Brand v reputation

I need to cut back on my use of the word 'brand'.

Brand (n). 1.  A trademark or distinctive name identifying a product or a manufacturer.  2. A product line so identified: a popular brand of soap.  3. A distinctive category; a particular kind: a brand of comedy that I do not care for

A key element of the long-term project to legitimise marketing as a profession is the argument that a brand should be treated as an intangible asset and thus be included on a Balance Sheet.  As a marketer by training I certainly understand that a well-respected brand makes it easier to sell the product so branded and thus has a value.


'Brand' is meant to have a value neutral connotation.  A brand is manipulable, which is the purpose of positioning.  This leads to a line of thinking that like any other asset a brand can be neglected or even purposefully damaged and then repaired.

This is the thrust of an article on the IPL cricket competition by Gideon Haigh who is surely the world's finest cricket writer.  He explores the damage that marketing thinking can have in sport: -

A game is a cultural activity, operating at myriad levels, all of which need to be maintained, nurtured, protected. In the world of the brand, all that really matters is the face shown the public, the spectacle, the image. A game depends on fair dealing, robust processes and good people prepared to place their individual interests second. Both a game and a brand are at reputational risk, but in the case of the brand only the appearance of respectability and integrity is essential, and that can be achieved, or so it is usually felt, by sound media management, and at worst post hoc damage control.

Part of the problem is that the term is used far too loosely.  Often when we say 'brand' we really mean 'reputation'.

Reputation (n). 1. The general estimation in which a person is held by the public.  2. The state or situation of being held in high esteem.  3. A specific characteristic or trait ascribed to a person or thing: a reputation for courtesy

Reputation has a old fashioned judgmental, not to say a moral, element to it.  David Cameron's long-term project to 'detoxify the Tory Party brand' was a worthwhile exercise yet it fell short of establishing a reputation for inclusiveness.  Of course there is only so much of a (positive) effect that a political party can have on its reputation if it is out of power so the Tories' real work on this starts now.


I spend a lot of time advising pharmaceutical clients to ignore the brand and to focus on patient outcome as this is where a drug's real value lies.  Advertising agencies, who make money on the premise that a manipulated brand is an enhanced one, rarely thank me for this.  Then again, if I'm annoying the agency then I'm probably doing something right.


The brand v. reputation distinction operates most cogently at a personal level.  As a performer I suppose I have a brand and certainly every show I've produced has benefited from attention to this detail.  Still, I think we'd all do better if we were less concerned with branding and each paid a little more attention to our reputations.

David Heinemeier-Hansson

Yesterday I went along to the Regent Street Apple Store to listen to David Heinemeier-Hansson speak.  I'm not a programmer so until yesterday he was someone who existed only on the edge of my radar.  This was the descriptor for the talk: -

David is the developer behind the hugely successful software Ruby on Rails and Basecamp. Join him as he discusses 37signals’ business manifesto, co-written with Jason Fried, Rework: Change the Way You Work Forever.

It was a free talk so that he could spruik his GTD book so what was there to lose?  As with any other free event nothing but my time.

Even an hardened stand-up would label the lecture theatre at the back of the Apple Store 'a tough room'; substandard acoustics and an audience full of nerds accessing the free WiFi but that doesn't begin to explain the underwhelming non-event that followed.  A profound inability to engage with the audience, an absence of stagecraft and a monotony of delivery all gave the impression that the speaker was focused on nothing more than his final PowerPoint slide and the customary yet desultory round of applause.

Leaving aside the props that Heinemeier-Hansson gets for being sickeningly fluent in English, he wasted my time.  The content of the talk was not so much 'how to improve my personal productivity' but rather 'how to behave if I worked at 37signals'.  I was less likely to buy the book at the end of the talk that at the beginning.

When will people realise that all public speaking is performing?

The end of the arc

Lately my stand-up has been underwhelming.  Whilst I haven't actually been 'dying' on stage neither have I left my audience clamouring for more.  Sure, I've only done two gigs since the month-long ash-cloud-extended sojourn in Asia and Australia but there's a deeper problem than lack of stage-time, which is my usual diagnosis for a malaise like this.

Instead it just feels like the end of the arc.

