Issue 7 | Volume 1
September 2013
Take Part In The DNA Of A Growth-CMO Study by SAP and Human 1.0, with GMN, Global CMO™ and The CMO Club
A Conversation With Elisa Steele, CMO at Skype Fiona Vesey
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Why Do We Follow? Emmanuel Gobillot
The Sweet Taste Of Failure Sheikh Hussein A Al-Banawi
Are We Really Customer Centric? David J Hood pgmn
The Panel The Key Qualities Of A Leader
MaryLee Sachs
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Great Leaders Are Great Learners
Global CMO is the Official Magazine of Global Marketing Network, the Global CMO™ Body The Magazine September 2013 | 1 Global for Marketing Professionals. www.theglobalcmo.com
We are delighted to confirm that the following GMN Faculty Members are confirmed speakers at this prestigious event, sharing their latest research and examples of best practices:
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LAST CHANC E ! BOOK NOW!! Global Marketing Network is delighted to be endorsing the upcoming Brand2Global Conference taking place in September in London. Featuring presentations from industry experts with global marketing experience the conference presentations are designed to answer a number of key questions facing the global marketer, including: •• What is your brand essence and how can you assure that it is established accurately in each target country? •• What are the best practices for global advertising campaigns that combine a universal message, yet can be easily translated into local campaigns? •• What is the best strategy for international SEO and how can you take advantage of it while building your global brand and campaigns? •• How are social media outlets revolutionizing the way your brand interacts with customers across borders and how can you track and integrate the sentiments of your global customers in an effective manner?
16th September - Professor Robert Shaw, GMN Programme Director for Marketing Analytics will be delivering a 1-day Global CMO Masterclass, Measuring Marketing Performance. See following page for details. Robert will also be delivering a one hour session on Measuring Marketing Performance on 17th September. 17th September - Dr Markus Pfeiffer, Founder and CEO of Bloom Partners, and GMN Programme Director for Digital Strategy and Innovation will be delivering a one-hour session entitled ‘Winning the Empowered Consumer’, sharing with delegates the results of the “Digital Readiness” Study 2013, providing some deep insights on key success factors for winning in a digital-first era. 18th September – David Haigh, Founder and CEO of Brand Finance plc and GMN Programme Director for Brand Valuation shall be delivering a one hour session on the results of the recent Brand Finance Brand League Tables and what the drivers of success are in building a global brand. NEW SESSION ANNOUNCED 18th September - 21st Century Global CMO for a Globalised and Digitised World GMN is delighted that Brendan Dineen, IBM Director of Marketing - Demand Programs in the UK and Ireland will be speaking at this session moderated by GMN Chief Executive Darrell Kofkin. As the former Director of Marketing and Communications for the Chairman of IBM in EMEA and a former CMO for IBM in the UK, Ireland and South Africa, Brendan shall be sharing the results of the most recent IBM Global CMO Study and share his personal insights on what it takes to operate successfully as a Global CMO in the 21st Century, the skills and capabilities required to be a Marketing Leader of today and the challenges of operating in a more globalised, digitised environment.
LAST CHANC ! BOOK NOW!E ! Measuring Marketing Performance Masterclass 16th September, 2013 In today’s challenging business environment, Measuring Marketing Performance is “one way direction” for marketers. This highly interactive Masterclass will offer them the latest techniques and tools, in order to use data to make strategic marketing decisions, optimize their brand and marketing strategy and maximize marketing ROI. The Participants will learn: •• how to use data to make better decisions
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•• what data is available and what do you need most •• how make strategic marketing decisions with data •• how to maximise the lifetime value of customers •• how to optimise your brand strategy •• how to optimise the marketing mix: advertising, promotions, pricing, innovation •• how to use econometric models
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Leading This Issue: Leadership Leadership is key to success in every organisation - and not just in the marketing team. To reflect this, we have dedicated an entire issue to the topic. Leading the way is GMN’s very own Global CMO Czar, MaryLee Sachs, with an interesting insight into one of the forgotten pillars of leadership - Learning. Plus we hear from Sheikh Hussein A Al-Banawi and Emmanuel Gobillot. Both of whom have also authored great books on Leadership.
Issue 7 | Volume 1
September 2013
Take Part In The New CMO Study with Human1.0, SAP Global Marketing, The CMO Club, GMN & Global CMO™
A Conversation With Elisa Steele, CMO at Skype Fiona Vesey pgmn
Why Do We Follow?
We are joined by new members of ‘The Panel’ this month. Every one of them a marketing thought leader. So thank you to Kent, Vince and Sandra for joining the team and sharing your wisdom. And I need to pass on a huge thanks to the wonderful Elisa Steele, CMO at Skype, with whom I was lucky enough to chat with for my first ‘Influencer Insights’ interview. It really was inspiring. Keep an eye out for a number of new events we have uncovered for you, in the UK, Morroco, UAE, Germany and the US. There is sure to be something of interest for you - and remember to check the full event listings as there are numerous events happening in the next few weeks. To close, I’d like to call on all the marketing leaders out there. The teams at GMN and Gloabl CMO™ are pleased to be partnering with SAP, Human 1.0 and The CMO Club in a new CMO study - and we want you to be part of it. You can read more on this amazing initiative on page 11. Enjoy the issue. Take care, and take the lead...
Emmanuel Gobillot
The Sweet Taste Of Failure Sheikh Hussein A Al-Banawi
Are We Really Customer Centric? David J Hood pgmn
The Panel The Key Qualities Of A Leader
MaryLee Sachs
:
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Great Leaders Are Great Learners
Global CMO is the Official Magazine of Global Marketing Network, the Global CMO™ Body The Magazine September 2013 | 1 Global for Marketing Professionals. www.theglobalcmo.com
Cover Image: MaryLee Sachs fgmn Global CMO™ The Magazine Issue 7 | Volume 1 | September 2013 www.theglobalcmo.com The official Magazine of Global Marketing Network, the Global Body for Marketing Professionals.
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Editorial Board: Editor-in-Chief | Fiona Vesey GMN CPD Director | David Hood GMN Global Faculty | Professor Greg Marshall GMN South Africa | Dr Anthony Michail GMN Global Advisory Council | MaryLee Sachs GMN Global Faculty | Professor Michael Solomon
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As the publishers of Global CMO™ The Magazine, we take every care in the production of each issue. We are however, not liable for any editorial error, omission, mistake or typographical error. The views expressed by all contributors are not necessarily those of the publishers. Copyright: This magazine and the content published within are subject to copyright held by the publisher, with individual articles remaining copyright to the named contributor. Express written permission of the publisher and contributor must be acquired for reproduction.
September 2013 | 5
Inside This Issue Cover Story 38. Great Leaders Are Great Learners MaryLee Sachs fgmn
THE
ting The Marke o Manifest
PANEL
8. The Top Qualities Of A Marketing Leader
52. Are We Really Customer Centric?
Kent Huffman - CMO, Bearcom Wireless
David J Hood pgmn
Vince Ferraro - Board Advisor, Former VP of Marketing, Eastman Kodak Company Alan See - CMO, DocuStar Sandra Zoratti - Author, Speaker, Former VP Global Marketing, Executive Briefings/Events, Education, Ricoh
The Brand
Marion Gamel - VP Marketing EMEA, Eventbrite
57. Branding By Example Andrew Vesey ggmn
14. A Conversation With Elisa Steele Fiona Vesey pgmn
63. GMN Fellow Profile Robert Shaw fgmn
GMN Programme Director for Marketing Analytics
67. Are You A Leader At A Loss? 44. The Month’s Best Podcasts 6 | September 2013
Will the new kids on the block munch your lunch? Walter Spoonbill of Spoonbill & Coot sees room at the top. Global CMO™ The Magazine
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by SAP and Human 1.0, with GMN, Global CMO™ and The CMO Club
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THE
This Month’s Question: What are the top qualities you look for in a Marketing Leader for your organisation?
PANEL
Kent Huffman KentHuffman.com
Chief Marketing Officer, Bearcom Wireless
Twitter: @kenthuffman The qualities I value most in a marketing leader are innovation, drive, and accountability. Equally important is his/her ability to use both the left and right sides of the brain to maintain a balance between the creative and analytical aspects of marketing.
Vince Ferraro www.VincentFerraro.com Twitter: @vincelferraro
Board Advisor Former VP of Marketing, Eastman Kodak Company
I consider a few key things when hiring for marketing leaders. First, I need someone who has the intellectual capacity, tenacity, and creativity to deliver world class products, promotions, and programs. At the same time, has a degree of emotional maturity to handle the myriad of employees, customers, press, and partners a senior marketing leader would be required to interface with. I also look for a balance of strategic thinking and the ability to perform, on time, with quality results and deliverables. Finally, I look for people who know how to create business leadership through marketing. Specifically I want leaders who recognize the marketing function as the complex intersection of new products, new businesses, and customer insights, and are willing to lead the way in the company’s strategies and plans.
8 | September 2013
Global CMO™ The Magazine
Do you have a question you would like some thought leadership on? Would you like to join our panel? Contact us at ThePanel@theglobalcmo.com
Alan See www.docustar.com
Chief Marketing Officer, DocuStar
Twitter: @alansee I’m looking for independent lifelong learners. Today’s CMO is dealing with dozens of applications, programs and platforms and that has an impact on how much attention a CMO can devote to any given area; whether that be big data, social media or the CRM system. If you’re in the SMB space that means you’re going to need to surround yourself with people who are eager to learn new applications and programs, and have the ability to relate to both technology and the creative process.
Sandra Zoratti www.sandrazoratti.com Twitter: @sandraz
Author, Speaker, Former VP of Global Marketing, Executive Briefings/ Events, Education, Ricoh
Marketing is a dynamic profession in constant flux; the speed and magnitude of change is staggering. In order to navigate the turbulent – and exciting -- reality that is marketing today, marketing leaders need to possess extremely agility, impeccable authenticity and be: •• Customer-centric. In our customer-driven economy, customer engagement is more critical and more elusive than ever. •• Curious. Real-time, iterative learning to stay current with warp-speed trends and developments is a musthave. •• Communicative. Commitment to communicate and establish clarity can make or break marketing. •• Connected. Building bridges, networks and cultivating relationships is a cornerstone of marketing survival.
Global CMO™ The Magazine
September 2013 | 9
Marion Gamel www.eventbrite.com
VP Marketing EMEA, Eventbrite
Twitter: @marion_gamel •• An analytical mind – someone who is able to analyse local market data and turn this into the definition of a concrete opportunity. •• Strategic thinking – it all starts with a brilliant marketing strategy. •• Cross-functional approach – because marketing should never work in silo from the rest of the business. •• Hunger for learning – someone who likes to test, test, test, before launching big. As well as someone who can turn successes and failures into valuable learnings for the entire company. •• Ready to get their hands dirty – I believe in leading by example!
THE
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Marketing Leadership: Is It in your DNA? Are you a senior marketer? Then consider doing what many of your peers have already done – participate in the DNA of a Growth-CMO Study. In addition to helping the marketing community, you will also gain access to increasingly uncommon, but valuable, insights. Designed by CMOs to give CMOs an actionable roadmap to success for the next three years, the DNA of a Growth-CMO Study examines the new realities of data-driven, technology-enabled, and people-centric marketing. The study strives to show you the ART of growth-CMOs – how they: •• Act differently from their peers. •• Relate differently to customers, employees, and other members of the executive team. •• Think differently about their role. Participating in the DNA of a Growth-CMO Study is easy. You can either take 10 minutes to complete the survey and/or you can take part in a qualitative telephone interview. In appreciation of your participation, you will be granted early access to the study results, as well as receive a complimentary 1 year Professional Membership/Fellowship* with Global Marketing Network. The DNA of a Growth-CMO Study is produced by SAP and Human 1.0, in partnership with Global CMO The Magazine, Global Marketing Network and The CMO Club. In addition, a CMO advisory council has been created to guide the Global Growth-CMO Study team, and we will continue to recruit additional advisory board members from the DNA of a Growth-CMO Study participants.
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September 2013 | 11
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Aligning Your Customer Strategies To Create A holistic, Personalized Multi-Channel Service Experience Today, Facebook has more than one billion active monthly users. Twitter has 500 million users and more than 200 million people are on LinkedIn. YouTube has some 800 million users, reporting four billion views every day. Social media now accounts for 18% of all time spent online and more than half of the people in developed countries now have a social media profile. We are in a socially-connected, customer empowered environment and every business has to quickly adapt to the everchanging preferences of their customers. As people become increasingly more mobile, social and in control, service is no longer limited to the store or call centre environment The need to deliver outstanding and personalized experiences at every touch point has never been more important.
