Monthly Archives: October 2012

October 26, 2012 · 10:40 am

Eating What You Don’t See

For our Foodie Friday Fun this week, let’s take just a minute to think about what goes into you receiving a simple plate of food at a restaurant.

English: White House Executive Chef, Cristeta ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve been with many folks who order and scarf down their meals without a thought as to the enormous enterprise that went into making that dish happen. I know they thought about if the food was good and if the service was up to their standards. They didn’t really consider, however, all the other elements that go into a great meal.
Consider how much work goes into that one plate of food. Someone (the chef) has to plan the menu and order the components. When those ingredients show up at the restaurant, they need to be inventoried and broken down (by prep cooks) into products with which the line cooks can work. Primal cuts are broken down into steaks and chops. Cases of potatoes and bags of carrots are peeled. All this before the real prep work begins. It’s an assembly line of sorts although we don’t think of kitchen work as a manufacturing job.

Prep cooks give way to the line cooks who actually fabricate the dish for you. In between are the servers and the rest of the front of house folks. All these people need to be hired, trained, supervised and paid. What’s the business point?
The point is that we don’t notice, nor should we. Most of us are in the same boat.  When I was teaching I knew that for every hour of classroom time there would be another hour or two of prep that the kids never saw.  A simple budget presentation of one slide can involve dozens of people and hundreds of hours of prep yet the only time that anyone asks about the process is when something is out of whack.  That’s really the business point.  Apple is famous for doing technology that “just works.”   Web pages and sites involve thousands of hours of design, coding, and creativity but we tend not to notice that until something broken.  We don’t think about how our cars were built and designed until something is wrong.  The list goes on and on.

Cooking in a professional kitchen involves something unknown to most jobs – the physical reproduction of a product, from 50-60 times a day, presented in a seamless manner.   Like the proverbial swimming duck, there’s an awful lot going on under the water.  We might just be most successful when no one knows that but us!

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October 25, 2012 · 10:55 am

Maybe It’s Easy Because It’s Not Effective?

The other day I wrote about how small and medium businesses were thinking of the internet in a way that made it less of a medium.  Another day, another piece of research concerning SMB’s and digital.  Today’s comes from BIA/Kelsey via the good folks at eMarketer and it talks about how 40% of small and midsized firms planned to increase their digital spending budget within the next 12 months.  That’s not a big surprise but the fact that the SMB marketers (probably the owners too!)  are thinking multi-channel.  Smart, but also a little concerning:

Facebook has also emerged as a favored digital channel among these smaller businesses, likely due to its low-cost barriers and ease of use. In fact, 52% of SMBs said they used Facebook for advertising or promotional purposes, making it more popular for marketing than newspapers (31%), community sponsorships (27%) and email marketing (25%).

It’s the “ease of use” thing that has me worried.  Sure, it’s easy as pie to post your latest offer or remind fans that you’re open on Sunday.  However, as we’ve discussed repeatedly here on the screed, many of those “fans” aren’t interested in anything other than discounts and really won’t engage.  Without an understanding of how Facebook works, Edge Rank, and the social graph, the results from Facebook are going to equal the price of entry:  not much.  More importantly  I’m not sure the amount of daily support required  is clear to these folks.

I also find it of interest that social media is compared with three other forms of customer engagement (above) that are completely different from one another and which should be used for very different purposes.  Email should be a lot higher on SMB’s radar than it appears to be.  However, it also requires a lot more support (and can be costlier) than what Facebook appears to be on the surface.  Sponsorships are great ways to build your email list (or social followers) but if the emphasis isn’t on using email, the value of the sponsorship – and the mailing list access it should affords – lessens.

The study concludes with a note that despite all the attention paid to the “social, local, mobile” (SoLoMo) movement, SMBs are failing to recognize the benefits of linking mobile with local, an especially important element for small businesses.  No surprise – that’s a very resource-intensive area to do properly.  The key, as always, is to match the business objectives with the tools and the budgets.  Just as every business is different, so too are the ways in which those factors – objectives, budgets, and tools – combine.  As always, let me know if I can be helpful with that.

Thoughts?

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October 24, 2012 · 10:44 am

Who Has A Reputation Worse Than Politicians? You Do!

We often hear that the professions that have the worst reputations among the public are bankers and politicians.  A study commissioned by Adobe and fielded by research firm Edelman Berland and reported in Ad Age finds that there is a group of professionals held in lower esteem:  marketers.  The study found that while people understand that marketing is an important role in business, they also think very little of those of us who do it and the value we bring to society.  According to the study, the majority of consumers –53%– stated that most marketing is “a bunch of B.S.”

When asked if marketing benefits society, only 13% of consumers agreed. And compared to other professions, the results were grim. Teachers — despite how little they are often compensated — were valued at the top of the list, followed by scientists and engineers. That’s somewhat to be expected. But what was more surprising was that advertising and marketing ranked below nearly every other profession, including bankers (32%), lawyers (34%) and even politicians (18%). Marketing and advertising were tied with the job of an actor or actress in terms of its value.

Ouch.  Then again, we bring these things on ourselves.  Think about what the public experiences with respect to marketing these days.  Spam in their in boxes.  Data being gathered surreptitiously and used without their knowledge or permission.  Those go along with issues that have been there for years – ads that seem (or are) sleazy (way too much fine print to be real), using media as a bullhorn via the “spray and pray” method, and an industry with not enough accountability for results.

Fortunately, we have a chance to change this as the nature of marketing itself has changed.  While consumers don’t like ads in digital (there’s a lot of evidence on that) they DO welcome the opportunity to engage marketers in conversation via these channels.  The study shows that just 2% of respondents believe information about a brand from a company’s social-media site is credible, however, so there is some work that needs to be done there.  As we’ve discussed before, there needs to be a paradigm shift on the part of we who communicate with consumers before the consumers will respond with a similar shift.  It takes time to build trust.

This is not a study that should make anyone engaged in marketing feel good.  It should be a wake-up call for transparency and more respectful  grown-up dialog with our customers.  That’s my take.  What’s yours?

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