Brilliant marketing how to plan and deliver winning marketing strategies regardless of the size of your budget, 3rd edition

Matthew McCreight, Senior Partner, Schaffer Consulting It’s a rare achievement to write a book for ‘everybody’, but Richard Hall has done just that – half a century’s marketing experien

MARKETING HAS NEVER BEEN SO IMPORTANT BECAUSE

BUSINESS HAS NEVER BEEN SO COMPETITIVE.

Successful marketing is about engaging customers – giving them

something they can’t fail to notice, something that interests them,

something they like and want to know more about It’s about winning

them over

Brilliant Marketing is your indispensable marketing and engagement

toolkit for devising and executing winning marketing strategies With

practical advice from start to finish, this updated new edition gives

you the lowdown on how to succeed with your campaigns, with all of

the skills, examples and attitudes that you need to carry out the most

attractive campaigns around

• Understand the ideas, actions and campaigns that make a real difference.

• Get a complete marketing skill-set to engage and inspire

• Be a master of strategy, from thinking through to planning and execution

Praise for the previous edition of

Brilliant Marketing

Sharp, insightful and highly amusing  .  so entertaining, you don’t

realise how much you’re learning * * * * * 5 stars!

Ian George, Executive President Marketing, Paramount Pictures

International

Richard Hall’s book doesn’t lie It is brilliant! Read this book It is

stimulating, entertaining and nutrient rich Written in an engaging and

inspiring style, it is packed with ideas and examples and is a must for

grads and seasoned marketers alike.

Tom Hings, previously Director, Brand Marketing, Royal Mail

. . . but here is what people are saying

about the new edition

From old fashioned discipline and timeless principles to futuristic,

disruptive, revolutionary thinking – if you want to be a well-rounded

marketer, read this book!

Daryll Scott, Director of Lab, the Digital Agency

Finally a marketing book from a person who has been there and done

it – listen, learn and implement.

Séamus Smyth, ThinkNation: the most engaging and

influential stories of our time

Bubbling with insight, fizzing with ideas, with great game-changing tips

on every page, this is a book for marketers who want to leapfrog the

future! Richard Hall makes marketing thrilling! Read it, be inspired,

be brilliant!

Richard Brown, Founder, Cognosis Consulting and

Executive Coach, MindsWideOpen

As the founder of a start-up disruptor, this book has provided a great

amount of insight and knowledge that definitely will be put into

and Insurance Innovation) Brilliant Marketing is brilliant in its clarity and simplicity From a complex

and changing landscape, it extracts the insights that matter, in a style that

all can access and benefit from An indispensable primer that blends an

affinity for new trends with an assured sense of timeless virtues.

Josh Davis, Seven Hills

Any successful business, large or small, new or established, depends on

happy customers This book tells you all you need to know about

creating them.

Chris Rendell, Founder, the Windmill Partnership

Marketing is stuck in the past and potentially is on its last legs Richard

Hall brings it back to life with imagination and points towards a

fascinating future, where the customer is its beating heart.

John Scott, Mediator, Management Consultant

The line between good marketing and failure is so fine This book is a

practical guide written by an expert practitioner about how to stay on

the right side.

Paul Zisman, Founder and CEO, Europa Partners –

boutique investment bank

Richard Hall captures all that is important in easy-to-digest, essential

chunks A fantastic update to a great marketing bible – amen

Rachel Bell, Chair, Shine Communications – the PR Company

Richard Hall has produced that rarest of business books – one that

delivers insight, inspiration and thoroughly enjoyable reading If every

business leader embraced this book, our companies would be much

more successful and our work much more rewarding.

Matthew McCreight, Senior Partner, Schaffer Consulting

It’s a rare achievement to write a book for ‘everybody’, but Richard

Hall has done just that – half a century’s marketing experience

combined with a youthful spirit of continuing adventure and a sense of

rebellion that will give even the digital natives pause for thought.

