Efficient v Effective

Efficiency is created by achieving maximum productivity with minimum waste. We know that waste is cost, and cost is bad, so that's why efficiency considered to be a good thing.  Efficiency drives change,  often by the desire to build more ‘cost efficient’ processes or systems. But I urge a measured approach where improved cost efficiency is measured against the effectiveness of a company to deliver against it’s promise, or its purpose.

The recent abundance of new aps and internet services which deliver products online gives an impression that all products and services are more efficiently distributed through the interweb. Food is picked and delivered to our door, clothes cleaned, measured, designed and delivered, books, shoes, fresh cut flowers, tradesmen or rock bands are all available to buy online. The last decade has been defined by retailers moving online. This decade will see industries follow their lead and move to an integrated online trading environment.

But does an online web based NHS become more effective at diagnostics and patient care? Or is an online NHS just more efficient, reducing the cost per diagnosis?  Is online legal advice an efficient method for delivering wise counsel or is face to face consultancy more effective? Is a printed newspaper an efficient way of distributing the morning news and can it be as effective as an online version? Efficiency and effectiveness are not mutually exclusive, but are always competing for our attention.

Ever since the invention of the wheel we’ve been designing technological solutions to make us more efficient.  And now these efficiencies are coming at us thick and fast. We need to be careful to choose the ones that help to to be successful in the service that we offer, outside of lower costs.

Technological efficiency saves time by performing difficult tasks automatically, the kind of tasks that would have otherwise have been manual. And if we save time we usually also save money.  But what is lost through cost efficient delivery?

By automating existing processes to make life or business more efficient, we surely miss the biggest opportunity that this new technology has to offer.  Whilst they’re not mutually exclusive, what’s more important to your business right now – efficiency or effectiveness?  

Only if we understand how customers choose to engage with our business (knowing where customers extract value from, not just our products but also our services) will we be able to implement the right savings and make our businesses more effective.  

Confidence & Culture

As I think about my recent roles within the telecoms industry and the companies that I’ve worked with past and present (and before I move on to my next role) I’d like to pose a question.  How is the confidence of an organisation and it’s management team related to the culture (processes, procedures, authority and empowerment of individuals) within that organisation? 

Businesses seem to mimic people in their personalities and cultures, more so when they are owner or founder managed.  So when a business is doing well we enjoy working in an environment that is comfortable with the future and allows people a level of empowerment to take risks, to experiment and to innovate.  The popular management books written about ‘failing fast’ all encourage to this type of leadership culture in positive commercial environments.

But when things take a turn and the future looks less certain confidence can quickly drop and the culture and leadership behaviour in an organisation can also change or adapt with a new 'safety first' but, in my view, myopic zeitgeist. When times get tough in the economic cycle, we’ve all experienced CFO’s reigning in spending especially on items they view as discretionary, like marketing or travel. This is usually in line with new policies and procedures implemented to sure up business cases to ensure spending is curbed and RoI is bullet proof.  This makes good commercial sense – after all who wouldn't tighten the belt when times are forecast to be tough? But how tight should the belt buckle be pulled and how does this turn in the economic cycle impact company culture?

It’s been suggested a that a new way of thinking about these issues is that perhaps that when times turn tough and confidence is low, that this is exactly the right time to change the way we think and operate, to experiment and fail and try to new processes to overcome the new obstacles; and not to revert back to the old, safe and trusted ways of working.

The reason for this is that the added pressure on business cases, the cost controls and the internal focus naturally leaves less time to worry about customers, prospects and the new business for the future. Now's the time to empower and innovate, not restrict and internalise. Now's the time to demonstrate best practice and improve on it for the up-turn, not to internalise and politicise decisions. Corporate culture is decided by the leadership teams and the ways they behave and how they permit other to behave. Any company's strength in a downturn is always its people - let them lead.

Don’t wait for your business to fail further, for pressures to increase to crisis levels before going out on a limb, taking the calculated risks and allowing your teams to innovate.  Maintain your best practices, continue to spend on your customers, encourage future projects and demand positive innovation from everyone. 

