Planning

The problems with ‘Pipelines’

As trading environments intensifies, slows or tightens, so the pressure to focus more energy, investment and time onto innovation and its lustrous promise inevitably grow. And what signals healthy innovation plans more than a pipeline – packed to the gunnels with new product, packaging or brand ideas; some ready to go, some looser, meeting an unmet need a couple of years from now, others, little more than outline thoughts about the art of the possible, off in the distance.

Yet innovation failure rates are increasing – and the push for ‘the pipeline’ is part of the issue.

To be clear, a well-stocked catalogue of NPD or renovation projects has clear advantages. For the leadership and the staff in the business, it’s engaging, exciting and gives confidence that new-news is coming through. For the brand teams, it is a demonstrable indicator that their charges are in good health. For others, there’s the ‘value’ of the pipeline: the financial projections for the money it will it deliver over the life of the plan: what can I report to the Board? What can I tell the analysts?

But innovation pipelines create false confidence.

First, there are the behavioural issues. The innovation team bust their guts to identify insights, ideate, develop concepts, validate and test. Strong, consumer-led projects are phased in to cover the next few years. The pipeline is filled with its innovation ‘oil’.

And what draws the eyes of the decision makers? Not the project for next year. Nor the one for 18 months out. No, it’s the “game changer”, slated for 4 years away. It is way more exciting. So the process of wrangling and re-analysing takes place; previous agreements are disregarded and the silver bullet is pulled forward. “Stage & Gate” processes are cast aside; project managers gently cough and look away as hitherto unassailable Sales & Operational Planning red lines are politely worked around. Ignore the additional technical risks; ignore the dislocation to other activities – the biggest, shiniest jewel wins through. And…. it’s quite possibly the right call (at least if it can be delivered safely). If something is motivating the business; if something excites a buyer, then major hurdles are already overcome.

Next, there’s the question of resource deployment. Pipeline thinking means salami slicing and prioritisation. Prioritisation sounds good, but with innovation it’s not what’s really needed. What’s needed is sacrifice. Pipeline thinking is built on allocation of resource, right throughout the chain – teams being briefed on 40% of their time here, 30% there, 20% further out and 10% for fire-fighting; same for investment. Not only is this allocation approach never realistic, more fundamentally it stops the discussion around elimination. Let’s not do this activity at all. Let’s put 0% effort into it. Let’s spend nothing on it. It’s not that it’s a bad idea; in fact it could have lots of possibilities, but this one could be a real disruptor. Big bets – not salami slicing is what’s needed – after all, it’s big bets that smaller, more nimble market entrants and future competitors will be making – they have no other choice than to be bold and single-minded.

Pipelines for Crows And then there’s the tyranny of choice. It sounds counter-intuitive, but the issue for innovation currently is generating too much choice. Think about a typical supermarket today. Do you really want more choice? What we need are better choices. Pipelines drive quantity. What’s needed is quality. Single-minded ideas that meet desires and needs better. That establish a brand’s positioning more powerfully. Simple solutions to the simple problems that so often we ignore or miss in our closeness to our categories.

A pipeline, after all, is a metaphor for continuous flow and supply. That’s not needed for ideas. That’s needed more for insights: finding those illusive springboards to growth. Yet so often, the process of insighting is compartmentalised: ‘we’ll do accompanied shops once a quarter’; ‘we’ll have stimulus sessions twice a year’. And yes, you can get some useful outputs from it, but essentially insight development is emergent. It is always on: being curious; poking around; asking questions. That’s where a pipeline is needed.

If insight needs a pipeline, innovation needs a refinery: a factory where ideas are refined. A place where focus is given to the raw materials you have at your disposal. A place where you choose to make different products suitable for your needs. At some point with innovation, you need to get everyone round the table, everyone who has skin in the game, distil the ideas you have and thrash stuff out. Make calls. Kill ideas. Not prioritise. Not fill a pipeline – eliminate. Ask: what are we going to back here? What’s good, but not good enough? What’s risky – or stretching – but could change the rules for the category?

If you can credibly bring more than one ideas to market, plan them based on when you can actually get them to market not on some hypothetical timing. Build in some red lines. Avoid the false confidence. Step back and look at the world as a consumer sees it. We’re seeing the outputs of pipelines polluting categories in a slick of OK product choices. It’s time to stop. Build a refinery and make big, bold bets on the real problems your consumers face day to day.

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps brands build foundations of stone. david@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670. You can follow The Crow Flies on Linked In (http://www.linkedin.com/company/the-crow-flies-ltd?trk=company_name), on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/thecrowfliesltd).

© The Crow Flies, 2017

Brand Premiumisation …and The Second Law of Thermodynamics

“Change in inevitable. Change is constant” wrote Benjamin Disraeli. And more famously, Charles Darwin penned the now classic lines, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent… It is the one that is most adaptable to change”. And ‘Change Management’ is almost a field in its own right nowadays, with ISO standards, higher education and degree courses, specialist training consultancies – the lot.