In late 2006 I kept a long-standing personal promise to try stand-up comedy.  I was 39 and rather than aiming for fame'n'fortune I gave myself the more realistic goal of attaining what I called 'journeyman status'.  In 2010 I get paid pretty well.  I get asked back.  I have bit of a reputation as a solid, reliable comic for either 'Opening 20's' or compeering.  If I stopped today I'd leave the industry if not a success then certainly not a failure.

Job done.

The end of an arc like this is a time of extraordinary vulnerability.  When our business began to take off in multiple markets around the world my then partner's enthusiasm demonstrably waned.  The minute the market wanted him he lost interest.

He explained the paradox by describing a dinner party with old friends from medical school.  Because their services are always in demand very few of the doctors he trained with were in any way entrepreneurial; why start your own institution when there are plenty who will bend over backwards to make sure you're happy?  Around the dinner table my partner's decision to start a pharmaceutical consulting firm was regarded as either brave, laughable or contemptible.  Yet within a few years he was a founding partner of a growing business  with strong prospects and an already impressive record in markets as different as the US, Spain, Singapore, India, Taiwan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

Job done.

By then no one was laughing behind their hands at dinner.  But once he reached the end of that narrative arc from risk to assurance he lost enthusiasm.  I was driven by less easily sated demons.  It was this misalignment of motivation more than any disparity in contribution that led to the decoupling of the business a few years later.

If I cannot construct a realistic and satisfying narrative of my future stand-up career then every gig from now on will feel like an unsatisfying postscript because that's all it will be.  The storyteller in me has some work to do.

Exceeding expectations

An easy point of differentiation between stand-up comics and improvisers is their attitude to collaboration.  An interesting question to ask a performer on a long car journey is this: -

Would you rather be recognised as the best act on a mediocre night of comedy or a good contributor without being the stand-out act on a great one?

Every decent improviser opts for the former; the audience experience (aka 'the night') is all that matters.  Far too many stand-ups measure their performance comparatively against the rest of the bill rather than in the absolute terms of audience appreciation.  When I'm going through a bad patch I fall into the same relativist trap and my post-gig analysis starts sounding like the ravings of a paranoiac: -

Was I the weakest on the bill?  Was there a sense of palpable relief when I said goodnight?  The audience only talked during my set and listening intently to everyone else didn't they?  The other acts were all backslapping each other but did anyone say anything complimentary to me?  In fact when I came off stage I don't think that anyone even looked me in the eye...

And so on.  As such schadenfreude is the default setting for most stand-up comics.  This is why a commonplace on the English scene that Michael McIntyre is a poor comic, hardly better than Jimmy Carr really but at least he's no Joe Pasquale.  This mindset is self-destructive in the most obvious yet insidious way and we each need to guard against it.

Conversely, in consultingland it's been years since I've watched another external consultant or trainer work.  I often share a stage with internal speakers but it's very rare for direct competitors to speak to the same audience on the same day*.  The only indicators I have that I'm any good are that (a) my clients pay me on time and (b) keep asking me back.  I find that it's actually pretty easy to 'exceed expectations' when a client has paid thousands in travel, accommodation and fees and effectively gambled tens of thousands more in taking the sales team off the road for a few days because I'm given a brutally clear sense of what those expectations are.

Part of the frustration in performing comedy on most nights is that the audience has no more than a shaky idea why they're there in the first place.  Expectations usually range from the depressingly downbeat (I just hope no one embarrasses themselves, I couldn't bear to watch that) to the ludicrously optimistic (What do you mean a tenner in a room above a pub doesn't get me Eddie Izzard?) making it hard to judge your performance on anything other than your fellow acts.

None of this improves the mental health of your average stand-up comedian, who was unlikely to be especially sane before he took up the craft.

* The exception to this rule are those showcase events where speakers are allotted stage time in front of an audience of would-be buyers.  It's been years since I've attended one.  My business is totally driven by word-of-mouth recommendation amongst a small number of potential clients so the effort needed to make a showcase work has never justified the return.

Ideas, opportunity, time & capital

Any new enterprise requires a combination of ideas, opportunity, time and capital.  The absence of one or an unsympathetic proportion between the four and sooner or later the venture will fail.