Nick Fitzherbert, author, Presentation Magic

brilliant

Become a brilliantly effective marketer in today’s

chaotic world, regardless of the size of your

budget

Third edition

Richard Hall

brilliant

United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)1279 623623

Web: www.pearson.com/uk

First edition published 2009 (print)

Second edition published 2012 (print and electronic)

Third edition published in Great Britain in 2016 (print and electronic)

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© Pearson Education Limited 2012, 2016 (print and electronic)

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EDITION

Preface xiii Introduction xix

part 1 Putting marketing into context 1

1 Brilliant marketing starts with a sense of smell 5

2 Have you really got what it takes to be a

5 How people think, feel and behave 69

part 2 These are your instruments, let’s party! 85

6 Advertising – the art of persuasion 89

7 PR – champagne, stockings and spin 105

8 Let’s talk business – B2B conversations 119

9 The future of marketing lies with digital

10 Sponsorship – using stars to impress 151

12 Direct marketing – yesterday’s world of data 179

13 Customer relations marketing – people

15 Selling – turning marketing into action 217

16 Getting it all together (or creating an

part 3 Change the world – create and execute a

revolutionary marketing plan 243

18 The science of pitching for your marketing money 257

19 How to inspire marketing people and how to put energy into their marketing campaigns 267

part 4 This is a new, radical world – it needs

a revolution in strategy and creativity 273

20 Budgeting? There is no money; next 277

part 5 Marketing in new and small businesses 307

23 Watching the revolution unfold 311

24 Small-business marketing checklist 323

part 6 A summary of the marketing rules 329

Index 341

Author’s acknowledgements

We’ve got to think again This is the third edition of Brilliant

Marketing Published in 2009, revised in 2012 and now

repub-lished in 2016, at each stage there have been big changes, but this

time it’s much more radical We’re in the middle of a marketing

revolution

People’s expectations are changing with unprecedented rapidity

in today’s world Economic train crashes are normal, politics has

become comically unpredictable and people in marketing and

selling are under unreasonable pressure to deliver

This book was first written in 2008 Remember 2008? It was

when Lehman Brothers collapsed and the world became an even

chillier and strangely alien place

It’s still icy and strange But the temperature is fluctuating

And it’s become more fun for marketing people Because there

are more marketing toys to play with and the challenges are

get-ting more and more exacget-ting and more and more exciget-ting

If you enjoyed the first and second versions of this book, you’ll

find this one even more useful Marketers need new coaching to

survive these revolutionary times, to manage the constant demand

to do more with less and the critical (but usually unmet) need to

be more creative

The consumer has taken over The world of business, once driven

by a command/control model, is very different now and the market

place is transformed, too Unless you respond to and anticipate the

revolution, you’ll become history rather than a shaper of the times

I’m surrounded by saints

Thank you, most of all, to my long-suffering wife (‘You just try

living with someone writing a book,’ she told me) She has an

astute eye for good design and has loads of common sense That’s

a big help when writing about marketing in which so much that

is written is jargon and baffling

Thank you to Steve Temblett, my commissioning editor, who has

shown patience, enthusiasm and a love of cricket As this new

edition was being completed, the marketing bandwagon of the

20:20 Cricket World Cup was in progress Being itself a classic

example of modern marketing, this seemed appropriate

And by the rich, vivid colours of creativity

Thank you to the Pearson team – and especially for getting my

books into so many interesting places – they are now published

in over 20 countries

Thank you to that band of colourful thinkers who’ve inspired me:

