Values matter in BUSINESS more than ever

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, Business Identity, Business mission, Business Values, competitive advantage, Dumfries and Galloway, Marketing, Strategy, Vision 13/04/201401/09/2025Comments are Disabled

Values in Business must be transparent

Business leaders face many challenges, some immediate and others which are not so obvious but can be far more dramatic to business success. In today’s business world the way you provide your product or service and to whom, says more about you than how much business you do. How you do your business now determines your current credibility and future success. Credibility is as much about your values in becoming successful as about the success you have. Values in BUSINESS must be transparent and lived by everyone inside the organisation.

For longterm success your values as an organisation as demonstrated by everyone inside your organisation matter to both existing, and potential customers, in choosing to do future business with your ad your brand. People have choices and they can now exercise them more freely than ever before, that means customers can access information instantly and make choices that are more informed. Examples such as Ikea’s staff misinforming undercover Times reporters about their sustainable and certified sourced products at a number of shops are one symptom of Ikea’s rapid growth and its underlying boardroom culture, allowing the core values to erode and trust in its reputation suffer. The damage to brand reputation from such as activities such as “greenwashing” create longterm brand damage as brands jump on popularity wagons.

Values Must Live in the Moment

Almost everything in life is in today’s world is in real-time and instantly communicated to circles of ever increasing influence and far beyond. A restaurant having bad night can have a poor reputation before the starter has even been cleared away, as customers post live feed back to sites such as Qype or Trip Advisor. Therefore, before the waiter, maitre d’ or chef knows what’s happening the world outside, potential customers already do, through instant social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook, and are cancelling their reservations in droves. Live experiences matter when they happen not in the apology afterwards.

Leadership teams must ensure that their business values are being lived ever day in what is called real time. The real experiences customers face every moment are the living touch points of a brand experience. Asking employees to make decisions and to own the decisions they make is vital for brand to live in the moment, but they have to be supported by the leadership team and not criticised for making the calls they make. If the call they make is in the best intentions to support the customer but is outside the experience you wanted to give the customer then that is not the employees fault it is leadership teams in designing the experience.

Why clean lavatories matter?

The old adage that if you want to know how clean the restaurant kitchen is, inspect the lavatories! This is because they tell you how the restaurant values cleanliness, is a great example of modern customer awareness of living values. Do you live your values or just post them on your website? Is the question customers want to know in establishing and experiencing trust with you, and your brand.

Seeing under the skin of a brand, or behind the marketing facade a brand promotes is now easy due to transparency in legislation, global media sources and a digital world. There are few places to hide as a brand in what and how they undertake their operations. From sweat shop labour, to brown paper envelopes down to paying influencers there are no places to hide, that’s why clean lavatories matter to customers.

Rail companies learning fast

A recent story of the man on the train talking too loudly causing enraged customers to Tweet complaints about his behaviour which was picked up by a duty manager hundreds of miles away who then contacted train’s conductor to track down the loud caller and asked him to quieted down.

This story is very much testimony to the growing demands of customer expectations, immediate online response, not waiting for passing train staff to react. This story is part of the reputation shift that train companies are actively pursuing to listen and understand customer’s real needs and expectations.

Values in Business must be owned and lived from the top.

The values that a business lives really matter to customers and to the brand reputation. Values are not bland statements in brochures, websites or company walls, but living attributes in how people behave (even when no-one is looking). Values start at the top, and must be owned, lived and driven by the leadership of an organisation. It is no-one else’s responsibility but the leadership’s to ensure they establish, spread and re-enforce those values throughout their people.

Learn more about strategy and how to build yours in your business, click here or on the book below.

Strategy: The Leader’s Role by Richard Gourlay

What Makes a Great Brand?

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, Business Identity, Marketing 11/04/201401/09/2025Comments are Disabled

A Great Brand is not about marketing

Despite what marketing people passionately believe most people don’t think about brands, they just get on with their lives. The coffee they buy, the supermarket they go to and petrol station they visit happen almost by accident. In Britain today we are too busy to think through these everyday inconsequential purchases, focused on saving time, not forgetting something or rushing from place to place on a tight deadline. So what makes great brand? Lets see.

Customer Choice

Let’s start with the basics, the customer has choices, endless choices if they choose to use them. But, in many everyday cases as in my examples above, the consumer sacrifices those choices for simple expedience. The inability to see (or value) brand differentiation, between Starbucks and Costa, between Tesco and Morrisons, between BP and Shell, and yet they each fight for space in consumers minds through tiny differences which if we stop and think about do actually exist and we the consumer do actively value.

Despite what marketing people passionately believe most people don’t think about brands, they just get on with their lives. The coffee they buy, the supermarket they go to and petrol station they visit happen almost by accident. In life today we are too busy to think through these everyday inconsequential purchases, focused on saving time, not forgetting something or rushing from place to place on a tight deadline. So do brands matter and if so why and how?

