New edition at Amazon!

Just back from holiday?

I’m sure there are people thinking about getting to grips with their marketing, and here is just the book to help you.

The nice people at Bloomsbury have made the pages slightly bigger…and…er….well, we’ve corrected a few things and tweaked a bit so….well….oh! And it’s blue now!

[Is that the marketing pitch? Great.]

Anyway, you might want to buy it as it will still fit in your pocket, it is extraordinarily well written and contains real, practical guidance to get marketing (not just promoting).

It also contains the, now infamous, four box matrix of plenitude and refreshment* (but without drinks or snacks) from Holden and Wilde which enables you to answer almost every strategic marketing question for your business or nonprofit.

Let us know what you think.

* Plenitude: 1. An abundance. 2. The condition of being full or complete. Refreshment:  1. The giving of fresh mental or physical strength or energy. 2. A light snack or drink, esp. one provided in a public place or at a public event.

The reason I’m reading it is because I’ve been commissioned to write the sequel (that’s not what the publishers call it, but it’s kind of how I sold it to them).

As you may know the book is all about getting established online – from nothing  – and costing next to nothing.  Well it’s all online and you can search around for help, but it’s good to have a guide book to hand.

Anyway, as I was hurtling up the M1 and M6 today (before hurtling back tomorrow morning) I started looking at the trucks – specifically those HGVs that are apparently nearly 14 metres long.

Eddie Stobart Truck...but what does it say on the side?

There were hundreds on the journey and I started to notice that huge bit of advertising ‘real estate’ on the side.

O f course most companies have their name and often a logo (though not all) and lots of companies have straplines.  Eddie Stobart pictured here (by far the most frequently sighted truck) has a strapline other than the one shown…and possibly the only twelve syllable one  “Delivering Sustainable Distribution” …which made me wince several times as I tried to determine what it meant and, as importantly, if it would make any difference to me if I was in a position to give them an order.

Answer: no.

There were a few other similarly tiresome straplines often about ‘delivering’ something or double glazing being ‘clearly’ superior in some way.

But the thing that struck me was that the vast majority (I estimated 80%) of the trucks had little or no branding (so they simply told you their name) and only about 1 in 10 had any really useful or informative communication on the lorry.

Quite a few just had the web address – which interestingly is almost redundant with the almost universal use of Google and more intelligent browsers – it serves only to tell you that they can be found online, if you look, because you almost certainly have no time to make a note!

Only one or two trucks had a useful or relevant message on this large area of ‘free’ advertising space. One example was a Pilkington’s Glass truck (pictured here) which had a graphic representation of its Activ branded ‘self cleaning’ glass. Important information about a product that would give you a reason to at least consider Pilkington’s.

So my question is; why doesn’t every company use the truck to really promote themselves? Not a bland corporate message but their biggest, most enticing benefit and a call to action?

I was also reminded of this photo I took a while ago which illustrates the uncanny ability some companies have to exactly demonstrate why you should never give them an order. It might take you a little while to work out.

In his article in the Independent James takes a not entirely original view of the ‘cult of Apple’ asking why people are  so enamored of the brand and if HBO has taken a similar track. The article presents an interesting question about the real nature of brand marketing which, I would argue, often has very little to do with marketing as such. I don’t have time to develop the full argument here (but I hope to in a forthcoming journal paper).

Here is James’ article and here’s my response (with some hyperlinks).

Hi James,
There is some truth in what you say, but I think we need to be careful about perpetuating the idea that brands are simply social badges – conspicuous consumption – or in any way simply to communicate with others. There are two problems with this.
1) The personal/psychological benefits of consumption of product such as these often come about through the material performance of products (as Tim Bourne recently pointed out in his Talkonomics report [no link available]). So things that don’t work create dissatisfaction, though I accept that the definition, as it were, of a think ‘working’ is hugely influence by the attitudes the consumer brings to the product or brand. Apple acolytes are far more forgiving of such things as short battery life than the agnostic.
2) The social dimension is hugely more complex. Consumers don’t simply signal to the world their personality or taste, they construct it and it is constructed for them. People consume a brand for many reasons. One may be to do with availability which can be economic but can also be social and cultural – what brands are “good to think” (to paraphrase Mary Douglas“)? People working in creative industries find that a pretty much essential part of their positioning is to use Apple products but that’s not to say that they are in any way conscious of this nor that it is overly ‘strategic’. It’s just the obvious choice.
But the product also makes the ‘man’.
When designers use Apple products, they are adapting themselves to the technology as much as the reverse. Indeed, the whole history of human technology is the naturalisation of new ways of working for putative benefits (an effect the sociologist Peter Golding has observed).
This reflexivity – the mutually constitutive nature – of consumption practices and consumers is a realistic portrait of social action as it interacts with the material world – it’s what anthropologists from Marvin Harris and Pierre Bourdieu in the last century to Daniel Miller most recently have explored in various (and compelling) ways for decades.
Miller has written elegantly about the absolute integration of, what seems to be, material and apparently value-less in people’s lives – without the loss of humanity that consumption is often accused of precipitating.
The mystic power of brands is, perhaps, a smokescreen. If one was concerned about the effect of corporate interests on our personal lives one would have to accept that Apple is a rather minor player. Think of the hidden power of Microsoft and, more generally, the openly accessible data now on social networking sites. Perhaps the most dangerous cult is the one we lend support to without even knowing.
As Bourdieu once said “The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words and ask no more than complicitous silence”

And have a peaceful and prosperous 2011.