James Arnold-Baker, Penny Hunt, Pete Shuttleworth, Lars

Holmquist, Martin Ledwon, Ian Parker, Daryll Scott, Jim Cregan,

Nicole Urbanski, Peter Lederer, John Scott, Rupert Maitland

Titterton and many others

And thank you to those of you who read me and react to what I

say The marketers to of today and tomorrow are the key

archi-tects of the world we are creating

I hope this helps with the bricklaying

Why I’m a lover of marketing

I love the discipline, unpredictability and the art of marketing In

fact, as I wrote this rewrite of Brilliant Marketing, I realised that

I’d fallen in love with marketing again and even more intensely

Author’s acknowledgements xi

In part, this is because we’re living through a revolution of ideas

If you are a marketer, you may not appreciate just how very lucky

you are – imagine, you might have been a banker

I hope you begin to see why I love marketing and that you share

this love as you read this book

About me

I read English at Balliol College, Oxford I then joined Reckitt’s,

moved to RHM Foods, followed by Corgi Toys, in senior

market-ing roles Lured by the excitement and razzamatazz of

advertis-ing, I joined French Gold Abbott, FCO and Euro RSCG

I left big-company advertising and marketing after 30 years to

create my own consultancy, and became a non-executive director

and chairman of several charities and successful marketing

ser-vices companies

I now live in Brighton with five young grandchildren and great

nieces close by I play more football than I probably should at my

age, write, travel and coach executives on how to deal with today’s

We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce

copy-right material:

Chapter 4, overview of the Nike story adapted from Nike Culture,

by Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson, SAGE Publications (©

Goldman, R and Papson, S 1998) is reproduced by permission

of SAGE Publications, London, Los Angeles, New Delhi and

Singapore; Chapter 6, extract from ‘The Strange Death of

Mod-ern Advertising’ from Financial Times, 22 June 2006 with

permis-sion from Lord Maurice Saatchi and the Financial Times.

Everything is changing so fast that this is a revolution

The most potent tool in maintaining the status quo is our

belief that change is impossible.

Kevin Roberts, ex-CEO, Saatchi & Saatchi

This completely refreshed edition of Brilliant Marketing helps you

market in the world as it is now, not how it was in 2012 Since

then, a quiet revolution has happened and it’s intensifying

Anyone who is starting their own business or is moving into a new

role in which understanding how marketing works really matters,

should read this book

Not only is it full of great tips, it also has content and examples

you won’t find elsewhere Most marketing books are rather

pre-scriptive and, sadly, deadly dull This is fun, easy to read and,

through its enthusiasm, can change your whole attitude to

busi-ness and marketing itself

Sir Martin Sorrell, the founder and CEO of WPP, one of the

larg-est marketing services businesses in the world, said:

‘All business is about marketing and all marketing is about people.’

This book sees things from the practitioner’s point of view, not

from an academic, prosaic or a lofty perspective . . . you should

be able to smell and feel the excitement and the challenge of

being in marketing on every page

It’s a travel guide through the journey of marketing that teaches

the reader, but also takes them on a brilliant adventure

This book is more than another ‘how

to do it’ book It’s a ‘let’s try and

under-stand how to be great marketers, not just followers of digital fashion’ book If I do

nothing more than persuade you to have a love affair with change, ideas and, most all, with your consumer, well, that’ll be just great

What is marketing about?

In my last edition of this book, I said marketing was about the art

of seduction I wish I hadn’t done so because I made it all sound

a bit too sensationally tabloid Marketing is more serious than that,

and these are seriously dangerous times Marketing is about the

skilful art of creating and building relationships between a brand

or a company and its consumers, customers and stakeholders

In simple terms? Marketing is about designing and presenting

your brand engagingly to people so they want to know more

about it, to try it and to join up with what you are trying to do

And it’s about being responsive to the ‘zeitgeist’ Brands that

belong in the dark ages of old marketing rather than the bright

shiny twenty-first century will get buried

Left brain first: marketing is about the art of informing and

persuad-ing It’s about creating conversations It’s about maximising the

effectiveness and the efficiency of achieving sales It lies at the very

heart of any business because a company is destined to fail if the

CEO isn’t constantly attuned to and in touch with its marketing

OK, right brain now: marketing is

about putting on a show It’s about dramatising your brand It’s about

creating audiences and applause It’s

like telling a great joke The punchline

Smell and feel the

excitement and the

challenge of being in

marketing.

Without great marketing,

companies wither Then

they die.

Preface xv

is ‘Try it – you’ll like it.’ Without great marketing, companies wither

Then they die

In a small company or a start-up, the reason a company fails is

likely to be one of three:

When marketing really works, you just know it – sales go up,

shares go up, research tells you that it’s working, you get write-ups

in marketing magazines and there’s a buzz about But, when it’s

working, it’s also fun because marketing deals with what makes

people tick And what could be more fun than being with, relating

to and influencing the way people behave?