It’s the people that make up your business and it's the responsibility of the leadership team to maintain a confident culture.  People are so important that I suspect once corporate confidence is lost it will only be regained by bringing in new people who bring their own buckets full of confidence with them, enough to share across the organisation.  And I believe a companies culture is dictated by the worst accepted or tolerated behaviours of an organisation, and not the best as described in their glossy manifesto.

New 'Purpose' and meaning at work

Today I wrote a short presentation for our HR team on their role in creating a brand. I realized that the foundation for most brands remains ‘purpose’ which is the meaning behind the direction of the company and the reasons we’re traveling that way.

 There are some jobs where almost everyone reports a strong sense of meaning, these are usually referred to a vocational jobs like teaching, the clergy, healing as a doctor or nurse; all of which makes me think that perhaps we’ve moved on from companies having ‘purpose’, and instead our roles require purpose.

 The jobs that hold the most meaning therefore tend to be those that are ‘organisation agnostic’. Perhaps we have the millennial generation to thank for this conscious decoupling of our meaningful work from the purposeful company? Certainly labour mobility and unified communications networks now mean that we can all work from anywhere, and often do just that.  So the organisation, the location and the products are not as important as the role that you’re able to play within the team.

Why has this shift occurred? Over 30 years ago Steve Jobs (2 SJ mentions in 2 blogs – I promise to stop) was able to trap John Sculley to work for him with the question “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?”. I doubt this would work today because people find meaning in their daily work and not in their association with the company.

 Real purpose is no longer defined by the company we work for, but instead is defined in the hands of the people who work in the organisation who are able to constantly shape their roles and deliverables in line with their own passions. Whether it’s the sales guy who helps marketers, the surgeon who now teaches, the farmer who develops properties or the travel agent who builds web sites; we’re all following our own shifting priorities to build meaning.  Where you work is no longer the major source of purpose and unless HR and marketing teams recognise that purpose is created from the bottom up and no longer from the top down and respond with other motivating factors, soon employers will fade even further into the background in the search for purpose.

Expectations v Experiences

Customer experience is a curious thing because two customers who should theoretically share the same experience, often don’t. Have you seen a film with a friend, ordered the same meal, shopped in the same store, traveled in the same brand of car or shared the same broadband supplier – and had widely varying views. Why? And what does this mean for customer services and your brand?

 In business it’s a mistake to try to appeal to everyone because customers aren’t the same which means their perceptions and so experiences will differ.  It's better to focus on your the people who already trust you and understand what it is you’re trying to do and trust is built by keeping promises.  If you’ve made a promise and kept it you’ll soon have a strong and trusted brand with its own followers who know what to expect. They love you for what you do and they’ll already be telling the rest of their tribe about your services.  

But if people don’t get it, it’s more often than not because they expect something other than what you are able to offer – not because your company couldn’t deliver what they want.  I know that when we pull out all the stops we can please anyone – but should we? Think hard before you go and change your product or service offering for disgruntled customers. Someone much smarter than me who wore jeans and a black turtleneck once said "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.".

I’m not suggesting that customer complaints are irrelevant, because each one is important, only that some are more important than others in maintaining a customer experience, keeping a promise and therefore in building a brand. Every company screws up and to my mind the measurement of customer experience is how you recover the situation afterwards. 

Gartner describes the customer experience as ”the customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, systems, channels or products.”

Because we’re dealing with people, perceptions and feelings we’ll never win them all over to our brand.  Not each expectation can be met, and most brands shouldn’t try to, but it’s very important to recognise when the brand promise has been broken and empower teams to fix it quickly.

This means that everyone in the company must understand the brand promise and how it's used to differentiate for the competitors.  Each staff member, at each customer touch point must be empowered to isolate and fix the customer issue quickly in line with the promise made. It's critical this is done because when a customer is fully engaged with your organisation (for the better or worse), this is where the emotional signposts identified with a brand (perceptions and feelings) are created. This is the time to pull out all the stops and delight them. 

So it’s often when things go wrong (based on expectation brand promise) that the opportunity to build an emotional connection (perceptions and feelings) presents itself.  This is how brands are built and destroyed.

It's no longer about free speech...

It used to be the TV and radio transmitters, and we've seen it time and time again in Asia, in the Middle East, in North Africa, in South America and now again in sub Saharan Africa; but now when governments are put under pressure and scared by social unrest the first port of call is the mobile operators and social media. 

