Marketing, professionalism and some advice from an "anti-guru"

Markets - go watch some, you'll learn a lot & it's fun

A former advertising colleague of mine was once, for reasons of politeness, introduced as a “marketing professional”. Howard, my colleague, politely and gently put us right:

“I’m a businessman. I happen to be in the business of advising other businesses about marketing and advertising. Doctors and lawyers are professionals. Like the people I work with, I’m a businessman, doing business.”

This may seem a quirky response in these days when ever job role aspires to being ‘professional’. The concept of doing a job and doing it well or of being ‘in business’ appears to have faded. We have instead the triumph of ‘book learning’ and the dominance of the ‘profession’. And because we have taken the bait of “I’m a professional not some nasty rapacious businessman”, there has arisen a vast industry stroking our professional sensibilities.

From out of no-where springs the idea of ‘professional ethics’; as if no-one besides the professional knows how to behave properly. Maybe we’re still worried about being ‘trade’ and having to use the back door? And given the behaviour of all those banking ‘professionals’ perhaps being an honest tradesman (paid in cash, of course) is rather more appealing these days. I note, however, that the bankers we blame are mostly either foreigners or barrow boy traders. The professional bankers, quiet, calm and understated, slip by unnoticed in our blame game.

This brings me, in a round-a-bout kind of way, to my ‘profession’, that profession denied by Howard – marketing. In a free market (or the over-regulated sort of free market we actually have) marketing should be the thing shouldn’t it? After all it has the magic word – ‘market’ – stuck right in the middle of it telling that we’re the ones who get that mystic (and invisible) hand like nobody else. Except we haven’t got a clue and choose instead to clutter round the knees of erudite – often self-appointed gurus – listening to the latest re-hash of old truths.

I’d thought about unpicking one or two of these gurus. Maybe Seth Godin with his repackaging of age-old sales principles as “permission marketing”, and letting others misuse these principles to justify – yet again – the pyramid scheme or the mathematically deranged ‘multi-level marketing’ idea.

Or perhaps I could describe seven principles, five watchwords or 375 “things every marketer should know” – a process involving the collecting of, mostly trite, observations and bundling them into some form of schema. But the thought of this results in the guilt buzzer sounding as I know that none of this actually helps make your business more successful.

Back in my direct marketing agency days, we coined the term “magic wand” to describe what us account planners were to do in the bowels of a mill conversion in Bradford. Businesses would arrive – often businesses doing OK, making money, growing slowly, giving their owners a living – and ask us to reveal the deep occult truth about marketing. To wave the magic wand that would change them from a business turning over £750,000 and making a decent enough profit into the world beating mega-business on the front of the newspaper business section.

And we would have the sorry task of explaining that, despite all the books written, all the gurus, all the conference speech with splendid presentations – despite all this, there is no magic wand. Just as the bearded maharishi doesn’t really offer spiritual enlightenment in exchange for cash, the marketing guru won’t provide (in exchange for cash) the way for your little business to become a big business. Those gurus will tell you this - it’s how they sell their books – remember that Seth Godin didn’t become your friend or even ask your permission before flogging you his book explaining how that’s the way to sell stuff. Mind you we can pretend we’re his friend by following him on twitter and subscribing to his newsletters.

But enough of this – so Seth’s made a load of money from guru-ness, from our desire to find “The Answer”, to locate that magic wand, to reveal the occult truth. And sometimes – gurus are very convincing – we feel we’ve found that truth. Except that it doesn’t seem to make us richer or our marketing more effective. Maybe we’re not following the guru’s strictures correctly? Or, more likely, there simply isn’t a magic wand.

So, in the spirit of the ‘Anti-guru’ here are some things I’ve learned about marketing:

1. Marketing isn’t about “free markets”. In truth, marketers hate free markets as they make our job harder and our results less good. Us marketers love monopolies.
2. Strategy is mostly a word used by consultants so they can charge more money. Marketing is almost entirely about tactics. Strategy is the easy bit – what market are we in, what route to market. It’s getting what we actually ‘do’ right that makes the difference.
3. Marketing is 1% clever brainy stuff and 99% boring routine – indeed this explains most people’s struggles with the stuff and the search for that ‘magic wand’. That dull repetitive routine – capturing and storing information, managing communications channels, monitoring and analysing results, checking timings and all the other tasks that your junior marketing executive is doing – is the meat and drink of effective marketing. Your high level strategy and visioning conference isn’t.

And that’s it really. I could add stuff about product development, about pricing or about the behaviour of that tricksy thing, the human being – all of these things matter to marketing. But in the end the whole point is to look for market advantage (ideally monopoly), decide what & where we’re selling and get on with the daily grind of actually doing that job.

I guess this is why I’m not a marketing guru!

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Trust me, I'm a politician!

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Trust is a tricky old thing – that headline probably brings out the sense of irony in you (although you don’t know for sure whether or not I actually mean “trust me”). Indeed our default position is, as Martin Vander Weyer points out, more often distrust:

...trust is no longer offered, in any sphere, as it used to be; distrust is now the default response. It’s easy to argue that business leaders, especially in the City, have brought this on themselves by behaving greedily and uncaringly. But that’s not the whole story, which is also about social change.