There’s been a quiet revolution, so marketing has

to change

The most potent words you’ll still see in-store are ‘new, improved’,

which means good old values, but better performance

That’s what this book is about, but it goes a stage further Not

just new and improved, but radically changed . . . brilliant

mar-keting needs to reflect this revolution

Marketing is in the spotlight because

everyone realises that the chase for

sales growth (or, even, business

sur-vival) is something brilliant

market-ers, who really understand their trade

customers and their end consumers, can achieve and no one else

can Only marketing can achieve sustainable sales growth

To keep up with the revolution, you have to not just have your

finger on the pulse of the modern world, but also you have to

Only marketing can achieve sustainable sales growth.

tightly embrace the changes within it (and more than simple

change – we’re talking radical here):

1 Innovation is expected the whole time – same-old, same-old

isn’t good enough

2 New technology is the catalyst to change – use it, don’t be in

awe of it

3 Sniper targeting – there are specific demographic segments of

key interest – the Millennials (generations Y and Z); the

young-elderly (the wealthy greys); twenty-first-century

working women as a discrete sector; ethnic minorities (over

5 million in the 2014 estimates); the leading-edge opinion

formers, and so on We can target all of these with sniper

accuracy now

4 Feelings and attitudes Embrace psychographics – what sort of

people are you targeting? What turns them on (and off)?

Reach their emotions, not just their wallets We need to

empathise with and share with people, not just tell them

stuff

5 Consumers are smarter than ever Be innovative in the way

you talk to them Inspire their intelligence Be in step with

their new interests and concerns

6 Creativity works If you aren’t being creative, entertaining*

and exciting, you deserve to fail Slightly creative is not

enough We are talking about breakthrough creative Shock,

surprise, enthral

*I thought it might be helpful to enclose a definition and some synonyms, just

in case you think ‘entertaining’ sounded too flippant:

Entertaining: providing amusement or enjoyment; charming and entertaining

companion; delightful, enjoyable, diverting, amusing, pleasurable, pleasing,

pleasant, agreeable, nice, to one’s liking, congenial, charming, appealing,

beguiling,enchanting, captivating, engaging, interesting, fascinating, intriguing,

absorbing, riveting, compelling.

Preface xvii

Whether you are already in marketing or are intrigued by the

subject as an outsider, welcome to this mind-blowingly, strong,

exotic alcohol of ‘new, improved, revolutionary marketing’.

Marketing is a fuel that can really transform things

Why marketing just makes me laugh with pleasure

I love shopping

I love new products

I love quirky stuff

I love the National Trust doorstop that is a life-size hare

I love Hotel Chocolat’s Chilli Chocolate

I love the storage boxes in Selfridges that are each decorated

with a different pantone colour

I love Ryman . . . all those useful office things

Yes, unashamedly, I’m in love

And I loved the Google logo (not so much the new one):

colour-ful, three-dimensional and, through Dennis Hwang’s Google

Doodles, it is topical, too The doodles are the inventive way he

plays with the logo on special anniversaries, so you have the sense

that the brand is constantly being refreshed But why did they

change it? Boo You see I am involved . . . I care . . . I’m one of

billions in this love affair with marketing

So, I confess My name is Richard Hall and I’m a marketing

junkie

But isn’t the enthusiasm of marketing precisely what makes

London, New York, Hong Kong or the North Laine in Brighton

so exciting? Give me a busy street full of shops trying to sell me

new stuff rather than any museum or art gallery

There isn’t enough time NOT to be brilliant at marketing

Speed rules our lives

We are not seeing slow evolution in our world It’s all changing

right in front of us now

Yet many people seem to feel too busy to even try and be anything other than mediocre nowadays If a deadline is more important than the quality of what is done by that dead-line, we’re doomed

Despite the improvements in technology, we seem to have less

time than ever All executives are switched on 24/7/365 with

smartphones, teleconferences, to-do lists, spreadsheets and

nerv-ous ticks We simply need to find time to be more creative if we

want to shine in marketing

This is not just a skillset thing; it’s a mindset thing, too

We have to find ways of maximising the stimuli to creative

bril-liance As Maurice (now Lord) Saatchi said:

‘Creativity is the last legal way to gain an unfair advantage.’