Brand Perception is Everything

Consumer choice is therefore the perception of the brand we hold at the time of making that purchasing choice. It is the conscious decision consumers make based upon how they feel about the brand at the time they choose to consume that product or service. So a brand needs to be more than just an image, more than just a recognisable label and more than just a mission statement. What makes a great brand is the sustained feelings which it provides its customers. That brand presence, the perception in someone’s mind is an accumulation of all the marketing elements which are planned into the deliver of that product and service to the customer. Often just called the extended marketing mix (the 7P’s) which define the areas of proactive marketing which integrate together and support any brand from Poundland to Rolls Royce.

A brand through is also more than cold marketing elements pulled together, it is also the feeling and values which underpin any brand. A brand invests its existence through it products/services. That R&D element often defines the brand and its position. A brand that does little to know investment in its R&D is often what is called a label, a company that sites within a market sector (player) but does not drive the growth of that market. This key element of a brand creates and sustains a brands culture. Its culture and ethos coupled, codified and defined by its leadership are essential elements in creating and sustaining any brand. When you are thinking about a brand, it’s not just the branding, it is so much more and it must all start with the customer.

Read on in part 2

The way forward in business, clear vision and direction supported by a supportive culture and a clear business plan, by Richard Gourlay

Content Strategy: The future of marketing

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, competitive advantage, content strategy marketing, Innovation, Marketing, opportunity, Strategy 07/04/201401/09/2025Comments are Disabled

In a world of continual change seeing what is happening is often difficult to understand until the paradigm shift has occurred. Many companies are struggling to stay ahead or even in the game of online marketing. Many companies are moving towards online marketing content strategy or as marketing people call it inbound marketing. This major shift in culture and one needs to be fully understood. The importance of content as a strategy is the future of marketing.

Content Matters

I have just had an old-fashioned marketing communication from a well-known brand, asking me to make an immediate purchase offering me a FREE upgrade for a new phone. My automatic response is not to be interested, at all because they have not demonstrated that they understand my specific needs. That made me thinks and write this article to explain why in today’s online world that old marketing technique is now as un-effective as a double glazing salesman offering me 50% off!

Content Strategy: It’s a complete shift not just an add-on

In a world where everyone is online all the time, the amount of information is drowning people, from Linkedin to Facebook and Twitter the rise of smart phone connectivity has promised much change to marketing but until recently only early adopters, high value and niche players could see what it meant to the marketing process.

Like many changes, it is not until the change becomes tangible does its impact become visual to many marketing departments that enables them to successfully influence a company’s marketing policy. This is considerably harder to convey when there is no tangible evidence of marketing results attributable to hard to track invisible marketing shift. Unlike the shift to direct marketing where direct connectivity between outcome and result can be seen through a transparent return on investment, online inbound marketing is struggling to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Content Marketing: Pace of change is outstripping current understanding

Currently content marketing relies heavily upon invisible and poorly understood online activities. Simply put, the rate of change is outstripping the knowledge base of the marketing industry, creating a gap between the understandings of marketing by decision makers. The routes causes of this is that not only are customers sourcing information in newer ways but the platform they are using, the Internet indexing is also changing ever faster, Goggle will make over 600 changes to way it scores content. Rapidly changing customer preferences, coupled with changing technologies and an ever changing platform results in the lack of certainty of what is working and why. By the time you’ve worked out what works it has already changed.

Content Strategy can create confusion.

Content strategy marketing process, one that now focuses on creating online and open platform engagement, online PULL; rather than internally controlled PUSH marketing methods, traditional marketers often struggle to understand the process let alone feel uncomfortable with the concept. This is not unreasonable, given the history of marketing in the last 50 years has always focused on the traditional pipeline of generating and then controlling customer decision-making, content marketing turns that on its head. People investing in inbound marketing are asked to spend money on losing control of the potential customer by letting them make an open decision about how and when they engage with your brand.

In the mid 1990’s I remember designing a website to support a brand. No one was interested until it was live and people could see something online. A director then said, “That’s great let’s print it off and send it to all our customers”

Dialogue NOT monologue

The inbound marketing process is about generating an open dialogue, rather than a structured marketing process. It lets potentials, prospects and suspects move in and out of your control while they select you, rather than being controlled by you.

The Content Strategy Process

Listening – Online is now the first port of call for 78% of web users.
Creating – Great content that answers need and demonstrates expertise.
Engaging – Is about being talked about and developing a dialogue with audiences
Transforming – Is about continual engagement, moving them from suspects to purchasers
Growing – Requires creating perpetual momentum developing new and developing loyalty

Source:www.tomorrow-people.com

Traditional marketing models of developing engagement such as AIDA are still highly valid but instead of just focusing on a immediate winning proposition through a grabbing hook, attach a liner and sink them in a simple linear model for winning customers. Content strategy marketing demands multiple engagement tools which include cross referencing other parties creating competitive collaborative working to generate awareness, giving away FREE content in white papers coupled with fast and slow acquisition tools in decision making.

Content strategy needs to be explained better

Moving to a content strategy is about moving from PUSH to PULL, not about the Internet platform, it is about understanding the importance of open unrestricted dialogue rather than material generation and in reality it is not just about the Internet although this is where its impact is being seen today, but equally will encompass every marketing platform and process. The growth of mobile technology will further the pace and realisation of content strategy.

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