We all know there are books we should read to keep up with the latest ideas and theories in marketing, consumer behaviour and wider business issues. No one wants to be the only person in the meeting who hasnt heard of the latest hot trend.
But who has time to keep track of them all. Fortunately for you, MediaCom does. As the UKs favourite media agency, we need to keep on top of any new ideas that are concerned with the increasingly complex task of communicating with consumers.
Here are the latest three books that we think are worthy of your consideration. Click on the covers to read our summaries. Then add your own views in our Forum.
Our main choice this quarter, The Future of Men, looks at the changing nature of masculinity, introducing "the new bloke", and explaining how hes different from "the new lad", or indeed "the old bloke". More importantly. Youll learn how to target new blokes effectively. Our other choices are Lean Solutions, which explains how your consumers could and should become your collaborators, and The Search, which reveals just how vital and powerful a role search engines now play in the world.
*To receive MediaComs Smarter Ways of Working Newsletter, or join the Smarter Ways of Working Book Club you must be involved at any level in the marketing function of a client company. Membership of the Book Club is limited, and subject to acceptance.
In light of the increased spotlight on women in the media at the moment, weve selected what could
perhaps be perceived as a controversial choice for this quarters bookclub.
This story recently appeared in the Independent:
Neil French, a 61-year-old "roving creative consultant" for a global advertising and marketing company, was asked why women were under-represented among the ranks of senior creative directors at advertising agencies. Known for opinions delivered with a degree of brutality, Mr French responded: "They're crap." (He left the company soon after.)
And this one in the Guardian:
According to Gordon Ramsay, women are crap in the kitchen and don't cook
With this backdrop I thought it might be fun to look at what two women, (and a bloke), from the marketing industry think future holds for men.
The book is co-authored by international trendspotters and advertising superstars and, as you might therefore expect, is not short of a bit of jargon. If youre in search of snazzy labels to throw into presentations you need look no further. For metrosexual we now have ubersexuals and contrasexuals; for new lad we now have new bloke (much nicer hes blokey and sensitive) and emo boy.
On a more serious note the authors take us through a whirlwind tour of the sexual politics of the last half century. The pace of change is actual phenomenal from the rules of a happy marriage circa 1950 where the housewifes primary goal was make your home a place of peace and order where your husband can renew himself in body and spirit to contemporary images of men in media typified by incompetent Homer Simpson and Jackass TV.
The book points to changes in technology which for the first time in the late 20th Century have reversed traditional advantages of the so-called weaker sex. It claims that as we evolve towards a more global information-centred society the stereotypical markers of a man physical strength and a hunter-warrior psyche have become less and less relevant to todays work environment. Whilst traditional masculinity has clearly never ceased to be an ideal - governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger energized a gathering of his supporters in 04 by calling his opponents girlie men and you only have to pick up a copy of Zoo or FHM to see that femininity is hardly viewed with respect - theres really no reversing some fundamental shifts in society and in the balance of power between the sexes.
This book gives some interesting stimulus for marketing to men. Some of it can be dismissed with a smile but much of it will be of use to the marketer.
Heres one example Doctoroffs 6 rules for marketing to a 21st century man:
So what does the future hold according to this book?
Renewed respect; a broadening of what masculine means; adoption of female traits; letting everyone play; new ways of living and working; equality and success redefined.
Most of our book club is male; your reviewer this quarter is female please let us know what you think.
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This is such an interesting book. If like me you struggle to remember the world before Google what did we do when we
wanted to find something out? then youll be fascinated by this history and contemporary account of how Google is transforming
our economy.
Google were late into the game of search, long after Yahoo and AltaVista, but offered a radical new approach. To call it a search engine now is to massively undersell its importance. Google has become the gateway to instant knowledge and its impact on marketing, job hunting, media, law, civil liberties and indeed most spheres of human interest is very important. And its very important that we take notice of the changes that have come about as a result of Google and its like and be prepared for the new future which they presage.
If you were to read just one chapter of this book it should be Chapter 7 - The Search Economy. The author John Battelle opens the chapter by focussing on the enormous importance Google played in the livelihood of one Neil Moncrief, an online shoe seller. Thanks to Google Moncrief did really well in the search engine results for shoes for big feet. That is, until November 14th 2003, when Google unilaterally changed the rules and tweaked its search result algorithm and Moncriefs company no longer featured in the top 20 and enquiries and sales dried up overnight. And because his place in the search listings was not paid for, because he had not planned for this, he had no immediate recourse and no one to appeal to about it. Of course he immediately bought some AdWords to protect himself from the loss of business.