It’s a shame about all those cheesy Pinterest Quotations, or the pseudo-motivational nonsense that does the rounds on LinkedIn, because change is fundamental – really fundamental (for alas, ‘fundamental’ is also a word over-used in these days of corporate claptrap). Ultimately, change is constant, and it’s described by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says – stay with me here – that any natural system effectively breaks down further and further, ultimately reaching (or attempting to reach) a steady state – or the highest state of entropy. A complex system – a building say, ultimately will become dust and dirt and component elements again if it isn’t nurtured. Living beings, ultimately die and are recycled. Change truly is inevitable – you cannot run and you cannot hide. So, as a brand marketeer we can only conclude that how brands are born, how they’re used, perceived, and finally how they die, is in fact, all to do with quantum physics. Don’t let anyone tell you that marketing isn’t science.

What the Second Law means for brands is that highly complex systems (brands) will undertake irreversible processes that will move them towards a state of higher entropy (counter-intuitively, this means simpler, more basic, more steady – in the course of time, more dead). Unlike pure natural systems though, the life path for brands, from creation to death, isn’t linear – witness the product life cycle. Through the intervention of sentient beings – us – we can influence and direct the life path of a brand. They will crumble back to dust eventually, but not without some fireworks and fancy dance moves wearing spangly dresses along the way.

The question therefore is how to respond to change. Effectively, what any brand stewards should be aiming to do during their tenure is to increase the complexity of the brand. To be clear, in no way does this mean to do complex stuff – but rather, broaden, strengthen and deepen the network of positive mental pathways and holloways in the target consumers’ brains. Create new sparks between those precious brand-related synapses in the old grey matter. Build, in effect, brand fortifications that can resist the denuding effect of time and other influences. To protect the brand ‘entropy’.

What’s important here is that a brand’s strategic response is not limited to one strategy or one set of options. It’s not limited to premiumisation. True, you’d be forgiven from thinking that it was given how often the term is mentioned in brand plans and around the planning table, but rather there’s a range of responses that are rooted in the brand’s current state and its desired future*. That relationship between past and future is the critical one: too often, in the rarefied and rather whiffy air of office political machinations, huge strategic leaps seem eminently possible: today’s commoditised brand is tomorrow’s luxury marque. That’s a real watch out: brands exist in the mind, and how far you can credibly move them from where they are now will be a large determinant of future success. The more established it is, the more effort, energy, money and time will be needed to shift it.

Broadly, there seem to be four primary tasks to protect a brand’s entropy:

Retain specialness: if the brand is positioned as premium but may be in risk of losing its sheen, then a specialness strategy is appropriate. Premiumise all the touchpoints; remind consumers of the underlying product truth; invest in a consistent experience. Give the brand a tune up, and a good spit and polish.

Retain distinctiveness: if your brand is a mainstream brand (you know, the sort of brand that consumers really like but the Board keep on banging on about premiumising the damn thing), then actually, your strategy is more likely need to focus on articulating distinctiveness. This could be from core brand values, from personality or tone of voice, from the central positioning or even from the insight that connects the audience to your brand. Whatever it is, you’ll need to find the hot spots and ensure that activity is built on something really interesting and compelling. Don’t try and please everyone.

Rebuild differentiation: commoditisation in increasingly common when we live in such tough competitive times. Commoditisation of course is very much a process of a change in entropy – it’s you feeling the effect of your brand being eroded. For everyday brands, that are struggling to balance their added value features in a competitive world, strategies should focus on your points of difference; squaring off your corners, proudly sticking out your shoulders and saying ‘look at me, here’s how I’m different, here’s how I’m better’. New product development can help here: reminding people about the difference at the heart of the brand family – even if that innovation is sacrificial to prompt core brand re-appraisal.

Retain cost or price advantage: it’s incredible how often a budget positioned brand is touted as tomorrow’s premium brand. And of course, it could happen, but frankly it’s unlikely unless consumers adopt and take it there themselves (Pabst Blue Riband, perhaps?). More realistic is to consider how a price advantage strategy can be leveraged to the brand’s advantage. What are the essential points of brand value that need to be bolted on and what is non-essential. This is not about being lowest cost, there’s own label for that, but it is about understanding what functions or services are the tie-breakers that a brand can offer better.

If your brand is faced with change – and it will be – don’t knee-jerk to premiumisation. Think about its current state today; where your target market actually map and it, and where it’s desirable, and possible, to move to. You may not be able to change the laws of Physics, but perhaps you can delay the inevitable by a few hundred years.

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that finds the direct route to success for categories and brands. Want to know more, then just wing over an e mail to david@thecrowflies.co.uk or call on +44 (0) 1889 725670. You can follow The Crow Flies on Linked In (http://www.linkedin.com/company/the-crow-flies-ltd?trk=company_name), on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/thecrowfliesltd). Or just send a carrier pigeon and we’ll intercept mid-air. © The Crow Flies, 2017

*In fact, in a pleasant circularity, concepts such as past, present and future are also described by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Effectively time is asymmetrical – what’s happened in the past cannot be reversed and everything will keep on trucking on until we reach a total steady state in the Universe (it is argued). I don’t think we’ll be worrying about premiumisation strategies too much then.

Generalisation Y?