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A Conversation With Elisa Steele Fiona Vesey pgmn
On a rare day working from her home office, it was truly my pleasure to interview Elisa Steele, CMO and Corporate Vice President at Skype. What struck me almost immediately during our chat was her genuine passion, focus and openness.
Fiona
At fifteen and a half year old, working her first job, scooping ice cream at the Rose Glen dairy in Andover, Massachusetts she was determined to make her own money and be independent. Now as an inspiring executive, mother and wife, Elisa integrates her many different roles with zest.
Your best advocates for the brand are your employees and yourself, and it’s so important to be able to spread that and be able to talk about it authentically.
That’s a golden answer - live the brand and connect with your customers. Elisa
Being a successful CMO, what do you consider to be the really key qualities of being a great leader?
But I would say one of the biggest things I’ve learned about what’s important, especially from starting out in sales, is when you start out in sales and you’re a bit of an extrovert, what you do all the time is you pitch, and you talk, and you tell stories and you try to get the deal. What I’ve learned, especially in the last few years is, it’s so important to be a good listener – a good listener to your employees, a good listener to your peers, a good listener to your users, a good listener to your shareholders, a good listener to external experts and so I found myself really working on that a lot the last couple of years and just be a good listener because it’s so helpful to hear different points of view and to really internalise other’s opinions.
Elisa
Fiona
Well first, and this is true not just of a CMO but anyone in the C-Suite, is that you have to live the brand.
And being a good listener is a skill that every great leader either naturally has, or learnt and developed. It’s just essential. So who’s a leader you admire?
Via Skype (how appropriate), with Elisa in Palo Alto, California and myself today in Glasgow, Scotland, we talk about the Skype brand, leadership, giving back and one of life’s funny flukes. Thanks Elisa.
Fiona
You have to be so attuned to what the brand is that you work for and how you can represent it every day. Whether you’re the CMO, the CFO, the CEO, it has to be something that you believe in, that you’re passionate about, and that you can stand up for every day. I’ve always felt personally, wherever I’ve worked I want to be proud of it, I want it to be aligned with what my beliefs are and so I think it’s really important that you truly live the brand and I would say that’s first and foremost. And then, the second thing for me is know your customer and know your user. There is no better unifying force in a company and especially if you’re working for a big company, to always look at things through the eyes of your users or your customers because people can feel a part of that no matter what job they’re in, no matter what organisation they work for. It’s a hard belief to argue. 14 | September 2013
Elisa Oh gosh, I admire a number of leaders. This will sound a little cheeky; I’m going to answer in a couple of ways. One of the leaders I truly admire is Tony Bates, who was the president of Skype and like I said, it sounds a little cheeky because he’s my boss but he is a CEO type leader who has such a great balance of the business and the brand; the business goals and then the emotional connection that’s important to employees and to users, and so I’ve learned a lot from him. So I think he is someone who I really do admire. And then I also admire, in a really special way, my Dad. He also was a corporate executive, he’s retired now but one reason I admire him is that he; different from me and my
Global CMO™ The Magazine
brothers and sisters who were lucky enough to have parents that provided a college education, who provided resources for us to grow up as people, and learning opportunities; my Dad grew up with nothing. I mean absolutely nothing and he was able to take his will, his determination and his smarts and build resources to provide for him and his family and so he’s probably the number one guy I admire as a leader.
Fiona That’s so inspiring, and there is absolutely no way you cannot admire such a powerful example like that. How would you say, you then go out and inspire your own team? Elisa The first thing is to provide a unified mission for the team. In a position like this you have a lot of diverse functions, skill sets and levels of people, and so what is it that
Global CMO™ The Magazine
September 2013 | 15
actually makes you a team? At Skype in particular we have a truly global team, so how do you inspire and build a team across geographic boundaries, cultural boundaries, skill boundaries? And so my number one belief is about unifying to a mission; a mission that everyone can feel a part of no matter what position they play. In the first couple of months, now a year ago, being at Skype that’s what I really set out to do with the team and it was a fantastic experience because we explored what should our mission be. We really centred around the user and being inspired by the user stories - people around the world are counting on us to do this really well. Skype gave a gift to the world with this amazing product, how do we continue to live up to that brand? So after a lot of debate, we came up with a mission for the whole organisation which is three words: “Build User Love”. With that “Build User Love” flag we were able to go forward as a team together and know what we were doing. Something we didn’t plan was the magic of how that created unification outside of marketing, outside of my organisation. Because it was something people could believe in very naturally, it was a great catalyst for us to build cross functional relationships with engineering, product, finance, and others around the company. To say, if we’re going to actually continue to build this user love that we have in our brand in our business, that’s a pretty big mission and we’re all going to sign up for it. Fiona It’s an exciting mission as well, and as you said, it’s something so natural and easy for all the different parts of the business to buy into. How then do you go about sharing your strategic vision for marketing within the organisation? Elisa One of the really easy things to do as a leader is to create your vision and your mission and then think everybody knows what it is. You have to put time and energy into this communication and into making sure people are going along the journey with you. We put together an internal, integrated plan on how we were going to move along as a team, which included things that would be milestones and experiences to make our mission have the breadth and the depth that we wanted it to. So for example at the highest level every year we have an annual marketing summit. We bring all of the team together into one location, we have a three day experience, we immerse ourselves. The last time we did it we immersed ourselves with our users. We brought in Skype users from around the world to talk with 16 | September 2013
us and spend a day with us and share their experience and we all left feeling so close to our users and what we wanted to do next to make things better for them, it was really inspiring. Then a very simple thing that seems to have a good impact, is every Friday I send an email to the global organisation and / or a blog post. It will be about my week or what happened in the market or a challenge that we’re facing and I’ll just write whatever the topic of the week is, and then I’ll get replies back and folks will start talking, and it’s just a good way to be able to share what’s happening and be less formal about it. We have lots of things in between but I really believe that it’s not just about communication it’s about engagement. It’s about having the dialogue; it’s about feeling a part of something. So that’s been my strategy. Fiona When we were first setting up this interview; I was wondering what it would be like working for a company like Skype when everyone hears “Skype” and they’re like, “Oh I love Skype”, and here’s my story or here’s how I use Skype. Is that something you come across? Elisa It’s kind of amazing that you said it that way because when I first joined Skype it was an amazing experience the first couple of months as people would find out I took this new position, whether I knew them really well or whether they were just an acquaintance, the conversation was very similar. They’ll come up to me and say, “Congratulations you’re at Skype. I love Skype… let me tell you my story”, and you hear these amazingly personal, meaningful, important stories from people of all walks of life, and you can really take that away and understand the meaning of the brand in their life. And then the next question I ask is, “And when’s the last time you used Skype?” and sometimes people go, “…mm… well it was last Christmas when I had this amazing call”. So we have this amazing brand love and affinity to using the brand but we’re working on trying to make sure people feel comfortable with video as an everyday occasion. Just like we’re using it today, that it doesn’t have to be just for those big moments, it’s actually really amazing for also those little moments. For example, when I’m on a business trip, if I can make it happen with the time zones, I’ll call in to family dinner. And my husband will just put the tablet on the kitchen table and it might not be dinner time where I am but we can still have that same conversation and feel like we’re together.
Global CMO™ The Magazine
Elisa Steele
Fiona Absolutely, and with the way technology is moving, situations like that will be able to become more of a norm.
Chief Marketing Officer at Skype and Corporate Vice President, Skype Division at Microsoft
What are your thoughts on remaining at the forefront as more competitors arise in this market? Elisa
As Corporate Vice President of Marketing for Skype, a division of Microsoft, Elisa Steele leads integrated marketing for Skype. In this role, Elisa oversees Skype’s global brand and marketing functions, as well as local go-to-market activities. She reports to Skype President Tony Bates and is based at Skype’s office in Palo Alto. Elisa is tasked with promoting, protecting and growing one of the best loved brands in the world.
Skype was a disrupter. It invented a product and brought a product to the world that people thought was magic. It was just magical, like really? I can do this? But ten years later there’s Google Hangouts, there’s Apple Facetime, we’re in a position where we have to make sure that we continue to invest and be smart and purposeful about our brand, our business and our users. It’s about cultivating and nurturing that brand love, but also knowing and being very cognisant and smart about what choices users have today that they didn’t have five years ago and we need to make sure that we remain competitive and that we give our users the best experience that’s available.
Elisa has extensive experience leading global marketing at technology companies and joined Skype after serving as EVP and chief marketing officer at Yahoo!. During her time at Yahoo!, she was responsible for the company’s global marketing strategy and functions including brand, consumer, business-business, research & insights, communications, policy, privacy, and regional marketing.
Skype’s true mission is to bring people together whenever they’re apart and it’s such a beautiful statement because it is so genuine and true to what Skype enables people to do both personally and professionally since Skype is also used in the work environment like we’re using it today.
Prior to Yahoo!, she was senior vice president of corporate marketing at NetApp, where she led a transformational brand strategy for the Company and was responsible for the execution of marketing programs, communications, corporate relations, and integrated marketing functions on a global basis. Before NetApp, Elisa led Sun’s integrated marketing and merchandising organisation, where she was responsible for global go-to-market initiatives, campaign execution, events, online marketing, and installed base marketing. Her experience includes marketing management positions at iPlanet eCommerce Solutions and JavaSoft. She was also a sales leader at AT&T for several years, producing revenue growth nationally and managing diverse sales organisations.
But personally the user story is about how Skype is able to keep families together or relationships together. It’s really different isn’t it to be able to talk face to face like this and feel like we’re getting to know each other, rather than just on cell phone or just on a voice call. Fiona It sure is. I’ve been hearing a bit about Skype Social Good. Can you tell me a little about the program? Elisa Social Good is so important to our brand because it’s truly who we are - breaking down barriers of communication.
In addition to her role at Skype, Elisa currently serves on the Board of Directors of RMG Networks and the Advisory Boards to the consumer Internet companies CareZone and Eyeona. In 2009, Advertising Age named her a “Women to Watch”. Elisa’s global marketing teams have been recognized in the industry for excellence in branding, innovation, convergence and experiences. She is also a strong advocate of Women in Technology programs and is on the Forbes Executive Women advisory board. Elisa is passionate about education and participates in various community and school programs in her local community.
We’re very inspired by how we can enable people to use Skype in ways that truly change their lives, and so we’ve committed our time and committed our brand to Skype in education. We’ve committed our brand to an organisation called “Peace One Day”, which is all about breaking down barriers and in particular for young people to have access to knowledge, people, leaders, content, that they would never have a chance to have access to without Skype. And so we have this program called “Skype in the Classroom” that allows teachers to come together in a network and share with each other. They can participate in each other’s classrooms to teach, to have the students get to know different languages and cultures and subject matter, and we also have partners who participate in “Skype
Elisa holds a master of business administration degree from San Francisco State University and a bachelor of business administration degree from the University of New Hampshire.
September 2013 | 17
in the Classroom” and donate their time and intelligence. Whether it be Random Books, when authors can come on and share with the students great new books, or whether it’s NASA. NASA does actual “Skype in the Classroom” sessions for us. Fiona Oh, the kids would love that. Elisa Oh Fiona, it’s incredible, we’d love for you to check out “Skype in the Classroom”. https://education.skype.com I’ll just tell you a quick story that happened last year. 18 | September 2013
There was a teacher in Taiwan; her kids were fascinated by Halloween. So she put a post up and said, “Would anybody be willing to Skype with me and my classroom because we would like to see the kids in America in Halloween costumes”. And so ‘boom’ right, there’s all these classrooms that sign up that want to talk to the kids in Taiwan. They get on the call, the kids see the costumes, they talk about their traditions and their different cultures and then as a follow up the teacher in America says, “Well we want to know about Chinese New Year”, and so they schedule a follow up call and they get to see the kids preparing and celebrating for Chinese New Year. Suddenly you have these two classrooms in totally different parts of the world sharing things about their culture that they could never get that interaction on.
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already using Skype, how can we bring new and interesting opportunities for them for “World Read Aloud Day”? So we went out to the community; this isn’t about marketing budgets or paying celebrities. We just went out to the community and said, “Anyone who would donate their time to read your favourite book to a classroom over the next year, we’d love to sign you up for ‘Skype in the Classroom’”. Celebrities, business leaders, technologists, innovators; so many people came forward and said, “I’ll do it, I’ll do it” Fiona What’s your ultimate vision for the program? Elisa Well we have this crazy goal that we want to reach a million classrooms. Fiona I love crazy goals! Elisa Yeah, just because it’s big and meaningful and if we could get to that, we could really feel like we’re doing something meaningful in the world. We want this to be something that teachers can use completely on their own. It’s just easy, they don’t need help, they can connect with other teachers. We want to make it just part of the culture that it is so easy to Skype in and to be connected with these resources. And then we’ve had partners who really just spark amazing curiosity in the kids.