Its very important that we note that where Moncrief had imagined that he was working for himself and independent of big corporations, he found himself in fact desperately dependent upon an anonymous organisation, with which he had no contract at all. His big shoe firm suffered collateral damage in a war that had little to do with him - a battle between Google and what they view as spam. Google had taken a major stand against what it determined were search engine spammers and those who felt their legitimate businesses were hurt were told to pound sand.
Battelle then goes on to make some predictions about the future role of search in our lives looking briefly at internet protocol TV and the changes that the marketing model is beginning to undergo in the light of the second dawning of the World Wide Web economy. There are also many challenges touched upon of new ways to defraud the consumer that this second dawn brings about, and many, many implications for privacy and big brother government. As Battelle says : whatever your first perfect search moment was there will be many, many more as the space evolves..increasingly search is our mechanism for how we understand ourselves, our world and our place within it.
Given the dramatic explosion of online advertising - particularly search based - and the continuing upward trend in internet use, its crucial for all marketers to pay attention to and exploit the opportunities that search can and will continue to deliver.
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Anyone who enjoys systems and doodling with diagrams is going to love this book. In a step on from their previous work,
Lean Thinking and The Machine That Changed The World, Womack and Jones challenge our mass-production brains into simpler,
more effective ways of delivering just exactly what our consumers need and want, when and where they need and want it.
Once they have locked our focus into understanding and responding to consumers actual needs, and not modelled or forecast demand, we are encouraged to walk the consumer journey, the employee journey and the production and supply journey, and create maps of our dysfunctional organisations. These diagrams become revealing roadmaps through the total production and supply process OUT from the organisation and the total consumption process IN for the consumer. Sounds like business as usual, until you recalculate the start point for your equation as the moment at which your potential consumer starts their search for goods or services to solve the need they currently have. The end point should, of course, be never.
Womack and Jones dangle a familiar thought in front of us the consumers world is characterised by heaps of choice and diminishing amounts of time. Technological advances have have been prioritised around producing more excellent end products at ever cheaper prices, but what we might call all the attendant service and supply elements have been given as much attention as an ugly bridesmaid at a wedding. Anyone who, like me, has taken their car miles across town for minor repairs, only to have to queue at 8:30 in the morning with all other customers checking in, to have to pay for a courtesy car, to be called late in the afternoon and told that itll take 8 days to order in parts, is a candidate in desperate need of a Lean Solution. Ditto finding the right computer equipment to perform all the functions you need, ditto getting your boiler repaired. Could the Service desk have pre-diagnosed the cars possible needs, ask Womack and Jones, using highly skilled customer service teams to answer the phone? Could they have staggered appointments to avoid queuing and the long wait between drop off and the car being diagnosed? Could they have been better prepared with the tools to complete the job? Could you have eliminated the need for a "courtesy" car at all with rapid response while you wait? The authors proposition is that if all companies have to calculate into business equations the amount of unpaid work the consumer does in searching for the right products, enduring onerous ordering and delivery, delays and queues and ultimately long-term satisfaction in the end product, they might find their business model (and financial returns) sadly lacking.
Their best practice solution is to identify opportunities where hassle time, both for consumer and the employees who crank the wheels, can be reduced; at the same time, where can value (for everyone) be added to the total process of consumption? This isnt the same as looking at our existing structures and saying where can I add value to the faulty process Ive got? Its about stripping down whats there and rebuilding it until it actually delivers peoples real needs and wants, as Fujitsu and Toyota in Japan have done. The pay back for all this effort is fewer occasions where the consumer relationship can break down, less time and resource lost, and less valuable business lost to one of your many competitors.
In a sentence, this books about shifting your organisation from a business model thats about selling or leasing product to a life-cycle management or subscription type process, where consumers become collaborators in the continual evolution of the lean organisation. They ask us to focus on lifetime value of a customer and solving the real problems consumers have.
Ultimately, its a more coherent way of tackling the question of loyalty. On that basis its to be applauded. I cant help thinking however, that the authors, who are so sensitive to our consumers lack of time, have conveniently overlooked their readers. This isnt a simple change you can make overnight within your organisation - its got to be at least a 3-5 year commitment, harnessing all the resource of the organisation to achieve change and pursuing it single-mindedly, despite short term increases in costs. Who might find this indispensable? Smaller entrepreneurial organisations with dynamic leaders, perhaps, and anyone setting up a new company, or faced with the task of total restructure. Who will find it thought-provoking? Everyone else. Their principals challenge our existing comfortable practices with good heavyweight case studies, and their practical methods help us start to focus our businesses more completely toward solving the real needs of our consumers.
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