At the core of this is a presiding sense that they’re out to rip us off. Politicians, lawyers, doctors, journalists – the entire panoply of professions – are cynical, driven by personal success rather than by any concept of service. And our mistrust extends further – we see train drivers striking on boxing day and see self-interest rather than a collective response to injustice, we tell tales or teachers or council officers seeing the “strike day” as an excuse for a jolly and we’ve got used to anger at huge bonuses in large firms and big public organisation that seem merely to reward failure or incompetence.

The other day, Jack of Kent pondered on why everyone hates lawyers and concludes that it is the majesty of the law that we fear rather than its agent, the lawyer:

It is perhaps not so much that lawyers are hated, but that law itself is feared and mysterious.

That this is the case is unfortunate, and it is an entirely fair criticism that many lawyers do not do more to promote the public understanding of law.

Of course, barriers to lay understanding can suit the interests of lawyers. Lawyers have no general interest in enabling potential clients to work out their own legal problems.

And, so to that extent, lawyers really only have themselves to blame.

But it isn’t quite so simple – what has happened is that we have stopped trusting lawyers because they are lawyers, doctors simply for the fact of their doctoring and politicians by dint of their elected authority. The brands of these professions are corrupted by our awareness of their failings, our recognition that lawyers, doctors, MPs and other ‘professionals’ will close ranks, will protect their privileges, rather than have those failings exposed.

This is a good thing although we still give too great a credence to the self-interest of the Law Society, the BMA or the ‘senior backbencher’. However the growing doubt as to motive means that trust must be earned. It’s perfectly possible to trust a lawyer, a doctor, even a politician but only in so far as we trust the individual behind the badge.

When I urge you to trust me because I’m a politician, I’m asking you to trust the idea of such a person rather than to trust me. Such heuristics damage society by granting to a given organisation, professional body or political party the power to bestow trust.

You should trust Simon Cooke because he has proven himself trustworthy not because he has the stamp of politician.

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A depressing thought for those who like the North...

From a conversation this evening:

All the professional jobs in the North are in the public sector or in businesses servicing the public sector. If you want a good job in the private sector you have to look in the South East

I don't know if this is entirely true - although a quick scan of jobs websites does show a real paucity of professional jobs outside London and the South East.

If this is true - and it could well be - then there's no doubt at all that the public sector continues to throttle the private sector, to push it aside. There has to be a way out from under this problem but I'm absolutely sure it isn't through resolutions of councils, through economic development strategies or through another round of regional initiatives.

Perhaps we should try a little less government?

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Thoughts on what you would have read if the IT had worked!

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I wrote a brilliant, insightful, budget-related article in my break today. You all would have been staggered by its depth, by the breadth of its argument and by the lyricism of its prose.

For reasons that are of no importance, I e-mailed it to my Council address. Sadly, Council IT has let me down this evening so you'll have to imagine the forceful brilliance of the article.

The great irony is that I wrote about the new obsession with being a "professional" - not that nasty lower class trade stuff. This is the snobbishness of a past age revisited in the public sector - a rejection of business, of getting your hand dirty and the professionalisation of everything - from managing a bin collection service to delivering meals on wheels.

We can't afford such superiority any more.

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Wednesday Whimsy: Bring back the Age of the Amateur

I’m sure my readers will be familiar with C. B. Fry but in case not here’s an extract from his wikipedia entry:

Charles Burgess Fry, known as C. B. Fry (25 April 1872 – 7 September 1956) was an English polymath, an outstanding sportsman, politician, diplomat, academic, teacher, writer, editor and publisher, who is best remembered for his career as a cricketer. John Arlott summed him up thus: "Charles Fry could be autocratic, angry and self-willed: he was also magnanimous, extravagant, generous, elegant, brilliant - and fun [...] he was probably the most variously gifted Englishman of any age.” Neville Cardus wrote that he was "a national gallery and a theatre and a forum.”

Fry's achievements on the sporting field included representing England at both cricket and football, an FA Cup Final appearance for Southampton F.C. and equalling the then world record for long jump. He also reputedly turned down the throne of Albania. In later life, he suffered mental health problems, but in his 70s was still able to perform his party piece: jumping backwards onto a mantlepiece from a standing position.

The other thing you need to know about C. B. Fry is that he was an amateur. Now I know that this example is an extreme one but the central point remains – there’s nothing inherently wrong with not being “professional”. With not choosing to turn everything in life into a career. I mean look where the two approaches got us.

While Britain was run by amateurs like C. B. Fry we created the richest manufacturing country in the world, extended the Empire to the farthest flung corners of the globe, produced magnificent literature, gave the world its greatest team sports, explored the boundaries of science, opened up the world to free trade and enterprise, built fantastic buildings and generally contributed more to the betterment of the world than any previous group of men and women in history.

Now we’re run by professionals – professional police chiefs, professional hospital managers, professional university leaders, professional marketers, professional educationalists, professional managers of every shape and size – all frothing at the prospect of some letters to adorn the name. Every job seems to require a degree and a chartered institute (or better still a “Royal College”). Look at us. Look at the mess we’re in. Look at the pettifogging, sub-optimal, misguided and down-right stupid decisions being made by so-called “professionals”.

And perched at the top of all this chaos we have professional politicians.

Bring back the “cult of the amateur” before it’s too bloody late.

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