimes the marketing budget is used to try and persuade consumers that there isn't any alternative to the clients product (food, detergents, beer). Trust me on this folks, the former is a hell of a lot easier than the latter.

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I was right. Plain packaging doesn't reduce tobacco consumption.

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In March 2011 I wrote this:

My main concerns in all this – leaving aside the issue of personal rights – is that, if the aims are twofold: first to increase rates of smoking cessation and second to reduce rates of smoking adoption, then we are barking up the wrong tree. By way of illustration, between 2003 and 2005 all forms of tobacco advertising in the UK were banned. If the arguments for a ban were correct – less tobacco use and fewer tobacco users – we would have expected the rate of tobacco consumption to accelerate. However, the ban (like the smoking ban in public spaces) had no discernible impact on the long-standing decline in use.

In simple terms introducing plain packaging for cigarettes simply won't work (if the aim is to reduce tobacco consumption or smoking adoption). And it seems I was right:

Ronald Coase famously argued that if you tortured the data long enough they would confess. In this paper we have tortured the data, but there has been no confession. At best, we can determine the plain packaging policy introduced in December 2012 has not reduced household expenditure of tobacco once we control for price effects, or the long-term decline of tobacco expenditure, or even the latent attributes of the data.

To the contrary, we are able to find a suggestion that household expenditure of tobacco has, ceteris paribus, increased. In our forecasting exercise the actual data come close to breaking through the 80 per cent confidence interval. While we do not want to over-emphasise these results, we do conclude that any evidence to suggest that the plain packaging policy has reduced household expenditure on tobacco is simply lacking.

Now I'm sure the tobacco control folk will redouble their efforts - despite being completely wrong. But I hope one or two of them consider whether some different strategies might be more effective in reducing the consumption of tobacco and the adoption of smoking.

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Quote of the day - on city marketing

From Aaron Renn (who's always good value):

This is easiest to see in marketing videos put out by various chambers of commerce and convention and visitors bureaus. If you happen to watch one that isn’t of your own city, you will immediately be struck by how generic it is and how it tries to sell you on a list of purported amenities and attributes we’ll label “conventional cool.” A list that includes things such as coffee shops, bike lanes, trendy fashion boutiques, startups, microbreweries, skateboarders, silk-screen-print posters, hip restaurants, tattoos, public art and so on.

Add faux heritage, urban growing and farmers markets to get the set! Aaron's point is that cities need to be distinctive, different to succeed. The city has to offer something that the visitor - or aspiring resident - can't get somewhere else.  This doesn't have to be 'conventional cool' as Aaron puts it - he cites Nashville, home of country music, as somewhere that has got it right. In the UK there are places with that same distinctiveness  - I think of Hebden Bridge and Todmorden in Calderdale, of Brighton and of North Norfolk. But our cities - other than London - are way off the pace.

What we get, again and again, is the same generic solutions - an 'independent' or 'cultural' quarter, a budget for 'edgy' street performance and a slew of street art. Add to this a nice city centre mall, a series of chain restaurants and a more-or-less featureless town square to get the standard issue English city - it could be Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds or Birmingham. This isn't to disparage the efforts of regenerators, merely to observe that the marketing of cities has got itself stuck - we're still thinking about 'Grade A Offices' and high end retail when the nature of work and shopping is changing rapidly, pulling away from the world of the CBD and shopping mall.

The pitch we make to sell the city appears more as 'we're just like all the other really good places' rather than 'this is the home of...' something. If your city is the best place to shop, sell it as the best place to shop and don't pretend that you offer culture when you don't. And if you've been curry capital of Britain for years on end, doesn't that tell you something about your uniqueness? If you've a great pop music heritage, go for it - not just the kitsch remembering but getting the cool kids who want to make music to come there. And if your city's strongest brand is a football team, make that the point of difference.

As Aaron Renn concludes:

Rather than rejecting their actual selves, cities need to embrace -- but update -- who they are. Adopt best practices to be sure, but also be true to the native soil. A great city, like a great wine, has to express its terroir.

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On the marketing of politics...

In the 1950s, with the expansion of television into every household, mass marketing was born. Clever blokes at companies making what became known as fmcg (fast moving consumer goods) found that they could pull customers into demanding brands using TV to advertise bold, brash and colourful brands.