Where people and nations are privileged to enjoy freedom of thought, freedom of expression and freedom of speech, we find that these rights fiercely protected. And in our increasingly connected world we must now protect the enabling freedom to connect.  

It's this freedom to connect that is slowly becoming enshrined in law because it allows people to access to the communications channel which enable these other freedoms to exist.

#washiqurrahman       #BurundiIsAfricaToo

Image from BBC Africa 

Part II, Relationships Matter – unless you’re transactional

When small businesses grow up into ‘adult’ companies (more on that another time) their scale, dependencies and sheer number of moving parts make them trickier to manage.

I’ve seen it in Wasteland, Gateway and other organisations that the original business models, systems and processes used to successfully establish a business are not there to scale the business.

For successful small companies it’s seductive to continue to use the ad hoc processes, that after all grew the company, for evaluating new business development initiatives.  Scale has a new set of issues and a new set of solutions which are needed to transform the organisation.  One thing that can help greatly is an understanding in management about who your core customers are and where they sit on the spectrum of from relationship driven to transactional.

Without this customer profiling new sales can only be attributed to blind heroism in the field and what's more any successes will further blind management to the limits of its sales process and delay or prevent scaling of the business.

Every company works hard to make itself easier to do business with (and for some tribes that means it will be harder to engage), so knowing who your target customer is before you start to invest is really important, and more so if you’re a challenger or little known brand.

Our head of sales constantly reminds us that effective customer selection focuses on the buyer — addressing the problems or opportunities that effect their business. So why do sales managers think its OK that our target account list should be allocated by geography, or through a paid for list?

So, in my previous blog I said that Relationships Matter. Now I’d like to rephrase that because courting the attentions of transactional customers with a solutions sales approach is a gross error of judgment.  You’ll let buyers know all there is to know about the solution, the technology and the service wrap to expect, only to see them wonder off and purchase form your competitor with a full loaded specified wish list! OUCH Leave transactional buyers to buy online, and leave the sales people to relate to customer needs.

And businesses always overestimate their ability to acquire relationship buyers and underestimate the role of brand and brand building in building relationships. Good marketers can help with that.

Part I, Relationships Matter

I was recently asked to sign off on some corporate tickets for the upcoming Rugby World Cup. The sales teams are all keen to have another reason to talk to their customers, but the finance teams want to know the return on the not insubstantial investment.   Where’s the balance?

It’s my view that Deeper Customer Relationships Matter and that sports events are often a very good way for account mangers to grow closer to their customers by bonding over a shared interest.  This bond is strengthened more so because the commonality falls outside of business.

 Typically events works best if the relationship is already established.  It is NOT the environment to try to make a sale or to introduce new product.

 As a consequence it’s almost impossible to offer a ROI for any particular event activity, but when seen in the context of building deeper and more trusted relationships I think that (alongside customer advisory boards, product trials, white papers, customer events, and great account management) sports events play an important role in sales and marketing.

I’m sure you’ve seen yourself that when invited to golf, rugby, soccer, Olympics, World Cup it’s most engaging when hosted by a passionate individual within the organisation who can evangelise about the event and start to build that common interest. So don’t send me to the boxing, and don’t send other skiing, but if you’ve got tickets to the Masters, I’m a customer forever!

I approved the tickets because more than ever relationships matter.

Top 50 Global Telecoms CMO's

It struck me that only three of the Top 50 CMO's recognised by the influential Global Telecoms Business magazine work for African operators. Is this a fair representation of the industry? There are some notable African absentees from the list including marketers from MTN, Vodacom and Telkom SA; and where would Afrinolly, Mocality, M-Farm or Mimba Bora be without their marketing teams? So Africa is alive with market makers innovating and creating value.  But because Africa still struggles with the lowest global internet penetration rates (26% against a world average of 42%) and still has less than 10% of the worlds internet users (source - Internet World Stats) I think that on balance GTB got it about right.  

What is clear from this list is that the role of the CMO and other marketing professionals is changing.  For several years the frustration has been to define what exactly the marketing directors role is. Ask CxO's or agencies and they'll share the same concerns that old school marketing folks don't appreciate the power of the new world marketing tools at their disposal. The upside of this is that we now see a mix of brand, commercial, marketing and communications people, all striving to do the same thing; to make products that people need and to add value. I'm delighted to be included in the list.

