The Leith Dock
FFS. Don’t Be British If You Want To Build A Business.
“Don’t be British” was just one of Lara Morgan‘s pieces of wisdom for selling and growing a business, at a no-nonsense talk on the Leith barge last night. Be less polite about it, just close the deal.
It was a straight-talking account of how Lara built Pacific Direct, starting with selling pre-threaded sewing kits in her front room, to growing it to 400 staff and eventually selling the business for £20 million 17 years later. What came through loud and clear was a dogged determination and competitiveness to make sales. When asked how she landed one of her biggest accounts, the answer was simple: “I rang them up every day for three years, sometimes three times a day”.
But there was also real creativity in how she made sales. One client baulked at a quote saying it was “painful”, so was told to expect something the next day that would relieve his pain. The following morning he received a tube of Savlon. He’s still got it in desk drawer. And needless to say he accepted the quote.
Even Rocco Forte couldn’t escape, and was threatened with actually being sent a kitchen sink, unless he returned her calls. He picked up the phone after that.
Another piece of advice was to be open and transparent in management. Tell staff how the company is doing. Create a culture where everyone is involved in the highs and lows and is invested in making it work.
And be creative with your management. She paid for staff to go and stay in hotels to see what competitors were doing with their products, and present back on what they were doing better. Staff training, staff entertainment and product development rolled into one. She convinced The Times to run her recruitment ad horizontally, to show how this was a different kind of company. She even put a rose on everyone’s desk on February 13th, to make sure everyone felt a little bit loved regardless of what they got on the 14th. It doesn’t cost a lot to be different, just good ideas and the drive to do them.
So Lara’s set the bar incredibly high for the first in the series of Leithal Thinking Presents. There’ll be more, and if you’re interested in coming to the next one, you can add your name to the list here.
This event was hosted in partnership with Lister McDonald, who enable leaders and businesses to clarify what they want to cause, and empower them to make it a reality.
Lara Morgan has also just brought out a book, More Balls Than Most, available to buy here. And to find out more about what Lara is up to now, check out Company Shortcuts, a collection of frameworks for budding entrepreneurs to do business right. As it says on the back of her business card, if you’re thinking of setting up or improving a business, “stop fannying about” and do it.
Product Placement. Oooooh! or Aaaargh!
A Nescafe ‘Dolce Gusto’ coffee machine made history yesterday when it became the first official ‘product placement’ on UK television.
After years of political and media debate, the event turned out to be about as exciting as a lukewarm latte in a styrofoam cup. Said machine appeared on This Morning, lurking hopefully in the background during the cookery section. There was no ceremonial pouring of complex, caffeine based brews for the guests, and no odd shoe-horning of mochaccino based references into the morning’s chat.
So, life goes on. Nescafe probably got their £100,000 investment back in PR coverage and the UK marketing world is left, ever so slightly puzzled as to what this all means for our brands going forwards. But fear not, here are Leithal Thinking’s top four tips for conquering this brave new world.
1. People get it – just don’t treat them like idiots
The younger generations have grown up with a far more collaborative experience of the media – we retweet, mashup, and freely sit through commercials in return for stuff we want to see or listen to. We get the principle and we’re not idiots. But we’ll not suffer fools who treat us like we are.
There’s a healthy cynicism around TV product placement in the UK. We Brits still seem to feel it’s all slightly beneath us. Last week’s media coverage of Britney Spears’ “Hold It Against Me” video with it’s extraordinarily blatant $500,000 of product placement gave off a nasty whiff to many UK commentators.
It’s no coincidence that some of our very favourite ads from the last decade have been from the Orange cinema campaign, where crass mobile phone product placement ruins the hopes and dreams of a raft of Hollywood A Listers.
So, we know all to well what product placement-gone-bad looks like. Ofcom will, of course, do its best to stop the nastiest examples slipping through to the UK – but any offending brands (and programmes) can should brace themselves to be publicly ridiculed and viewers will vote with their remotes. It’s interesting to note that Google already lists 300,000 sites exposing “the worst examples of product placement”.
2. It will work better for some brands than others
Product placement favours more unusual brands, which can zing out a bit more without having to rely on blatant finger pointing or crass plot integration. Grolsch is a good example of this as the swingtop bottle and pop sound to the opening can make it just noticeable enough, without crossing the ‘crassness’ line (see the film, About a Boy as an example of this in action).
In this sense, the Dolce Gusto coffee machine was a good choice for product placement. To Middle England, it probably still looks a bit odd – so seeing it in Holly and Phil’s kitchen makes it more acceptable.
If you’re already a ‘wallpaper brand’ and part of the fabric of British life, then product placement in dramas and soaps is unlikely to work for you. The fact Deirdre Barlow uses Tetley Teabags is never going to be persuasive – it would just be unremarkable – or crass if it did become remarkable. ‘Wallpaper brands’ will tend to go more for non-drama based options – but Ofcom’s regulations mean it’s unlikely we’ll see branded cups of Coke appearing on X-Factor, in the same way they do week-in-week-out on American Idol.