Last week's travel hassles had me cooling my heels in Singapore, hanging out with old mates and getting a taste of the comfortable expat lifestyle that a career in Asian dealmaking affords.   I found myself thinking, "I could handle this. The great food, warm weather, access to amazing cities and a chance to be situated near the centre of the next economic revolution."

But could I handle it?  Is there a niche in the turbocharged Asian environment for a Headcount: 1 player?  No one of my personal acquaintance is genuinely and successfully playing with his own capital in Asia.  I can name half a dozen people who've fallen in love with this or that island in Thailand or Indonesia and who are the proud (part-) owners of overgrown building sites rapidly receding into the jungle.  The real game in Asia is either resource extraction or building those big things that only governments and huge consortia can afford to pay for.  Tapping into that world is what gets you that cool Singapore lifestyle.

I doubt that a market yet exists in Asia for my sort of sales/marketing insights.  I've delivered a couple of projects a year across the region over the last five years but in every case the client was the Western-run global or regional office.  I've never had a local manager contact me for unsolicited follow-up work. This lack of bottom-up demand speaks volumes; I don't mind taking occasional money in the name of global harmonisation but to be successfully based in Asia I'd need demand directly from Asian offices.  No amount of time, capital or great ideas will compensate for the lack of on-the-ground opportunity.

As I write I'm sitting in Zurich en route from Singapore to Germany.  I bet that there are at least a dozen men and women just like me in this airport right now; self-employed, small-shop consultants specialising in semi-soft skills. Each of us happily making a living without needing to conquer all of Europe to do so.

Eighty percent

Eighty percent of being successful in life is showing up.

I've quoted this Woody Allen line (from Annie Hall) before but in the shadow of Eyjafjallajoekull it's worth revisiting.

I've long held the Sydney Morning Herald to be the worst broadsheet in the world so this smug and sneering article was no surprise whatsoever: -

All those people on TV, frantically rushing from departure gate to train station to hire car vendor, remind me of a quote from a novel I once read (Margaret Atwood, perhaps?): “People will do anything rather than admit their lives have no meaning.” It turns out they’re even willing to sleep in airports.

Of course there's nothing a SMH journo enjoys more than sneering at the wage slaves.  If they're those nasty, Gaia-killing corporate traveler types then so much the better.  It doesn't occur to the writer that for many of the people she's mocking travel is as much an end as a means.  Showing up - being present at the meeting - is not a downside of the job, it is the job.  Airily declaring the meeting to be pointless doesn't change this.  Making fun of someone trying to do their job well; i.e. doing everything in their power to make the meeting, is a cheap shot.

A freelance writer who hires a taxi to get her copy to the editor when the fax and email goes down is the ultimate professional; the legend who went above and beyond to get the job done.  The habitual Business Class flier who opts to travel overnight in a 3rd Class rail carriage is an exact analogue.

Looking back I bet we'll be saying that this was the week when the understudy got her big break.  Like when the up-and-coming act got to close out the main stage.  Critics will put it down to the luck of being in the right place at the right time but in our hearts we know there's more to it than that.

No one is going to get sacked this week for missing the meeting but being the guy who did show up will count.

Eyjafjallajoekull

I suppose everyone is stuck somewhere this week.  I just happen to be stuck in Singapore.

It's hard to grasp the extent of the shutdown of European air traffic from this distance but doubtless there won't be a full roll call at Wednesday's pan-European pitch meeting in Milan.  My worry is not that I'll be somehow marked down for failing to anticipate the eruption of a volcano in Iceland but simply that the moment presented by the pitch will be lost.  In most workplaces an Act of God is the ultimate 'Get Out Of Jail' card.  Missing that meeting in Milan is consequence-free for everyone but me.

Most people live lives with very few totally unforgiving days; the time your train got delayed on the way to the interview and the job went to the other guy.  Self-employment is accepting that there are going to many more of these totally unforgiving days.

No one owes me a second chance regardless of why the first one went awry.

Orange, NSW

We spent the weekend in and around the town of Orange in the central-west of NSW. The occasion was my youngest sister's wedding, which gathered friends and family for a truly great couple of days.