The stories go on and on, about how teachers are using Skype to be able to connect with classrooms around the world. It’s something we support not just in a way that allows our technology to be used by them, but we really support it as part of what we believe in for our brand. Fiona And how wonderful for those children to introduced and learning from completely different cultures and, like you said, with different authors and NASA for goodness sake. That would just have them so excited. Elisa Yes, let me tell you of another program we did last year for “World Read Aloud Day”. We thought teachers are
One is Mark Wood. Mark is a true blue explorer, he climbs mountains, and has come and spoken at Skype. He attempted Mt Everest and all of these other amazing places, where he will Skype into the classroom from the top of a mountain and talk to the children about what it’s like to be living in those conditions, and it is inspiring and amazing. And we currently have a program with Jacques Cousteau’s grandson, Fabien Cousteau. He is going literally under the sea for thirty one days and he is going to live under the sea and every day he is going to Skype us. He is going to Skype a classroom and talk to them from the ocean floor. The stories go on and on and we really believe that this is so genuine to who we are, so genuine to our brand and if we can bring these opportunities to children around the world we really break down barriers for their learning and for their opportunities and so we’re committed to it, we believe in it. It’s just simply part of who we are, we don’t think about it as a program or a marketing effort. We think about it as just part of our DNA.
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September 2013 | 19
Fiona
Fiona
So obviously this is something you’re incredible passionate about and, like you said, fits perfectly with the Skype brand. How does it integrate with your marketing? That’s not it’s purpose, however there will be ways that it compliments and works with your marketing strategy.
That’s a good answer, I like that.
Elisa
Elisa
It’s actually very natural because our marketing strategy is all about creating the opportunity to understand and hear genuine and authentic stories. So our Skype for Good program is all about that. I just shared three or four stories in a nutshell, and all of them are about true, authentic people trying to connect and using Skype to make that connection and so it’s very similar to our marketing from a stand point of we don’t think about marketing as pushing out messages. We think about marketing as cultivating and curating the stories of our users and the kids in the classroom are our users and the Moms who stay connected with their family are our users, and the small businesses are our users. So it all really is just part of the fabric of our strategy.
Well it gets back to the concept of listening. Skype is inherently social, it is all about communicating with each other and so we are very open and transparent in talking with our users in a social environment. We listen a lot in social channels and respond a lot and dialogue all day long with our users, We then have a team who’s based in London that, if we have things our users have questions about, or is not working, or they don’t know what to do, we have a place where we can send them and they can have an interaction with us to make sure we get them on track.
Fiona That’s perfect when the transition is so natural because it fits so wholly with what you stand for in your brand.
Keeping on the global theme: How do you cross the cultural barriers remaining authentic to your brand values, the brand meaning and messaging, while connecting with international users?
The global nature of the brand is our privilege and the beauty of what Skype is all about. So we have to step up to making sure that we give users the forms in which they can talk with us if they need us and they can also share their stories, because that’s really, really important to us and it’s important to them. Fiona
Being a global brand how do you ensure brand consistency worldwide?
What’s a current marketing trend that you think that marketers today should be paying attention to?
Elisa
Elisa
It’s an interesting question; first and foremost which probably is obvious after our conversation so far, but the first thing is to have the organisation truly understand the brand, not the brand guidelines, truly understand the essence of the brand. And we do that with great passion. Even internally, on a regular basis, we do brand inductions and people who have been with the company seven years still go to them. People who have been with the company seven months go to them because we want our brand to be a living mission within the organisation.
Data, data, data, and I say that in answer to your question, but it’s not a trend right? It is a reality. The market today is so different and it has to be about the science and the data and the understanding of your users; of the trends in the marketplace. Marketing has really grown up to be a combination of art and science and the art is still very important. Beautiful experiences, beautiful stories, attractive and compelling creative, but it has to be in balance with the science of the work and so I look to have really diverse experiences within the team and skill sets within the team. To have the hard core data scientists from marketing sciences with branding and creatives so that we come together in a wonderful blend of art and science.
So, I actually don’t think it’s about consistency, it’s about meaning. The brand can show up in many different places and channels. It shows up in the way we interact, the way I use the product, in the way I’m experiencing the web, there’s all sorts of ways that it can show up and as long as it shows up in the right context of what the brand stands for, that’s the most important thing. And so we work hard at the brand’s meaning and the execution of the brand comes after that.
That’s what I think the number one thing is. How marketers should look to have experiences in both worlds because I think it’s so important that you understand the science and the math and the numbers. Fiona And like you said, surrounding yourself and making sure that your team is strong in those different areas in order to be all complimentary and work together as a whole.
20 | September 2013
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Elisa
Fiona
Absolutely
Wow, how do you spell “meant to be”? Now, if you were talking to a someone who was just starting out in their career, aspiring to be successful in the corporate world. What advice would you give?
Fiona So if you were going to change one thing in the marketing industry, what would it be?
Elisa
Elisa
You know there’s a couple of things, the first thing is, do something that you have passion for and that you want to wake up and do. It’s very, very important.
Well it’s funny you ask that right after data because you know the thing I would change is just not make it so hard. I mean, what is the big thing we’re all trying to do? We’re all trying to get a three hundred and sixty degree view of the customer. We all want a holistic view of the user. We all want to know all the user will allow us to know so that we can be smarter and better about giving them a service that really fits with their life and is personal to them.
But I would balance that with; early in your career, take alternate, different assignments. Don’t stay in one place because you like branding, or you like sales, or you like finance. Take all sorts of different types of jobs because it gives you experience that later you can draw on can use for your decision making skills. Your understanding of other people, those experiences become so important because all those different roles give you a different set of challenges, different types of people to work with, and different business problems. I feel I was very lucky early on, I did a bunch of sales roles but I also was able to take a few positions that I knew, while they weren’t going to be long term for me, they really helped me learn other parts of the business and I think that becomes a foundation for you to accelerate your career and take different leadership positions.
If we could just make that easier, that’s what I would want because right now it’s hard. Understanding the data is hard. That’s why we call it a science. Because it’s not like it’s easy to get to it, to understand it, to make sure the numbers are actually reflective of reality, so that would make our lives easier. Fiona From our discussion, you seem to be such a perfect fit for your role within Skype; in regards to being in alignment, living the brand and being passionate about what it stands for.
Fiona Vesey
Elisa
Founder, Vesey Creative
It’s crazy. It is a perfect fit for me. It is really something I truly don’t have to work hard at having the passion and the energy to take the next goal, whatever it is.
Fiona Vesey is the Creative Spark and Co-Founder behind the dynamic Brand and Design Agency, Vesey Creative, the official Brand Guardians for Global Marketing Network. Her natural ability to build relationships, communicate and truly understand clients needs is essential to the process of both creating and implementing - result generating, people focused, Marketing, Design and Branding. Fiona oversees Vesey Creative’s global operations, and is focused on expanding the company’s client portfolio from both their New Zealand and United Kingdom bases. In addition to driving Vesey Creative’s expansion, Fiona is also the Editor-in-Chief of both Global CMO™ and Brand Quarterly magazines. In these roles Fiona draws on her experience as an award winning, professional photographer and her background in the newspaper industry. Delivering that fine balance of comprehensive content in a visually appealing format. Combining a number of her passions in ‘Influencer Insights with Fiona’; she thrives in connecting and building relationships with fantastic people, while continually learning, being inspired and sharing this with others. Currently Fiona’s co-authoring ‘The Brand GAME’ with her husband and partner in crime, Andrew.
I’ll tell you a funny funny fluke in life. My Mom’s father immigrated from Lebanon, she was first generation born American. I never really knew him because he died when I was very young, but when her father came to this country, he had a very complicated Arabic name. So to sign his immigration papers to come into the country and to be a citizen he shortened his Arabic to Skype. S-K-Y-P-E. He ran a local grocery store and when I got this job at Skype my Mom came over to my house and she gave me this little slip of paper which she’d saved since she was thirteen years old, which said “John Skype’s Grocery Store”. There were no computers, right. So you just wrote down the invoice and you wrote down what the customer bought and you’d add it up and take their money. She gave me that grocery slip and it was just so amazing to me, I come from the roots of a name, my grandfather’s name was “Skype”. I belong here.
pgmn
September 2013 | 21
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What Are The Real Statistics Behind The Impact Of Your Social Media Strategy? Statistics bombard the social media strategist: 65% of UK consumers feel social media is a better way to deal with companies than call centres; 85% of customers expect businesses to be active on social media; 55% more web visitors and 67% more leads are generated by businesses that blog. Social media has essentially demanded marketers to reevaluate traditional digital marketing strategies to integrate social media networks as a new way of reaching potential customers.
new, we want to teach delegates how to properly utilise the channel to directly work towards business and marketing objectives,” says speaker Patrick Altoft, Director of Search at Branded3. As the event for social media marketers, we’re excited to be involved this year and share our own insights with the digital marketing industry.”
As with any relatively young industry, building a strategy that actually produces results is a core challenge. Additionally, what do these stats really mean for your business?
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Emerging Economies And Increasing Influence Of ‘Development Agenda’ On National, Transnational And Corporate Objectives Anuja Prashar pgmn
In the first article, of this three part series, I introduced the concept of the ‘Corpnation’ as the new emerging institutional form of systems and organisations of the 21st century. The evidence suggested that in future businesses and governments will need to strategise together within deeply rooted contexts of development and consumer behaviour, which reflect social needs of a dawning emergent ‘South’ that contains two thirds of world population and not the commercial consumerist ideology of a ‘North’ dominated past. This second article explores how the global ‘North’ is engaging with these new trends of an ‘Emerging South’ that is already evidently beginning to form effective ‘Corpnation’ structures. We will also explore the possibility of any other alternatives that may be operating today and from which we can learn lessons for the 21st century. Please note that the use of terms North - South instead of East - West is deliberate and emphasizes that for most of the 21st Century the social, political, economic distances between 26 | September 2013
the global North and global South will be far more influential in shaping the global political and economic economy. (Thompson & Reuveny, 2008) In this article I propose that resulting from this North – South distance in the 21st century, two leading global imperatives will become (i) The necessity for producing more balanced economies with the associated greater equal wealth distribution within and across nations and (ii) The global collaboration and co-operation across all essential sectors of economic, social and political divisions. Failure to embed these two factors into the new 21st Century transnational structures and systems will witness a continued acceleration of social and political instability across the globe, which in turn has rapid and enormous negative consequences for trade and business. In order to embed these two global imperatives, 21st century global systems and structures will require a foundational pluralist world view, which can in turn engender a high level of economic, political and cultural dexterity.
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The promise of Neo-Liberalism post Cold-War was that Democracy, Capitalism and the Free Market Economies will deliver greater prosperity across the globe and at the turn of the Century, our euphoria was so great we even dared to declare the ‘eradication of poverty by 2020’. (Millennium Goals, 2000) Lesley Sklair’s theory that a ‘Transnational Capitalist Class’ consisting of owners of Fortune 500 corporations, Executives of these corporations, Global Media and government lobbyists are together the shapers of globalization today (Sklair 2001).
also marks an shift towards the “Re-Orientation from Western to Eastern economic dominance of world trade” (Frank-Gunder) and the formation of a new multi-polar world order. (Gramsci, ; Wallerstein, ; Cox, ; Alain de Benoist) % of WORLD ECONOMY growth projections
I contend that the transnational capitalist class in not homogenous nor only confined to corporate structures (Prashar thesis 2015) and that the Emerging Economies of the global ’South’ is producing transnational corporations and indeed ‘Corpnations’ (Prashar 2013) that have distinctly different values, structures and objectives. (Agtmael,2007; Sheth, 2008; Khanna, 2007; World Bank & institute of Policy Studies 2007; Kohli, 2008) The recent civilian unrest in Brazil, Greece, Spain, UK Riots of 2011, Middle Eastern ‘Spring’, uprisings in key economic zones of India, the increase in China’s expenditure on internal security, US Food riots (2011, 2012) and civil wars in key African states demonstrates the beginning of a ‘multitude’ reaction (Hardt & Negri, 2004) as citizens and national governments cope with the transitioning conditions of Globalisation. This moment of world history
(Source: Goldman Sachs 2011)
This discussion, focusing upon economic development of the global ‘South’, becomes particularly relevant when we remember that the ‘shift’ of global economic growth and capital is going to cause a need to engage with the emerging economies of the BRIC and CIVETS countries, and with India and China in particular as the ‘engines of global economic growth’.
