Customer “not always right” shock!

And while I’m in the mood to take pot shots at sacred cows I feel obliged to point out that neither are they “the king” nor do they always come first.

Time and again customer appeasement protagonists have fallen into the trap of making these (and no doubt other) ridiculous blandishments.  It is somewhat ironic that such slogans, mantras and mottos have rarely served a greater purpose than to paper over cracks in a suppliers post-sales support.  In far too many cases they amount to no more than a feebly thin form of sycophancy (as if there is any other).

So (just for a minute) suspend your disbelief, don your “I’m a Customer” hat and consider this:

Do you really want a supplier, for anything that is in any way important or strategic, to believe that you are always right?

The right thing to do, the right way to do it and the right time to act.  All the time.

Really?

Such a servile relationship is hardly the best foundation for developing competitive advantage; sycophancy virtually guarantees antagonism rather than synergy.

A customer-supplier relationship that is worth more than the paper the invoice is printed on has to be based on both parties acting in the best interests of each other.  A customer that is always telling thwarts a supplier’s ability to add real value.  Likewise a supplier that is always looking for selling opportunities is unlikely to be truly focused on the matter in hand.

The customer-supplier relationship should be a meeting of minds and not a battle of wills.  At the same time it must be an open, fear-free relationship where both parties can present their views and discuss the options.

The resultant whole will then be greater than the sum of the parts and this increases the likelihood of success rather than diminishing the potential returns.

Choose your suppliers carefully and ensure that they have the mettle and confidence to speak their mind and tell you what you need to know.

Michael Hart Michael Hart is a Senior Associate at Vivid London.

Greetings from S(n)o(w)ho!

We’re certainly getting ourselves in the spirit of the season at Vivid HQ! The festive events for Keebra.com have led to Christmas songs throughout the office, which in turn have led to Santa hats.

It seems the weather’s doing its part too; the scene is certainly set for Keebra.com’s festive readings in Covent Garden, From 6pm tonight!
Vivid Senior Partners David Nash and Neil Evans enjoy a snowy break

Quick, quick, slow

I am constantly surprised by the pressure that is sometimes exerted in order to extract a piece of copy in time. Who is the better copywriter? The person who writes without pressure, knowing that a deadline is days, perhaps weeks away, or the person who submits a piece with minutes to spare having spent the hour beforehand frantically slaving over their keyboard?


Logic dictates that the person with more time will write a better piece. After all they will be calmer, more able to collect their thoughts and under much less pressure. They also have plenty of time to proofread and edit a piece before publication. But what about the moments of genius that can occur when a writer is under pressure? Although forsaking the luxuries that time can bring, being under pressure can be incredibly liberating for a person’s creativity. A tight deadline forces the person to engage all their energy at a very rapid pace into whatever they are writing.


There is a key difference between copywriting and authorship to consider. Copy written by a copywriter has to be fast, snappy, engaged, instant and disposable, so a rapid style of writing is a must, whereas an author can take a more thoughtful and considered approach.

When considering the virtues of a pressured writing environment, there is a clear difference between being fast and being late. Writing a piece at speed does not necessarily mean that it is late.


Inspiration plays a key role here. It can strike at the most inopportune moments, but can be actively encouraged when a writer in under pressure.


Of course both approaches also have their pitfalls. If the writer takes the longer approach, they can end up writing lengthy pieces that are not concise or sharp enough. These pieces can be dull to read and ultimately unsatisfying for both writer and reader. In this case, as well, you can also fall into the trap of thinking that they have so much time that they keep putting the task off until they are forced into taking the quick approach anyway. 

On the other hand, if you leave writing a piece too late it can end up being either incomplete or feeling rushed. Or worse, you could miss the deadline…

Ultimately it all depends on the author’s personal writing style and preferences, I fall into the latter, one-mad-hour-before-deadline kind of writing. The virtues of writing this way work for me.

Writing under pressure produces better results – the writing seems to be more gutsy, instinctive, concise, and often a more entertaining read; which is after all what our clients are paying us for.