As both the UK and Australia go to the polls this year there was much discussion about the relative strengths of the two countries. I spent a lot of time trying to convince the othet party guests that they were better off, both comparatively and absolutely than the Brits. No only does Australia have more natural resources under better management than any European country, its intelligent, pro-active oversight of local banks meant that the economy barely dipped into recession during the GFC. As bad as it might feel in rural Australia, I said, life is far worse in urban England.

"So what?" was the response, "You can only live in one country at a time." A more cogent comparison for Orange, 2010 is not London, 2010 but rather Orange, 2005.

Walking past block after block of vacant shops on Summer Street this morning restated their argument for them.

Time & tide

After a good week's work in Singapore, on Friday I met my wife in Australia for Easter. We traveled south from Sydney to spend the night in the beautiful Calderwood Valley on the farm where she grew up.

The matriarch is her grandmother, a 92-year-old sculptress named May Barrie. May has been working in stone for seventy years and whilst she's well-known to the cognoscenti the family has always harboured a feeling that she deserved greater recognition. Last year she won Australia's most prominent sculpture prize.

May herself remains as matter-of-fact as ever. She's always known her work is good. A long life creating beautiful things in a beautiful place with friends and family close by is as good as it gets.

Necessity & sufficiency

The only thing I remember from Logic classes in first year Philosophy was 'necessity' and 'sufficiency' in conditional statements.  Of course in the years since then I've somewhat purposefully mutated the terms, adapting them to marketing consulting.  For example: -

For a product launch to be successful it is necessary to have a good product but that alone is not sufficient

This is more than a rhetorical device.  It helps keep a client discussion focused on those factors that have to be in place before starting a project; the genuine deal-breakers.

This is easily applied to staging of comedy night: -

For a comedy night to be successful it is necessary to have a functioning microphone and a decently lit performing space and whilst these alone are not sufficient, without them you're just another guy standing, yelling in the middle of the pub 

 What?  Quit showbiz?

Wow

I missed this story when it came out.

Red Letter Days v. Accretion

Life is slow in consultingland at the moment.  After a massively travel-heavy first ten weeks 2010 has slowed down dramatically.  I hesitate to say alarmingly.  It's the usual combination of postponed meetings, a decrease in the speed of clients' email replies and a consequent upsurge in my tendency to look for Red Letter Days. 

Human nature to attaches significance to points in time.  Every well-told story has its then-one-day moment.  We celebrate anniversaries and birthdays to reinforce this significance.  When my To Do List shortens I find myself combing my diary for upcoming events that I can turn into these Red Letter Days; high-stakes moments when I have to 'bring my A-game'.

After twenty years you'd think I'd know better.  We can celebrate success any way we want but rarely is it achieved in one fell swoop.  It is accreted.

accrete [v] grow by accumulation or coalescence

It is the days spent drafting and redrafting whatever it is you're writing and nights performing in unnoticed venues.  It is the expectation that a decent client base will be built over years not months.  It requires a combination of experience and circumspection.

That's not to say that Red Letter Days don't occur or that they aren't important when they do.  We have to bring our A-games to the job interview, the pitch to clients or investors, the presentation to the senior management team or why bother showing up at all?  But we can overemphasise their importance; if a Red Letter Day is all about downside then not enough has been accreted beforehand.

Pricing in

Recently a banker friend was evaluating the performances of the major players in the UK's upcoming election.  On the subject of Gordon Brown's bullying he declared that the reason why this news had so little effect on opinion polling was that the electorate had already 'priced in' this sort of information.

'Priced in' is a bankerish way of saying that news is unsurprising.  I like phrase as it implies that an intelligent assessment has been made of the offer in question with a degree of tolerance included in the face of an uncertain world.

Buried somewhere in my pricing must be the fact that I don't work continuously otherwise my business is unsustainable.  This is where the trouble begins for the dilettante who looks at that first week's fee and immediately multiplies it by fifty-two.