This book is a manifesto for liance, the kind of brilliance that comes from an intuitive leap that all brilliant marketers make in working out how to get their target consumers to do and think something

bril-they otherwise wouldn’t have thought about or have done

Brilliant marketing is that magic stuff, the ideas, the actions and

the campaigns that make a real difference

This is not a textbook It is not a business book either, although

of course it is about business

It’s a thriller, pure and simple.

If a deadline matters

more than the quality of

what is done by that

deadline, we’re doomed.

This book is a manifesto

for brilliance.

Why you must read this book now

This book is now in its third format But this is a completely new

book because the way we think about marketing has changed, and

is changing, and is now in revolutionary freefall As Bobby Rao

of Hermes Growth Partners (previously Strategy Director of

Vodafone) said:

‘Nobody knows where the ball is right now.’

Technology and speed of communication is transforming our

world

Life has morphed from being a

con-sidered, gentlemanly game of golf,

played quietly in rural Surrey by

CEOs, to a rough and tumble game

of noisy, brutal, take-no-prisoners ice

hockey in which, as star player Wayne

Gretzky put it:

‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’

Is it really a revolution or is it plus ça change?

We tend to be overdramatic

There’s a swine flu epidemic in Moscow and it’s the end of the

world There’s a new iPhone and my life is transformed There’s a

cranberry and orange variant of hot cross buns and we behave like

there’s been a breakthrough I cannot live without Coca-Cola Life

Life has morphed from being a gentlemanly game of golf to a rough and tumble game of noisy, brutal, take-no- prisoners ice hockey.

‘Calm down,’ I’m told.

But is it the right time to be calm? From my own perspective of

half a century of marketing, it would be bizarre if I couldn’t spot

big trends by now It would be stranger still if I hadn’t screwed

up, learnt a lot of lessons, made countless connections and

exploited a few opportunities

Most of all, I can see what hasn’t and isn’t changing . . . those

eternal truths of marketing:

change.

wonders . . . no change.

The big changes, though, are mighty:

development . . . massive change.

vulnerable . . . massive change.

So this is revolution Be ahead or be dead.

* Moore was a co-founder of Intel who asserted that the number of

transistors in circuit boards would double every two years The idea

that such rapid change is inevitable with transistors is a telling

commentary to apply more broadly to our changing world.

PART 1

Putting marketing into context

Before we get down to the nitty-gritty of the tools of

market-ing, it’s important we know how to get in the right frame of mind so we understand its essence

There are countless books on the ‘Science of marketing’ They

tell you how to assemble a marketing plan in much the same way

as you’d put together an IKEA bookcase Now look, there’s

nothing wrong with that, except to say there’s a lot more to

mar-keting than having a marmar-keting DIY manual

All marketing is about people, how they think and feel, what turns

them on, how they change their minds, why they laugh and how

we, as marketers, can make a difference

In a world of rapid change we often exaggerate the importance

of minor innovations (like being able to adjust the temperature

and pouring of your bathwater by mobile phone on the way

home from work) By taking a view over the past 50 years, the

changes – but, more importantly, those things that haven’t

changed (greed, fear of loss, lust, competitiveness, envy and a

sense of humour) – can be identified

This puts ‘marketing’, one of the oldest trades in our civilisation,

into sharp perspective

Philip Kotler, Professor of the International School of Marketing

at the Kellogg School of Management, puts the skills marketing

demands rather nicely into context:

‘Marketing takes a day to learn Unfortunately, it takes a lifetime to

master.’

