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

Most of what you hear about economics and how economies work is rubbish.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• This book destroys the myths about economies and explains how the world really works. His points, or ‘things’, are:

1.     There is no such thing as a free market (all have some regulations)

2.    Companies should not be run in the interest of their owners (because they all want short-term gain, which is usually detrimental)

3.    Most people in rich countries are paid more than they should be

4.    The washing machine has changed the world more than the internet has (by reducing the time needed for household chores and allowing women to work)

5.     Assume the worst about people and you get the worst

6.    Greater macroeconomic stability has not made the world economy more stable

7.     Free-market policies rarely make poor countries rich

8.    Capital has a nationality (transnational corporations always have a national base and mentality)

9.    We do not live in a post-industrial age

10.  The US does not have the highest living standard in the world

11.   Africa is not destined for underdevelopment

12.  Governments can pick winners

13.  Making rich people richer doesn’t make the rest of us richer

14.  US managers are over-priced

15.  People in poor countries are more entrepreneurial than those in rich countries

16.  We are not smart enough to leave things to the market

17.  More education in itself is not going to make a country richer (education makes people live better lives but doesn’t increase productivity)

18.  What is good for General Motors is not necessarily good for the United States (businesses need to be regulated properly)

19.  Despite the fall of communism, we are still living in planned economies

20. Equality of opportunity may not be fair

21.  Big government makes people more open to change (a well-designed welfare state can encourage people to take more risks because they have a safety net)

22. Financial markets need to become less, not more, efficient (modern efficiencies have made the market more unstable)

23. Good economic policy does not require good economists

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• It is in a short, pithy format. Each thing is introduced with  a paragraph on What They tell You followed by What They Don’t Tell You.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• Nothing. It’s a good read even for the layperson.

The one-sentence summary

We can bring more meaning to our lives and help change the world at the same time by turning capitalism upside down – shifting from a profit focus to caring for people, communities, and the planet.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• We can bring more meaning to our lives and help change the world at the same time by turning capitalism upside down.
• This means a shift from a profit focus to caring for people, communities, and the planet.
• Capitalism 24902 is his name for this new approach – that’s the circumference of the earth in miles – something of a euphemism for putting your arms around the world.
• There is no Planet B, so we need to look after what we’ve got.
• It’s not so much about doing good, as doing better.
• Whereas most businesses concentrate on affluent customers, there is a ‘fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’, in which giving poorer people access to products and services at sensible prices represents a massive market.
• Meanwhile, business suffers from a ‘missing middle’, in which small entrepreneurs lack investment because they are too small for large investment and too big for microfinance.
• Social intrapreneurs can have a huge effect by driving socially responsible initiatives inside large companies.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• Branson is nicknamed Dr. Yes by his team because when he latches onto an idea he wants to get on with it right away – a good business approach.
• The author is a fan of James Lovelock’s Gaia theory (named after the Greek goddess of the earth), in which the earth is viewed as a living organism. In its current condition, it is sick, so we need to amend our approach to it urgently.
• He disagrees with the old adage that “It’s not personal, it’s business.” Instead, he says that all business is personal, all the time, and we should act accordingly.
• Virgin has a foundation called Virgin Unite. Their philanthropic methods are not simply to give out money willy-nilly. Instead they run it like any other business, making sure that their investments have the best possible social and environmental return, and trying to help ventures be self-sustaining as fast as possible.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• It is effectively all about Virgin and its activities, so the subject matter can become a little samey after a while.