Your Employer is Not Your Friend

I had two 'proper' jobs before I struck out on my own.  In total my tenure was just over three years, which was long enough to learn what should be a pretty self-evident truth: -

Your Employer is Not Your Friend 

In the mid-80's Unilever, my first employer, had an aggressively promoted Graduate Marketing Programme that roamed Australian campus Careers Days looking for soon-to-be marketing graduates like me.  I applied for the programme and was accepted.  As a 23-year-old Bachelor of Business with a major in Marketing and Advertising working for the multinational that produced roughly half of the brands sold in any supermarket meant that my career was off to a flying start.

I had chosen marketing for two reasons;  I had just enough self-knowledge to know that I didn't have either the maths or the patience for accounting, but mainly the vague idea that a marketing was the job where the advertising agency took you out for The Great Long Lunch.

My immediate problem was that the Graduate Marketing Programme took another 25 marketing graduates on the very same day as me, despite there being only five actual marketing roles on offer.  I got shoved into ‘Trade Marketing’ which is a sort of bastard son of sales and marketing that is all number crunching and report printing.  There were no long lunches only a boss with a bad haircut and an unenviable yet comprehensive collection of polyester officewear.  At least the word ‘marketing’ appeared in my job title – others were randomly dumped in sales, manufacturing, new product development and, in one especially unfortunate case, Occupational Health & Safety.

We learned that the programme was one big lie when we understood the myth of us being on a Six-Month Rotation.  Even then I could see it takes at least a year before a graduate accomplishes anything even vaguely useful and no manager is stupid enough to take on two new smug little incompetents every year whose only genuine thought is “When do I get to go to Rockpool?”

Closely aligned to The Six-Month Rotation Myth was The Great Overseas Posting Lie which worked like this; about three-quarters of the way through a successful graduate interview there’s a lull in conversation when the HR person leans conspiratorially towards the interviewee to ask in a hushed yet serious voice “How would you feel if we had to send you to say, London, for six months for work?”

The interviewee faces the stern challenge of suppressing an immense shit-eating grin whilst selflessly promising to be available for any and all overseas postings ‘for the good of the company’.  Internally The Great Long Lunch is upwardly revised from ‘Rockpool’ to ‘The River Café’.  The trick works in company’s favour every time because anyone who dreams of The Great Long Lunch (i.e. anyone in marketing) is a sucker for the prospect of overseas travel.

The beauty of the lie is that as long as the employee believes in it then it forms a part of the remuneration package.  For over eighteen months I truly believed I was but a heartbeat away from a Business Class ticket to Heathrow and that alone compensated for me being substantially less than my classmates who got sane jobs.  I shudder to think what a 24-year-old version of me would have done in the London office had they ever made good their threat, probably just stood around grinning inanely and crashing the mainframe if his cheerfully monolingual Japanese replacement was anything to go by.

To keep us happily underpaid all the company had to do was send a respected if replaceable employee on an overseas secondment every year or so.  When the ‘All Staff’ memo hit the notice board (this is all pre-eMail) the rest of us were torn between bilious envy and the internal whispering “I could be next!”

The theory behind the ‘Graduate Marketing Programme’ was that there were plenty more where we came from and this was annually proven to be correct.  The attrition rate was either horribly high or spot on depending on how you viewed it.  Most of us lasted less than five years in the company and I was gone in under two without ever leaving Trade Marketing.

 A couple of my intake did stick it out and both went onto greatish things.  If I was asked for adjectives to describe them I would settle on ‘patient’ and ‘unimaginative’; the exact words the business press use to describe the company overall.

The day I realised that I never likely to be on the short list for the long flight to London I felt underpaid.  A big part of our salary packages is hope and when that goes we generally follow it out the door.

Marketing-by-telepathy

The endless British winter this week brought a paucity of punters at gigs across London and the south of England. On a cliched foggy night I drove with a couple of comics to a once-a-month gig at a pretty little pub in an isolated village.  The landlord greeted us with a bizarre accusation: -

"Not many in tonight. Don't know why I bother with comedy. I got twice as many to watch opera last week and paid the singer half what you lot cost me."

Who were we to dispute this? The thirty (happily happy) punters who turned up to watch us apparently amounted to less than a third of the audience for the first foray into arias.  The comic in me shrugged his shoulders, did the gig, collected the fee and drove on home.