The Value of Soft Skills in Hard Tech

Yesterday, during a conversation with an accountant and a marketer, a question came up about the value of soft skills in a hard technology company. These skills could include brand management, internal communications, identifying and nurturing talent, customer service skills, tone of voice or social media management. Because I recently had a frustrating time talking with customer service reps (at British Gas and a local restaurant chain) I want consider the value that could be gained through using soft skills with customers and customer service.

Since the first research into customer care in the 1970’s, billions of dollars have poured into the industry and companies now all claim to put customers at the heart of their organisations.   Research at the time showed that the simple act of complaining made consumers feel better about the products and built brand loyalty, regardless of how or if an issue was resolved. This knowledge built an industry based around CRM.  Understandably, since then volumes of complaints have increased and our expectations have changed. About half of us made a formal complaint to a company last year, which is more than 18% higher than in the 1970’s. But now unresolved issues damage brands quickly and directly impact on companies profitability. 

After all this investment and energy, why are we so dissatisfied with todays service standards? I propose it’s due to our higher expectations and a mismatch between the results that the complainer and the company seek.

• Why did I complain to British Gas and what did I want? My thermostat broke and was just out of warranty but covered by insurance. I wanted someone to fix the issue without questioning or apportioning blame. I wanted the fault fixed.
• What happened? They questioned my competence in understanding the issue, they pointed out that it was not their problem, they pushed me through to another department who referred me on again and 90 minutes later I was put back in touch with the first department I spoke to.
•  Emotional response - No empathy, no dignity, no ownership of the issue, no apology, no validation that my concerns were justified, no resolution of the problem, my time was wasted.

How has their brand value been affected? I have cancelled my home care insurance and have source a local plumber – something I should have done years ago.

• Why did I complain to a local restaurant chain and what did I want? A take away meal gave my wife food poisoning. I wanted them to know and to prevent anyone else from suffering the same illness. The last thing I wanted was more food from them.
•  What happened? They apologised, they looked into which other customers had ordered the same meal and contacted them, they reviewed their supply chain and reported back, they invited us to tour their kitchens and meet the chef.
• Emotional response - They empathised, the apology had compassion and contrition, they took action with the CEO taking ownership to find out more about the problem and report back, not wasting my time.

How has their brand value been affected? Whilst I’m not ready to order from them again soon, they are a company I would recommend and I’m comfortable that everything has been done to prevent a repeat occurence.

 Conclusions - what soft skills add value in customer service?

• Apologise – with compassion and/or contrition
• Know that your response will be shared – people share all news on social media, but good news for your brand has more online salience than bad.
• Respect your customers time – and promise to report back.
• Own the issue – and empower the front line to resolve, train the front line support desk to work within liberal guidelines and give them discretion.
• Treat all customers with your best service level (social media platforms won’t discriminate between gold, silver or bronze).
• Allow customers to share good news – it will be heard louder than bad news.

Important note to reader – I’ve not mentioned credit notes, refunds or free samples. Value here is created using soft skills like empathy, compassion, engagement, dignity and ownership.

Changing behaviour by moonlight

At best, I hope that my work can change people’s behaviour; I know I can’t change their opinions. This week I was lucky enough to work with some of our retail sales team on the streets of Nairobi selling our new high-speed broadband services (up to 100 mbps).  This new service will give Kenyans a chance to change how they work and sell, all benefiting from the opportunities that the Internet provides them.

Selling on the streets, we all understood the enormous potential that this product has to change the lives of the residents we were selling to.  We were armed with a bunch of routers, half a dozen brochures and fist full of contracts.  We had no power, no lights, no retail unit, no advertising and an unheard of  brand.  This was the sharp end of sales in emerging markets.

Roughly 65% of Africans are under 35 years, and more than 35% of these are 15 to 35 which makes Africa the most youthful continent on the planet.

And more than ever Africans need to be connected to international markets.  Because of the internet, barriers to progress are quickly coming down and now there are more opportunities for connected young people than ever before.