Isn’t it strange how in this age of ever smaller micro niches of ‘targeting’, powered by digital ‘big data’ engines, and the promise of ever-more accurate psychographic profiling, that the use of the term ‘Millennial’ is still used with so much unthinking and carefree abandon. Ahhh…the intoxicating, beguiling whiff of pseudo-expert terminology. “Millennial”. It’s like it has some magic power – to impress, to confound, to enthral. Marketeers, despite their intelligence and above-average ability for rational thought, are swept into the alchemical vortex created.

In fact, ‘Millennials’ wear many cloaks. Echo Boomers, Generation Me, Generation We, New Boomers the Net Generation and possibly the most interchanged name, Generation Y. The one factor that connects them all is that they’re a generation, sharing nothing more than a birthdate somewhere between the early 1980s and the early 2000s. That’s a full 20 years. And that’s everyone born during that period – or approximately 14 million people in the UK alone. Yet somehow, they’re too often seen as a homogenous mass, sharing traits and attitudes and behaviours that somehow, make them a useful targeting profile. Generation Y? Generalisation Y more like.

Here are just a few of those Generalisations.

Millennials are confident and team orientated with a greater sense of civic duty and social responsibility than generations before them. They want to achieve; indeed, they expect to achieve, and they expect to do it in their own way.
Millennials are lazy and work shy, apparently, and more like to have narcissistic tendencies – either a high degree of attention seeking and a quest for power or more of a self-orientation, being defensive, idealistic and having a keen sense of entitlement.
In the work place, work-life balance is valued more highly; they’re likely to pursue creative roles, or possible multiple roles to fulfil their different life goals. Not bound by loyalty to institutions, they’re also much more likely to hop from job to job, like ambitious rabbits.
Millennials are supposed to be more liberal – both socially and economically – yet they are typically less politically active (witness Brexit, where ‘Millennial’ voter turnout was lower than all other age cohorts)
They are ‘always on’ these super-connected digital natives, not knowing any other way of living – using digital for getting the news and connecting with friends with social media habitually –creating alter-egos
for themselves in the digital world vs. the physical world

I’m sure you know a ‘Millennial’ or two; indeed, you could well be one. You may recognise yourself in some of this – both positive and less so. But here’s the rub: you’re just as likely to recognise people who are older, maybe even younger – who share these traits. I don’t fall into the Millennial age bracket, but I’m socially liberal and fiscally conservative (a trait of Millennials apparently). I’m not lazy or work shy, yet neither are many younger people that I’ve worked with or mentor. In fact, I’ve not known a group of young people who have had to work so hard as this one: to afford to rent in London, to pay down student debt, or just to get or hold down yet another low paying internship for some much-cherished work experience. It’s as hard graft as the Industrial Revolution, just very, very different work – and slightly less grimy. And I’ve not known a generation who have been shown so little genuine loyalty by employers, many of whom are more concerned with metrics rather than real engagement. No wonder engagement is lower and little loyalty is shown.

Rather than targeting a whole generation, what’s more useful to brand owners and brand builders is striking the right balance between identifying a meaningful market segment – defined not by birth year, but by attitude and behaviour. One big enough and recognisable enough to the people you are targeting to actually move the needle commercially and ‘small’ enough to be differentiating and informative for targeting your brand or your marketing activities.

So, don’t think ‘Millennial’. Don’t think ‘Generation Y’. Think ‘Why Generalise?’ Why generalise when you can build a consumer targeting profile yourself. Why generalise when you can develop a whole consumer market segmentation if needs be – one that is more useful, more usable and more commercially valuable than crude brushstrokes.

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps discover the direct route to success for brands and businesses. david@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670. © The Crow Flies, 2017

What marketeers can learn from gambling on Leicester

Why you need to throw away your brand story and write some non-fiction

In case you missed it, Leicester have won the Premier League – a triumph of the improbable – much celebrated because no one predicted it. In 2008-2009 they were playing in the third tier of English football, by 2013-2014 they were still only playing in the second and just a year ago, they were fighting off relegation from the Premiership. Everybody knew that the ‘big 4’, (Chelsea, Man Utd, Man City & Arsenal for those not in the know), were the only teams ever likely to win the league again. The bookies certainly knew. That’s why they gave Leicester odds of 5,000/1 back at the start of the season. That’s 10 times less likely than the odds you could have taken up on discovering the Loch Ness monster (500/1) and 5 times less likely than seeing the Queen (hat wearing monarch not perm loving rock band) release a single which makes it to Christmas number 1 (available at 1,000/1 if you fancy a flutter). Yet people did bet on Leicester. They lay down their hard earned cash to back a vision which inspired them. They had no control over the outcome, only a belief in the story and so they let the narrative unfold.

Red Leicester The future of marketing, I’d wager, is to take exactly the same approach. Indeed, there isn’t any other option. Consumers have never been more marketing literate, more aware of ‘marketing tricks’ and as a result, the only strategies which will succeed are those based on fundamental truths. The days of the ‘brand story’ are behind us because consumers want fact not fiction. Look no further than everyone’s favourite supermarket, Tesco. Their sheer scale has not only caused high levels of rejection from the populous, it has also seen their own marketing campaigns repeatedly questioned and, crucially, not just in marketing circles but in the national press: farms that aren’t farms, fair trade that’s not fair and, indeed, beef that’s not beef. This has had a profound and significant impact on which horse marketeers should now back. Simplistically, consumers do now believe that any football club can win the Premier League but they no longer blindly believe in your packaging, your campaigns or your messaging. They know that a piece of fruit on the packaging is no longer proof that the product is healthy, a story about the brand’s pioneering founder is probably invented and the word ‘premium’ on a label no longer really means anything at all.