3. It will create more headaches for TV producers than for marketers
From now on, TV producers will have the headache of managing not only what really is commercial product placement – but what viewers think might be.
When Cormack McCarthy’s award winning novel, The Road was adapted for the screen, the writers and producers had an unexpected product placement nightmare. In this post-apocalyptic story, where next to nothing remains of life as we know it, a father comes across an old can of coke and gives it to his son.
“He sat and ran his hand around in the works of the gutted machines and in the second one it closed over a cold metal cylinder. He withdrew his hand slowly and sat looking at a Coca Cola.
What is it, Papa?
It’s a treat. For you.”
In the book, it’s a moving and thought provoking moment where the old and new worlds unexpectedly collide – but the producers’ fear was that audiences would automatically assume it was a crass piece of paid-for product placement – completely at odds with the mood of the film. The scene made the final cut, but many reviews of the film online showed that some people had just this reaction.
Examples like this remind us that the onus will be on the UK TV community, as well as the marketing community to ensure that programme integrity is retained in this new era – whether or not commercial product placement is involved. The role of invented brands (Duff Beer and Corrie’s Newton and Ridley brewery spring to mind) may not have died a death just yet.
4. Know the facts
If you haven’t done so already, now’s a good time to get your head around the facts. Ofcom has published detailed guidance on when, where and what kind of product placement is allowed in the UK. Kids’ programmes are out, as are alcohol brands – so no Sourz in the Rovers Return just yet. TV channels must also use a new logo to signal to viewers when a UK-produced programme contains product placement.
(Right, I’m off – I have a sudden, strange urge to go and get myself a Nescafe coffee…).
Language leaves a lasting impression
I found myself working on developing a language guide for a client’s business this week. It’s going to be a tool that will engage people within the organization, encouraging them to have confidence in their own writing abilities. We tend to trust people more than we do organisations, so this is going to be quite an important piece. As you’d expect from a creative …
Language leaves a lasting impression
I found myself working on developing a language guide for a client’s business this week. It’s going to be a tool that will engage people within the organization, encouraging them to have confidence in their own writing abilities. We tend to trust people more than we do organisations, so this is going to be quite an important piece. As you’d expect from a creative …
Brand workout time for the Commonwealth Games?
Here at Leithal Thinking we’re pretty excited about the Commonwealth Games coming to Glasgow in 2014. It means we can bypass having to schlep down to the London Olympics, negotiate baffling ticketing systems and worry ourselves about terrorists. Instead we can just nip over to Glasgow, see some phenomenal world-class sport and be home in time for tea and Taggart. We’ve also …
Brand workout time for the Commonwealth Games?
Here at Leithal Thinking we’re pretty excited about the Commonwealth Games coming to Glasgow in 2014. It means we can bypass having to schlep down to the London Olympics, negotiate baffling ticketing systems and worry ourselves about terrorists. Instead we can just nip over to Glasgow, see some phenomenal world-class sport and be home in time for tea and Taggart. We’ve also …
The mullet principle in action
Who’d’ve thought that the finest coiffure ever known to grace heads could be such a valuable inspiration for digital strategy? Us neither. Until we applied The Mullet Principle to the design of two internal websites and the benefits became immediately apparent. The Mullet Principle – otherwise expressed as ‘business up front, party at the back’ – …
The mullet principle in action
Who’d’ve thought that the finest coiffure ever known to grace heads could be such a valuable inspiration for digital strategy? Us neither. Until we applied The Mullet Principle to the design of two internal websites and the benefits became immediately apparent. The Mullet Principle – otherwise expressed as ‘business up front, party at the back’ – …
Can Can
Interested to see on brandrepublic today that the big drinks companies are collaborating on figuring out a single back of the can message encouraging people to recycle them.
The phrase currently being debated is apparently: 100% recyclability, 100% reusability. Every can counts.
Recyclability. Not a terribly user-friendly word but you can see where they’re coming from.
They reportedly did a whole bundle of consumer research across Europe that suggested that consumers reject any attempt to make them feel guilty about not recycling or “tried to evoke emotion”. But responded well to any attempt that demonstrated unequivocally (good word, huh?) that their can, recycled, would make a difference.
I’m encouraged by this as we did a – no doubt smaller scale – piece of research in Scotland when working with the Scottish Government on the bag re-use campaign. Insight gathering research followed by creative testing research. And both demonstrated exactly the same thing. That people bitterly resent being made to feel very guilty about not doing something they know they should. They also get a bit squeamish when you try and stupefy them with cuteness. They don’t need to be in love with the environment to do something about it. They just need a bit of a nudge.
Patrick McGuirk, European recycling director for Coca-Cola Enterprises, said: ‘We are interested to understand what messages work as this allows us to better build targeted campaigns that drive changes in consumer behaviour.’
If only he’d spoken to me weeks ago, he could have saved himself a whole bunch of money…