Before this time marketing was as much directed to the shopkeeper as to the consumer. What marketers did was get the shop to display the brand and, in many cases, provide a financial incentive for the store to push the brand to shoppers. If you want to understand how this works, look at how pharmaceuticals marketing works today - the company can't use direct-to-consumer brand marketing and relies instead on direct sales efforts targeted at doctors.

Brand marketing helped transform our society (for the better I would argue), contributed to better quality, greater choice and lower relative prices. And along the way, it also provided a load of pleasure - we reminisce as much about the ads of the '60s and '70s as we do about the TV programmes those ads were wrapped around. Promotion was broad, sweeping and general rather than precise and targeted - ads reached out to broad chunks of the population: "C1C2 women in the Granada TV area". The once dominant sales people became mere order takers as the heroes of fmcg became marketers.

Looking in awe and wonder at this brand marketing was the world of British politics. It's not stretching the metaphor to say that, until 1979, British politics was stuck with that pre-war model because the law wouldn't let political parties advertise on TV. Politics worked at the local level where professional agents organised local parties to push the party message - that familiar method of canvassing to identify support and 'get-out-the-vote' to make sure that support materialises. In 1979, two young ad men (and brothers) changed how we campaigned with one poster.

Today this approach - a big, bold brand message poured repeatedly into promotional channels - dominates our political campaigning. That old 'sales-led' approach has atrophied - we still canvass, we still ask people for voting intentions and we still knock up on the day but these activities are marginal to the outcome of a general election. And it is the general election that matters - it is to politics what Christmas is to turkey breeders and Easter is to chocolatiers.

So political parties have turned to the marketing men for inspiration - to get the message honed to perfection, to get that message constant and consistent in every promotional channel. The party machine has been replaced by a team of experts pulled together so as to direct those channels. The leadership doesn't put its effort into policies and ideas that would improve the nation but into enforcing the message.

Politics is beefing up its brand management just as brand marketing begins to falter, as marketers respond to the challenges of a fragmented media market, to aggregation and choice-making systems. We are watching political parties applying the ideas of a past marketing age - relying solely on the power of their brand to achieve success. And it will work (for one or other of the parties) since the heuristic of those big party brands (we often call it 'tribalism' but it's essentially the same as always buying Persil) means that most people will vote for one or the other. Plus, of course, Britain's electoral system makes it hard for new parties - there hasn't been a successful, sustained new party since the Labour Party overtook the Liberals in the 1920s.

The problem (and people from all sides and none in politics have noted this) is that the fastest growing 'brand' in the market isn't a political party but what we might call 'anti-politics'. We watch as brand marketing is used to promote what are essentially hollow shells - things painted to look like large, thoughtful and ideological political organisations but in reality contain little but but ambition.

This isn't to say that there aren't thoughtful, creative and ideological people in politics or to suggest that there isn't a critical and fundamental difference between the politics of 'centre-right' and 'centre-left'. Rather it's to point out that the marketing of politics remains a child of 1950s mass marketing, something done to the public not with the public. And, as Douglas Carswell quite bluntly points out, 'anti-politics' is here to stay:

It's just a phase, many MPs think. Voters are angry over expenses or Iraq or more expenses. But the mood, they presume, will pass.

No, my friends, colleagues and opponents. This anti-politics thingy is not just a phase. It will not abate. We are witnessing a permanent change in the relationship between the governed and the governing.

The big brand politics will carry on for a while - our electoral system guarantees that - but at what moment do we start to worry? When turn out in a general election falls below 50% maybe? In 2010 that already happened in Glasgow NE, Leeds Central and Manchester Central - plus there are another 120 constituencies with turnout below 60%. And none of this accounts for the estimated 20% of the population that don't even bother registering to vote in the first place. Or do we wait until other parties and independents soak up a third or more of the vote in return for a handful of seats? In 2010 in England the two big parties got less than 68% of the vote and all but 57 of the 616 seats.

When I learnt about marketing all those years ago, they told about the 4Ps - promotion, price, place and product. Our political marketers - fresh from running campaigns in Australia or America - seem to have lost sight of these fundamentals and especially any attention to the politcal product. Marketing has become mere promotion leaving behind an etiolated, weak political product. Sound and fury has replaced the idea that politics is a shared enterprise between politicians and the people they represent.

For now nothing will change except that a few more disillusioned folk will turn away from politics. But something will give in the end. With luck what will emerge from that change will be a more conversational politics, one not shaped by the demands of a big brand and its message but by a desire to create the best possible political product.

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How advertising works...