But let’s not despair, this is the best thing a marketeer could have asked for. For too long, too many brand plans have been compromised by the demand to generate maximum awareness and availability at minimal cost. Too many businesses have forced marketeers in to taking short-cuts in delivering on brand promises. It is essential that marketing plans are built on sensible commercial principles and ROI should be at the heart of any strategy. However, pursued to the extreme (as many companies have) this approach relies on marketeers’ ability to outwit the consumer – to create the perception of authenticity, of naturalness or of countless other traits and principles without spending the money on actually living these claims. Any strategy built on the principle of deception deserves to fail and its time is done. This is the natural evolution of our art: we all perform the commercial – creative dance, but brands can no longer be built solely by investing in availability. The future is all about belief.

Brands can and will inspire consumers but only if they stand for something. The key to creating marketing plans which genuinely cut through is to create genuine marketing plans. The opposite of inventing farms and fabricating brand histories can be seen in Kenco’s recent marketing strategy. The brand has long had an ethical agenda, however by 2013, their competitors were starting to encroach on their principled territory. Their reaction? They took it to the next level, they built a campaign centred purely and completely around their ethical values: coffee vs. gangs. When everyone else was focused on investing their ATL budget BTL in availability, Kenco invested theirs in Honduras, creating a scholarship to take Hondurans out of gang life and train them to become coffee farmers. They had no control over the outcome, only a belief in the story and so they let the narrative unfold. Their TV campaign shared the idea, their packaging offered consumers the chance to get involved in choosing which charity campaigns to invest in and their website continues to tell the personal stories of those involved. The result? 37% value growth and a gain of 3% share. In a declining market. As a number 2 brand in the category.

Undoubtedly it takes real bravery to place a big bet, especially one on which your company’s profit rests. Kenco’s is a bold campaign which few would have dared to implement. However, the far bigger gamble is to mislead your consumer. The key for marketeers is to create brand plans which celebrate a purpose beyond making money and to do so in a genuine way that consumers can (literally) buy in to. Doing so requires you to relinquish a little control, to create something genuine and true but, if done the right way, this can lead to the biggest and best of rewards. This is the turning point not just in the Premier League but for premier marketeers. You have two choices: bet big and let the strategy live or flog a dead horse and put it in a burger.

Rob Parker is a Partner at The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps discover the direct route to success for brands and businesses. rob@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1283 295100.

Time and brand planning wait for no man

On the news the other day, there was a report about two American sailors who have to be rescued 9 times by various coastal rescue services – just on their journey from Norway to Cornwall. They still have their trans-Atlantic crossing to make in a boat, ‘Nora’ that looks clinker built and is, well ‘romantic’ more than seaworthy. At the same time and on a seemingly unrelated path, I have been wrestling with a recurring challenge on innovation projects: why do great ideas get ditched so quickly?

The analogy of an ocean storm is what draws the comparison here. The ‘storm’ is the annual round of business and brand planning. Like a Force 12 storm blowing in, it approaches fast; it swirls and blows – disrupting normal events; the waves are big, awe-inspiring in fact and it demands immediate action.

If a brand plan is a good one, out of this maelstrom come the annual action plans, innovation being one of them. Teams set off, get briefs written and engage various partners. Insights are articulated and challenges expressed. Ideas are generated and validation kicks in. Yet, more often than not both client and agency are left disappointed: clients because the ideas aren’t ‘breakthrough’; agencies because the great ideas get left behind. Why? There seem to be a number of recurring themes.

The ideas generated in the here and now always seem the best – they’re owned by that team; they have a senior sponsor (or perhaps originator), they seem fresh and new. But newness doesn’t make them the best ideas nor the right ones to move the business forward. Just as it’s important to test your ideas vs a competitive control, so you should also test your ideas against existing ones. Are we moving forward? Are we taking learnings and applying them for better results?

An idea’s support and sponsorship is fleeting – there’s a purple patch for ideas. You love it; you present it with passion; you engage the Board, everyone’s excited. But depending on how you go about taking innovation forward, it can quickly wane. Rounds of iterative fettling; focus groups and quantitative testing if lingered over can sap the momentum. It’s important to be single minded, test and verify with urgency and get on with it. If you lose the momentum, whilst the idea may, in consumers’ eyes, still be a good one, you’ve probably lost the battle internally.

Great ideas don’t just spring out at brand planning time – we’re increasingly realising that great ideas are a jigsaw – a jigsaw of structured planning at a point in time, constant curiosity and spontaneous creativity. Put it this way: you are less likely to be successful if you set up an old meeting room with a few fairy lights and post-it notes than if you think about your physical environment for innovating all year round. More than anything else: capture thoughts and ideas whenever they arise and display them. Ideas attract interest like moths to a flame, but only if the flame burns brightly.