CHAPTER 1

Brilliant marketing starts with a sense of smell

Imagine Sherlock Holmes and his ‘mind palace’ Imagine that

massive brain in action Imagine him trying to work out exactly

what has been going on . . . with whom and why and how

Any of the great detectives would have been good at marketing

because they’d have been temperamentally adept at the first thing

that matters, ‘whodunit’ Just as a city trader, presumably, has a

nose for the market, its shifts and swings, so the marketer, just as

skilled and, arguably, a lot more useful, can smell gaps in markets,

opportunities and know how to position a brand to best

advan-tage They’ll have the charm to engage a potential customer in an

interesting conversation and will have an absolutely voracious

appetite for winning market share

Most of all, do you have a nose for this? Can you be like Helena

Rubinstein, the founder of that great eponymous, cosmetic brand

who, on being asked why she’d chosen a new perfume, said,

immortally, ‘because it smells of money’?

brilliant tip

Have an insatiable hunger to win; insist on understanding issues;

refuse to be dull

This is revolution.

Here’s what I wrote four years ago:

‘The world in which we now live will be tougher than the heady days

of the early and mid-noughties, tougher but more exciting.’

Reading this now I think I was being rather complacent about

those emerging trends

Because, as it’s turned out, the world today is a very different one

from the one in 2012 From e-commerce to the demise of old

brands to hero-to-zero digital brands (remember Myspace?) to

innovations in all sectors to . . . and this is the big one:

a major change in consumer attitudes and behaviour:

Getting a sale now is really hard and takes longer than ever And

(did we ever think we’d see this day?) when marketing people talk

about sales more than they talk about image, that’s a huge and

impor-tant change.

The average CMO lasts maybe two years now The older ones are

a frightened and confused breed and their boards are a sceptical

and bemused bunch Everyone is working harder and trying to be

smarter

Three things should now be at the top of any marketing agenda:

Brilliant marketing starts with a sense of smell 9

How do you keep up?

Most marketing textbooks don’t help you It’s not that they’re bad

books, but they offer only ordinary solutions and usually are

bor-ing They tell you too much in a dull drone

Turn your back on dull and on prevarication

Always have a list of ‘must dos’ on your desk And do them

Put away your calculator Marketing has more to do with art than

science, more to do with feelings than logic

Here’s the hierarchy of talent: mindset first; skillset second;

smartset third How you feel; what you know; how you utilise

both together Getting it together is the way to focus

Ask yourself if you are being remarkable Here’s what Seth Godin,

the brilliant author, said:

‘Quit or be exceptional Mediocre is for losers.’

● Focus on ‘doing things’ I love seeing people do clever

things, such as Nestlé’s launch of its Skinny Cow Hot

Choc-olate drink The brand was targeting young women who

loved fashion, but had limited budgets So it was showcased

in Oxford Street and Manchester, at House of Fraser

boutiques and at tasting sessions at George at Asda (the

big-gest UK clothes retailer) Lesson: focus on your core market

and be there when they first encounter your brand

● Develop your curiosity Having curiosity makes you focus

on asking ‘Why?’ Spend time scanning the web, looking at

Twitter, reading Marketing online, keeping up with the news,

looking at magazines, visiting shops and talking to bright

people Being good at marketing is like still being at

university, but with much less lager

● Think, daydream, visualise Don’t think too big, don’t

think too small, don’t think too much and don’t over-

intellectualise Focus on trying to understand your customer

Feel the momentum of a market and try to work with it

rather than analysing every last bit of data Focus on trying

to understand your customer and see things from their point

of view – that’s the real key

● Listen to more stories Stories are historically how

information, advice or lessons to be learnt were passed down

from person to person Today, they have come back in a big

way Throughout this book I use contemporary stories to

illustrate the way to become a brilliant marketer

The keys to success are all around you: use your

eyes and ears; use your wits; get out and start

looking

brilliant example

Nespresso: the brand that acts like a club

Nestlé earned its spurs by being a big, aggressive, sales-driven business with

some historic brands (increased when it bought Rowntree) For many, the

arrival and subsequent explosion in size of Nespresso has been a surprise

Brilliant marketing starts with a sense of smell 11

These are so obvious, it’s embarrassing to repeat them (OK, so

why do I so often feel this need to be embarrassed?):

1 Superior products – just do it better – the world needs

‘new, improved’ products, not mediocre stuff

2 Find the right price and, if that means changing your

dis-tribution model, change it

The more so since it seems to operate as an autonomous arm of the Swiss

parent What can we learn from the marketing cocktail the people at

Nespresso invented?