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Here from Rory Sutherland (who knows a thing or two about advertising):

There is no prospect of anyone paying me to advertise mattress toppers, however life-changing they may be. You see, one of the problems of hyper-efficient market capitalism is that copying products is now so fast and easy that every new market category rapidly fragments into hundreds of competing manufacturers. There is no interest in any one of them promoting the category, since their own share of any resulting growth in sales of the item would be so small. 

It would be good if the Naomi Klein fans and all those public health agitators read this and commited it to memory.

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Less policy, more poetry please.

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"Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies in a box on Beasley Street"

John Cooper Clarke is a great poet. I don't share his politics but I appreciate the poetry of his passion, an almost anger captured by the quote above. And, unlike too much modern poetry, Clarke's is accessible and appealing beyond the usual pretentious circles of the literary world. It's a reminder that, like a great song, a poem cuts right to the very core of something. It communicates.

So I was struck by Clarke's comments about today's politics:

 

I suppose if I had to I would vote Labour but only out of blind class hatred, nothing else. That's what keeps these bastards coming back. To be honest, the only one whose language I even remotely understand is Nige [Farage]. Shoot me down in flames. Everyone else: they talk about nothing that seems to matter. It's beyond satire. And even satire has become PR, you know, since someone told politicians they will get more votes if they join in with the piss-taking themselves.

This comment from Clarke isn't an endorsement of UKIP but rather a recognition that most of our political leaderships fail to break through to the audience, to get them to pay attention, to really listen. Take a few minutes and read the tweets of politicians - with just a couple of exceptions these are boring, banal and entirely forgettable. All wrapped up in caveats, conditions and the avoidance of confrontation, today's political communication mostly fails to communicate. Or rather it communicates the message that we are patronising, out-of-touch and unable to hold a conversation with a voter.

One thing Nigel Farage seems to understand is that it's perfectly fine to attack your opponents - there's no chance of getting 100% support so spending time trying not to alienate people who will never vote for you is a thoroughly stupid idea. Yet politicians do this, carefully crafting their words to be inclusive and the views to be moderate. We peer down our noses at the likes of Farage, talking of extremism and division - as if it's impossible to present a moderate view in polemic.


If the public simply don't grasp our language then all those hours of policy wonkery, the backroom chats and the market research will be wasted. We fail if we think it's enough for our political tribe to like, retweet or forward the latest banality. We don't breakthrough if our policies are presented in press releases with all the wit and charm of one explaining a vending machine. Or where those policies trickle out in speeches to selected audiences and are couched in the language of those chosen few not words a shop assistant or sales rep would use. No-one cares, no-one's listening.

Clarke's Beasley Street captures a place and the idea of a place in a few sharp words - you've an image of that Salford street instantly as he delivers the words. And politics can do this too:

It's morning again in America.

It didn't matter much about the words that came after this opener in Hal Riney's ad - he'd got your attention with that image, those few words said more than all the statistics we politicians play our games with. And it worked.

Our words are guided by audience analysis, filtered through focus groups and derived from the policy brief not the benefit on offer. We list initiatives and policies with each one design to tick a communications box. Speeches and announcements are made according to a framework rather than because we've anything to say. And we make the grand assumption that it's the detail of policy that matters rather than the positive image of the place we're in or the place we want to get to.

Here's the opening paragraph of the 1945 Labour Manifesto - this is how it's done:

Victory is assured for us and our allies in the European war. The war in the East goes the same way. The British Labour Party is firmly resolved that Japanese barbarism shall be defeated just as decisively as Nazi aggression and tyranny. The people will have won both struggles. The gallant men and women in the Fighting Services, in the Merchant Navy, Home Guard and Civil Defence, in the factories and in the bombed areas - they deserve and must be assured a happier future than faced so many of them after the last war. Labour regards their welfare as a sacred trust. 

Bang - straight to the point. We've won the war, now let's make the country a great place for the men who did the winning for us. If you read that manifesto - and for good or ill it changed the country forever - it's not filled with statistics or analysis, just a narrative describing the Britain a Labour government would create.

For balance read the 1979 Conservative Manifesto - again it makes a clear call from the start:

THIS ELECTION is about the future of Britain - a great country which seems to have lost its way. It is a country rich in natural resources, in coal, oil, gas and fertile farmlands. It is rich, too, in human resources, with professional and managerial skills of the highest calibre, with great industries and firms whose workers can be the equal of any in the world. We are the inheritors of a long tradition of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.

