Let your fingers do the walking

Well it turned out last week’s thoughts on the middle class subsidy we call our libraries, stirred up a wee bit of a hornet’s nest. The Guardianistas ended up in a right lather over my heretical thinking. The good news is that no library is needed to read these thoughts.

But it should be pointed out that to prove said point last weekend Cicero hung around his local library to see if being used and by whom. And Cicero’s point is proven-the library was not being used by working class types keen to improve their literacy and education levels. They were no doubt too busy playing with on their Playstations and X-Boxes.

And in defence of the marketing profession who were also slated by last week’s Guardianista, we should point out that marketers do not manipulate anyone to buy anything. We present you with and edit for you, choice. It is still your right to choose to buy or not. We make it easy for you to do so. And in doing so we create value for our brands and our businesses which means our people, our companies and ultimately the nation all benefits through the taxes we collect and pay.

So you see marketing is of immense social benefit to the country helping our businesses generate the wealth to pay for the libraries that fewer and fewer people are using.

And back to this week’s lesson........

Cicero does not just do marketing and as you might expect Cicero can be a bit of a Renaissance Man in a metro sexual kind of way. He also does films. And according to Cicero no sequel ever in the whole history of cinema has worked as well as the original with two notable exceptions. Godfather 2 was every bit as good as the original Godfather, although even Martin Scorsese was unable to stretch the quality across three films.

And the other film? Toy Story which did manage to make three films of increasing quality though since this is a cartoon it is a moot point whether this is a film in the conventional sense of the word.

This principle that no film is a good as its original except in the aforementioned examples Cicero calls the Godfather Theorem.

Now if anyone can name another film which has managed to maintain its artistic integrity and celluloid quality across more than outing, we would be interested to know.

Now this detour into the realms of Claudia Winkelman has been occasioned by the arrival of the latest ad from Yell. Yell used to be known as Yellow Pages in the days when people used to look up phone numbers in big thick books. Remember those days?

Now for those of you who have no idea what we are talking about, here is a brief précis of the marketing plot.

Many years ago there used to be a Yellow Pages ad featuring a kindly old man trailing from book shop to book shop (and do we remember those?) looking for a book called ‘Fly Fishing’ by J R Hartley. He searches in vain before returning home tired and empty handed to be greeted either by his sympathetic daughter or his gold digging young wife who mops his weary brow and hands him a copy of Yellow Pages. Eventually after letting his fingers do the walking and umpteen phone calls he finds a bookshop with a copy in stock. ‘That’s great’, he exclaims in excitement, ‘My name? Yes of course. J R Hartley’.

Cue logo and end frame. And the ad enters advertising folk lore to be parodied and imitated through the succeeding years.

Well now Yell has re-made the ad. Only this time J R Hartley is a DJ called Dave Lately looking for a dance track helped by Yell.com and his teenage daughter.
Does it work? Frankly no and so Cicero’s Godfather Theorem still holds true.
Now it is interesting to Marketing Grand Fromages like Cicero to see ads going down the same route as films with sequels and re-makes but you should never go back. This is true for advertising as in life. It will only disappoint.

J R Hartley was a lovely old man and you really felt great warmth for him as he experienced the joy of finding his magnum opus before he joined the Great Fisherman in the Sky. He had a Werthers-esque warmth and humanity about him. You wanted him to be your granddad.

Our DJ hero in the re-make, Dave Lately, lacks the humanity and authenticity of Mr Hartley. We do not have the same level of wanting him to succeed in his quest. It is interesting but not engaging. And great ads are always engaging and totally authentic.

And there is another flaw. Today we are swamped with search engines. Surely it would have been just as easy to Google the track or pay a visit to Amazon to find it. These days why would you bother trekking the High St to find something? This is a great big gaping hole in the plot. Surely in this post J R Hartley day and age one would use Google to find not Yell. We use Yell to choose when we don’t exactly what we want like when we want to choose an electrician or a hotel or a plumber.

So if you are like Dave Lately and let your fingers do the walking, be careful. You might just find yourself up a dead end.