● They recognised the pent-up consumer demand for really good coffee

Starbucks and others give us improved coffee Nespresso gives us even

better coffee

● They price it as very expensive for instant coffee, but very cheap in the

overall scheme of beverages

● They deliver it to us as an easy-to-make, at-home product and give us a

recycling mechanism

● They ceaselessly innovate with new flavours

● They give us great decaffeinated, too

● They create good partnerships with appliance manufacturers of the

Nespresso machines and focus on the software – the coffee

● They have George Clooney as a spokesman – and everyone loves

George I bet even the Pope is a secret fan

● You must join the club and you can do this only by owning a proper

Nespresso machine There’s no entry cost, but you must join to be ‘allowed’

to buy their coffee Ordering is a phone call away and, 24 hours later, you’re

drinking more great coffee

● They are very clever They’ve created a luxury brand at an accessible

price that is superb in quality (even Gordon Ramsay serves Nespresso)

3 Create a strong distinctive message – create the feeling

that you deserve attention

4 Strong, passionate, noticeable marketing works – from

people who care and understand what works

5 Never underestimate the consumer Mass marketing

increasingly feels like a mess We want to be treated as

spe-cial, as individuals Nespresso gets this Selfridges gets this

brilliant tip

Never underestimate the consumer . . . they are smart and are

getting smarter

Think very small

Maybe you’re shaking your head, thinking that you’re just a small

business and suggesting you can create marketing tactics like the

mighty Nestlé is foolish But Nespresso thinks small It loves its

product It has fun with it

Go to the very few stores where you can buy it, like Selfridges (if you are

a club member), and look at the plays and the quality of the staff

dis-By thinking small and with such detail, by creating a virtually

one-to-one customer experience, Nespresso has proved that small,

beautiful and quality can also become big The danger for

Nes-presso will be in its forgetting, with its increasing success, that its

small thinking is, in fact, one of the keys to that success Love your

product Have fun with it

Love your product Have

fun with it.

brilliant tip

Thinking small is the biggest thing you’ll ever do in marketing

Brilliant marketing starts with a sense of smell 13

Think about each consumer as though they are the only one you

have Bill Clinton had this talent I knew someone who thought

they disliked him, but then they met him and were bowled over

because:

‘he spoke to me as if I were the only person in the room and that

I was very important to him I could think about no one else for

hours afterwards It was extraordinary.’

brilliant example

Looking after little children

Kate Peach runs a childcare centre in Hove, West Sussex –

eachpeachchildcare.co.uk/

She founded it three years ago, from scratch, fully self-funded, and she now

employs 30 people and is running to capacity Ask anyone in the business or

any local parents and they’ll tell you it’s a class act Thinking small got her

to be bigger

Start-ups get bullied She was bullied early on by the Council, who ordered her

to take down the poster on the side of her building She refused and weathered

abuse from council officials She appealed and eventually won (of course)

Lesson : Be resilient.

Start-ups make hiring mistakes After nearly two years of her staffing not

being right, Kate made drastic changes Painfully, friends were let go and,

after a 10-month search, a new person was hired

Lesson: Bite the bullet sooner not later . . . rebel against mediocrity Make

sure the hiring in key roles is perfect, however long it takes you

‘Perfect people’ often cost more than what’s budgeted for the role And

here’s the piece of Peach wisdom I liked:

‘You have to find the money to pay your key people from the marketing

budget because in a small business your key front-of-house people are

your marketing, not the promotional “stuff” that marketers produce.’ ▲

Completely change the way you look at things People who write

about marketing or management are always talking about

‘change’ They are out of date Today, these are the words to use:

‘comfort zone’ must be signed to the history bin

con-One of the things any marketer wants to be is cutting edge – why?