Yet today, this country is faced with its most serious problems since the Second World War. What has happened to our country, to the values we used to share, to the success and prosperity we once took for granted? 

Today's politics with its media and message management does not allow for great narrative, let alone poetry. The popular response to most of our words is 'so what'. We don't paint pictures with words or tell stories, we relate a barrage of 'facts' and a torrent of policy hoping some of it sticks.

So let's remember that, come the day that matters, the politicians aren't in charge - we are. Election day as John Greenleaf Whittier put it is everyone's day and politicians should remember this:

The proudest now is but my peer,
The highest not more high;
To-day, of all the weary year,
A king of men am I.
To-day alike are great and small,
The nameless and the known
My palace is the people’s hall,
The ballot-box my throne!

Who serves to-day upon the list
Beside the served shall stand;
Alike the brown and wrinkled fist,
The gloved and dainty hand!
The rich is level with the poor,
The weak is strong to-day;

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Quote of the day: on urban branding

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From Al Modarres, Director of Urban Studies at University of Washington Tacoma writing in New Geography:

The challenge of urban branding is that cities are not commodities. As such, urban branding is not the same as product or corporate-style branding. Cities are much more complex and contain multiple identity narratives; whatever the business and leadership says, there are other local voices that may challenge the accepted “script”. In fact, while city marketing may focus mainly on attracting capital through economic development and tourism, urban branding needs to move beyond the simply utilitarian, and consider memories, urban experiences, and quality of life issues that affect those who live in a city. A brand does not exist outside the reality of a city. It is not an imported idea. It is an internally generated identity, rooted in the history and assets of a city.

Catchy phrases, logos, shiny booklets, invented cultural events, or the latest urban design schemes are not the answer. Copying tactics from other cities won't make a city recognizable; it will make it less visible and less unique. The challenge is, then, to ask what assets a city has that others do not possess; which of these assets can be seen as a city’s mark of achievement or recognizable characteristics; and how does one activate, elevate and sustain those characteristics?

Interesting observations - many City marketers could learn from this outlook.

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"Leeds, Leeds...everyone hates us but we don't care" (except you do really)

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OK, so I'm in Bradford meaning that what I say about Leeds is filtered through a historic rivalry. More recently that rivalry has been further tempered by a sort of sophisticated grumpiness - how come it is that Leeds is ever so shiny while Bradford struggles. We seek out the little wins - the fact that Bradford, all stone and grandeur, is so much better looking than Leeds; the superiority of the South Pennine uplands to grey, man-ruined central Yorkshire coalfield. And we point or laugh at the struggles of Leeds United.

But we're allowed this indulgence. It's a sort of West Riding sibling rivalry and, when the chips are down, both cities are both great and also in Yorkshire. Unlike Manchester.

So I smiled at this passionate grumble inspired (if that is the right word) by Evan Davies' 'Mind the Gap' programme on the BBC and its conclusion that 'only Manchester could compete with London'. Here's a flavour:

What the BBC tend to do on such occasions is ‘confuse’ the city of Manchester with Greater Manchester, which is not a city but a type of county. I’ve no idea how they sneaked Greater Manchester past the people of Salford, Bolton or Wigan. I do know that if, at any point in history, you suggested that an area of Yorkshire was called Greater Leeds then the proud people of Bradford, Wakefield, Halifax or Keighley (a town bigger than Wigan) would, quite rightly, be out on the street smashing and burning stuff.

Fighting stuff! But Mick McCann (in the mix for the biggest fan of Leeds as a city) needs to step back and ask a serious question. Why is it that Evan Davies concluded what he did about Manchester (other than rank bias because the BBC got transplanted - or is it dumped - in a city that isn't Manchester but is close by)?

Mick sets out all the statistics, observing that Leeds folk are wealthier, brainier and prettier than Mancunians, but this isn't the point. The point is that, while everyone knows about Manchester (blame football for this), Leeds is best described as "oh yes, Leeds, I forget about Leeds". Folk out there in the wide world know about Yorkshire - the Yorkshire marketing folk win prizes for their efforts:

Yorkshire's bumptious tourist board has retained its title as best marketeer in the World Travel Awards, the nearest thing to the Oscars in the industry.

And the county is great - what other English county gets its name chanted at rock concerts? (The London indie band Goodshoes, when they first appeared at the Cockpit in Leeds were taken aback - they thought the 'Yorkshire, Yorkshire' chant was 'You're shit, you're shit').  Across the world, Yorkshire ex-pats are telling people that it's the grandest, greatest, most beautiful and definitely most manly place on the planet.

