A Chinese takeaway

Salvete.

Thank you once again for all your contributions to last week’s thoughts. Cicero would however like to correct the charge levelled at him by one of last week’s anonymous contributors that he is mean. This is a libellous and scurrilous accusation. Cicero is not mean. He is just careful with his bawbees.

Cicero has also been asked from where he gets the inspiration to write such thought provoking insight each and every week. Clearly you realise that though it is made to look easy, stimulus is required each and every week for such great thoughts to be written. The words inscribed on the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren are clearly apposite in response:

‘Lector, si monumentum requiris te circumspice’

Cicero will not insult your intelligence by translating this into the vernacular but needless to say inspiration is everywhere and nowhere.

Last week Cicero was musing for no apparent reason on the words and works of Chairman Mao. On this occasion he means the Great Helmsman, the Supreme Leader of the Chinese nation, and not the Chinese restaurant on Wigan High St.

In the 1960s this man urged the nation to let ‘a hundred flowers bloom’ to encourage radical and off the wall thinking. Now while this ended in the absurdity of the Cultural Revolution and mass murder of anyone thinking unorthodox thoughts, maybe just maybe there might be some lessons for us as marketers in this approach. And when Cicero says this he means the first bit about letting a hundred flowers bloom and not the mass murder bit even though it would open a few career paths.

Too often in business we employ people on vast-ish salaries who are under the impression that they must come up with vast-ish thoughts and equally vastishly expensive thinking to justify such vast-ish salaries. The result is often initiative after programme after project which expensively delivers outputs and rarely outcomes. Just look at the volume of initiatives pouring from TSSBs across Whitehall for proof of this thesis. The urge to do be seen to do things is like an itch and the bigger the scratch the better.

Now here’s a radical thought.

Maybe more could be achieved if businesses and its leaders focussed on doing the small things which can quite often deliver big results. And maybe if we as leaders encouraged ourselves and our people to light a hundred small fires, to let a hundred flowers bloom, we might achieve more. What do you think? Do you think Cicero is onto something here?

Many businesses will have tried to put in place comprehensive and full blown and no doubt expensive employee engagement programmes usually involving an expensive staff satisfaction survey or by chasing IIP accreditation. And no doubt a Director of Employee Engagement will be hired on a vasti-ish salary to think vast-ish thoughts.

Not necessarily wrong but taking the small fire approach much progress can be made to engage our people if we remember to take time out to show we appreciate their efforts; if we share business results and progress on a regular basis; and if we take time to listen to what they are doing and what they are feeling.

Easy. Cheap. Effective.

Maybe businesses of all shapes and sizes would do much better if they stopped hiring fancy Marketing Directors on fancy salaries who think they must develop expensive brand refresh programmes and expensive advertising campaigns to justify their fancy salaries.

And instead they employ a Director of Small Things to concentrate not on the big expensive stuff to drive business but on initiatives which cost the price of chips but deliver big results. A person whose job is to light loads of small fires around the business to improve business performance.

In the world of small fires where a hundreds of flowers a bloom, BT combined a telephone number and web address to boost response by a factor of 3 over a single call to action. Simple but brilliant.

Another example? One leading charity added a text response and immediately doubled donations especially from the young And

This even works for small businesses. One small shop Cicero knows boosted turnover by £60,000 simply by moving the fruit and veg from the rear to the front of the shop.

And in one town that employed a Director of Small Things the number of people who gave up their car and switched to walking was increased after they replaced signs showing distance to places as is the norm with signs showing time on assumption that people are short of time not miles. Again Cicero is in awe of such thinking, such an approach.

And so if this week you smell burning, you can be sure that Cicero has been lighting small fires across his TSSB and has been encouraging his team to do the same. Let’s not think about spending money on the big things but about how we can deliver big results by doing the small stuff better.

Let’s smell the flowers, let’s set our business alight, let a thousand thoughts contend. It will be good for us, for our people, for our business.

Is it only me?

Cicero is fed up. He is angered, annoyed and apoplectic. And, what you might ask, is the source of such apoplectic angst? Well it is the record industry. Why so, will be your next question?

For years the record industry has done nothing but moan about the threats posed to their business model by free downloading and the competitive threat of the internet. Indeed so loud has been their moaning that the conventional and usually broken approach is now to be followed. The government will intervene and do something. This is always a recipe for disaster. Governments of all shades are regularly implored to do something, just listen to the ‘Today’ programme for 15 minutes and count the number of times the government ‘must do something’. It rarely works.

Now it might only be me but I have never heard the manufacturers of Perrier, Evian or Buxton Spring asking the government to do something to help them compete with the threat to their business model posed by the free download of their major competitor, tap water. Even the mighty Coke, which regards tap water, not Pepsi, as its major competitor for share of throat, has raised no objection to competing with this free resource.

Unlike the record companies who just carp on and on about how unfair life is, these companies set out to build brands which better meet and satisfy consumer need than tap water does and for this they charge a premium. And it works. Indeed it works so well that the data manipulating eco-mentalist brigade are now muscling in on the act and moaning about the eco-mentalist impacts of these examples of great brand building. Stick to manipulating and hiding the climate change data, you are good at that, and leave the brand builders to do what they do best.

And so Cicero has this advice to the moaning minnies of the record industry. Get over it. Life is unfair. Deal with it. Stop moaning. And start thinking about how you can compete. You will find the answer on tap.

Have a great week. And see you again next week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.