Mike Evans
Mike Evans is a Junior Associate Copywriter at Vivid London.

On Synergy

Synergy, the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

Public Relations should be all about synergy. Not just synergy between the agencies and clients, but between any and all interested stakeholders.

It’s easier when it isn’t though. It’s easy to focus narrowly on your client, to fight for column inches, and jealously guard all promotional activities and events.

This approach may garner some responses, may raise interest and credibility, may please your client, and will probably fulfill your contractual obligations to them. Is that where you stop?

Not here at Vivid. We’re not interested in ‘pleased’ clients; we want ‘ecstatic’ clients. We don’t fulfill obligations; we exceed them. Sure, in part this is due to our attention to detail, our refusal to settle for ‘second-best’ for our clients, and the passion we have for the projects we take on.

We’ll not only think of ‘going the extra mile,’ we’ll think of bigger and brighter destinations you can reach on the same tank of petrol. That’s why our client’s keep coming back for new journeys.

How?

We know that even in a commercial world, looking for partners is important. Disagree? Take a look at the (product)RED partnership: over ten global brands, each with huge influence in their own markets, come together in joint campaigns targeted at eradicating poverty and combating aids in Africa. They aren’t scared of cooperating with other organisations towards a common aim. Everyone benefits – from CEOs to consumers, from the impoverished to the wealthy.

Our client, Keebra.com, is organising a series of festive events to benefit the homeless charity, Crisis. Keebra.com is also donating 2000 books to this very worthy cause, books that will be distributed to Crisis’ homeless clients over the festive period. By gaining brand recognition in the UK, Keebra.com will be able to help Crisis with its festive fundraising.

Whether the partner organisation is a different brand in a different market, a charitable cause, or an influential individual, both have more to gain together than alone. Picking the correct partnerships and spotting the gainful opportunities is the key to real synergy. That’s where we come in.

Beware of any communications agency too interested in following your marketing plan to the T. Your agency should exceed your aims by having ideas that you didn’t, and finding new ways to approach the conversions you seek. After all, that’s why you bring on an agency, instead of doing it yourself.

Call us and take your first step towards mutually beneficial outcomes. Let’s see where our synergy takes you.

Adam James Morecroft
A Junior Associate at Vivid London, Adam James Morecroft is a graduate of King's College European Studies programme. A childhood spent on the continent has fostered his keen linguistic skills, which he makes full use of in his role as junior PR and social media marketer.

On being appropriate: Multitasking is wrong

One of the big lies in modern management is that multitasking is

(a) good
(b) preferable to linear action, and
(c) possible.

Time management tools, whether paper based or electronic, promise to make sense of an increasingly confusing and complex world. But they’re based on one basic, and mistaken premise – which is that it is actually possible to do hundreds of things at the same time at the same level of effectiveness.

This is so fundamental a misconception I am astonished it is still held. There’s a simple exercise, taught amongst others to people on the expert patients’ programme in the UK, which proves the point. People who have, for instance, panic attacks, are taught exercises that stop them thinking about their situation and which instead immerses them in thinking on something else – like thinking of an animal for every letter of the alphabet, for instance.

And what happens? The panic attack subsides; the fear somehow dissipates – simply because the mind cannot focus on more than a very few things at once.

If it is this simple to stop thinking about something as fundamental as a panic attack, how easy is it to stop thinking about work; to lose focus switching from one task to another; to forget, in the melee of daily business the one thing that actually matters.

Refusing to multitask, though, quickly gets you an image as some kind of workplace wimp. What’s the solution? Personal effectiveness experts like Steven Covey or Brian Tracey have good ideas on prioritisation, and some useful ways of thinking about work organisation, but still perpetuate the idea that multitasking is actually achievable. David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology works better, acknowledging that organising tasks is only the first stage in finding ways of keeping tabs on everything that is going on.