But somehow this doesn't rub off on Leeds.

Leeds is boring, workaday, the dullsville of the West Riding. And not just because it lacks the glamour of a premier league football team. Ask people what there is in Leeds and they'll go, "er, shops?" People will stay in Leeds (hotels, restaurants) but remember the trips out of town - to Saltaire or Ilkley, to York and up into the Dales. So when someone asks those visitors where they went, the answer is Yorkshire not Leeds. Never Leeds.

Leeds needn't be boring - after all there's little to recommend Manchester (football and telly apart - and that's not really in Manchester anyhow) but it has scrubbed up well, put on its new pair of Converse and made out that it's the trendy place in the North.

Here's the problem for Leeds. Instead of a shaggy haircut, a beard and skinny jeans (or whatever is trendy these days - I'm not an expert) what Leeds has done is buy a Hugo Boss suit, some shiny shoes and a man bag. All those hipsterish trendsetters (or people who think they are and have access to a TV camera) aren't impressed.

So rather than dwelling on a (pretty impressive) arena, a (very fine) new shopping centre and some (splendidly grand) art and music venues, what Leeds needs to do is find something edgier, rougher and tougher. Perhaps change the perception so those visitors who came to Yorkshire go home and tell people they went to Leeds.

But what I do know is that moaning about how the BBC (or anyone else for that matter) has some sort of down on Leeds will get the city precisely nowhere.

Trust me on this, I'm from Bradford.

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Advertising doesn't cause riots, make people gamble or cause revolution!

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She said she was particularly concerned about gambling advertising before the 9pm watershed and went as far as saying that "excessive marketing" had been a factor in 2011’s London riots, when looters had gone in criminal search of expensive trainer brands.

Read that very carefully. What Helen Goodman (for it is she) is saying here is that some of society's problems - in this case gambling and rioting - can be laid at the the door of advertising. This is clearly illiberal, when it comes to gambling certainly judgemental, but worst of all is utterly ignorant of advertising and marketing and what it does.

It makes me incredibly cross that people like Helen Goodman (who is a leftie but not everyone who wants bans or controls on advertising and marketing is such) simply fail to understand that commercial speech is still 'speech'. And that it is as worthy of us defending it as any other form of speech. I know that Helen probably read 'No Logo' a few years back and has signed up to the Naomi Klein school, that "brands are the work of Satan" line, but the truth is that marketing communications are a tiny proportion of all the communications we receive every day.

If someone like Helen Goodman is going to stand up and talk about advertising, to propose legislative intervention of some kind, then the least we can expect is that some effort has been made to understand the business of marketing. Let's start with whether advertising increases aggregate demand, what we might call the 'false demand' hypothesis:

“The null hypothesis that advertising does not cause consumption cannot be rejected, but some evidence that consumption may cause advertising is presented.”

Unwrapping the academic language this research says that advertising doesn't (in aggregate) cause demand and may even be caused by consumption. Funnily enough us advertising and marketing folk have known this for years - most of our advertising isn't about creating demand it's about us not losing our bit of that demand. As I wrote a while ago:

Why should I spend my client’s scarce cash on making the market bigger – promoting sausages rather than Fred’s Grand Yorkshire Sausage, The Champion on Your Plate?

This isn't to say that an advertisement has never prompted someone to buy something they haven't bought before but it is to say that there isn't a strong connection between advertising and demand growth. To illustrate this, here's a graph of US cigarette advertising against cigarette consumption:

If you can find some sort of causal link here you're a better man than I am!

If shadow ministers (or government ministers for that matter) are going to pass opinion about advertising and marketing - rather than merely court a headline - then they really should start to understand what marketing does and how advertising works. And that it's as much a part of free speech as their address to the house or my torrent of tweets.

And if Helen Goodman wants to know about the revolution - it won't be televised you know!

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On being a mass membership party again...

The rhetoric from Conservative Campaign HQ is ringing - get more members. The chairman, Grant Shapps MP has written to all his MP colleagues urging them to recruit more members, to get 3% of Conservative voters signed up as members.

I don't object to these injunctions although I suspect that most MPs will adopt the old Spanish colonial adage, obedezco pero no cumplo - I obey but do not comply. And why blame them. After all the number of members isn't the big deal it used to be. Election campaigns are fought out over the airwaves and election funding allows for a generous dollop of postage and paid doorstep delivery, there's no real incentive to persuade people to join the party, however much Grant Shapps may cajole.