They no longer need a publisher, a record label or a production company to be heard. These tools are now in the hands of all energetic, young creative and entrepreneurial Africans.  And it’s the Internet that gives them this chance.

Does marketing change their behaviour, or do consumers change mine?

iPhone negotiations in Great Wall, Nairobi.

Unwanted attention from HQ

For the past two decades I’ve been managing teams (and virtual teams) across diverse organisations and often in disparate locations. I started managing teams based in France from our small office in Fulham Broadway, but soon I was looking after teams in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Hong Kong, South Africa and Kenya and even Warrington.

That’s why this month’s research highlight from the MIT Sloan School of Management is so interesting to me.  They warn against the “Perils of Attention From Headquarters” and offer advice to satellite offices as well as managers from HQ. Certainly, building relationships between a group function and local operating entities often defines success for both parties.

Much of the feedback from their research is familiar to me. People complain of frequent visits which often generate additional workloads for local (and group) functions. These are sometimes created due to a lack of understanding as to what is expected from each party.  One thing that the report misses is the role of clear and consistent internal messaging and the role it plays in mitigating many of these issues.  If we all understand the group strategy and commercial objectives, we know that we’re all pulling in the same directions.  Projects that fall outside of this strategy should simply melt away.

The better the internal communications and the clearer the messages, the closer the relationships will be and it’s more likely that teams will have honest and open dialogue. At best these are without company politics or personal agendas interfering.

It’s always tricky for a group role (where resources are often spread thinly across a wide territory) to avoid behaving like a parent in the relationship.  Flying visits often require as much listening as guiding, and anticipated decisions are expected to be made whilst on site. But the best results come from a more consultative approach, mentoring and guiding and then solving problems together. At Liquid, we’ve defined these roles as ‘centres of excellence’ and they could be located anywhere across the group.

That said, generally local opco’s can also do more to help themselves. If dialogue prior to visits is free and open then both parties will find it much easier to push back on unrealistic pressures on timelines,resources or budgets.  My experience in West Africa was just this way with a great team who were more than happy to offer me advice in a brutally honest dialogue – and we both benefitted because they knew their markets more intimately than me and I brought them a broader and deeper understanding of their tasks.

It’s still unusual for a local office to invite HQ to come and participate in decision-making. If the group functions can sell themselves as helpers and trusted advisers, complimenting the skills of the local decision makers and the ‘doers’, then travel and ‘attention from headquarters’ could become something to look forward to.

Award Season Fatigue - so what's the point?

This week I’ve been disappointed by the press coverage that we’ve had from our litter of industry awards.  It turns out that we’ve won too often and the press no longer want to cover yet another industry win.

So why should we enter awards in the first place?  Even if the press haven’t covered the wins, we’ve sent notes out internally celebrating the successes, so this wins will play a critical role in reinforcing the strong intent of the management team to continue to build and grow our network in Africa.  It’s a clear signpost to everyone of what we’re here to do.  That must be valuable. 

The internal sales message is key when it comes to attracting and recruiting the best teams, especially if the award is for a category that can be tough to recruit in, or better still is recognition for investment in staff and the people who work for the company.

Usually it’s for a boost in sales that CEO’s want to win awards.  But awards are perhaps overrated as a sales medium.  In very competitive markets, an award or peer recognition can often demonstrate that small increment of relative advantage in your category which might make winning new business a little easier, but awards are not a short-cut to fast sales.

So what went wrong with my PR strategy? The role of PR is very sensitive.  Recently, we’ve won al lot of awards, and the local press and trade papers quickly get ‘award fatigue’.  Yet another award becomes none news, and the journalists will often push back in search of deeper qualifying facts and criteria to justify the flurry of awards.

I reckon that good companies win awards and the growth would have been there regardless of the awards. But a study by the University of Western Ontario and Georgia Institute of Technology, showed that from 600 quality corporate award winners,  37% had more sales and 44% had a higher stock price return than their peers who didn’t win the awards (but does this show a causal relationship – I don’t think so). 

To know who will benefit most from any specific award t it depends on the company size and structure.  Smaller companies will gain credibility quickly by being put on the same platform as their larger competitors.  And larger companies can win ‘big time’ by instilling ‘purpose’ and conviction to their teams, demonstrating their investment in people.

