Posts Tagged ‘David Butter’

Since The TV era, marketing has been defined by communications not content.

About polishing the stone rather than sharpening it. Or about questioning if it should be a stone.

Take Heathrow 5 - where the focus on the new ( cancelled) campaign proved to be an inadequate deliverable for marketing management.

You know the joke of the ad man who sitting on the edge of the bed telling how great it’s going to be.

We need to focus on actions not words. Or rather interactions. That’s where value is created. Marketers tend to call them ‘touch points’ . This is a feeble term. They should be considered ‘value points’

We need to create the experience, not talk about how great it’s going to be. Or as my colleague Francis Gouillart would say: Co-create the experience.

‘360′ is ‘180′ the wrong answer. It’s implies a technique-driven perspective: integrating from us to the customer.

We need to come at it other way round! Put the customer inside - then take a 360 with the organisation. Rather like my friend Miha Pogacnik who puts the audience inside his Slovenian Symphony Orchestra !

The future is about aligning resources and skills around companies’ interactions.

A marketer’s job is to create an experience - part tangible part intangible. To ‘Co-create’. With ‘prosumers’ rather than consumers.

The traditional client agency structure is wrong in so many ways. What is needed is for marketers to initiate a conversation between their colleagues, their agencies and their customers in real time and in real space.

Yes, on the web is a good start, but there’s nothing like a physical real time conversation where you can see the whites of your customers eyes, hear what they don’t say as well as what they do, and take live decisions with all key stakeholders present.

Don’t start with techniques; as innovative marketers are doing , start with experiences.

And the final thought: marketing is too important to be left to marketers. Because a good marketer needs all parts of the organisation aligned behind delivering their story. Unless of course you just want to be a storyteller.

Heard Stephen Pinker at the RSA speak on his new book ‘The Stuff of Thought’

The part on swearing - the five ways to cuss - is worth the price of entry alone as he describes language as a window in human nature’ If you want to know the five ways or tell your euphemisms from dysphemisms, look it up!

But how much of challenges in collaboration come down to language and culture. One of my French clients was cursing - well at least bemoaning - why the Brits don’t say what they mean . And frequently say what they don’t mean.

‘Gerard’ described how we use ‘maybe’ when we don’t mean maybe at all. (As when I was cussing once to my boss he said ‘maybe you should get another job’.)

He asked if in our next European workshop I could get the Brits to say what they mean. Easier said than done’ Gerard.. Even if the word facilitate is based on the French Facile’; making things simpler. I’m not sure that it will be that simple. Many of us use words to avoid saying what we think.

As de Gaulle noted the French may have 250 kinds of cheese. But we Brits even though not renowned as great lovers, or perhaps because of it, have 800 expressions for copulation.

But I’ll give it a go, mon brave. Next week I’ll pick on and ‘out’ any hapless Brit who obfuscates in one of my sessions.