Think about it for a second. Assuming you're not ambitious or a politics anorak, why on earth would you pay good money to join a political party? What do you get for your pleasure? Endless appeals for more money, on infrequent occasions you get to vote for the leader of the party and similarly to select a local MP or councillor. You won't be asked about policy (although you can join groups that engage in endless circular discussions about that policy) and you might get asked to buy tickets for dinners and garden parties.

If you join the RSPB they give you stuff, send you a magazine and give you free entry to their nature reserves. The same goes for other organisations - the National Trust, RHS and so forth. Joining a political party doesn't really get you anything.

If Grant Shapps wants more members at £25 he needs to offer something more and to give up on the idea that the overstretched troops on the ground have the time or inclination to respond to his urgings. Back in Campaign HQ they need to find some money to recruit members - do some old fashioned direct marketing. I don't just mean mass mailings but rather the development of an offer that might make it worthwhile for Fred Smith to hand over that £25 in exchange for a membership card.

The sad truth is that those MPs - and the young things at CCHQ - really aren't interested. Either we'll carry on with parties funded by business donations (or in Labour's case by unions) or else the politicians will, as Nick Clegg wants, dip their hands into the public purse and have state funded politics.

Using Christmas clubs is rational behaviour

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Over in the USA they have these things called 'layaway' schemes and Alex Tabarrok thinks it odd that people use them:

Layaway plans are immensely popular, a fact I find deeply puzzling much like the popularity of Justin Bieber, Snooki, and homeopathy makes me question the rationality of my fellow human beings.

The typical layaway plan requires a deposit of 10-15% of the price of the good, say a new TV. If the consumer pays the balance over the following 10-12 weeks (i.e. by Christmas) they can pickup the good. If the consumer doesn’t pay the balance they get a refund of payments made less a service fee.

I suspect that there is some important factors that Alex overlooks here - for many people such schemes are entirely sensible and their use absolutely rational. Alex talks of how Walmart and such won't run out of what people want so that's not a motivation for pre-order but fails to realise the problems of living on a limited income.

For a number of years, Park Food Group - Britain's biggest Christmas hamper company - was a client. We put together direct marketing and agent recruitment programmes. As the Account Planner my job was to try and understand who might buy these hampers (or rather who might act as an agent persuading others to buy) and the reasons why such purchases are made.

In simple terms the incentive is that, on their own, many people in the target market for hampers and Christmas clubs (and indeed for Alex's layaway plans) simply do not trust themselves to save. There are too many pressures in year that lead inevitably to a little dipping into the jar with the Christmas fund meaning that the fund, come Christmas, is depleted and insufficient.

What hamper businesses do is provide an agent to make sure you save (they pop round every week, have a cup of tea and collect the £3.36 or whatever) and a pot you can't access - so no dipping in to pay for school uniform, birthday presents or a treat taking the kids to the zoo. This is what people are buying, not certainty but rather the assurance that someone is helping them make sure they have a great Christmas.

"Tabarrok's Layaway Plan" simply doesn't offer this assurance and therefore does not offer the actual product ('making sure you save') that people think they need.

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Layaway plans are immensely popular, a fact I find deeply puzzling much like the popularity of Justin Bieber, Snooki, and homeopathy makes me question the rationality of my fellow human beings.
The typical layaway plan requires a deposit of 10-15% of the price of the good, say a new TV. If the consumer pays the balance over the following 10-12 weeks (i.e. by Christmas) they can pickup the good. If the consumer doesn’t pay the balance they get a refund of payments made less a service fee.
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/10/stayaway-from-layaway.html#sthash.eTIAonk2.dpuf

How much of a fix is this then? More from Leeds City Region...

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As reported by the estimable Leeds Citizen:

They’ll be rejoicing down on Albion St this week after it was announced that Leeds and Partners have won a £2.25m uncontested contract to deliver the city region out of the inward investment doldrums.

You've read that right folks - Leeds City Council (on behalf of the City Region) have bunged a multimillion pound contract in the direction of an organisation it set up itself but which they insist is a 'private' concern not subject to such pesky things as 'freedom of information'.

Does this seem like a fix to you? After all this is a body intended to promote investment into the city REGION - that includes Bradford. Yet I don't recall - as a Bradford Councillor - us being consulted on all this? Nor do I expect 'Leeds & Partners' to pay any attention to the inward investment needs of Bradford - it will, as ever, be "Leeds, Leeds, Leeds". A strategy that has worked ever so well for us!