It’s never now or never – the market opportunity may be now or may be in the future, and sometimes it’s difficult to tell where you are with an emerging trend. Keep the ideas from the past and don’t be afraid to dust them off, tweak them and put them to consumers again. (And yes, a ‘Three Strikes And Out’ rule is sensible, but only over the course of years, not months).

Fine ideas are like fine wine –young white wine you may think is best with fish, but a bit of age and you realise it’s sublime with chicken. So too with ideas – and the insights behind them. New ideas can be a bit rough and ready whereas some time, some thought applied, some prototyping can put a sharp point on your idea. Think about how you nurture and protect ideas with potential beyond the one year window.

Like a big ocean storm, if a concept doesn’t make it through in time, then the next wave swamps it, even if it is a crackling idea. And this push, this desire for short-term winners means we risk losing the wild cards and the potential higher risk but high reward game-changers.

Cold Turkey Time

A while back, I read a short article in a round-robin e-mail / new service for the leisure & hospitality industry which featured a quote from the head of eating chain, Pret-a-Manger. For context, it is quoted in full below.

“Pret A Manger boss Clive Schlee has reported the beneficial outcome of giving himself 18 days off from reading emails during his August holiday. Writing in his blog, Schlee said: “The encroachment (of emails) is becoming a problem. I wanted to set an example, and so between 14 August and 1 September, I gave myself 18 days off Pret emails. Tell your colleagues, business partners, and teams about your plan. Most of them will congratulate you. Persuade one of your colleagues to look over your emails once a day. It will seem scary but there are many people within Pret to whom I would have entrusted this task. Knowing that there is someone keeping an eye on the business in your absence makes you feel responsible and allows you to let go. If you don’t feel you can do this step, write a carefully crafted out of office message. I am happy to report that the impact of the detox is entirely positive. The relaxation effect of the holiday is increased by at least 100%. This is a wonderful result and needs no explanation. Your team will send each other fewer emails. They know you aren’t reading them and they will make more decisions for themselves. They told me they enjoyed my detox as much as I did. You will find that when you skim through your emails on your return, most of them are trivial or no longer relevant. Who now needs to know the sales in Pret US on Tuesday last week? I have concluded that a great deal of business email is motivated by the need to belong and stay involved and does not generate genuine commercial benefit.”

It was that last sentence, in particular his belief that e-mail’s primary and unstated purpose is to actually nurture a sense of belonging without conveying a commercial benefit that struck a chord.

Turkey I worked in a large corporate business for two decades, and witnessed the launch, roll out and ultimately the drug dependency of e-mail communication. In fact, e-mail is not my beef. It’s a wonderful form of communication that knocks down formal barriers, is convenient and largely, when used with some structure and discipline, highly effective. But, now merely part of a communications weaponry that includes instant messaging, web conferencing, file sharing, and the many personal forms of messaging service (Facebook, Tritter, Instagram, Shapchat) that are used in parallel, the management of e-mail has become the work itself. They used to spoil my holidays and time off, not because I was answering them there and then, but rather because despite my best efforts to empty my inbox before I headed off, I knew that I would get back to what? 1000 e-mails a week. If I only I had had the presence of mind to do what Clive Schlee did – although maybe it’s more effective when you make the rules.

For fearing of sounding nostalgic, there was some powerful about writing memorandum and having them put in a ‘For Signature’ folder. I’m not wistful about this: it was a hideously inefficient way of working. But there was one major benefit: your communications were purposed. They were focused. They had to be. Infrequent and high impact was the mantra for a memo. E-mail is the opposite. A surrogate for speech, it has become the default primary communication method in many businesses. Colleagues located metres away from one another send an e-mail rather than have a conversation. Desk phones hardly ever ringing. And the effectiveness of e-mail reducing and reducing as it becomes a constant buzz of background noise.

There are implications for brands in this environment. Despite the proclamations that traditional media is dead, in a world where attention is salami-sliced over multiple forms of communication with scant attention being paid to any, the job of brands cutting through is in some ways easier. The competitor of a client I am currently working broke with contemporary thinking recently and launched a 40 second TV spot on the ad break in Coronation Street on ITV1 on a Friday night, backing it up with 48 sheet posters and epic poster sites in stations and airports. Has it been noticed? You betcha.

And there are implications for us too. Now I have set my own business up and am freed from the daily tidal flow of (mostly) pointless* e-mails designed solely for political purposes or communicating to the world and their dog something 97% irrelevant to them, my work is focused and effective. When I sit down, progress is made. I regularly complete my daily task list. And it feels, to quote a well-known UK price comparison sight, epic. The time for the communication counter-revolution is here.

* Finding the ones with a point used to be a task in itself.

Why is it so hard to do a few things, big?

Who strive – you don’t know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat,
Yet do much less, so much less, someone says,
(I know his name, no matter) – so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia.

