Are you talking to me?

As you know Cicero is not at all political and normally eschews making political comment lest he be seen as partisan. But this week he is going to break this habit and policy. Sorry to all who come here expecting a politics free zone of calm meditative thought.

But Lord Browne is wrong. A university education should be fully funded by us taxpayers. End of. A university education offers great potential to transform lives and a great opportunity to deliver a well balanced society. And as taxpayers we should be investing this. Given all the other stuff we as tax papers invest in which are nowhere near as liberating for individuals, why are we even debating how much students should be paying?

If we are prepared to invest in keeping people in dependency, why are we not investing in giving people the means to make more of their lives?

And if, as will be the case, we have issues with the affordability of going down this route, the answer is equally clear. We should be paying for fewer but better graduates and universities. It does not say in the Declaration of Human Rights that everyone has the right to go to university, does it? No.

But we say that all, regardless of race, gender, creed or size of wallet, should have the opportunity to get there. And should anyone fail to seize that opportunity then tough. You are not good enough. Get over it. But if you are good enough, you can be assured that Cicero will willingly share sesterces with you to allow you to get a truly great university education. For free.

Think again, Lord Browne.

And now normal service will be resumed.........

Imagine if someone you worked with failed to remember your name or called you by someone else’s name, or got some information about you that you would expect them to know about you, wrong. How would you feel? Probably not very valued or respected.
And yet every day that is exactly what brands do to their customers. And no matter how much we try to endow with human characteristics such as personality and tone of voice, brands can still come across as impersonal, faceless and anonymous. Just who exactly are they talking to?

A few months back Cicero received from his local chariot dealer a letter offering a summer holiday service check to ensure ‘you were not stuck in the car on the way to your hard earned holiday with the kids screaming in the back’.

Great idea. Great proposition.

Somewhat spoiled by addressing it ‘dear customer’ even though all customer details were on the system and were used to address the letter.

And what is the point of talking about ‘kids screaming in the back’ if, as in this case, there are no kids to scream in the back.

How well does this business really know and understand its customers? How much does it show it recognises its customers? Is this the sort of business that puts the customer at the heart of its marketing?

Now is the time for us as Marketing Grand Fromages to think about ‘brand personalisation’.

The more businesses can personalise their brand the more it can meet the consumer need of ‘, recognise me, know me, understand me’. And all of us like dealing with brands and people that know and understand us. We trust people and brands which can deliver against this promise.

And how do you personalise a brand?

Think 4 Ds-Data, Decisioning, Digital, Direct.

In other words let the data and insight held on your customers inform your digital and direct marketing strategies, creative and messaging. Of course it should go way beyond this with the data informing all touch points on how to feel and look and sound personalised to the consumer but let’s face it getting the direct and digital messaging coming across as personalised would be a huge step in the right direction.
Data from or about the brand’s customers informs the insight that drives the decisioning that allows you to make your brand feel personal and alive to your customers across as many touch points as you can and lets the brand demonstrate the deep understanding that earns customer trust, making it more responsive to changes in customer behaviour, more relevant to customers’ individual needs and more rewarding in the way it treat its customers.

And customers will repay by buying more, staying longer and introducing others over time. Or, to put it more simply, will drive the bottom line.

Seize the chance, fellow Marketing Grand Fromages, rise to the opportunity and make your brand relevant to market of one. It can be done. Think 4 Ds and don’t be a D for Dumbo.

Is it only me......but does anyone else care that we are losing skills?

Walk down any High St these days and you will be hard pressed to find a thatcher, a cooper or a blacksmith. And yet a hundred years ago these traditional skills would have been in plentiful supply in towns and villages across this green and pleasant land. No longer. These skills have gone and once gone they are gone forever as there is no one around to pass down ancient skills like these to a new generation.
And if we are not careful and take action now, a host of skills that many of us take for granted will also be lost.

Take the simple task of basic arithmetic. With the advent of pocket calculators young people these days are rapidly losing the ability to add, subtract, divide and multiply, whether on paper or in their head.

We are similarly losing the skill to map read and navigate, something at which the males of the species are especially adept at, relative to distaffs. Nowadays we just jump in car and just ‘sat nav’ the way to our destination. And should the ‘sat nav’ be left on the kitchen table or pack in, well, quite frankly and quite literally, we are lost.

We no longer know how to use encyclopaedia and other interesting fascinating books to find out what we need to know, instead we choose to ‘Google’ or, and this is even worse, ‘Wikipedia’ the information we need to know.

In passing, it is interesting to note that we are not only losing skills that people like me take for granted but we also are creating new verbs in the process as we have just demonstrated.

And finally we should be worried about the long term cognitive development of our society caused by mobile phones, iPhones and the like. Have you noticed how few telephone numbers we all now remember? When we were lads and lassies we could ream off the phone numbers, birthdays and house address including postcode of all our friends and relations, many of which we can probably still remember to this day. Nowadays we rely almost entirely on the memory banks of our mobile gizmos rather than our own. What will this do to our brain power going forward? We should set up a medical study now before it’s too late.

Now it might only be me but I find this all very worrying but, given that we can’t put toothpaste back in the tube and stop the onward march of technology and progress, I don’t really know what to do about it. I just thought you should know-a problem shared and all that.

Anyone got any suggestions?

And on that depressing note, have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.