So we have a contract issued without competition to an organisation that was previously called 'marketing Leeds' - as Leeds Citizen concludes:

Check out the Manchester investment site to see how a serious organisation does this kind of thing. And then tell me we’ve just taken on the only credible organisation that’s capable of doing the same for us.

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A lesson in money and marketing...

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This only works because it runs close to illegality. It's not the edginess (although that helps), it's that others won't play:

The manager at the McDonald’s on Northwest Yeon Avenue glanced at the money in the customer’s hand, a $2 bill that looked as if its edges had been dipped in blood. He grew tense, shook his head and turned away.

“Oh, no,” he says. “We’re not allowed to accept those.”

So where do you go? The bar won't take the bills, the bank won't take the bills - so it's back to the strip club that dipped them in red ink:

But despite these warnings, Casa Diablo keeps doling out the blood-red money. A WW reporter last week was still able to get a stack of the $2 bills from the bar.

Of course, the marketing would still work if the authorities smiled and let the bills circulate. But right now Casa Diablo are getting a double hit - promo from the red bills and a captured audience.

The strip club is simply gaming official sensitivity. More power to its elbow.

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On anti-smoking laws...the task of public health is done

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From The Heresiac:

The pattern revealed by the graph does, however, show something significant about anti-smoking laws.  They aren't really aimed at discouraging smoking, or protecting the health of non-smokers, or even at punishing smokers (as some pro-smoking dissidents like to think).  Rather, they are a form of bandwagon-jumping.  Measures such as "plain packaging" are seized upon by politicians seeking to prove themselves "relevant" and up-to-date, in much the same way that they pounce upon passing moral panics or promote ideas that seem popular with focus groups.  The long-term decline in smoking is a social trend for which politicians would like to claim credit.  Introducing "tough" measures that can scarcely fail - because their aim has already been achieved - and which can claim to be both morally virtuous and medically justified is almost too tempting.

An insightful comment. I don't entirely agree - part of the motivation is sustaining the business of anti-smoking - but the gist is spot on, that anti-smoking is about laying claim to something that results from a social trend rather than from government action. And the job - making sure we know the dangers of smoking and providing help for quitters - is done.

We might also consider that there is a degree of frantic worry as the public health interventions seem to have stalled:

We spend millions on anti-smoking, thousands of jobs are involved and...well it has stopped working. So these people seek out new bogie-men to blame, new ways to 'denormalise' smoking and new strategies (requiring more public funding) to deal with the 'biggest preventable cause of death'.

Nobody smoking now - or taking up smoking - doesn't know the health risks. Nobody. The task of public health is done. If people choose not to take note of the warnings that's their business in the same way that the freeclimber knows he might fall off that sheer cliff and the cave diver knows the high chance of drowning.

By all means provide support to people who want to stop. But let's accept that some people prefer the fleeting joy of a fag and accept that it means a high chance of ill-health, a shorter life.

In the end that's their choice, their business.

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Integration and the shop as brand marketing....more thoughts on the High Street

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When I came to Bradford, I came as an account executive at a direct marketing agency. And, back then, direct marketing was flavour of the season. The advent of databases, the collection, manipulation and analysis of information, and the idea that we could tailor our offer or appeal to the target consumer - these things made us the scientists of marketing set against the flash, braces-wearing 'above-the-line' folk making those useless TV adverts.

But direct marketing seemed a stale term, more akin to door-to-door selling than to the white heat of information technology. With all our profiling, multiple regression, expert systems and data-mining we rebadged the business - firstly as database marketing, then as relationship marketing - before realising that the unreliable, untargeted advertising was still there, our clients were still spending more on this than on letters and leaflets.

So integrated marketing was invented. Or rather it wasn't, we simply realised that the different bits of marketing activity needed to work together if the campaigns were to succeed. Our clients needed brand marketing as well as targeted marketing.

What's all this got to do with the high street, I hear you cry? Put simply bricks and mortar based retailing has to make use of on-line promotion and sales - we know this and every retail strategist worth his salt is focused on making this transition. But what we haven't appreciated is that this isn't a shift from real to virtual with the high street vanishing but the integration of different channels and their use for marketing as well as selling.

