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 hasn’t heard of the latest hot trend.
But who has time to keep track of them all. Fortunately for you, MediaCom does. As the UK’s 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.
While we always try and ensure that our Smarter Ways of Working Book Club choices are works that will be beneficial in your career (and, sometimes, your life), we reckon this quarter’s Pick is virtually required reading. Let’s put it this way: if we could set you homework on it, we would.
The Long Tail looks at a phenomenon that is changing our accepted beliefs about retailing and about what consumers are looking for, as online shops ( to begin with mainly in the entertainment sectors) move away from concentrating on a few best-sellers and instead are able to make profits on a vast array of niche products.
The Triple Bottom Line also asks us to reappraise received wisdom, offering a new way of defining business success, by linking it to sustainable social and economic policies.
But in case we start to think that everything’s changed, our third choice – the latest work by Jeremy Bullmore – reminds us of some of the basic truths of the business, the constants we mustn’t lose sight of while chasing the latest fashions.
I haven’t really had the privilege of living through a technological revolution until now that has caused a fundamental shift in how I live and work. I don’t think that the massive increase in TV channels, nor the ability to play games on a hand-held computer or even the ability to talk on the phone while moving around really made me change how I operate in the same way that, for instance, the revolution
in printing technology in the 18th century caused an explosion in knowledge and freedom of information in Dr Johnson’s day.
I do think that the internet revolution is delivering that kind of fundamental shift. Is it just me or is it unimaginable now to not find the answers to questions on the computer after typing a few words? And you know you can buy anything, anything at all, from anywhere in the world, from your own home.
The Long Tail by Chris Anderson is the best analysis I have read so far on the real significance of this revolution. Based on ideas he developed while editing Wired magazine he takes a proper look at the economics of the internet age and the huge possibilities and challenges for businesses.
Anderson first coined the phrase ‘The Long Tail’ in an article in Wired magazine. It boils down to the idea that our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of best selling mainstream products and towards a huge number of niche products. Companies such as Amazon are successfully making more money from a large number of niche products than from a few best sellers. It is obviously very hard for bricks and mortar retailers that are in competition with companies like Amazon to match this model in store.
Anderson thinks that there are 6 trends that contribute to the Long Tail:
The bottom line is that the Long Tail is a reversal of the traditional economic theory which focuses on supply and demand and assumes that supply of product is normally limited : ‘the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy unlimited wants’. The internet effectively provides infinite shelf space – at the moment particularly in certain categories, largely in the area of entertainment (ie books, films, music). Scarcity in human time and disposable income still remains a factor, but the abundance of supply of certain and growing categories is changing the world in ways we experience every day.
The key issue is then how people navigate their way around unlimited supply in the Long Tail – who are the new tastemaker? This too is an area of radical change as faith in individuals and their opinions is on the rise. In what we at MediaCom are calling the 4th Age of Communications : The Age of Dialogue – what your peers say about a product either on or off line, on the internet or in the real world is crucial to that product’s success or failure.
Getting your product or service talked about in the right way is now a critical for success. It will require a loosening of control and a rethinking of traditional advertising and marketing techniques. How far and how fast this revolution permeates more marketing categories is still open to question. But its just not possible to ignore the lessons of the entertainment category when so much is changing so fast. This book helps us to prepare for the interesting challenges ahead.
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In his book The Triple Bottom Line Andrew Savitz sells the idea that sustainable financial business success is intrinsically linked with sustainable social and environmental policies. Savitz argues that in today’s interconnected world thinking about profits as if they were unrelated to the social and environmental impact of what you do is both short-sighted and counter productive. He puts forward the notion that a sustainable business should be able to measure and report a positive ROI on all three bottom lines (economic, environmental & social), hence ‘The Triple Bottom Line’. He goes further by saying that if you can identify where these objectives overlap then you have a ‘sweet spot’ that embodies the very definition of sustainability. In essence making your company viable for the long term by managing according to principles that with strength the company’s impact on society, the economy and the environment.