But the challenge is still there – that these are solutions to a problem we have imposed upon ourselves. What we need to do instead is realise that giving uninterrupted time to a particular project promotes concentrated, effective work – and find ways of promoting that uninterrupted time within the workplace.

At Vivid London, where we work open plan, finding ways of limiting the interruptions that break concentration was one of our first foci. We solved it with something simple, and effective – we each have a flag (in a multi-national, multi-cultural office, there are more than enough flags to go round). When the flag is up, no interruptions are permitted. When the flag is down, the person is fair game. And suddenly, there is time in which to think.

This wouldn’t work without personal organisation – and personal organisation which is shared. We know what we have to do. We share that with our colleagues by having our task lists on a board which we all can see.

Sure, there are times when you have to multitask – when there’s a phone call, an email, and a colleague, all in the same space at the same time. But recognising that better work comes from better concentration, that the pressure to multitask is an artificial one and un-necessary; and by setting a policy in place that provides space, we believe we are giving people the time and space they need to do excellent, focussed work.

Jonathan Blanchard Smith
A strategic marketer with a range and depth of international experience, Jonathan is Managing Partner at Vivid London. He coaches at executive level and lectures on cultural integration with specific reference to cross-border mergers and acquisitions. Past chairman of a national patient advocacy charity, he also chairs the board of a technology company and a number of committees.

Keebra.com’s Christmas Thunderstorm

Our client, the books and ideas website Keebra.com is sponsoring a series of festive events in Covent Garden, on behalf of Crisis, the homeless charity.

There are thousands of homeless people who sleep rough every night on the streets of London. Crisis operates centres from 23 December until 30 December, where these people can enjoy some of the festive cheer most of us take for granted. Keebra was also able to donate 2000 brand new books to Crisis – a selection of classic literary favourites – to these centres, to be distributed on Christmas Day.

There are five events in Covent Garden to help the charity – check Facebook for the first in the series, with special guest William Boyd, who has graciously agreed to sign all of his books bought on the night, with 50% of the sticker price going to Crisis! It’s from 6:00 – 8:30pm, in the South Wells of the Covent Garden Market Building.

Enjoy some festive fun in Covent Garden this Christmas, and help Keebra to help those less fortunate than most.

New artwork on our walls

We’re great art lovers at Vivid London working with internationally renowned artists including Totte Mannes, Derek Jarman, Simon Costin and most recently Althea Wilson Galleries in Chelsea.

Almost everyone here collects art, creates art or does a bit of both, so on a recent excursion to Köln we simply couldn’t resist this collection which now have pride of place at Vivid HQ in Berwick Street.

We found them at The Artroom, which we’d heartily recommend if you’re ever passing through Köln. You can find them at Ludwigstrasse 1, 50667 Köln.

On being appropriate: part one of a series

One word that the people around me have to get used to is “appropriate”. It’s a great word – seemingly innocuous, it is in fact the key to successful marketing.

Marketing works when the message is appropriate to both the product and the customer.  Should be a given, right? But missing either side of the equation produces marketing material which does not work.

What marketers often forget is that people, the people who we’re trying to persuade to change their minds, are enormously efficient at spotting when the message does not work. They may not know why it does not, but they’ll know it doesn’t. The uneasy feeling that something is not quite right can kill the effectiveness of any campaign.

We sometimes spend so long ensuring that the material and the message we produce is appropriate to the client, that we forget that the client’s ambitions may not reflect those of their target customers – and it is in this dichotomy, this failure of appropriateness, that the unease, and ultimately the failure to connect, occurs.

It’s this failure to think about the end user that appropriateness collapses. It need not be as egregious as Habitat’s use of hashtags to promote furniture in the context, for instance, of coverage of the Iran protests. It can be as simple as addressing a group of target customers in a language which is not theirs (for instance, expecting that a group of schoolchildren will understand a piece written for technical specialists). Or developing an international marketing push using colours which are inappropriate in specific jurisdictions. Or using small type in a publication addressed at pensioners, or realising far too late that the logo the client has just settled on looks, well… inappropriate. (Anyone who reads b3ta.com will by now have started looking at least three times at any logo every possible way up so that someone won’t suddenly decide that, in a certain light, it looks rude).