(‘Andrea del Sarto’, Robert Browning, 1855)

Less is more. If there’s one piece of consistent feedback I’ve received or had to give over many years of building or working on brands, that’s it. The push for simplifying, choosing and focusing on fewer, activities, so that they can be scaled up. It seems so hard. Is it the fear of making sacrifices? The wistfulness that comes from an opportunity not brought to market? The tyranny of choice? Or is it simply too many voices; too many opposing views; too much desire to please too many people? Or the inability of consensual companies to make decisions?

The theme cropped up again on a client’s project just the other week and got me reflecting on how this problem remains so persistent, spanning the years, never waning in the face or ‘learning organisations’ or good, old-fashioned common sense. It’s a ‘sticky’ issue no doubt. But why? There seem to be a few common denominators.

Thinking in plan years not consumer years: of course, you’ve got to be practical. You have to write a brand or business plan for the ‘next Fiscal’; budgets need to be cut; revenue investments divvied out or zero-based; resource allocated; endless negotiations with the sales guy about how much they can’t sell concluded. The business focus becomes therefore, the business cycle not the consumer cycle. If such a ‘cycle’ exists of course, because rarely do consumers think in chunks of time, except when planning holidays or Christmas. Most people don’t write annual Life Plans that include, amongst other things, which brands they are going to take notice of this year. A pity perhaps, but actually no. You have more time rather than less to impact their lives.

Not having a clear purpose: there has been a penchant in recent years to write purpose statements that need decoding to work out what the brand or company is actually trying to achieve or where it’s headed. But a purpose statement – subjective, written from the heart, directive, stretching – is vital, not only to help people decide whether this is the business they want to invest their life in, but also to help all the major decisions the company makes, up to and including what its brands choose to do. Without a purpose, all bets are off. Any activity can be justified on the basis of a loud, persistent voice, the point of view of some senior executive or perhaps because of an intriguing or compelling piece of data or half-truth (the latter often gained from a store visit to Asda in Mansfield on a dreary November evening and quickly exploded up to represent the broad opinion of the Western Hemisphere). A Purpose is the start and the end game. Are we heading in the right direction if we do this? Should we repeat? Other than being, when done properly, hugely engaging, a purpose statement is your first and last line of defence in doing less and doing it bigger.

‘Now’ not just ‘New’: I’d like to be able to scientifically claim that there is a strong and direct correlation between the small number of business activities that drive 80% of the margin of your business. I can’t, but I will, because you know it. There is a correlation between the ability of the ‘tail’ of a company (brands, customers) to attract a disproportionate share of focus and attention relative to their (lack of) commercial return. Why? Because “it’s new”. Or “interesting”. Or a “huge opportunity”. The “revenue stream of tomorrow”. Or part of my personal hobby farm. Like with many things in life, the grass seems plush and verdant over there. In fact, look! Butterflies and buzzy bumblebees swarming over the lavender and small children, giddy with excitement frolicking across a field! The prime job of leadership is to keep the business honest: spend 80% of our time on those few big levers that keep us thriving now and the rest on those that show future promise. Hold firm and don’t get bored.

Drive and Support: it’s staggering how often companies forget which parts of their business drive the topline and which support it. If all the functions have equal voices around the table, then the ability to prioritise drive activities become woolier, more a debate than a directive. If you’re a brand business, chances are that the drive comes through brands and sales. If your own label, chances are it’s production and sales. If you offer legal services, chances are that it’s the legal beagles who bring in the tasty bacon. Prioritise these functions unapologetically. Oh, and if you work in them and are feeling more special, more loved, be prepared. With focus comes accountability and tough love.

Not saying “bye-bye”: How many products or brands do you have that limp along? How many are on life support? How many do you fool yourself remain a ‘brand’ (when actually they’re just servicing a habit not adding value)? The inability – or fear – of confronting the rear end of the product life cycle has unintended consequences right across the business. From complexity in the supply chain to complexity in the managers’ brain. Spring clean. Wield the long knives. Have a Car Boot / Yard sale. Call it what you will. But make sacrifices: create the physical space and the mental space to allow focus. And celebrate their lives with a party. They’ve played their role. You’re here today because of them. Share the learnings. And move on.

It’s almost 60 years since George Miller published the seminal work, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits On Our Capacity For Processing Information” (Psychological Review, 1956) – what became known as ‘Miller’s Law’. It has been much discussed, cited and challenged, but the basic tenet has proven sound. As humans – as managers – as consumers – we can only process a small number of things. If you fragment your brand activity; if you don’t make it beefy and bold; if your consumers don’t get hit squarely between the eyes with scale; it just won’t get processed. You’ll remain unnoticed.

Think as a consumer. Be purposeful. Don’t be beguiled by ‘new’ over ‘now’. Focus. Sacrifice. Then fully commit.

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that discovers and maps the direct route to success for categories and brands. Get in touch. And be prepared for focus and sacrifice. david@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670.

Time for a new brand:retailer dialogue

Over a coffee today, I was chatting to a friend about the scale of Tesco’s recent loss. £6.3bn in an enormously cash-generative business is some feat. Sometimes though, it’s best to take the pain with big cuts rather than little slithers, and this feels like a case in point. While it seems few and empathising with Tesco that much, for many suppliers it will create shudders of commercial fear. A reduction of 20,000 stock keeping units has been promised: you can bet that these results, store closures and closure of new store opening programmes are hardening that resolve at Tesco HQ.