Pick your awards based on what you want to to communicate and recognise that as a small growing company, even if you don’t win the BIG gong, a well written and comprehensive award entry will always be read by judges, and these are often journalists, analysts and category experts – just the people you’ll want to get in front of sooner or later. That's the point, now do it.

Why were we so slow to catch on?

According to the ‘FAST FORWARD 2030 - The Future of Work and the Workplace’ report from October 2014 in the near future work will "become a consumer experience. People seek a holistic life: they want to work with intelligent people on exciting and rewarding projects where they can be creative and left alone to get the job done; values and purpose are as important as money; working for social good is an option; and they want to be a part of ‘the next big thing’. 

“Not only are youth seeking happiness over money, but study participants reported that a majority of parents now aspire for their children to have happiness over money. Companies that fail to respond to these trends will do so at their peril.”

Yes, yes, yes,; about time.  Isn't it already like this in most creative agencies? And the forward thinking companies are welcoming this new flexible and engaging workforce.  As a child of the 70’s, this comes as a great relief.  This evolution makes perfect sense to me and I’m glad that my children will demand a work environment with more creativity, humanity and innovation than the workplaces most of us have had to wade through in our early careers.  And I hope they follow their hearts in finding a vocation, choosing those that choose them. (Ref Godin Nov 14)

Wow, this feels good.

When a brand puts its name to a cause there is always a risk that there will be backlash.  Often times these CSR initiatives can be misconstrued as paying lip service to an issue, instead of immersing themselves and becoming truly involved. It's usually the large corporations that fall foul of this trap, compromising efforts to pander to shareholder value.  Which is why it's so good to be working for an organisation that does immerse itself in local issues, wherever they are.

Our Rwandan company has just taken the extraordinary step of donating $250k towards the prevention of Ebola in Rwanda. Our wildly charismatic Chairman of LT Rwanda handed the cheque over to Rwanda’s ministry of health to supplement the government’s own prevention plan.

We hope the funds will be used in strengthening capacity through medical, social prevention and mobilisation and awareness campaigns. 

The Minister for Health, Dr Agnes Binagwaho, expressed appreciation, saying prevention is everyone’s responsibility.

In Africa, there’s plenty of opportunity for the private sector to support government efforts. I know that we have very generous stakeholders in this company who are little lauded. I know this donation is not the first from the shareholders at Liquid Telecom and am certain it will be followed by many more in the future.  I only hope that other corporations and multinationals working in Africa will follow suit, mostly because it feels good to work for a team that does this

Next time,remember to smile!

Miserable me and smiley Juanita Clark, CEO FTTH Africa

Earlier this week at the annual awards ceremony of the influential industry group Fibre To The Home (FTTH) Council Africa, I collected the “Infrastructure Innovation of the Year Award" on behalf of our retail team.

Earlier this year Liquid Telecom launched its FTTH service in Zimbabwe with Internet access of up to 100Mbps, the fastest broadband available in Africa today. We’ve also got plans to launch services Zambia, Kenya and Rwanda.

It’s great that our work in building Africa’s digital future has been recognised by our peers in the industry.

It’s great to win, but next time I must remember to smile?!

Celebrating success in Nairobi

I’ve just come back from Kenya. I always love going to Nairobi, and this time was no exception.  I was there to organise the launch of the opening of a new floor at the East Africa Data Centre (EADC), the only Tier 3 secure electronic data centre in east and central Africa.  My company has just invested Ksh 1bn (that’s almost $12m in old money) expanding rack space to meet demand. 

The data centre, which now houses Kenya’s Internet Exchange Point, has been credited by the global Internet Society as a key factor in driving down internet prices in Kenya, to among the lowest in Africa. 

Greeting ICT CS, Dr Fred Matiang'i at the entrance to the EADC, Nairobi, Kenya

The East Africa Data Centre has transformed how data traffic is handled in the region by providing a central point for interconnect services, it has reduced latency, improved data services, reduced costs and made it easier to transfer data across networks.

For almost a decade now, I’ve been arguing that by keeping African data in Africa we will reduce the costs of internet access while creating an environment that encourages innovation and entrepreneurial culture in ICT and local business.