South Africa
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September 2013 | 27
Both India and China have exceptionally large populations and despite economic growth rates that seem comparatively high for us in the west, the numbers of people living in extreme poverty is still extremely high. It is my contention that these populations, including the many millions in Africa and Latin America cannot be ignored for too much longer. Number Of Poor People In India & China 1981 to 2010
The consumer in the ‘South’ often requires newer innovative products that best suit their particular needs and these can be very different from what the ‘North’ has become accustomed to providing. For example, Mobile Phone Banking in Africa, introduced by Safaricom (35% ownership of Kenya Treasury) and Vodacom of South Africa, serves a need for a growing market for millions of people who do not have a bank account. In countries like South Africa, for example, mobile phones outnumber fixed lines by eight to one. In Kenya there were just 15,000 handsets in use a decade ago. Now that number tops 15 million. In Tanzania just 5% of the population have bank accounts. In Ethiopia there is one bank for every 100,000 people. In Africa traditional banks have to compete with this new form of ‘South’ banking with an estimated future market across Africa of billions of dollars.
Figures in Millions Source: World Bank
Today the combination of a failure to meet the millennium targets, the emergence of selective economies and the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 we need to review and re-design our capitalist systems to deliver sustained growth in developed economies that addresses the developmental needs of the less developed world, which is occupied by two thirds of the total world’s population.
Equity Bank in Kenya has chosen not to compete but rather to collaborate and co-operate with the new mobile phone operators. The resulting partnership with mobile operators enabled the bank to grow it’s deposit base at an average compounded growth rate of 40% from 2007 to 2012, without incurring any significant branch network expansion costs (African Development Bank Group). Millions in the BRICs to Enter Middle Class Income Bracket By 2020, Far Surpassing The G7
Global Poverty
Millions of people
*At 2005 purchasing-power parity Source: World Bank
One strategy for traditional transnational corporations is to focus all strategic attention on capturing the emerging middle class of emerging economies as consumers and hoping to capitalize on this growth sector to sustain corporate growth & profits. Traditional transnational corporations will increasingly face competition from transnational corporations and ‘corpnations’ from the ‘South’ who are focused on providing the solutions for a market need and not ‘creating the market’ through the selling of a consumer model which is aping the ‘West’. 28 | September 2013
Source: Goldman Sachs 2006 BRICS report
Targeting the middle class market space in emerging economies appears a sensible strategy when you look at the overall figures and realize that the consumer base will shift significantly from ‘North’ to ‘South’ overtime. However, the combination of dependency upon a dwindling ‘North’ consumer base and a short term investment into emerging economies will put most ‘North’ corporations into a weak and risky position over time. The risk of an ‘Outreach to middle class’ strategy becomes apparent when you consider there are 3 key global market environmental trends which will render this strategy ineffective.
Global CMO™ The Magazine
i.
Diverse methods & goals - Access to these emerging economies is becoming increasingly more difficult, despite the liberalization of the market place, due to rapid rise of domestic competitors and diverse business cultures. (Agtmael,2007; Sheth, 2008; Khanna, 2007; World Bank & institute of Policy Studies 2007; Kohli, 2008)
ii. Protection of priorities - National governments increasingly focused on protectionist policy to ensure internal growth and development of the national economy and national well being of citizens, so as to curb social and political unrest. (World Bank & Institute of Policy Studies, 2007) iii. Breakdown of cohesion - Failure of the current global institutions, such as WTO, UN, FSA, ICC, UNFCC and UNESCO and other global systems, to forge co-operation around one set of core values and regulations for implementation The greatest triumph of Neo-Liberalism and deregulation of markets has been the formation of transnational corporations and it is the future role of these global giants, many of whom are larger than the economies of many countries that we are focusing on in this series.
(Please see first article of this series for exact statistical data) There are only 26 countries that have economies larger than the largest transnational corporation. How are the nation states of the global ’North’ and fortune 500 transnational corporations engaging with these new market environmental trends? Evidence that transnational corporations from the ‘North’ have enormous influence on national and global strategy and that the ‘developmental’ agenda is gaining priority is visible to anyone who monitors and observes the formation of transnational systems. Over the past decade I have observed the growth and progress of the World Economic Forum at DAVOS. I agree with Rothkopf, author of ‘Super Class’ that WEF is probably one of the most significant transnational networks for its influence upon the formation of global agenda items and it’s consequent impact upon transnational businesses and national economies. In January 2012, the World Economic Forum (Schwab Foundation website) hosted a special private discussion on the possible future for ‘Impact Investment’ (World Economic Forum website) a new concept that had everyone very excited. The private discussion was attended by 30 CEOs and CFOs along with the Chief Investment Officers
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of the world’s most powerful private equity, venture capital, investment management firms, foreign investment funds, pension funds and leading business professors and 20 leading social entrepreneurs. (Noble, Huffington Post, 2012) At the conference ‘Impact Investment’ was defined as the emerging industry that places capital in businesses that intentionally seek to create social or environmental value. The dialogue created the ‘next steps’ around implementation of the ‘Impact investment’ class. In other words, the best financial minds of the ‘North’ came up with the notion of creating another Asset Class for investors that would fund ‘developmental projects’ and that would also become regulated and monitored through a value based system of exchange. According to a JP Morgan Global Research & Rockefeller Foundation report published in 2010 and titled Impact Investments, An Emerging Asset Class, Impact Investment is forecasted to swell to between 400 billion – 1 trillion dollars by 2020. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited and the Deloitte US Firms have committed to craft a strategy for institutional investors. (Harvey, Deloitte Persepectives, 2013) The influence of the World Economic Forum upon national and global economies was evidenced in June 2013 when at the UK’s G8 presidency summit, Prime Minister David Cameron asked for a special pre conference event focusing
on Social Investment, that was attended by himself, Nick Hurd MP, Iain Duncan Smith MP and Justine Greening MP with delegates representing all major investment banks, Embassies for G8 counties, European commission and many Charities and foundations, all with Headquarters in Europe or USA. In his key note speech at this event David Cameron announced three key developments: Tax breaks for social investments; a Social Stock Exchange to measure how successful those social investments are; Help for communities who want to buy local assets. In other words, leading financial thinkers, business interest groups, philanthropists, charities and representatives of ‘North’ Nation States were brought together to discuss an ‘Arms Length’ approach for engagement with the essential social and developmental issues of the globe, through a methodology of financial instruments and a financial system that has yet to be properly regulated and with the possibility of a bonus of an added tax break to institutional investors. Davis, Lukomnik and Pitt-Watson in their book The New Capitalists : How citizen investors are reshaping the corporate agenda (2006) state that institutional and civil investors are changing the world by forcing the rise of a re-engineered capitalism within a ‘civil economy’. The
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Dr Tracy Tuten
India
suggestion is that there is now a shift away from individual ‘tycoon’ or state ownership towards a more democratized system of ownership. The assumption is that the ‘parts’ now all fit together and that corporations are therefore more accountable. However, when you understand that the accountability principle is only exercised through the fund managers who operate the collective influence on behalf of the individual investor/shareholder, the whole picture appears less democratic than is suggested by this book. Democracy, Accountability and Investor interests are made ambiguous within this structure of liberal market investment. There lies the danger in this form of ‘Arms Length’ and distanced accountability to the primary objective of social benefit and towards development of systems and structures that address the needs of people and ever changing economic circumstances. In contrast, despite a very disparate and often unfamiliar economic and social value system, India and China appear to be engaging with the developmental agenda with a long term and close-up strategy. Nay, I even go as far as to say they are beginning to set the agenda and creating the terms of reference for implementation of this agenda across the globe. Transnational Corporations operate in many countries and are beginning to engage with Africa too. It is the significant rise of the Emerging Economies of BRICS and CIVETS and the increasing ‘South – South’ trade which is a new trend in world trade and which will re-orientate the focus from ‘North’
consumerism to a ‘South’ focus on ‘Developmentalism’. Both India and China with enormous domestic markets seek to prioritize the local market. (World Bank & Institute of Policy Studies, 2007) Jagdish Sheth, who coined the phrase ‘Chindia’ suggests that Indian corporate growth will occur through large scale acquisitions of businesses across the globe and that “Chinese enterprises that have the scale and incumbency advantage to dominate the domestic markets will end up expanding globally by first going to other emerging economies and countries in Africa” (Sheth, Pg xxi, 2008) Harry Broadman writes in ‘Africa’s silk Road’ that China and India’s “new-found” interest in trade and investment with Africa presents a significant opportunity for growth and international integration of Africa. In an understated critic of the ‘North’s approach to Africa’ Broadman suggests that China and India’s South-South commerce with Africa is about “far more than oil”, and is opening the way for Africa to become a processor of commodities as well as a competitive supplier of goods and services to these Asian countries. Broadman also identifies a real benefit for African engagement with India and China, as Chinese and Indian firms in Africa that operate on a global scale with world class-technologies fostering global and regional (Pan-African) integration of African businesses. (Broadman) It is important to recognise these new trends in world trade, but they take on greater significance when compared with trade statistics comparing African trade with the global
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‘North’. According to Eurostat and World Bank statistics, the volume of African exports towards Asia has been accelerating over the past two decades, growing by 15% between 1990 and 1995, and by 20% from 2000-2005. Currently Asia’s share of African exports is in excess of 27% and is almost equal to that with the EU 32% and the USA on 29%. Sub-Sahara Africa
Source: Reuters www.blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/files/2011/10/sub-sah_afr.gif
In Africa we see the rapid rise of a focus on ‘Development’ and infrastructure development in particular, as the driver for key ‘South – South’ trade. When you look deeper into the statistics and realize the extent of Africa’s economic distance from the rest of the world, we begin to understand the growing urgency of African leaders to ensure their countries optimise on the journey towards sustainable economic growth. The President of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta (An example of a new generation of African leader – affluent, educated in the west and with experience of transnational systems) made his first visit to China in August 2013. As he arrived in Beijing President Kenyatta tweeted “Arriving in China. China’s importance to Africa cannot be underrated. China is our biggest partner in development.” Kenyatta and the Chinese premier Xi Jinping shook hands and signed a 5 billion dollar agreement that includes new projects on Energy, Infrastructure, Wildlife protection and building a railway link from the Indian Ocean to Uganda. President Kenyatta stated “We welcome the investment in key sectors of our economy. The rail link, particularly, is important in the context of East Africa’s shared goal of ensuring quicker movement of peoples, goods and services.” An improved train link could cut the costs of shifting freight across East Africa by 79 percent, according to Kenyan government calculations. Despite the International Criminal Court charges against Uhuru Kenyatta, the Kenyan president won a substantial election victory earlier this year. This is only one example of a ‘South’ country and her people defining their own 32 | September 2013
destiny and route map into 21st Century world economy, which demonstrates the erosion and eventual failure of traditional global systems, which cannot achieve cohesion around one set of values. There are numerous examples for this ever increasing challenge by the general emerging economies body politic, ranging from China, Brazil, Russia and India challenging the WTO agreements, India’s selective adherence to Nuclear nonproliferation treaty and China’s position with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Kyoto agreement. We in the global’ North’ need to own up to our own national role in creating inconsistency in upholding various values and thereby developing a more equitable and consistent standard for all, which also recognises the pluralist approach. As the global ‘North’ lives through a long period of economic growth rates that ‘bump along the bottom’ and global ‘South’ countries, particularly BRICS and CIVETS grow increasingly rapidly, It will be a grave error in the 21st century to think that the nation states and the corporate capitalist system can be separated from accountability for these unique global circumstances. The increasing economic inequality within nations and the enormous inequity of wealth across the ‘North – South’ global divide has produced a threshold moment of reckoning, which should now be faced with courage and honesty, if we are to ever see sustained growth return to the ‘North’ and a cooperative and collaborative relationship with the emergent global ‘South’. Income inequality: Gini coefficient
Source: EU Community Statistics on Income and living Conditions; the data is for 2009; updated Dec 2010
As we see the slow and painful drop in living standards in the ‘North’ and an increase in inequity in nations of the ‘North’, transnational corporations will need to engage with a ‘closer’ relationship with social and welfare needs of people, in order to do business at all. The ‘Impact Investment’ model of financial instruments and exchange mechanism will be a short lived distraction, much like the ‘Carbon Credit’ episode.