And of course, it’s not just Tesco: all ‘middle ground’ retailers are struggling, their ills manifesting themselves in different ways. The concern is that the emerging reaction is underpinned by fear. Fear for the retailers that their like-for-likes will relentlessly fall and with it the share price (and with that the value of executive long-term incentive plans). Fear for suppliers, that their brands just need to slash to survive; slash their range; slash their prices; slash their profits; slash their staff numbers.

If ever there was a time for brands to step forward and own – or create, if necessary – their category agenda, it is now. This is an easy thing to write, I know. And perhaps it is not a ‘rocket science’ statement, I admit: but it needs to be said nonetheless. My fear is that the reaction within buying teams, within marketing teams, within sales teams is for category management. To understand the dynamics in the nth degree of detail; to range accordingly; to push into the ‘big data’ under the guide of ‘insight’ and negotiate new terms, or defend accordingly. Probably, big suppliers with a strong portfolio want this – it’s an opportunity to claim their fair share of space when for years they have been under-spaced. But most, the majority, will hunker down and prepare for trench warfare.

The current crisis in UK food retail though, is not really a crisis in organisation or supply. Tesco won’t see it that way I’m sure, and I support their open heart surgery. But underneath it all, this is a crisis of identity and of market position. Of who plays around the edges with unique, but more narrow positionings, and who will stand up for the middle ground proudly, distinctively and prepare to inspire.

There’s always been an opportunity for the likes of Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda or Morrisons – and the brands who sell through them – to do this – but none has taken it. And they haven’t because everyone has been distracted by the minefield of eggshells they have been mutually created. Can the brand trust the retailer to deliver on their distribution promises and activation? Can the retailer trust the brand to deliver the progressive innovation agenda and improvement in terms? The dialogue becomes tentative, untrusting. And then, in walks an Aldi and boom! The agenda has changed and you’re on the back foot.

This is the time for a new dialogue between brands and retailers that must be built on trust. Now is not the time for category management, now is the time for category leadership. For brands to step forward and be bold with their vision, their agenda, their picture of the future. To partner with retailers to create a shopping experience that helps the consumer; that solves those small but important problems in their life; that delivers value certainly, but not just low price. And it’s time for retailers to step forward and be bold too: to be clear what they are offering and work with brands to create this mutual vision. An agenda that builds the brand not just the retailers’ sales. It is time, in short, for all the words around ‘win:win’ to be put to one side and for the actions to follow suit.

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success. david@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh.

Bending the space-time continuum

Wandering around the supermarkets in the run up to Christmas got me wondering why it is retailers think that they can bend the space-time continuum. Shelf upon shelf of retail space, normally focused on food essentials given up to sell festive trinkets: Christmas Deco’s; vast vats of Prosecco; fat Church-style candles; artificial trees and of course, more Christmas Jumpers than you can shake a reindeer with a flashing proboscis at. Too much stuff in too little space. Yet for fear of inciting the Ghost of Christmas Whenever, the issue is this: all this space, dedicated to limited-shelf-life tat has to come from somewhere. And given that the well-known US retailer is called Target not Tardis, one can only assume it hasn’t been conjured out of thin air.

But actually, Christmas isn’t the real issue, it’s just a specific manifestation of what’s going on in the big retailers (not just food). The commercial question, the commercial conundrum in fact, comes from the salami slicing* of space on shelves for our everyday essentials, year round. How do you run an effective retail operation when the majority of your sales and profit comes from a tiny proportion of your space – an amount decreasing, not increasing.

A small example: I popped out yesterday evening for some vanilla essence from my local c-store (in this case, a Co-op). A classic top-up store – less than 3000 square foot, 4 aisles, tills, a tiny in store bakery. Good store, but pokey. How many types of vanilla essence does it need to sell? One. How many does it sell: two (a ‘Madagascan Vanilla’ version would you believe). Literally, a tiny example but illustrative of what’s going on.

A more significant example is my old category – alcohol. In your typical supermarket, despite physical product size (and weight) this is not a category short on choice. But it is short on growth. Decade long growth in wine, has slowed to a crawl. Beer too posted decent growth until a decade or so ago when it came to a crunching halt. Cider has bucked the trends to a degree yet traditional cider is struggling with fruit ‘cider’ smaller but growing fast. Overall picture: alcohol volumes as flat as the Fenland. Appropriate then, in a category treading water, that space overall hasn’t increased. But the way the space is used is has changed beyond recognition.

To illustrate, consider the growth of fruity, sweeter products. This is nothing new and certainly not unique to alcohol, be it K cider, Hooch, Breezers, Moscow Mule or even Corona with lime. Seeing the growth, the big suppliers, the big brands have reacted by hybridising their products. Spirits with flavour additions (honey, smoke, fruit shots); cider with yet more fruits, beers with spirits, wine pre mixes, ciders with spirits, beer with fruit. And it’s important to say that as innovations, many are fine, indeed when viewed in isolation, commercially successful. And it’s good too that the category is innovating.