Mind The Gap

As a marketing geek, it’s easy to believe to believe that marketing drives the business forward and creates sales and value through the organisation. My friends in finance look at marketing in a very different way – they sometimes see my work as a discretionary spend that could be cut and added straight to the bottom line. 

Finance teams are generally much more sceptical than us about a marketing teams ability to drive revenue or create new sales channels.  And we’re often unrealistically confident in our ability to transform a business.  Do marketers have an inflated sense of self worth and why the difference in perceptions about the value of marketing? 

Marketers can be blissfully ignorant of the real RoI of their budgets and sometimes are wholly unaware of how their budgets fit in with the wider commercial and operational targets.  So it’s not surprising that the eagle eyed finance departments use their own measures and metrics to asses the value of marketing.

Some stats from a recent Marketing Week report show how wide the gap is.

•    84% of marketers agree that marketing needs to grow for the business to grow, but just 47% of finance respondents agree
•    77% of marketers agree that marketing is a critical function in their business, while fewer (62% of) finance respondents agree
•    72% of marketers agree that the marketing function is becoming more important to their organization, compared to just 55% of finance respondents
•    62% of marketers agree that the marketing function takes the lead in driving innovation within the business, with only around half as many (34%) of finance respondents concurring.

Marketing departments need to work harder to build bonds with finance teams to make sure their objectives are better understood and that the extrinsic and intrinsic value of their toils are recognised, even if they can’t be measured.  

Once one of the opco's flighted a billboard with no sales promotion or expected RoI. When the finance team asked why they did it the local marketing team told how the office morale had been  feeling low, but now, driving past the new billboard gave the whole company a energising boost. How do you measure that?

Just because everyone else is, should I?

Doesn’t sound like a convincing argument to me, so no, I think that I’ll pass on blogging.  But perhaps, just praps, if I did start blogging I might actually enjoy it; and then praps give some insight into something that someone else cares about.  So maybe I should at least consider writing a blog.  Sometimes I do have a bit of time on my hands, so I could occasionally put thought to word and drop in a  short blog.

For me though, time’s to short to spend all that time smashing away at a keyboard scribing missives to the ether, so now I’m decided, I’m not going to write a blog.  

They say that if you do blog you have to “engage with your readers”. It’s advice I’ve given to my team plenty of times.  But here’s the rub, I’ve got no readers.  Now that’s a challenge isn’t it?  I like challenges.

So then I ask myself, who’s my target market?  But wait, what’s a target market anyway?  Aren’t markets places where you pay for stuff?  I don’t want anyone paying for stuff – we should get all this for free. Free, ‘cos it ain’t worth nought?

And if you’re a blogger reading this and thinking, what a great web log this chap is crafting, well then I’d urge you to spin on your heals and run, because this blogger isn’t interested in the dialogue, just in this monologue.

All that’s now needed is something interesting to say – I think I’ll save that until next time, unless you’re still reading, which means you’re finding this interesting.

So that’s it.  No-one else is reading this, just me writing so I guess it’s time to sign off.

Tom Tudor Strengthens Management Team at Liquid Telecom

The Liquid Telecom Group today announced that Tom Tudor has joined its management team as Chief Marketing Officer and will oversee the expansion of Liquid’s marketing activities across Africa.

Tom joins from African wholesale carrier Gateway Communications where he has been responsible for its marketing and communications strategy since 2005. During this time he managed the integration of the Link Africa and GS Telecom brands into Gateway and was constructive in rebranding its enterprise assets into Vodacom Business Africa.

Tom has worked closely with the international teams at Vodacom and Vodafone, as well as more recently with PCCW Global which acquired Gateway in 2012. Prior to this he worked for Energis, Cable & Wireless and Opal Telecom in a variety of product, business development and marketing roles.

Nic Rudnick, CEO of The Liquid Telecom Group, said: “We are an ambitious company which is growing fast. Tom understands our industry and his experience in African telecoms and his marketing expertise will be vital in guiding us through our expansion plans. I am truly delighted to have him on-board”.

Tom adds: “Liquid is a fantastic company with an exciting future. It’s already established a number of excellent businesses and I look forward to contributing to its future successes”.

http://www.liquidtelecom.com/blog/tom-tudor-strengthens-management-team-at-liquid-telecom-group