Here's Adam Stewart, marketing director at Rakuten’s Play.com:

“Our view from the marketplace is that there is going to be a form of humanity, and consumers are still going to be interacting with the high street,” he said, explaining that consumers will always prefer to look and feel products and connect with retailers on a face-to-face basis. “What Rakuten’s Play.com is trying to do is be able to offer the services so that high street retailers can have the services without the massive costs and infrastructure to build a digital proposition within a marketplace. So our position is very much not about Cannibalisation, but more about working together with the high street and being able to offer a digital proposition that works in collaboration with a tangible, physical, high street environment.”

All a bit wordy but, in essence, what Stewart is saying is that the virtual retail world needs the high street environment because customers crave tangibility. The problem is that those tangible retailers will struggle to succeed alone - the store becomes as much about brand development and promotion as it is a sales channel.

This can take the form of the spectacular - here's the Johnny Walker House in Beijing:

Diageo describe this as:

...the Johnnie Walker House serves to meet consumer demand for luxury with substance. Blending a bar, museum, retail outlet and an exclusive members club, the Johnnie Walker House Beijing is a response to the demand from Chinese consumers for in-depth knowledge, not only of the specific luxury brands they indulge in, but also of the broader categories the brands fall under.

If you want the more mundane you can check out Disney's presence in Walmart - for sure this makes sales but it's just as much about maintaining the ubiquity of Disney as a brand. Plus of course there's the wonder that is the Apple store - again there's no obvious need for a high technology brand to have a high street presence but the stores provide a strong brand impression in the real world (as well as flogging the odd iPad). When the new product launch comes along and all the fans want one it's better marketing to have all those fans queueing in the town centre than to have them invisibly poised over the 'enter' key on their laptop.

Just as importantly - and this matters in thinking about our centres - the customers that the brand owner wants in his store aren't simply any old customer who wanders by - here's Stewart again talking about retail banking:

 “A very good, corporate, customer, with a high lifetime, probably wants to go in to see a bank manager, and banks need to be able to facilitate that conversation and offer a good service,” Stewart explains. “But a customer who is churning on zero per cent credit cards, banks want them to interact digitally."

Just as Diageo wants high net worth customers in the Johnny Walker House, the future high street success wants high spending, high end customers - the every day buyer can shop from his computer and have it delivered or collect from the Post Office. In town retailing becomes an event, an orchestrated, animated marketing promotion. The customers walking into you shop are there because you've invited them - to a product launch, an anniversary, a preview. They're dressed up to party not slouching round the shops in jeans and an old t-shirt.

Inside you'll get them to engage on-line even more - to like the Facebook page, to follow on Twitter, to join an on-line club for the best customers. And they'll go away and become your best sales people - bragging and preening about the brand urging their friends to get involved.

This integration will be - for retailers - the essence of success. Without a strong on-line presence the retailer cannot compete once over a third, perhaps half, of retail sales are virtual. But that isn't enough - the best retailers will see the shop as one of their essential marketing tools, as a place of rewards, celebration and excitement. As the thing that captures the idea of that brand as fun - as leisure and pleasure.
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“Our view from the marketplace is that there is going to be a form of humanity, and consumers are still going to be interacting with the high street,” he said, explaining that consumers will always prefer to look and feel products and connect with retailers on a face-to-face basis. “What Rakuten’s Play.com is trying to do is be able to offer the services so that high street retailers can have the services without the massive costs and infrastructure to build a digital proposition within a marketplace. So our position is very much not about Cannibalisation, but more about working together with the high street and being able to offer a digital proposition that works in collaboration with a tangible, physical, high street environment.”
Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/07/22/true-value-customer-rakutens-playcom-marketing-director-why-understanding-customer#A2BGjJzbeSo66TWI.99

Adam Stewart, marketing director at Rakuten’s Play.com
Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/07/22/true-value-customer-rakutens-playcom-marketing-director-why-understanding-customer#A2BGjJzbeSo66TWI.99

Adam Stewart, marketing director at Rakuten’s Play.com
Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/07/22/true-value-customer-rakutens-playcom-marketing-director-why-understanding-customer#A2BGjJzbeSo66TWI.99

Adam Stewart, marketing director at Rakuten’s Play.com
Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/07/22/true-value-customer-rakutens-playcom-marketing-director-why-understanding-customer#A2BGjJzbeSo66TWI.99

Adam Stewart, marketing director at Rakuten’s Play.com
Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/07/22/true-value-customer-rakutens-playcom-marketing-director-why-understanding-customer#A2BGjJzbeSo66TWI.99