Greatest Hits Blog

The one-sentence summary

Marketing and marketers play a critical role in creating the customer value and demand that leads to growth, so it’s not enough for the marketing department to be organised effectively – the whole company needs to be.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• The book claims to be the definitive guide to transforming marketing capabilities.
• Marketing and marketers play a critical role in creating the customer value and demand that leads to growth. It’s not enough for the marketing department to be organised effectively to create better customer value – the whole company needs to be.
• The core disciplines and practices of effective marketing are explained, along with how an organisation can transform itself using them.
• Their 3D approach involves Defining strategy, Developing solutions, and Driving embedding.
• The Growth Propeller is a process for getting all this done:

~ The Outer Ring involves business objectives and performance, segmentation and portfolio strategy, brand positioning and architecture, innovative value propositions, integrated communications, route-to-market, and customer experience delivery.

~ The Connecting Ring involves strategy and planning.

~ The Inner Core involves insight and engagement.

• The Training Trap is where companies focus on individual skill development and fail to wire the marketing function into the organisation.
• The Brand Learning Wheel shows how to drive marketing capability through processes, skills, organisation, people, and culture.
• Learning occurs 70% on the job, 20% from feedback and role models, and just 10% from formal learning programmes.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• Marketing with a big M typically operates at the functional level, and with a small m at the company level.
• To get your company growing do you want to lift the floor (ensure consistent best practice) or raise the ceiling (stretch capabilities)?
• Five star marketing leaders have a restless customer obsession, a bold and inspiring vision, are humble, honest, and have great attention to detail.
• There are many Measurement Traps, including marketing = communications (it doesn’t); art v. science (creativity shouldn’t triumph over analytics); data v. insight (the former is useless without the latter); time lags (data cannot be acted upon if it’s too late); and commercial knowledge (huge numbers of marketing papers involve basic miscalculations and misunderstandings of fundamental concepts such as margin and ROI).
• Consensus seems to be emerging that instead of people making decisions in the sequence of feel, think, do, actual behaviour seems to be based more on a model of feel, do, post-rationalise.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• To any experienced marketer, it’s all a bit obvious.
• Perhaps not surprisingly, the book is obsessed with growth.

The one-sentence summary

In an age of information overload, the most effective way for a brand to stand out is to tell the truth.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• In an age of information overload, the most effective way for a brand to stand out is to tell the truth. Marketing with honesty is the only strategy that truly works, because customers stay more loyal.
• Equally, the absence of truth could be the death of a brand.
• With regard to content, brands need to:
• With regard to context, brands should~:

1. Acknowledge reality (there are 5 ways to do this: forceful, functional, funny, fair, forecasted)
2. Deliver real change to services and company structure (any claimed truth must be matched in reality)
3. Take consumers on the brand truth journey with you (allow them to participate and create communities)
4. Enlist third-party advocates (identify and nurture your natural fans and those you can win round: look at employees, cynics, advocates, critics, and agnostics)

1. Be close (tailor all communications to be locally relevant: propinquity is nearness in place or time)
2. Find a Truth Turning Point (identify and orchestrate surprise moments when telling the truth would make a real difference: this can include ignoring the script, breaking the format, exceeding the platform, expanding the brief, ‘being’ the quote, or interrupting a journey)
3. Use point-of-action media (communicate when the consumer is most open to hearing from you)
4. Leverage routine (what are your customers’ regular routines and where does the brand fit in it?)

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• Make your brand a relentless source of factual data, let people disagree, and actively encourage debate. That means communicating clearly, creatively, and collaboratively.
• Tell stories with punch lines, have a single use, do one thing well, offer a clear improvement, fix something, and say it simply.
• The content is the message, depending on the context.
• Locality can be as diverse as physical, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, or experiential.
• All of us live in ‘an endless narrative of moments’.
• The Guardian defines the truth as engagement with purpose, vetting of facts, and qualified participation.
• Amusingly, the top British traits are talking about the weather, queuing and sarcasm.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• The research quoted is probably valid but no particular methodology is explained to back it up – a biography of sources would have helped here.

The one-sentence summary

You can avoid drowning in data by asking seven simple questions.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• It is possible to make smarter decisions without drowning in information.
• Information is essential in making intelligent decisions, but more often than not it overwhelms us – it’s like drinking from a fire hose.
• Most business cultures these days worship numbers, but useless data saps morale.
• The Spray and Pray approach pervades many presentations – the presenter sprays as much data at the audience as possible, and prays that someone will spot something that’s relevant.
• The knack to dealing with this and finding the most helpful nuggets is to ask the right questions at the right time.
• The authors explain seven questions that fall broadly into the categories of discovery, insight, and delivery (the sequence is not fixed):

1. What is the essential business question? (What is the one vital piece of information you need to move forward?)

2. Where is your customer’s North Star? (Are you navel-gazing or truly listening to what customers really want? Use a Customer Impact Assessment to work out how plans will affect customers before you make them)