Have a close look at the graph here. Can you see how much the budget deficit is (thanks bankers)? Don’t forget to add the various bail-outs.  Have a look at how much Trident is supposed to cost compared to, say, schools or local government. It’s all the more shocking isn’t it, for understanding their relative size properly.

I became aware of this from a show on BBC4 called The Joy of Stats. I really recommend you watch this in the next few days. Or, if you can’t, pray that it comes out on DVD and buy it.

Quite apart from the delightful visualisation of data and the demonstration of Hans Rosling’s own ‘Gapminder’ application, there is so much to learn about world health, language, communications more generally and (not surprisingly) statistics.

I tried statistics and I didn’t like them. Even Bodo Schlegelmilch couldn’t really make it painless. But Hans has at least enthused me again to have another go.

The BBC4 show is here. You can play with Hans’ Gapminder at  www.gapminder.org and there is this particularly telling example shown above as well as the We Feel Fine project which we’ve blogged on before.

Have fun.

Click here to read the Guardian article

The Guardian just reported Tim Berners-Lee’s concern that the web could be evolving into something less desirable.

He suggests that Facebook and similar are creating walled ‘gardens’ around information that doesn’t really belong to them.

The sense is, of course, that a Facebook “friend” can’t easily be contacted any other way, unless you establish enough of a friendship for them to give you another email address or maybe twitter name.

For some this just isn’t a problem. The news that Facebook will offer all the messaging you need will be welcome.  On one of our courses at Greenwich, we read about just how involved people are with online environments – look at Edward Castronova (and here) or Danah Boyd. The we realise our students are even more committed, but not wholly defined by that commitment.

But this potentially ‘one way’ street of data, at first, seems to be a problem. I’m told. though I’ve never tried it, that you can’t easily extract your data from Facebook. So whatever you’ve contributed belongs there – or (again according to some) it belongs to Facebook itself.

But the ethics and law of communication are always fraught. The law of copyright doesn’t help much and the principles of data protection boil down to a check box (“Do you agree we can do anything we want to with your data? Tick here or don’t use our service”).

Okay, so we all enter into the contract and try and manage our privacy settings, if we understand them.

The point here though is to think of where we are now and the direction we’re going.  Facebook  and others (some commentators have mentioned the closed nature of the Apple platform) thrive on third parties creating ‘apps’. You all know what they are.

So the resolution of this is that somewhere out there a clever little so-and-so is writing an app that does what Facebook does but without getting sucked into someone else’s plan for world domination. This (imaginary) app may simply set up ghost Facebook accounts and dip in to find people; connect; present you with an interface to control your involvement and, at the press of a button delete any evidence of your having been there. It’s theoretically possible for the app to select and implement a  nom de souris for you – that you needn’t even know.

Ah, you say, but Facebook would then block that app. Yes, they would.

And our public spirited developer would be happy to create a playground where all his apps could happily associate, each one with its secret handshake for people you know.

But, but, but. Social networks go beyond people you know already. They go to people who know people you know. These are formally or informally introduced to you by intermediary friends (As Linked in does it its slightly clunky, big brother way) so, you could grown networks in this new site.

The point is that, unlike Facebook, this new (Faceless book?) would be a distributed network such that no owner could have a view of the whole or even extract information unless it was freely give.

Problem? yes. The same one that Facebook itself has, and will have in the future. The real reason why they (and every other network and even the Times Online) build walls around customers is that they want to be able to generate revenue.  make it free (or virtually free) at the point of entry and then sell the ad space is one way. Sell subscriptions is another (Mr Murdoch wants to do both, greedy b~).

Interestingly Mozilla, that beacon of useability and freedom have announced they may be launching a mobile app store.  There could be a market for an app that does exactly what Facebook does – and even recruits from Facebook, but without holding onto any of your data. And think of the incentives for Google and others to show they are more open than FB.

So, who would pay for a Facelessbook account? Hands up? Or you could email me. Or I’ll see you on Facebook.

Does that sound over-dramatic? Maybe, but most of us know from our experience (especially if we have children) that the positive outcomes of education are, in fact, coincidental to formal education itself. Timetables are ‘filled up’ with a standardised curriculum, then we find time for pleasure or leisure outside of classroom time.  And these are the things that make the difference to us and our children.

It’s also true for tertiary education where young people drift towards a subject and (sometimes) a career, almost unconsciously – certainly only partially engaged. I have to say that I think narrow specialisation perpetuates this too.

If anyone knows of any practical prescriptions or manifestos to change education, then let’s hear them

You can find out more about Ken Robinson’s ideas on his website

Here’s an example of a shared mark-up link -

http://markup.io/v/q96b8rt7mzpr