Now it might only be me.......but what is happening to us and our society, big or otherwise?

The other day I was told a story of a Friend who asked a Railway Porter to help a blind man. ‘What do you want me to do?’, asked the Railway Porter. ‘Your f$*&£ing job’, replied my Friend, before being reported for abuse.

I also read recently the report from the Care Commission on how nurses in hospital are abandoning and ignoring vulnerable old people by doing unthinking things like that putting food and drink and call buttons out of reach. One patient even asked the nurse to call her daughter to be told “this is not my job".

No wonder such reports caused one of the Two Ceasars' little helpers to say that ‘care standards still needed to improve.’ You reckon. With insight like that it is no wonder that you get elected to parliament.

Of course such attitudes as this and like the behaviour witnessed by my Friend at the railway station will be blamed on the Two Caesar’s refusal to spend more money. Naturally it will all be the fault of the Government. Heaven forbid that people should take some responsibility for themselves.

Now this is the bit that I don’t get. This is not about money. Or lack of staff. Or government cutbacks. No matter what some people might think. This is about caring for our fellow man. I am not the most caring or empathetic of people, yes I do have weaknesses, but even I know to go to offer help someone who is less capable and able than me, though in my case this means that I have to help just about everyone.

Seriously what has happened to common sense? What has happened to common decency? What has happened to giving a bit of ourselves to help others? To treating others as we would like to be treated?

It might only be me but nursing is supposed to be a caring profession. It is supposed to be about helping and supporting and caring. Or have I got that wrong? No nurse should ever say ‘that is not my job’, unless of course she is being asked to perform open heart surgery. No nurse should ever be looking at her watch and say I don’t have time for you. And no nurse should ever be as thoughtless and so lacking in care to leave vulnerable people thirsty, hungry and abandoned just because they never gave them a moment’s thought. Nurses like this should be run out of the profession before it sinks to the level of railway staff.

And as for the Railway Porter, we expect nothing less from these people. Help a passenger, me, don’t be silly.

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.

Getting to know you, getting to know all about you

Apologies yet again.

Last week Cicero went AWOL. He disappeared over the wall constructed by Hadrian before he could collect and publish his thoughts. He now wishes that he had stayed behind and continued his communion and conversation with his devotees instead of watching the tribe from beyond the Dyke of Offa beat the living daylights out of the Pictish Tribe. It was a weekend to forget.

And to respond the devotee who asked what brands were giving their people a great reason to come to work-John Lewis and Apple spring immediately to mind. Any others you want to add?

Last week Cicero bought a book online.

This is not an uncommon or unusual activity for Cicero but while doing so Cicero was struck by the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the recommendations offered to Cicero. It was as if Cicero and the book seller had lived together all their lives. And yet said book seller knew very little about Cicero. Amazing.

Now since Cicero stopped being an Apparatchik with responsibility for protecting our security and freedoms, he has joined a Luvvie Agency helping clients become great at marketing, with his help of course. Now you would not believe how much data brands collect about their customers. And yet despite this many brands fail to make use of this data and continue to send out generic marketing. And this is where Cicero comes in.

And it is worth point out at this point that the advice you are about to be given you get for free, others pay a small fortune. Aren’t you lucky?

Now if you have been charged by your business to come up with a customer data and customer marketing strategy, please think about what’s important and what will really make a difference, and to collect only the data you really need to make your marketing truly great. It sounds obvious but you would be amazed how many times the obvious is overlooked.

Now some people may tell you that information is power. They are wrong. Information is not power but powerful but do we really need all the information we seek to store?
Brands certainly have a habit of collecting lots of information about us that never seems to be used. For example, how many times have you completed an extensive registration form stating your preferences, gender, date of birth and much else beside yet received nothing but generic marketing in return?

So what’s the answer? Don’t collect information and save the storage space? It’s an option but probably not the most intelligent one.

Instead think about what will make a difference, and focus on customer behaviour.
This information will expand your understanding of your customers and allow you to influence their behaviour and buying patterns. It’s called marketing, darling.