3. Should you believe the squiggly line? (Gain perspective by stepping further away from the data to avoid short-termism)

4. What surprised you? (Don’t regard numbers you can’t explain as outliers, and don’t just look at the numbers you expected to see)

5. What does the lighthouse reveal? (Define the criteria that are relevant to your business and use them to guide, warn or serve as an example as to what will happen next)

6. Who are your swing voters? (Neutral, somewhat satisfied, customers offer the greatest opportunity for growth. Identify them and work out what will impress them most)

7. The three Ws: What? So what? Now what? (Find the data that really matters, work out what it means, and act on it)

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• Businesses need to concentrate on the difference between things that are complicated as opposed to complex. Complicated things are going to the moon or performing hip surgery – they are difficult, but you can follow a process. Complex things are raising a child or running a healthcare system – these require a set of principles, but cannot be predicted in a linear way.
• The Hype Cycle begins with a Technology Trigger, creates a Peak of Inflated Expectations, followed by a Trough of Disillusionment, a Slope of Enlightenment, and a Plateau of Productivity.
• Do you have the time to be surprised? Helpful data discoveries do not happen in a rush – they need time to be found and analysed.
• Insights are borne out of rapid iteration – continually reassess your position to learn and re-learn.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• You might want to skip the data detail and just grab the method.

The one-sentence summary

The greatest gift we can offer each other is the framework in which to think for ourselves.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• The greatest gift we can offer each other is the framework in which to think for ourselves.
• We are living in an epidemic of obedience. We need a more thoughtful way of being in the world, and a stronger ability to think properly.
• Better meetings, better trusted leadership, better relationships – all are possible if good thinking is allowed.
• There are ten components to the Thinking Environment:

1. Attention (a deep interest in what someone thinks)
2. Equality (regardless of status)
3. Ease (if you are at ease yourself, people think better around you)
4. Appreciation (appreciate people 5 times more than you criticise them)
5. Encouragement (build their courage to go to the unexplored edge)
6. Information (this needs to be accurate and complete)
7. Feelings (expression of these should be welcomed)
8. Diversity (differences in cultures and identities can be fertile)
9. Incisive questions (these replace untrue limiting assumptions)
10. Place (this must suggest ‘you matter’ and not be sterile or barren)

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• This equation is wrong:
• Rushed = important
• Tense = focused
• Tight = professional
• Pressured = alive. None of this is true.
• Adventurer Priests listen hard and generously because they want to know what the other person really thinks.
• Withholding information is intellectual vandalism. We need to dismantle denial  (the assumption that what is not true, is).
• The author sets great store by the precise wording of questions, such as:

Do I want to know what this person really thinks?

Do I know how to help them think at their best?

Given that the assumption you are making is stopping you from reaching your goal, what would you credibly have to assume instead in order for you to reach your goal?

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• The method is in there, but you have to dig quite hard for it.
• Some of the observations are quite spiritual so it won’t suit everybody.

The one-sentence summary

Mathematical ideas underpin everything in our lives, from the geometry of a 50p piece to how probability can help you win in a casino.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• This is not strictly a business book. It contains dispatches from the wonderful world of mathematics.
• Mathematical ideas underpin just about everything in our lives: from the surprising geometry of a 50p piece to how probability can help you win in a casino.
• Dyscalculia is the condition of number blindness, in which sufferers don’t ‘get’ numbers as fast as most of us (dyscalculics wouldn’t enjoy this book).
• By contrast, lightning calculators are people who can compute highly complex calculations at high speed without using a machine.
• People have been arguing about number systems for years – some prefer ten as a base, others twelve, and so on. (Grocers are so named because of their preference for counting in twelves, which is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6, and a gross is 144 – a dozen dozen).
• Tessellation is the technical term for covering an area so that no part is left uncovered – something that only regular polygons can do (there may be an example on your bathroom floor).
• In India, Slumdog Millionaire was released as Slumdog Crorepati, because they do not have the word million. Our 100,000 is their lakh, and is written with the comma in a different place: 1,00,000. Ten lakh is a million, and ten million is a crore.
• The phrase ‘lowest common denominator’ is often used to describe something basic or unsophisticated, but this misrepresents the maths since an LCD can be as high as 468. The highest common factor is better. The HCF of 13 is 1, and you can’t much lower than that.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• In 1972 the fist HP calculator killed off the slide rule – it cost £365, about half the salary of a junior engineer.
• Popular obsessions with numerical teasers continue unabated – sudoku, Rubik’s cube, and the Fifteen puzzle, which has one square missing in a frame and you have to get them in the right order.
• The Fibonacci sequence is recurrent, with each term generated by the values of the previous terms: 1, 2,3, 5, 8, 13, describes the breeding of pairs of rabbits, and pretty much all cell division in nature.
• You can’t square a circle – that is to measure the circumference with total accuracy – because the true number is beyond the realm of finite algebra.
• The 50p and 20p pieces are design classics – curvaceous heptagons.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• It has some very technical moments that are so complex you just have to move on.