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Taxation has been and still is a traditional system of holding businesses accountable, however this measure is no longer sufficient for the future role of organisation which supersede the wealth, capacity and knowledge of many nation states. Giovanni Andrea Cornia et Al, in the book commissioned by the UN Development Programme - Inequality, Growth and Poverty in an Era of Liberalisation and Globalization – recommend a ‘Hetrodox’ economic approach is needed to address global inequity. However, National government monetary and fiscal policies will no longer be sufficient for the rapid global change that is required and therefore if Transnational Corporations wish to engage with the emergent ‘South’ and the opportunities this will afford them, they will need to shoulder more of the responsibility for creating, and implementing and providing social benefit and welfare in all the countries they operate in, otherwise risk being left out altogether. By the same token, as UK and European countries struggle through this long slow period of recovery, transnational corporations based in or operating from these countries should not be extended further tax incentives to engage or invest in projects and businesses that will benefit society, but rather they need to strategise and begin to take corporate social and welfare responsibility that is commensurate with their size, profitability and global influence. How to deal with this potential business responsibility will be the discussion of the third and final article in this series.
Anuja Prashar
pgmn
Founder | Executive Dirctor, APP Consulting Anuja Prashar is GMN Programme Director for Emerging Markets and sits on the GMN Global Advisory Council. She is involved in academia, consultancy and politics. She teaches in Higher education on International Business, Emerging Economies, Global Management, Globalisation, Political Identity & Cross Cultural Communication Anuja has a BA Economics (Hons.) from University of Michigan, AnnArbor (USA), an MSc Race & Ethnic Relations. Birkbeck College, University of London and MPhil Sociology, She is currently completing her PhD. Anuja has a long standing record of civic participation in Interfaith & Race Relations work. International experience includes building water wells in villages of Kenya with International women’s group, being appointed to Global Strategic Hindu & Jewish Schloars team: Hindu Acharya Sabha, (2007) and appointed to Indian National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions: subcommittee (2007) Anuja is currently a Liberal Democrat Euro Parliamentary Candidate for London Region 2014 and Chair of British United Indian Liberal Democrats (BUILD). She writes regularly for Indialink International magazine, UK on issues of Religion, Transnational Business & Political Identity
Catch the third and final article in this three part series on Emerging Economies and the New Marketing Landscape, in the next issue of Global CMO™ The Magazine - Out Monday October 7th 2013.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Agtmael, A.V (2007) The Emerging Markets Century – How a new breed of world class companies is overtaking the world. Free Press, imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc. Broadman.H.B (2006) Africa’s silk road: China and India’s new economic frontier ; The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank. Cornia, G. A. (Ed.). (2004). Inequality, growth and povery in an era of liberalization anf globalization. (World Institute for development Economics; United Nations University ed.): Oxford University Press
Negri, A. H., Michael (2004). Multitude - War and Democracy in the age of Empire: Penguin Press. New York. Reuveny, R. & Thompson,W. (Ed)(2008) North and South in the World Political Economy. Blackwell Publishing Rothkopf, D. (2008) Supercalss : The global power elite and the world they are making. Little,Brown. Schumpeter, J. A. (1989). Essays : On entrepreneurs, Innovations, Business cycles and the Evolution of Capitalism.
Davis, S. & Lukomnik, J. & Pitt-Watson, D (2006) The New Capitalists – How citizen investors are reshaping the corporate agenda. Harvard Business School Press.
Sheth, J. S., Arun. (2006). India as a Global Supplier of Products and services: Expectations and emerging Challenges.
Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism: Oxford University Press.
Sheth, J.N (2008) Chindia Rising – How China and India will benefit your business, Incore Publishing LLC
Harvey, D. (2006a). Spaces of Global Capitalism : Towards a theory of uneven geographical development: Verso, Lond & New York.
Sklair, L. (2001). The transnational capitalist class: Blackwell publishers.
Khanna, P. (2008). The Second World : Empires and influence in the new global world order.: Allen Lane ; an imprint of Penguin Books.
Smith, D. (2007b). The dragon and the Elephant : China, India and the world order: Profile Books Limited
Khanna, T (2007) Billions of Entrepreneurs – How China and India are reshaping their futures and yours ; Harvard Business School Press.
Stiglitz, J. E. (2002). Globalisation and it’s discontents: W.W.Norton & Company . New York. London.
Kholi, H. (2008) Growth and Development in Emerging Market Economies – International private capital flows, Financial markets and Globalisation ; Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd.
Winters, L.A & Yusuf, S (Ed) (2007) Dancing with Giants – China, India and the Global Economy. World Bank & Institute of Policy Studies.
Kynge, J. (2006). China Shakes The World : The rise of a hungry nation: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Woo-Cummings, M. (Ed.). (1999). The Developmental State: Cornell University Press.
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Advanced Notice GMN Announces New Hubs To provide further support to marketing professionals around the world GMN is delighted to announce the launch of two new hubs, GMN Morocco and GMN UAE.
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GMN Morocco On 28 September the launch of GMN Morocco shall take place in the presence of business VIPs and the media. GMN Chief Executive Darrell Kofkin shall be present to lead a presentation about the exciting initiatives GMN has planned for Morocco. He shall also unveil the inaugural GMN Morocco President. In addition GMN Morocco Country Director Nasser Jamalkhan shall lead a presentation entitled “Going Global, a Moroccan Perspective” exploring how Moroccan brands can succeed globally benefit from the success of leading global brands. For more details about this event and sponsorship opportunities please contact Nasser Jamalkhan at opensd1@gmail.com.
Global CMO™ The Magazine
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Advanced Notice
GMN UAE GMN UAE shall launch 15-18 January 2014 in Abu Dhabi. At a conference taking place under the Patronage of H.E. Shaikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Culture, Youth and Community Development and Hosted by The National Center for Documentation & Research, GMN shall lead a masterclass on Emerging markets within the UAE Context. In attendance shall be GMN Programme Director for Global Outsourcing Nasser Jamalkhan, and GMN Programme Director for Emerging Markets Anuja Prashar. On the evening of 18 January GMN shall then award the inaugural UAE Marketing Leadership Awards in Abu Dhabi, with the aim of recognising and rewarding those individuals who are achieving exceptional achievements in Marketing in UAE. Says Darrell Kofkin, Chief Executive of Global Marketing Network. “We have been asked for a number of years to introduce our own Awards. We are delighted to have been invited to launch these awards in Abu Dhabi and it as our intention that we then introduce these awards in every territory we operate so that we can recognise those Marketing Professionals around the world who are delivering outstanding achievements.” For more details about this event and sponsorship opportunities please contact Zakia Ahmed at zakia@businessinabudhabi.com. 36 | September 2013
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Create The Right Marketing Mix To Optimise Your Return On Investment In today’s digital world, traditional marketing alone is no longer enough. Business leaders continue to pressure marketers to be data-driven in every way and to prove the ROI of their marketing spend. Yet, digital tools remain in their early stage and marketers are challenged with different measurement techniques ones that can be challenging to integrate. With so many access points —mobile, social media, website, and tablet, how can marketers create the right marketing mix to generate leads, drive sales, decrease costs, and ultimately optimise the return on investment (ROI)? Join us at this year’s Digital Marketing Mix & Metrics Summit taking place November 13-15, 2013 in Miami, FL and learn how to create the right marketing mix to optimise your return on investment. Plus, we will address how to navigate today’s top pressures including big data privacy regulations and balancing the thin line between customizing your customers’ experiences while avoiding privacy violations.
Book Now
Who will attend? This event has been designed for those who market P&L and make strategic decisions on resources and the marketing mix. We expect attendees to represent VPs, Directors and Managers of: •• Marketing •• Digital Marketing •• User/Web Experience •• Mobile Media and Experience •• Consumer Insights •• Social Media •• Digital Content & Management •• Brand Management •• Online Strategy •• Web Portal Management •• CRM •• Online Advertisement •• Promotions
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Global CMO™ The Magazine
Always be willing to learn
Great Leaders Are Great Learners MaryLee Sachs fgmn
September hails the “back-to-school” season in many countries, and with it comes the notion of reviewing policies and practices, as well as strategic planning and budget-setting for organisations running a fiscal JanuaryDecember year. CMOs may be well-advised to take a step back and think about their agenda within their own organisations. Are they truly leveraging their creative and analytic abilities given the growing complexity of the business environment? Can they really deliver against the leap in customer centricity and consumer power? The rapid pace of change is creating the need for a new breed of “super-hero” CMO able to demonstrate strength in communication and collaboration, fully understand both the business and the customer, and able to be agile and flexible – and yet decisive. And above all else, today’s senior marketer needs to demonstrate curiosity and an eagerness to continue to learn – as Caren Fleit of executive recruitment firm Korn Ferry International would call it: “learning agility”. Julie Woods-Moss, CMO of $4 billion technology company Tata Communications, calls this “intellectual curiosity”. Woods-Moss was interviewed for the book What The New Breed of CMOs Know That You Don’t, and she participated in its launch at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in June 2013. “Intellectual curiosity is about always be the one in the room saying: why, what about this? I think it’s a combination of intellectual curiosity and intellectual honesty,” she said. And she added, “Don’t be afraid to say, even if it’s not in your interest, that this is not in the interest of the business. It’s this combination of intellectual curiosity with intellectual honesty.”
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Call it what you like – learning agility, intellectual curiosity, staying ahead of the curve…it all adds up to keeping an open mind and continuing to innovate whenever and wherever you are able to create positive change. When Woods was asked by the board to build a “global marketing function that included the corporate communications right through”, she was conscious that she inherited a group of highly optimised, local teams that were unaccustomed to working in a collaborative way. So instead of saying: “Okay, guys, we’re going to do a topdown plan, here we go”, she said: “Everybody continue to build your own plans. But then we’re going to have a donor and a recipient. And I’ll be looking for those who steal the most from other people’s plans and those who donate most to be stolen.” Woods-Moss rewarded her team members with a 20 percent bonus on achieving that dynamic, which meant that instead of forcing the globalization, she was able to build a plan from the bottom-up with incentives. In that way, she
was able to celebrate the champions who gave the most, as well as those who were humble enough to actually share and re-use the most. On a much larger scale, Woods-Moss has led the development of a platform to capture idea generation on an enterprise-wide level. While Tala Communications is a global leader in the Asia-Pacific region, the company’s challenge is to build the brand around the world. According to Woods-Moss, “Where I may be able to have a couple of data scientists on my bench, and half a dozen digital experts, I can’t always have the top, top talent in every discipline. So what we’ve done is develop a platform which spans the business. We’re 480,000 people around the world – from chemicals to beverages to luxury goods. So we’ve developed this platform called Tata Innoverse. ‘In’ for innovate and ‘Verse’ for universe. And anybody in the company can throw a challenge to the Innoverse, and anyone in the company can reply.” According to Woods-Moss, since its inception, the company has generated 30,000 business ideas. But what has been most interesting is of the winning ideas, 30 percent of them have not come from the function concerned. So, for example, an idea for mobile came from the beverages team. “Because we all know the secret so often in innovation is diversity in all aspects. So we’ve started this within our own family,” Woods-Moss reasoned. On the subject of innovation and idea generation, Douwe Bergsma, CMO of privately-held FMCG company GeorgiaPacific, also spoke about innovation at the Cannes Lions Festival. When Bergsma arrived at Georgia-Pacific, the definition of innovation and the application of innovation was predominantly product innovation. They were, in many respects, synonymous. But Bergsma was keen to take innovation beyond product. “It’s innovation of processes, innovation of marketing, innovation of packaging our graphics, our channels, the way we go to market,” he said. “One of the largest innovation efforts we’ve made is moving into e-commerce, which has become relatively big for us in a relatively short time. But that’s guided the innovation. So we’re talking to folks like yes, you’re a brand manager, or you’re responsible for a media buy. And our question is: how are you innovating our media buy? How are you innovating our line measurements? So we’re actually innovating across the board,” he continued. Douwe focuses on creating what he calls “restless discontent” in order to achieve innovation. “First, you need to have some discontent with the current situation. Second, you need to have a vision of a better state. And a third is to believe that there’s a reasonable path to get there,” he explained.
Julie Woods-Moss, CMO, Tata Communications, at Cannes
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Setting lofty goals to be achieved by innovation in practice seems to be a common thread across change-making CMOs. SP Shukla, who is president of Group Strategy as well as chief brand officer of the Mahindra Group, described a policy for empowering the Group’s teams in order to get the best ideas. Shukla’s Office of Strategic Management is responsible for the conduct of “war rooms,” a concept pioneered by Mahindra Group. All 18 operating businesses present their three-year strategies in one-, two-, or three-day meetings which are attended by the chairman, group CFO, group strategy head (Shukla), and several other senior colleagues from HR, finance, accounts, IT, as well as of course the business company or sector team presenting. These meetings take place from mid-October through end-December. Then, strategy is not re-opened again for one year. Shukla says, “So they’re left alone to operationalise the agreed strategy in peace. That is true empowerment.”