Graze, the company that delivers healthy snacks for anorexics to their desk, seems to get this. After each delivery they will ask customers to rate the foods, if you can call nuts and raisins food, and to edit preferences for the next time.
These simple bits of data are key to targeting customer behaviour and purchases with the brand. Arguably everything else is superfluous.

Relevance and attractiveness is key. If you can glean information about your customer’s preferences, your marketing can be very specific to their needs. This is exactly how Cicero’s amazing bookseller chappie. They know nothing about Cicero expect how he behaves when buying a book and that is the information they use to nudge his behaviour. Genius.

And as they might have said in the ‘King and I’ great marketing is really all about ‘getting to know you, getting to know all about you’.

Now it might only be me but.............................libraries should RIP.

Have you been to a library recently? Nope thought not. Neither have it. But that does not mean we don’t read books. In my case my appetite for books is only bested by my appetite for the kind of foods that the Nanny State wants to ban. In other words food that is not good for me. But I do like books but a library is the last place I would go for a book.

And yet society is up in arms because the councils supposedly acting on behalf of the Two Caesars, which is a debatable point in itself if they stood up and accepted responsibility, are reducing funding to libraries, an act of ‘cultural vandalism’ according to some. Get over it.

It has been estimated that in some councils only 2.5p out of every pound spent on the library service is being spent on books. No doubt much of the rest is being siphoned off to pay for Local Council Apparatchiks to have fancy chairs and gold plated pensions.

And have you seen who are using the libraries these days? There might be a better argument for retaining them if they were an invaluable weapon to combat illiteracy and poor people were using them to source learning. Now I’m sure this might be the case in some instances but in most cases, and I have studied the sort of people using this service, the type of people going in and out of libraries are the retired middle class. Is this just not another hidden subsidy for the middle class?

And then I heard an interview the other day with some woman who used her local library to source Mills and Boon novels. And I will repeat this....she was borrowing Mills and Boon novels. Come on. It is hardly cultural vandalism if this is what we are subsidising. Indeed I would argue it is cultural vandalism to disseminate this time of material.

Let’s face facts. We are going to hell in a hand cart. The number of people visiting libraries is in long term decline. The amount of books being borrowed is in long term decline. And yet we are being asked to continue to pay for this so that some people can access Mills and Boon and so that Local Council Apparatchiks can have fancy chairs and retire on the kind of pension that of us can dream of.

Now it might only be me but the day of the library is over. It has done its job. We can all now read and write and if we can’t then it is not like you will be the sort of person who will be hanging around a library. They tend not to like ASBO-ites down there. If we were starting out today would we invent the library? I don’t think so.

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.

Do you know why you come to work?

After last week’s brief interlude to pay our respects to the death of free speech and free thought, and which led to Cicero being considered ‘ a sexist pig’ by some, no doubt Guardianista types, who know little of Cicero, we are back this week with more considered thoughts on the business of business. No doubt this will be a relief to you.

A few days back Cicero was re-acquainting himself with the works of Kipling (the author not the cake maker on this occasion even though Cicero is also well acquainted with the works of the cake maker as well, hence the girth).
We digress.

In particular Cicero met once again Mr Kipling’s ‘six famous serving men whose names were who and what and where, and how and why and when’. For those of a questioning and challenging disposition these serving men have proven invaluable, especially ‘why'. But do these serving men not also apply to the structure of a modern business?

Consider this. The training and development department, and sometimes even a corporate university, take care of the H – how employees do things. The HR people, along with the headhunters, handles the “who”. Meanwhile, the Head Honcho of the business aka the CEO, often flanked by a few high-priced consultants and his Grand Fromages, devises the strategy – the “what”. The “where” and “when” of products is the domain of the logistics and supply chain team, while the “where” and “when” of people is the responsibility of the facilities manager and administrative staff and even line management.

But who is responsible for the why? Now don’t all cry out at once.