Originally, it was because innovation was more fun for them But

now, if you aren’t cutting edge, innovative and constantly improving,

you’ll be outflanked and a helpless victim In short, you are toast

Being cutting edge says something about your being a modern,

state-of-the-art brand Because consumers are cutting edge And

unreasonable And contradictory They want low- calorie,

sugar-free, salt- and fat-light with better taste than calorie,

high-fat, high-sugar And they want it now.

What we are also seeing now is great crossover between

catego-ries Cars, fashion, organic vegetables, wine, hammers, insurance,

anything What would each do if they applied their market

assumptions to the other categories? Open your mind and kill the

voice that says, ‘We always do it this way’

Assume a blank sheet of paper Assume a ‘shock’ to the system

Lesson: In a small business, getting the product right is the key

Word-of-mouth, news about good things you do and the sounds of happy children

laughing are the marketing tools that are most potent

Embrace new ways of doing

things.

Brilliant marketing starts with a sense of smell 15

brilliant tip

Shock, rattle and roll It’s time for big changes

Marketing – a simple, but devastating,

plan of attack

1 Write the marketing brief – the discipline of setting out

what you have to market, what makes it special and what

you need to make it succeed This is your map or your battle

plan It will be brief (as the name implies)

2 Define your resources – who do you have on your team,

are they good enough, how much time and talent do they

have? Be clear about what they and you are capable of

delivering Next, how much money do you have to spend?

This will determine what you can and cannot do Never

bite off more than you can chew

3 Examine your options –

and then settle on

one . . . (yes, just one, not

several) Go in one

direc-tion; don’t go wandering

about So long as you have a clear brief, then the things that

most economically and effectively match the objectives you

have set should be shortlisted One word is key here: focus

Focus on what you are trying to achieve Focus is the single

most important quality in marketing and business

4 Write a detailed ‘how-to’ plan – no one should ever

spend a penny of a marketing budget without having a good

robust plan Detail really matters Big-picture thinking alone

won’t pay bills Make your ‘how-to’ plan simple, clear and

easy to do Is the plan radical enough? In a revolution, the

world is even noisier than usual Does your plan (and your

Focus is the single most important quality in marketing and business.

content) have the radical cut-through qualities that mean

you’ll be seen, heard and remembered? Maximising

noticeability and memorability is key

5 Execute that plan well – Harvard Business School says

exe-cution is more important than strategy It has dozens of case

studies where the strategy was fine and the execution was

wanting Is everything ready on time? Is everything right? This is your checklist time This is where energy comes into its own Make it happen . . . just do it . . . no hanging about

6 Measure the results – everything you do must have an

effect Your job is to measure these Are sales going up? Is

share going up? Is anything changing? As a result of your

review of the progress you’re making, does anything need

changing? Go back to the brief and make sure it still holds

water Never, ever keep pouring good money after bad The

biggest sin you can commit with marketing money is to

spend it invisibly Measuring results and studying data are

fun things to do, not boring

The biggest sin you can

commit with marketing

money is to spend it

invisibly.

brilliant tip

You’ll miss everything if you don’t focus on aiming straight

Ready Aim Fire . . . fast.

Again Aim Fire.

But the real revolution in your thinking will happen only if you keep

on asking whether you’re being radical enough

CHAPTER 2

Have you really got what

it takes to be a marketing

star?

Everyone needs to understand

how marketers think and what

they can do for business

But is this right for you as a career? Will you love or loathe it?

Marketing lies in your persona, mindset and attitude as much as

in the marketing weapons available to you You need greed to

suc-ceed Maybe marketing isn’t for you but, if you have some

tenac-ity, creativtenac-ity, curiosity and the greed to succeed, it might be So

work on it (and want it enough) and you might be able to turn

yourself into a brilliant marketer

Alternatively, you can learn how to work with marketers so your

respective skills shine Unfortunately, some marketers today are

behaving more like accountants, IT people and ordinary

trades-men than the magicians they need to be To be brilliant at

market-ing today you need to be inspirational, not merely adequate

brilliant tip

Be an optimist Aim for the stars Nothing is impossible if you’re

smart and lucky enough

You need greed to succeed.