What The New Breed of CMOs Know That You Don’t started as a research project to determine how CMOs are upleveling their roles. This was a follow-up to my first book – The Changing MO of the CMO: How the Convergence of Brand and Reputation is Affecting Marketers. I interviewed 26 CMOs who were appointed to newly-created roles, or roles that had been heightened in importance, examining a range of CMOs across the spectum of B2C, B2B and some that spanned both. The CMO is arguably the least understood executive in the C-suite by both the outside world and internal audiences. Marketing is often seen as a “black box” confused with expensive advertising campaigns, sponsorships and other untold extravagant line items. And while marketing may be the least understood business function, everyone things they are a good marketer. Job specifications differ widely – much more than for the CEO or CFO. And the responsibilities of my interviewees varied depending on the organisation, but they had two things in common: the ear and support of their CEO, and a passion for using marketing to create a change agenda in their organisations. As Guy Longworth, SVP of Playstation Brand Marketing for Sony Computer Entertainment Americas, said: “Having been a CMO in four different organisations, I have seen at first hand the dramatic changes in the role of the CMO over the last 15 years. The role continues to evolve and increase in importance and MaryLee’s book provides incredible insight into the way the CMO role will continue to develop. It’s a must read for aspiring and seasoned CMO’s who are looking to keep ahead of the curve.”
WIN one of MaryLee’s books We have two copies of each to give away.
Simply let us know which one you want. Tweet us your answer to @TheGlobalCMO with the hashtag #CMO including the title and Amazon link: The Changing MO of the CMO: http://amzn.to/1f9rhEZ What the New Breed of CMOs Know That You Don’t: http://amzn.to/19DUI1g
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Douwe Bergsma, CMO, Georgia-Pacific, at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity Forum
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These meetings are followed with “budget war rooms” in February and March – a series of mostly half-day or one-day meetings which convert the agreed strategy into annual operating plans (AOPs) with quantified goals. Any developments in markets or regulations are taken into account which might have happened since the strategy war room. Then, from July through September, the group conducts “operations war rooms” to discuss how the businesses are performing against the budgets, and any change in tactics that may be required. This is also where possible market expansion is discussed. For example, in the automotive and farm sector, Mahindra already is in the US, Australia, India, China and South Africa, but the group is looking to expand into Africa and Europe. According to Shukla, these war rooms also provide platforms to discuss starting a new business. “We are starting new businesses all of the time. For example, Mahindra Partners, which is an incubation arm, ventured into solar energy in 2011. When Elisa Steele was appointed to a newly-created CMO role at Skype (as well as becoming corporate vice president of marketing for Microsoft), she needed to consolidate a team of diverse functions across a number of geographies. And she wanted to build what she could see was a huge opportunity across the enterprise: story-telling. She discovered that people love Skype. “Any great consumer brand aspires to brand love. That’s the ultimate. And it was amazing to me to find not only how much brand love Skype has with its users but how much users use that word. Even when I got this job, I got ‘Hi Elisa, I heard you’re
CMO panel at Cannes, with (from left to right): Renee Wilson (moderator), President, MSLGroup North America; Douwe Bergsma; Julie Woods-Moss
working at Skype. I love Skype. Let me tell you my story.’ And it just happens, all of the time,” she claims. This premise gave her the inspiration for working with the team to build a mission statement aiming to build the best relationship and collaboration between product and marketing. “It has to be memorable. It has to be inspiring, and it has to be long-lasting. And so, what we ultimately came up with is three words, and not only the team rallied around those three words, but I have product managers asking me ‘when are you getting the T-shirts?’” she states. That mission is “Build user love”. Steele explains, “The ‘build’ is around the hard work that we want to put in because building something is not easy and it’s also a signal to the product organisation that they build great products and we support you. The ‘user’ is about putting the user in everything that we know, into the centre of decision-making and into our hearts of how we move forward with the brand.
The New Breed Of CMOs: Dual Challenges Business Leadership
Marketing Leadership
Earn the right lead - adopting a general manager mindset
Be the voice of the customer or consumer
Establish a performance culture
Advocate for the brand
Have a vision for the future
Demonstrate performance - ROMI
Support (& alignment with) the CEO
Be the external radar
Develop business strategy
Ensure appropriate marketing capability & continuous learning
Innovate
Innovate
Flex with the role - driver facilitator, collaborator
Leverage new technology
Develop key peer partnerships (CFO, COO, HR, CTO/CIO)
Retain & acquire appropriate talent Engender disciplines & creative culture
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And then obviously the ‘love’ is what I just team up with everything else.” And this mantra informs everything in which the marketing team engages.
this is to their peril. They need to establish their executive/ business/leadership credentials as priority number one, and have a concrete strategy to do so,” Malcolm said.
Steele continued by saying that the big accomplishment is that the mission is deeply believed in, and now she and her team are building off that, operationalising it with her team and peers.
All of the CMOs interviewed for the book demonstrated these characteristics. Several brought experience in operational roles to their marketing positions, bringing a new level of business acumen and fluency to the practice of marketing in their organisations.
But the CMO challenge goes way beyond the marketing function. Given the ambiguities of the role, a CMO often has the toughest job of educating both the internal community as well as the external world about marketing and its primary role in building business, contributing to growth of the organisation. And in order to do so, the CMO has to have one foot in the business leadership area, being a true C-suite player, and the other foot in the marketing leadership area. This presents a set of “dual challenges”.
Other common strengths included the strong desire to collaborate across the enterprise, a fearlessness to experiment and learn from both success and failure, a dedication to soliciting creativity and innovation from all employees - not just those in the marketing department, and a passion for recruiting, developing and retaining the best talent. Interestingly, these CMOs are remarkably aligned on the importance of culture in the organisation, and the role they can play in helping to shape a positive and productive mindset. But the CMO role is increasingly not for the faint of heart. According to Caren Fleit: “What we hear consistently from CMOs is that the world is changing, what they’re facing is changing, and as a result, their role is changing. Nothing is the same as it was a couple of years ago.” And as much as it has changed today, it will continue to change tomorrow.
While there are many differences in the job descriptions, the marketers taking on new CMO roles or looking to uplevel current roles need to demonstrate some remarkable characteristics in. According to an article published by Marketing Management in the Spring of 2012: “The chief information officer, chief technology officer or CMO who thrives as a member of the senior leadership team will be a team player who can lead without rank and has built an organisation that earns the respect of the rest of the business. The skills that are increasingly in favor are strong communication, willingness to partner and strategic thinking. For CMOs to thrive and survive in a collaborative C-suite, they will have to adopt a general management mindset and earn the respect of the others with fact-based analyses. They will be accountable for the brand strategy, driving the organic growth agenda and positioning the business for the future. As the acknowledged voice of the customer and consumer, they will ensure the strategy is built and executed from the outside in. They can no longer be passive service providers, content to oversee market insight activities, coordinate relationships with key marketing partners and ensure compliance ‘reasonably’ with brand guidelines.”
MaryLee Sachs
MaryLee Sachs is GMN’s Global CMO Czar. With over 27 years of integrated marketing experience in the international arena, MaryLee has worked with and advised many blue-chip organisations including P&G, Kellogg’s, Motorola, PepsiCo, Frito-Lay, Beiersdorf, HSBC, American Express, Porsche, Patek Philippe, Mexico Tourism and many others. MaryLee has always been highly active in the marketing space for many years and has taken on many roles • An advising member of the Marketing 50 for over three years • An advisor to The CMO Club in the US for over four years. • A 2009 jury member for the PR category in its inaugural year at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity • A member of the Marketing Group of Great Britain and the Marketing Society (UK) for over 15 years.
One of the co-authors of this article was Rob Malcolm, former president of global marketing, sales and innovation at Diageo and current lecturer at Wharton Business School. Malcolm spoke at a Conference Board CMO master class in November 2012 and stressed the dual leadership challenge for CMOs to demonstrate, first and foremost, business leadership, and then marketing leadership. “The successful CMO embraces the dual business leadership and marketing leadership roles. He or she must work harder at the general business leadership role as they do at the role of leading the marketing because these are the newer challenges that they are less well prepared for. Too often CMOs focus on the marketing role only and
fgmn
Founder | CEO | CMO, Changing MO LLC
September 2013 | 43
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Upcoming Events
Official GMN Events: GMN Mauritius Launch 5 September 2013, Mauritius
Measuring Marketing Performance Global CMO™ Masterclass with Professor Robert Shaw (Brand2Global Preconference Masterclass) 16th September 2013, London, UK
GMN Global Certification Launch 18 September 2013, London, UK
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If you get lemons...
The Sweet Taste Of Failure Sheikh Hussein A Al-Banawi
People are often startled when they hear me refer to ‘the sweet taste of failure’. It’s a paradoxical phrase that requires a bit of explanation. No one likes failure, of course. Whether big or small, any failure exacts a price. A career failure means a setback on the journey toward leadership. A business failure means a loss of profit, wasted time, damage to one’s reputation, and missed opportunities. And when failures are not faced honestly and directly, and addressed promptly, they can have a cumulative impact. The discouraging impact of failure can lead to self-pity, a blaming mindset, and inertia, either in an individual or in an organisation, and an uncorrected failure can cause the same mistake to recur, often leading to ultimate catastrophe. So no one likes failure – and no one needs to be reminded to avoid it. But we do need to be reminded to take advantage of failures when they occur – which they inevitably do. And that’s where ‘the sweet taste of failure’ comes in. 48 | September 2013
For me, the three best things about failure are admitting it, learning from it and finding opportunity in it. Admitting it is the first crucial step. Once you accept the fact that you’ve made a mistake, you can stop being defensive, denying reality and wearing blinkers. Admitting failure is about being humble, human and authentic. Have you ever known someone who never admitted failure? People like that are generally very difficult to get along with – proud, arrogant and sometimes harsh toward others. By contrast, people who are comfortable admitting their own fallibility are those we can respect and enjoy being around. By confessing their own humanity, they give you permission to be human as well – and that makes a genuine relationship possible. Showing vulnerability in this way does not take away from your personal capital – it builds it by increasing your credibility and the trust it earns. Think of this for a moment: people will eventually start saying, ‘Someone who is honest with him- or herself will be honest with me.’
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So don’t be afraid to admit your failures. This is especially true within an organisation. It can be tempting to try to cover up an embarrassing mistake in the hope that no one will ever find it out. Believe me, they will! And when they do your lapse in honesty will harm your reputation far more than the original failure could. I make a point of telling everyone who works with me, ‘Let’s hear the bad news first. Good news can wait.’ It’s a philosophy every organisation can benefit from – because once you’ve admitted your mistake you can learn from it. Or, as I also like to say, ‘First accept the wrong. Then right the wrong.’ Many people and organisations don’t do this. Because failure is so painful, they prefer to bury or ignore their mistakes. Don’t fall into that trap! When your car is stuck in the mud, don’t just keep revving the wheels, churning the muck and hoping that the next effort will free you. Instead, get out of the vehicle, take a few steps back and study the situation. Take time to examine what went wrong and figure out why it happened. You may need to change a habit, a way of thinking or a decision-making process that you take for granted. Confronting your failure is the best way to discover ways of growing and improving. Finally, the smartest leaders learn how to find opportunities in failure. Wherever there is a problem, there is an opportunity lurking right behind it. That applies to many organisational failures. They represent weaknesses in our systems, our processes and our ways of doing business that offer opportunities for reinvention. If you really study the underlying causes of your failures, you may be surprised to discover that many of them point directly toward opportunities to create bold new successes in the future.
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Sheikh Hussein A Al-Banawi Chairman | CEO, Banawi Industrial Group Hussein A. Al-Banawi is Chairman and CEO of The Banawi Industrial Group (B.I.G.), one of the leading manufacturing groups in Saudi Arabia. He is an inspirational leader dedicated to help the next set of enterprise leaders in the Arab World. He is Founder of the Chair in Islamic Economics, Finance and Management at Rice University in Houston, Texas and also serves on the board of various civic organisations. Al-Banawi is also a founding member of The John D Gerhart Center for Philanthropy and Civic Engagement.
Reproduced by kind permission of Kogan Page, from the Sheikh Hussein A Al-Banawi title ‘The Unknown Leader’.