A central support to this idea is the growing power that external stake holders have in forcing change in businesses; these include the community, consumers, investors, the media and NGO’s. Today businesses do not operate in a vacuum but in a world where everyone knows your business and importantly has an opinion about it that they have a right to express if they want to support or change that behaviour. You only need to think about Nike and sweatshops, Nestle and baby milk or McDonalds and obesity to understand how hard these stakeholders can hit a business. The book asks us to think about every issue your company has to deal with and then imagine someone – perhaps many someones – in your face, pulling at you, demanding action and refusing to go away or let go and until they are satisfied.
What I also found interesting was the assertion that businesses have taken on a broader role in society than they have historically. With government deregulating in an effort to provide a more enticing climate for business we have seen the rise and rise of the large corporation. If you take the top 100 economies in terms of GDP just sixty- three are countries, this puts enormous wealth not in the hands of politicians but in those of boards and CEO’s. This shift in power means that society at large is looking for business to help solve social, environmental and economic problems than were once solely the province of government.
Savitz seems to know his onions, he was a partner specialising in sustainability in PricewaterhouseCoopers before starting his own consultancy. The book is both sets up the sustainability idea in a lucid and accessible manner but then also provides advice and encouragement for managers al all levels to both asses their own businesses and then start down the path to sustainability. His ideas are well supported with logical argument and practical examples across a range of businesses, those that have obvious implications on sustainability (BP) and the not so obvious (Yahoo).
If you have an interest in this subject matter already then Savitz provides some great case studies from the US that should help to further your knowledge (they seem to be some years in front of the UK), if this is new territory however then the book will provide you with a compelling new way to think about your business and how you might change the way you run it to safeguard its future.
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I have to admit to a certain bias in this review. I’ve grown up ‘On the couch’ with Jeremy Bullmore, whose gentleman’s wisdom for the young ‘bucks’ of advertising, always gave me a chuckle and was always one of the best things about the trade press (in my opinion).
So I approached Apples, Insights and Mad Inventors with great glee. This ‘analysis of modern marketing’ is in fact a collection of state of the nation musings that he has contributed to WPP’s annual reports since 1997. As I finished the book 2 hours later, my glee was even greater (authors of marketing books, take note – keep it short).
This old master of the craft takes a helicopter view over the nature of brands, marketing, communications, advertising and consumers, giving you a sense of how the key issues affecting our industry fundamentally don’t change the principles and best practice of the profession. Many new marketing tomes are myopic and obsessed more with revolution and death of the old order, chasing anything shiny and new in marketing communications. Not so with Jeremy Bullmore. This is refreshing. The growth in digital interaction, the ‘age of the imagination’, the rise of the consumer voice and the nature of celebrity all find their reference in the broader principles and fundamental best practice he promotes. For example, he advises never forgetting that ultimately it’s consumers, not companies that own brands; that advertising is not a glorious end in itself, but a product that companies buy; that there is a danger in the trend towards wanting to quantify everything, as consumers have always and will always embrace both tangible and emotional equally and without explanation. The downside of this is that the theories and perspectives put forward are nothing new, and as such it’s less thought-provoking or challenging to our critical faculties than the revolutionists.
I forgive the author this, on account of the clean spareness of his writing and the joyous Bullmore-isms that spring up throughout –a brand perceived in the consumer’s brain like ‘a bowl of multi-coloured spaghetti – too complex, too confusing, too inter-related to be of any immediate value’; and brands as ‘fiendishly complicated, elusive, slippery, half-real/half-virtual things’ which make CEO’s ‘brains hurt’; then there’s his horror at the ‘shameless rip-off imposter of a (steak and kidney) pie’ not delivering on it’s promise.
I can see this appearing on the reading list of academic courses, and in the clutches of new recruits to our various businesses. It’s an enjoyable concise manual for tuning your brain to thinking about how best to work together, what we are actually trying to achieve as we tackle that difficult relationship between a brand and consumer. It’s the sharing of a lot of professional common sense, beautifully crafted and sparely packaged into words – and after all isn’t that the art of a good advertising man?
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