The 'who', 'what', 'where', 'when' and 'how' in any company will be on the organisation chart but 'why’, ‘the why we come to work question’, and surely this is the most important question, is conspicuously absent. Sure businesses will often go about being number one in chosen markets or maximising shareholder value as the ‘why’. But will this get our people out of their beds in the morning? Doubt it. Does that why excite you? Probably not.

And that can be a costly mistake as recent studies have found.

Introducing “why” – even in surprisingly modest ways – can have a big impact as we will now demonstrate.

In one study, employees at a call centre made phone calls to alumni to raise funds. These were randomly divided into three teams. For a few days, before they made calls, people in the first group read brief stories from previous employees about the personal benefits of working in the job – how they developed communication skills and sales know-how that later helped them in their careers. The second group also read stories before hitting the phones, but their stories were from people who had received scholarships from the funds raised and who described how the money had improved their lives. The aim of these stories was to remind workers of the purpose of their efforts. The third group was the control group; they read nothing before hitting the phones.

The results from the three groups were startling and enlightening.

The people in the first group, who’d been reminded of the personal benefit of working in a call centre, did no better than those in the control group. Both groups earned about the same number of weekly pledges and raised the same amount of money as they had in the weeks before the experiment.

However, the people in the second group – who took a moment to consider the significance of their work and its effect on others’ lives – raised more than twice as much money, in twice as many pledges, as they had in previous weeks and significantly more than their counterparts in the other two groups.

In other words, reminding employees about that missing W – the “why” – doubled their performance.

Similar results in another call centre study back this up. There, when employees spent just five minutes talking to the recipients of the funds they were raising, those employees spent twice as much time on the phone with prospective donors and raised nearly three times as much money as they had in the past. Surely big lessons here for people working in the charity sector-sorry the Third Sector. But also is such thinking also not applicable in all businesses? Surely it makes sense for us all of to know why were are doing something. And buy into it. And it must be about more than just making money for the shareholders. Cicero as you know found it especially to be inspiring to have some small role in safeguarding the safety and security of us all. That was his 'why'.

It’s often difficult to do something well if we don’t know the reasons we’re doing it to begin with. People at work are thirsting for context, yearning to know that their efforts contribute to a larger whole. And a powerful way to provide that context is to spend a little less time monitoring who, what, where, when and how – and little more time considering why.

Do your people even have a “why”? Ask them this question: “What’s the purpose of this business?” What do you hear? People needn’t recite the same lyrics, but they should be playing the same basic tune. If they’re not – if answers range all over the place or people don’t have answers at all – you might have a problem no matter how good you are at the where, when and what.

So what is your why? Why are you really in business? Will it inspire your people to something more than a yawn and a glazed look in their eyes? Do they really know why they come to work? And do they believe it?

Is it only me..........but please try this at home.

Now for my sins I have to sit through a lot of meetings and a lot of Death by PowerPoint presentations. And of course from time to time I have in my time had to present myself. Sometimes these are good presentations, sometimes bad but there are some words that are said that always strike terror in my heart.

Now no matter how good or presentation might be invariably the speaker inflicting Death by PowerPoint on his or her audience will be running late, or will feel as if running over, if especially bad. And at this point you will hear words ‘I will just whiz through the next few slides’ or ‘I will speed up’ or ‘I will skip through the next few slides quite quickly’. Whenever you hear words like ‘speed’, whizz’ or ‘skip’ in the context of PowerPoint, you are in trouble. It never happens.

I don’t why it is but Death by PowerPoint presenters even when they know they are running over or late, find it impossible to change gear. It is as if time no longer seems to exist when you are absorbed with PowerPoint or the presenter’s script is so hardwired that it is impossible to deviate no matter how pressing the audience is willing the presentation to end. Or maybe said presenter is thinking ‘I have spent bloody ages pulling this presentation together that not even the arrival of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is going to stop me saying what I wanted to say’.

You think I’m joking? You think it’s only me? Well this is a game we can all play. Next time you are enduring Death by PowerPoint listen for any words to do with speed being introduced into the presentation and let us know if you discern any increase in the speed. I would be really interested.

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.