The Unknown Leader Sheikh Hussein A Al-Banawi Our world has many obvious leaders: captains of industry, high-achieving academics, CEOs, statesmen, champion athletes. But we also depend on leaders whose work is usually not so visible. They are all around us, filling crucial roles at every level of society, in all kinds of organisations and in our communities, enriching the lives of those around them and making the world a better place. The Unknown Leader celebrates these leaders among us and invites you to join them. Hussein A. Al-Banawi shares the inspiring stories of some of today’s Unknown Leaders and shows how they discovered their hidden talents through hard work, reflection and continual learning. He also recounts his own lifelong journey toward leadership and the invaluable lessons he gained from unusual friendships, daunting challenges, tough decisions, victories and defeats. And Al-Banawi explains the six crucial qualities every aspiring leader must develop, with specific advice about how to enhance these qualities in yourself. www.koganpage.com/editions/the-unknown-leader/9780749465728
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g n i t e k r a M The Manifesto
‘A satisfied Customer is the best business strategy of all’ Michael LeBoeuf
Are We Really Customer Centric? David J Hood pgmn
What a great question. Are we, or can we really be customer or market centric - and in any meaningful way? Can our organisations and by extension, or propositions, be created and contrived to fulfil that most important of marketing’s tenets, to ensure that what our organisations deliver is wholly dedicated to the sustained and improved lives of those we purport to serve? I guess it is like searching for some nirvana. We all intuitively, as Marketers, quietly hope to grasp the definitive process or single most important methodology to better understand our markets. As Professor Stephen Covey put it, we need to understand before we can seek to be understood. That is fundamental to both marketing and its stated desire to lead the organisation and help it to become more agile and competitive through sustaining customer centricity. Lets face it though, we only start on some change or quest to alter our corporate behaviours and activities if we think there is something in it for US, our organisation. Very rarely do we start to undertake that journey if it is for THEM, the customers. Are we therefore predisposed, as I’ve suggested in earlier editions of this column that we are, as organisations, genetically predisposed to be ‘corporately selfish’, and subsequently it may be impossible to attain some degree of the equivalent of a corporate ‘out of body experience’? If that thesis is correct, then we have some way to go. When some organisation or other is reported in the media, demonstrating some success in being innovative - and therefore commercially successful - in case study after case study, it is wheeled around as some kind of enlightened entity; some stratagem or tactic has resulted in enhanced revenue for it, but not always for the customer. The argument that our world view - the Marketers - is externalised and quite different from our colleagues in other roles, is a strong one. This complexity is compounded by the fact that many organisations do not have Marketers or knowledge and experience of marketing - at Board level. That means the customer and markets’ needs, wants and particular dynamics are poorly understood at the topmost levels. The time given to competitors and their activities and propositions at Board discussions and other top-level meetings, far outweighs the time and effort spent on and with the prospect or customer. So is it practicable, or
‘Cease calibrating to the beat from the metronome of mediocrity’ David J Hood
indeed possible, to satisfactorily ‘re-engineer’ the whole organisation around something that is tragically ethereal that we know little about, and far, far, removed from those Board meetings? By definition, we know more - much more - about our internal wrangling and goings-on, than we do about the customer and their needs. By extension, we know more about our competitors activity - and obsess about it - than we do about our customer’s activities. Can we do better than just hang a ‘The Customer is King’ poster on the wall whilst ‘training’ our people to slavishly conform to ‘customer service’ policies that are little more than ‘how to deal with complaints, quickly, and not that effectively’? I am sorry to have to say it, but our ‘centricity’ goes the wrong way. It goes UPSTREAM to management and the Board, and then on to shareholders. It needs to change to face DOWNSTREAM to our customers and outside of the company to have any hope of being truly marketcentric. How can we hope to do this, when we not only face upstream to our ‘internal customers’, but in doing almost everything just to serve management or owners, we additionally slow down the process of decision making and dilute the valuable insights and momentum we may have gained from examining the market? I am also sorry to say, that even in our modern world of new company structures and paradigms, we still have a top down, command-andcontrol approach and systems firmly in place. It is still more important to satisfy the command structure than it is the customer. Imagine a situation, or a time, when your organisation is not linear or pyramidal. By that, I mean instead of the start of the line, or top of the corporate pyramid where the senior management and shareholders reside with the ‘functionaries’ (!!!) further ‘down’ the line or the pyramid, we have wholly replaced those structures with one that looks more like a circle. So instead of the marketing or other customer-facing people being the only people who interface and engage with the market, those at the top level do likewise. I have already suggested that we get the Board and other colleagues ‘out there’ in the market, to sit with our customers and prospects; but to become customer or market centric we absolutely have to formally reconfigure
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September 2013 | 53
our organisations to some circular structure. This indeed, would result in not only top management becoming more savvy about the customer and what actually constitutes a market, or a competitive proposition, but would stop the top-down addition of so-called ‘value add’ bells and whistles we pile on in the hope of finding some elusive tactical competitive advantage! The Customer and the Market is seen as something that only marketing, sales, and customer services engage with, with some exceptions now and then. Marketing needs to match its rhetoric. Back in the old days, we humans serviced our markets in the market. We were actually there. We had barrows and stalls and everything was about the customer. We eye-balled them, listened to them, engaged with them, and cared about and for them. Less so now. Ever since the industrial revolution, we have become more distant, uncaring and seen them as some sort of synthetic collective to be manipulated and who must conform to our organisational needs and wants. Spoken to, rather than with. Here is a thought: in business, we have many ‘standards’. By that, I mean formal processes and policies that lay down certain rules, practices, methods and goals that together, help us conform to and maintain a desired degree of functional performance. We have national and international standards in just about everything, we have ‘quality’ systems, offering the means to qualify, codify and standardise almost every component of our lives. We have a plethora of ‘efficiency standards’ to help us squeeze every penny from our organisations, cut their costs and reduce waste. But we have no standards to improve performance, effectiveness, or to formally codify the way that we do the same FOR OUR CUSTOMERS. I was struck many years ago, when employed in a marketing department for a large international company, I was told that we - along with Sales and Customer Service - would not be included in the quality improvement process we were going through. We seemingly needed this European and Internationally-recognised quality standard to conform to market and customer expectations. But to ignore and not include the very people and departments that engaged with the customer seemed incredulous at the time. Indeed, since then, I have perhaps seen only one system - Six Sigma - that involved the customer at all. Various ‘fringe’ standards have come and gone, but as Marketers, we are without a truly recognised standard to even define and meet needs, never mind actually reconfiguring our organisation to better engage with the market. When all we see is ‘customer services’ being a glorified ‘complaints department’ or the ‘opportunity to up-sell’, then we have missed the opportunity. If we do not think that it is necessary to contact a customer post-sale rather than spending an inordinate amount of time, effort and money in acquiring them compared to serving them afterwards, 54 | September 2013
then we miss the opportunity. When we allow upstream demands, fire-fighting and attention to take us away from the market, we miss the opportunity. When we conform to a corporate world that wants our customers to bleed, rather than thrive, we miss the opportunity. Years back, as that much younger Marketer and new to marketing, I was struck how we didn’t have any standards for marketing in terms of uncovering, defining and serving customer need. I became further struck when I saw that our profession subsequently didn’t develop recognised standards in effective engagement with the market, other than tactical experiments and offering lip-service to centricity. We still spend more time on the competition than we do the customer, and on finding and selling to the new customer rather than over-delivering to the existing one. And yet, we wonder why we might not be customer or market centric. Marketing’s definition usually involves something like ‘matching companies resources to the market’s needs to make profit’. We must begin to ‘better define the needs of the market and develop the companies resources to match them, for the profit of both’. And revolve around them. Downstream. A few ‘Customer is King or Queen’ posters is simply not enough. The vision must be followed by the venture.
David James Hood
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Competitiveness Strategist David James Hood is a member of the GMN Global Advsiory Council. A proficient and experienced Competitiveness Strategist who thrives on seeking improved revenue performance using realistic and practical market-led methods, David’s passion is to lead the call for the smaller business to improve marketing effectiveness through the ‘Competitive SME’ initiative. He has served on the UK’s Marketing and Sales Standards Setting Body and the manufacturing trade body competitiveScotland. He is Co-Director of the ‘Competitive SME’ mission, and is also a Guest Lecturer at the University of Glasgow. In 2013, Addressing the Marketers ongoing issue of “Getting the Proposition Right, First Time…” David has launched ‘The Epsilon Project’ (on Twitter @projectepsilon) David’s two new books, are available through Kogan Page - ‘The Marketing Manifesto’, for professional marketers and marketing, improving prowess for both the Marketer and the organisation, and ‘Competitive SME’.
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The Brand
Branding By Example Andrew Vesey ggmn
One of the pillars of building a strong brand with longevity is getting buy-in. Buy-in from your team Buy-in from your organisation Buy-in from your potential customer There are many different ways you can go about achieving this buy-in, and as always, using a combination is stronger than sticking with one method. In this article though, let’s focus on one of the most powerful of these strategies Building brand love and trust through leading by example. It’s a simple concept really: Don’t just talk the talk - Walk the walk. Your team and the organisation’s employees as a whole are your front line in the drive for brand loyalty. The more they believe in your brand, the easier it is for them to represent it in the best possible light. You want these front line brand ambassadors to feel an affinity for the brand and believe in what they are doing every day.
Are you going to believe what he says or what he does?
September 2013 | 57
Now, the easy part is to pass on to your staff the brand story, messaging and what your expectations are regarding their representation of the brand. What isn’t quite so easy, is getting those same staff members to believe what you are saying and actually buy-in to the brand. It helps to tell them. But for any real success, you need to show them. If you are trying to get buy-in on your ‘Eco-Friendly’ image, but it’s obvious to your staff that your carbon footprint is larger than a small country, how can you expect them to be genuine in their portrayal of the brand? You want to portray eco-friendly? Then start being eco-friendly in the office. If you are building your brand on the ‘Family’ mantra, then isn’t it pretty obvious that you should create a ‘Family’ atmosphere of caring and support within your own organisation first? It’s commonly agreed that a smile is a contagious thing. You want your brand values to be just as contagious as a great smile. Being passed from management, to your staff, to the customer - and from them on to many more potential customers. The larger you get, the more people the ‘brand smile’ will need to get through to reach it’s target destination - the customer and beyond. The modern customer is a sceptical creature. With so many sources of information, being spoilt for choice and much higher awareness of the power of people, it will take more than a few catchy words to convince someone you’re the right brand for them. People see marketing collateral and advertising for what it is and will take most of your claims and supporting data with a grain of salt. You’ve heard the saying before “I’ll believe that what I see it”. Well, it’s that thought or something similar that runs through the average person’s mind when they read or listen to your latest product or brand claims. They’ll believe it when they see it? Great. Then let them see it. Better yet, show them first, then tell them only if you need to. If your brand values are aligned with those of your target customers and you successfully portray those values in how your organisation and your frontline staff act, along with what your products or services truly deliver to the customer, then you can obtain buy-in without ever needing to explain your brand values.
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Some customers will just love your brand. They won’t know why, but they just do. They could take some guesses at it, but to them, the brand just feels right to them. Then you will have those that really ‘get’ you. And when this happens, you need to nurture them and help them to spread the word about your brand. Done right, you will have your own volunteer marketing brigade of brand evangelists. One of the biggest reasons organisations don’t focus on ‘walking the walk’ is fear. Fear that they will give the wrong impression. Fear they may alienate some of their customers. My reply to that is simple. If you have done your homework and have clearly defined your values and ensured they align with your target market, then all you need do is be authentic in what you do and the rest will follow. So, I want you to ask yourself. Does your organisation walk the walk? Or just talk the talk? If you are already walking - how can you do it better? If you’re only talking, how can you make the change?
Andrew Vesey
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Founder | Creative Director, Vesey Creative Andrew is a member of the GMN Global Advisory Council and the Founder and Creator of Global CMO The Magazine and Director of the New Zealand and United Kingdom based Graphic Design and Branding Agency, Vesey Creative - the official Brand Guardians for GMN. Working in partnership with a wide variety of clients around the globe, Andrew’s business experience includes over a dozen years leading design and branding studios and agencies, including the launch of his own agency Vesey Creative over 9 years ago. Andrew is a strong believer in continually upskilling, learning and staying relevant in business. This ‘education brings growth’ mentality lead him to create Brand Quarterly, a not for profit digital magazine for SMEs, and the magazine you are now reading. 2014 will see Andrew’s first book for SMEs published “The Brand GAME - Business Growth Through Real World Brand Management”.
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GMN Fellow Profile
Robert Shaw
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GMN Programme Director for Marketing Analytics
Dr Robert Shaw is the GMN Programme Director for Marketing Analytics and recognised as one of the world’s primary Marketing Analytics gurus. A prolific author, twice winner of Marketing book-of-the-year awards, CEO magazine named him one of its “new generation business gurus”.
business. He was subsequently retained for another year to refine and research the strategy and was instrumental in defining the vision for IBM’s new business direction. Cranfield School of Management made him an honorary professor in 1995.
Through the years, world-recognized experts such as Philip Kotler, Jean-Claude Larreche, Malcolm McDonald, Andrew Ehrenberg and Don Shultz, as well as Industry icons including Sir Martin Sorrell, Sir Paul Judge, Sir Roy Gardner and Lord Marshall, (to namedrop a select few), have endorsed Shaw’s pioneering Marketing Analytics work, which today is used by some of the world’s largest corporations.