But there’s a worrying undercurrent. No new space is given to these products. There’s a Morrisons in the town near where I live which I have been visiting on and off since it opened in the late ‘90s. It has the same amount of space today for alcohol as it did back then. But the proliferation is staggering. Hybrid beer products (low or mid alcohol, fruit additions and so on) have munched the space away from their parent brand and parent category. There is no extra off shelf display, no additional gondola ends. The parent, in essence, is expected to sell as much from less space. How do you do that? Increase the deal.

It’s not clear who wins. The supplier cannot win, because despite the new hybrids commanding a higher unit margin (lower cost, more premium position) their rate of sale is a fraction of the parent and ultimately, the equity of the parent brand suffers endangering long term sustainability. The customer doesn’t win as effectively margin is moved around and if an individual company’s trading position strengthens then the retailer’s bargaining power is weakened. Consumers? Well they get more choice – but do they want it, and how do you navigate a fixture that is so complex (when the average purchase decision takes 2 seconds)?

Perhaps what is emerging here is a new retail paradigm. The key lines: Pareto’s 20% that sell 80%, get sold online or click and collect, or indeed through a discounter. Store space becomes increasingly focused on trading up, new and different and delivering category or brand experiences. Or perhaps, it’s simply time we got back to innovation based on solving real problems and that meet real needs. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s a call to retailers and brand owners to concentrating on getting big brands doing their job better and not slicing the sausage ever thinner? Now I’m sounding like Scrooge so I’ll be off to get some salami with my festive Humbug.

(*For players of business bingo, what shall we call this? Salamification? Sausification?)

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success and a good Salami retailer. david@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh

Decomplexification

With more start headlines from Tesco this week, it would be easy to jump on the bandwagon and say ‘I told you all along. Those supermarkets are rubbish. They’re getting their comeuppance’. Of course, they’re neither rubbish, nor are they due a comeuppance. They have transformed most of our lives for the better. My mum and I were reminiscing recently and the topic of the food shopping came up: we had to drive 8 miles to go to a little shopping centre that simply wouldn’t pass muster today: a dour retail experience, not that cheap and certainly not that ‘super’. A few years’ later at University, studying in a biggish city down south, I encountered my first proper, out-of-town, Sainsbury’s. It was a revelation, staggering. And for fear that I paint a picture like it was Victorian times here; this was the late ‘80s. (1980’s, thank you, before you say)

But here’s another staggering fact. The average discounter stocks 3,000 product lines. The average supermarket? 40,000 to 55,000.

The rise of ‘every little helps’ – and by this I don’t just mean Tesco, but a grocery retail platform built on offering even more products, even more categories, from ever bigger stores, whilst beguiling at first, has brought with it the brand killer: complexity.

Killer? Too strong? No.

Consider product lines in a mid sized supermarket. 40,000 stock keeping units. Break this down: the supermarkets rarely stock a brand’s full range. They rarely stock the full availability of product formats, or packaging types. Consider: seasonal lines; limited edition runs; When It’s Gone It’s Gone lines. Consider: gondola end buy-ins, secondary siting units. Consider: in store activity; trial mechanics. Consider: the supply chain alone to get all these products, so that they are in store all the time to a perhaps over 2000 stores. Consider the impact of promotional pricing: the associated paperwork to get it set up on systems; the stock build up; the management of stock post event and the clearing up all the price mismatches months after.

No, there is little doubt, complexity is killing the retailers.

But, there’s also the change in shopping behaviour. My gran used to get my granddad to drive her, at least 4 times a week, often daily (Sunday’s excepted of course) into town. She’d work her way round the shops. Wakefield’s the butcher; eggs from the stall under the arches of the town hall; maybe some oatcakes from Browns inside the town hall; fish from ice-banked counter of the fishmongers which you could smell from the top of the street, Chatwins for a cream cake. And so it went on. How, years later, we would scoff at such antiquated and inefficient nonsense. Shop every day? Pah! Shop in more than one store? Madness!

The circle is coming round though. Inter-linking agendas, from supporting local, to food waste, to the pressure on time, to food trust, to the vanquishing of our high streets are seeing a return to some of the ‘old’ ways. Nowadays our family does a main shop with little top-ups or embellishments. Meat from the butchers, not the supermarket counter. Fish from the Monday van from Grimsby. The Co-op for fresh bread. Blimey, even the milkman has re-entered the mix.

It’s not just grocery: McDonalds’ are cutting back their range to ‘…let customers…quickly understand their order’ and because, ‘80% of our sales come from a small subset of the menu’.

And there’s the growth of the specialist, especially on-line. ASOS, Wiggle, Beer Hawk. If you want complexity, there has to be simplicity elsewhere. Want a crazy range of bike tyres? Go to Wiggle (or Chain Reaction) and get them. But want to buy books from there? Shop elsewhere young man.

The reality is that one major reason for the current stellar growth of Aldi, Lidl and even, say Poundland, is simplicity. Exploiting a niche and operating a simple business model. 3,000 lines. No up and down pricing. Less range. With a price that makes up for the (relative) lack of choice.

Whilst Tesco, Sainsbury and the likes are learning the lesson the hard way, the truth is, there’s a lesson in this for all brands. Simplicity and focus is the way to scale. Decomplexification we call around round here, in an ironically un-simple way.