My inner consultant wanted to grab him by the lapels and shake some sense into the fool. Can't you see that you're blaming the acts for a lapse in your marketing?  How does that help us entertain the people who have managed to turn up and god knows how they did given that your sole promotional effort was a chalkboard listing our names inside the pub itself? Are you having the same whinge at your equally underwhelmed bar staff tonight?  Well done on the opera thing.   Maybe you've tapped an exciting new market of well-heeled culture-vultures or maybe you got lucky.  Either way I bet you spruiked the night a lot harder than the solitary chalkboard we got.

Marketing-by-telepathy. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?

Pithy

Seth Godin on change: -

Comfort the frightened, coach the clueless and teach the uninformed

Betting the house

Another out-of-town gig this week meant another few hours idly chatting with comics positioned on different steps on the comedy career ladder. Late on the drive home a particular question crystalised: -

Under what circumstances would you decline the opportunity to appear in a pilot for a TV comedy?

Unsurprisingly, popular wisdom's answer to this is 'never'.  For the vast majority of comics anywhere in the world, television is the ultimate goal if not the sole reason for taking up stand-up in the first place.  Why would anyone ever decline such an opportunity?

Well, because most TV pilots are horrible. Often career-limitingly so.  The shows that make it through to series often aren't much better.  Ridiculous production deadlines, poor decision-making and inexperienced directors all conspire against the first-time writer-performer. In an industry as absurdly fixated on novelty, you don't get too many failures as a fresh-faced new talent before your face is no longer fresh and the talent that got into the room in the first place gets called into question.

Holding out for the 'right' project takes a combination of strategic nous (is this the right idea backed by the right team?) and sheer nerve (can I survive financially as a jobbing comic until that right project comes my way?): -

Under what circumstances would you accept the opportunity to appear in a pilot for a TV comedy?

A serious and talented Australian actor I know has a great response to this.  Real estate.  She'd sign onto absolutely any project (except pornography) that would put her within five years of owning property.  The contract itself didn't have to match the purchase price but it had to amount to a deposit sizable enough to make her five-year plan a realistic one.  She worked out that property ownership was the one thing that assuaged the fears of her thoroughly middle class parents.  Achieving a permanent roof over her head put her in a place where a lot of other questions stopped being asked.

To her, this was success.

The caveat here was that there was a well-paid TV job at the beginning of it all; she wasn't so naive as to attempt to service a mortgage based solely on the proceeds of her live performance. That way lies madness.

You're the 'hot new thing' for such a short time in a long career.  But if you have sufficient talent (and sufficient belief in that talent) then you have more choice over the timing of that short time than you perhaps realise.  If you make that horrible choice then at least be able to look around your own kitchen and think, "Hey, it bought me this."

An Australian in a European winter

The comedian in me should be happy; in the last week I've amused onlookers in Zurich and Oslo.

Leather soles + icy ground = indignity.

A procession of small humiliations

This week I had lunch in Switzerland with two clients, an Egyptian man and a Cote d'Ivoirean woman. As is the way at such things the table talk inevitably turned to travel. The Cote d'Ivoirean had only recently relocated from Africa and we bombarded her with recommendations of weekend trips to Strasbourg, Munich and Milan.

It wasn't until I stood in line at Swiss border control later that day that I realised how thoughtless I'd been. Every white traveler in the queue was pretty much waved through without a glance whereas every black or Asian, regardless of passport, seemed to be held up by demands for permits, work contracts, proofs of residence and even medical certificates, often spending fifteen rictus-faced minutes standing at the counter.

This was to get out of the country.

In the past I've described air travel as a procession of small humiliations but I'll never be subjected to anything close to that degree of institutional racism. If I lived in Switzerland and carried an African passport there's no way I'd have my current enthusiasm for short cross-border pleasure trips.

Sales v. Marketing

Why is it that the senior sales guy who publicly declares that his company brooks no divide between Sales and Marketing is the one to run down his colleagues in private?

He's also the guy who backs the marketing strategy 100%, unless of course that entails any on-the-ground behavioural change from the sales team.

And he's the man most likely to insist that it takes years to gain credibility as a salesperson but that marketing can be mastered in months.

It's going to be a long week.