In 1998 he set up the think tank The Value Based Marketing Forum, with 50 member organisations, exploring best practices in Marketing accountability. He worked for a diverse range of clients in FMCG, Financial Services, Retail and other sectors, typically on 4-6 projects annually on aspects of Marketing automation, efficiency and measurement.
Robert launched his career with a PhD in nuclear physics at Cambridge University. After several commercial jobs, during which he obtained a MSc in Operational Research, he was headhunted to Andersen Consulting (today known as Accenture) to set up their Marketing Consultancy practice. In some high profile projects for BT, Barclays and British Airways, he built some of the world’s first customer databases, coined the phrases “database Marketing”, “contact strategies” and “customer lifetime value” and wrote the seminal book “Database Marketing” (1987). In 1995 he was hired by Lou Gerstner and Sam Palmisano at IBM to write a strategy for their emerging services
Currently he is honorary professor of Marketing Metrics at Cass Business School, London and he still runs his own consulting firm.
Are you a Marketing Leader? To see if you qualify for GMN Fellowship click here.
Hear from Robert in our Marketing Analytics Issue. Out Monday 7th October
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September 2013 | 63
Why Do We Follow? Emmanuel Gobillot
Trying to become a better leader by studying the characteristics of great leaders is futile. It is followers (through their choices and hard work) who decide who leads and how great the leader will be. Successful development strategies start with one key question: why do followers choose to follow? The answer will enable anyone interested in becoming a better leader to uncover the ‘mechanisms of followership’ in order to create the attraction strategies necessary for effective leadership.
I have written about Lefkowitz, Blake and Mouton’s experiment before.1 I have always found it a fascinating example of our bias for ‘followership’. What these three researchers did when they set up their catchily entitled experiment – ‘status factor in pedestrian violation of traffic signals’ – was to highlight two fundamental paradigms of leadership. The first is our innate desire to follow. The second is that this desire leads us to making choices about what or who to follow.
To everyone watching that bright morning in 1955 the situation was clear. They were in no doubt. The man was crazy. He was risking his life.
These paradigms raise the key questions anyone interested in being a leader, developing their leadership skills, or indeed developing other leaders, should have in mind. Why do we follow? How do we decide who to follow?
Yet, an hour later, so would they. The man in question was an average-looking man, dressed casually, standing at a traffic light. The strange behaviour witnessed by others was that every time the traffic sign showed ‘do not cross’, the man would cross. People looked on wondering how long it might be before he would get run over. An hour later the same man came back. This time, he was dressed in a suit. Incredibly every time he attempted to cross at the wrong time, the crowd followed, seemingly putting their lives at risk for the sake of a suit. 64 | September 2013
Too often we start the journey towards becoming a better/ great leader the wrong way round. We focus on other leaders in the hope of identifying killer characteristics that we hope to ape. At other times we focus on ourselves to understand why we do what we do, with a view to managing our impact better. These are not worthless pursuits (there is nothing wrong with watching what the best do, or with seeking self-awareness) but they are purely academic until someone decides to follow us. That act alone is the only one that will make us a leader. So whilst few do so, I would argue that our time is better
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young depend for survival. Like cowboys rounding up their herds, they gather up the sardines in what are referred to as ‘bait balls’. The threatened sardines, surrounded not only by dolphins at their sides but also by sharks underneath and birds above, instinctively group together as a defence mechanism (an individual fish is at a much lower risk of being eaten if it is part of a large group). The ensuing feeding frenzy is as spectacularly deadly as it is wonderfully choreographed. The surrounded sardine ball has no chance. Dolphins swim into the ball from the sides whilst sharks come up from underneath and birds launch aerial assaults on their prey. Sardines move in and out from the centre of the shoals and ball baits to their extremities and back again at regular intervals to minimize the chances of being eaten. Their amazing numbers ensure that, despite the countless attacks, the shoal size remains pretty much the same to the untrained eye. There are obvious advantages to being a follower. From sardines and termites to monkeys and sheep via birds and bees, nature is full of examples of herd behaviour. The prime concern of life being to survive, the safety afforded by following others is obvious. And in that we humans are not much different from other species; we too have evolved a followership instinct.
spent at the start of our journey by understanding the reasons people follow. Without followers there can be no leadership. Understanding their needs and choices will help us understand the mechanisms leading to their fulfilment. So let’s start our journey at the beginning and try to answer the question: Why Do We Follow? The beginning of an answer can be found in Africa. It’s not hard to see why tourists would want to join birds in flocking to South Africa’s east coast. Following the southern garden route from the tip of the great continent upwards leads you through a breathtakingly beautiful and lush landscape reminiscent of 19th-century pictures of paradise. But it’s not just birds and humans that are keen on the place. Each year, starting in June, sardine shoals, tens of metres deep and several miles long, make their shimmering way along the KwaZulu Natal coast. The giant sardine shoal is a wonder for some and a meal for others. Attracted by the plentiful bounty, in some cases from several miles away, tens of thousands of dolphins and birds, and thousands of sharks follow the shoal. To witness the event is to witness nature’s amazing circle of life, with dolphins even timing their breeding seasons to coincide with the availability of sardines on which their
Standing in front of Christ’s College in Cambridge, England, watching the busy shoppers hurrying along on St Andrews Street is reminiscent of that herd instinct. What is less obvious is that, it is in the college rooms behind the walls, that a key contribution to explaining that instinct was made. It was in these rooms, in 1828, that a young Darwin, sent to Cambridge by his father as a punishment for not studying medicine hard enough at Edinburgh, developed a passion that would leave an indelible mark on the world. In his On the Origins of Species, Darwin set out his theory of natural selection. Individuals who adapt better to their environment – the fittest, not the strongest as is often postulated – are more successful at reproducing. As their genes are passed on, species develop and continue to adapt. Back in humankind’s most primitive times, before we ever thought of agriculture, even less organisations, for our nomadic forebears, as for sardines, following facilitated both their survival and ability to adapt. By coming together in groups our ancestors sought safety. Faced with a charging mammoth, hunting alone would have been stupid, and stupidity in those times was typically rewarded by death. The ones who could adapt to following survived more often than the lone hunters and gatherers and as a result passed on their ‘followership genes’ down through generations. Whilst following the group for survival makes sense of followership, it does not, in and of itself, create the need
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for a leader. There are plenty of examples of successfully evolved leaderless, self-coordinating groups in nature. So, apart from the obvious – human beings are not sardines, even though anyone witnessing crowded rush hour trains in any city in the world might disagree – why do we follow leaders as well as the herd? Our activities have always been varied and social. It is not hard to imagine that from an evolutionary standpoint some of our ancestors were better equipped to undertake some tasks than others. It is these varied activities and abilities that created leadership. Whilst hunting in a group makes better sense than hunting alone, for the group to follow the best hunter makes even more sense. In fighting, it made sense to follow the strongest warrior. The same argument stands for most social activities. Primeval leadership was distributed leadership: in other words, it flowed through the group, depending on the task at hand. As these tasks evolved and our social lives became richer in their complexity, the need for single-point leadership, in the form of an individual, became more prominent. In trying to resolve complex social issues, it made sense to defer to a group of wise elders. And as led groups were more successful than leaderless ones, nature selected the ‘leadership’ genes to go hand in hand with the ‘followership’ ones. The advantages for leaders were obvious: the status afforded by leadership gave more opportunities for reproduction. For the followers the act of following was reinforced not only by the safety it afforded but also by the opportunity to learn at the feet of the leaders and the accompanying hope of one day becoming a leader. And so our fixation with leadership began.
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Emmanuel Gobillot Author, Speaker, Consultant Emmanuel Gobillot is a senior practitioner in the area of leadership and organisation effectiveness. He is a leadership development consultant with a wide range of corporate clients such as Vodafone, Carlsberg, Google and Hilton. He is an engaging and in-demand speaker who frequently appears on television as a commentator on communication, innovation and leadership issues. Before setting up his own business to focus on writing, speaking and consulting, Emmanuel was a Director at Hay group where he headed up both the consumer sector and the leadership services practice.
Reproduced by kind permission of Kogan Page, from the Emmanuel Gobillot title ‘Follow The Leader’. 1 Gobillot, E (2007) The Connected Leader, Kogan Page.
Follow The Leader Emmanuel Gobillot Most leadership models start with trying to identify what great leaders do. In Follow the Leader, global speaker, consultant and leadership expert Emmanuel Gobillot answers a much more fundamental question to anyone wanting to become a great leader: ‘what do great followers want?’. In this fast-paced and well-researched book, he identifies the key elements of leadership success and the proven pathways to developing the charisma we all seek in the leaders who truly inspire and motivate us. He breaks down the all-important ‘charisma’ into eight critical elements, explaining how each component works and offering practical development steps for each. Getting these steps right will transform good leaders into magnets for great followers, harnessing an unstoppable power for business achievement. www.koganpage.com/editions/follow-the-leader/9780749469054
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choose Innocent smoothies or Zico coconut water. Meanwhile, their research indicates 25% of beverages are drunk before 10 am & their ears on the ground heard Brad Pitt’s problems with his six kids: Listen, I admit there’s times like, “We gotta get up. Get up! Here’s your shoes. Here’s your shoes. Drink this Coke. Drink this Coca Cola. Drink it all. Right now! Drink it! Drink it! Drink it!” Just so we could get ‘em up and going.
Are you a leader at a loss? Will the new kids on the block munch your lunch? Walter Spoonbill of Spoonbill & Coot sees room at the top.
Soon after, Coke introduced its smaller 250 ml can – perfect for a quick early morning lift. No, I’m not asking you to have it with your cornflakes says Jon Woods, GM Coca-Cola UK. He points out they also have fruit juices. Heads they win, tails they do too, because they leverage their competence of producing & distributing liquid refreshment. Is your competence making potato chips – or making good-tasting snacks? Banana & beetroot chips will do imagined wonders for our waistlines. Non-chocolate chocolate made with carob awaits a leap from the wings to centrestage.
Having the biggest brand-share is like having the biggest muscles in Ju-Jitsu – unless you have the skill, you are the target. Too many of the muscle-bound have the technique of a soggy tomato.
You can also confound the sceptics by going up-market. McDonalds in Japan is offering $10 dollar burgers for one day only, complete with glitzy seats to proclaim your instant shogun status. Starbucks is rolling out its premium Reserve brand that costs a couple of extra bucks in return for waiting a couple of extra minutes for your caffeine shot, displaying your superiority over the masses who are too time-starved to debate the relative merits of Rwandan Musasa & El Salvador Orange Bourbon with the barista while their flat white is individually vacuum-pressed. As economic gloom persists, little luxuries are valued & truffleflavoured potato chips may well mitigate the barbecue boxed wine.
Coca-Cola had soggy tomato years when Pepsi successfully baited them into New Coke madness. Today, the Coca-Cola company tracks & responds to what is & what is likely to be. The health-seekers can
Coot now has emerged with the relevant saucy postcard. It features, in the style of McGill, an overweight gent tucking into an opulent meal, aided & abetted by two generously endowed females.
Dear Walter, We are the potato chips brand leader in our region. But revenues are flat. Locals enter the market by the bucket-load, whilst the category stutters because of new health-seekers. Are we on a sticky wicket? Stumbling Leader Dear Stumbler – Coot snorts ‘a leader leads’, then dives into a collection of saucy seaside postcards.
The caption reads: Everything I like is immoral, illegal, or fattening. I think Coot is telling you not to give up your core business.
Dear Walter, We are the leading insurance company in the country. But prospects see us as old & tired. Should we change a winning formula? Fear of Loss Dear Fol, The hardest thing for an old FoL to do is become a HoG. When Hope of Gain replaces Fear of Loss, you will know the enduring partner of success is innovation. Gillette in its pomp stated ‘there is a better way to shave & we will find it’. The winning formula of today becomes the discounted commodity of tomorrow. Coot recommends the high-wire without safety-net approach. Book the biggest conference halls you can find for six months hence. Invite important people. Then tell your development team they are launching a significant product at the event. They will squawk that there is nothing in the pipeline. You gently remind them the conference centres are booked & the bigwigs are coming. Any who survive the mental breakdown, Coot concludes, are worthy of retaining in the next corporate cull. Is that a trifle harsh, I ask. Faint heart never won unfair market share Coot replies. May leaders lead,
Walter Spoonbill Wspoonbill@theglobalcmo.com Spoonbill & Coot North Corner, Southern Tip, Western Cape, South Africa
Do e-mail Walter with your Midnight Worry – the most intriguing will be published & answered.
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