You’re now thinking,

Good God man, this is obvious. Why are you telling me this?

Because of appropriateness, of course. We blog abut what happens, to people who are interested, in language they use. When we produce a campaign, we research it so solidly beforehand that we know what it is that the customers want. Whilst this can sometimes be a real shock to our clients, it ensures that what we produce is appropriate to them, but most importantly to their customers – and because of that, to the success of their project.

A good question to ask when you see some advertising that does not work to you, is “Is it appropriate?” Is it right for the product, for the medium, and for you? It’s in understanding what’s appropriate that marketing works – and in forgetting it, where it fails.

 

Jonathan Blanchard Smith
A strategic marketer with a range and depth of international experience, Jonathan is Managing Partner at Vivid London. He coaches at executive level and lectures on cultural integration with specific reference to cross-border mergers and acquisitions. Past chairman of a national patient advocacy charity, he also chairs the board of a technology company and a number of committees.

 

Congruence, disintermediation and value to the client

When – in another life – I was working on a large marketing project for a client some years back, I was horrified to see the sheer range of subcontractors the project involved.

Apart from my own marketing team (seventeen people across five countries (and three time zones)). A branding agency. A graphic deign firm. A web firm. Two different media companies (film and audio). A marketing strategy agency. Localisation in each country. Internal management and digital teams. And me.

The process was, of course, screamingly inefficient, in so many ways.

Creatively, just trying to keep some forward movement involved conference calls, videoconferences, emails, faxes, flights, offsites and meetings, meetings, meetings. With so many parties in the process who were on the “creative” side, getting what the client wanted front and centre often got lost in competing design and creative directions. Something as simple as a colourway would take up days of work; something as complex as a tagline would take weeks.

Management reporting was, as you can imagine, inaccurate and always out of date. Every person on the project reported to their line managers; as far as the project was concerned, they worked for us, but sometimes their working for us was compromised by their direct line reports in their own firms.

Every time one organisation ground up against another, in addition to the business and creative tensions, you could almost see money leaking out of the system. Too many invoices, too many unspecified jobs getting themselves somehow worked into a task order. Too much management of budgets, too many debates about what the client could now afford. And of all things, the additional staff the project recruited were financial accountants.

Yet – project was delivered to time, and to budget. And it worked. All of these people managed to make it work despite, not because of, the structure they found themselves in. Hours of unpaid overtime. Giving up holidays, working nights, the whole lot.

Because the basic system that many of us still work in is inefficient. It’s inefficient in time, inefficient in money, inefficient in management. Projects succeed despite themselves.

What’s the answer? As it so often is in management, reducing the number of working parts is key. This has been one of the principles underlying what we do at Vivid London – bringing all of these diverse skill sets under one roof so that the client gets one bill; the team works together from the outset; the use of seminars means that ideas can be worked through with all of the various project teams represented; communication is simplified. And clients get their work faster, pay less, and come back more often.

I made lots of friends on that project – more through the companionship of shared adversity than anything else. Mind you, the client was so put off by the experience that they haven’t done the same thing again. Not, I have to say, something that’s happened to Vivid London.

Jonathan Blanchard Smith
A strategic marketer with a range and depth of international experience, Jonathan is Managing Partner at Vivid London. He coaches at executive level and lectures on cultural integration with specific reference to cross-border mergers and acquisitions. Past chairman of a national patient advocacy charity, he also chairs the board of a technology company and a number of committees.

Vivid London interviews Dan Hannan for Keebra.com

We coordinate and produce a weekly podcast for our clients, Keebra.com, called ‘The Buzz’, in which we interview a prominent person about their five favourite books. We’re very grateful to Mr Hannan who provided an excellent account of the most important books that had influenced his life – check it out on Keebra’s Facebook fan page!