Category Archives: Consulting

May 27, 2014 · 8:45 am

Long Promised Road

This TunesDay, I thought I’d continue to celebrate yesterday’s very American holiday with one of our most “American” bands, The Beach Boys.  The song below is from their “Surf’s Up” album of 1971 and it’s one of my favorite songs when I need a little inspiration.  While Carl Wilson plays all the instruments and sings the vocal parts it has the distinctive Beach Boys sound.  Give it a listen:

They’re one of the few bands that I believe is instantly recognizable as soon as you hear a vocal part.  Maybe it’s that 4 of the 5 were family – the 3 Wilson brothers and their cousin Mike Love.  Their unique five-part harmony influenced almost anyone making music at the time and since.  Which is, of course, today’s business thought.

Every business needs to have its own “sound.”  In a perfect world, that brand identity is unique and wordless.  As the American Marketing Association says:

Your brand identity is the representation of your company’s reputation through the conveyance of attributes, values, purpose, strengths, and passions. Great brands are easy to recognize, their mission is clear, and it fosters that coveted customer loyalty all businesses crave.

It’s not good enough to look to another brand or business and say “me too.”  You need to have something intangible that people will recognize when they encounter the brand.  It’s really the essence of the brand – that central set of emotions that are brought front and center, just as one conjures up California, the surf, and good times when hearing the Beach Boys.

Marketing 101?  Maybe, but if you’re not creating as recognizable a sound as these guys, maybe back to basics is just what you need.  Or as the song says:

But I hit hard at the battle that’s confronting me, yeah
Knock down all the roadblocks a-stumbling me
Throw off all the shackles that are binding me down

Success is waiting!

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May 22, 2014 · 10:05 am

Enablers

Have you read Christine Brennan‘s excellent column about FSU this morning in USA Today? You can do so here and I’d encourage it. This is how it starts:

Florida State University

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Were Jameis Winston a fourth-string punter rather than a first-string quarterback, he almost certainly would have long since been kicked off the Florida State football team, probably for good. Instead, the Heisman Trophy-winning problem child is being protected by his university and athletics department for the worst reason possible. He is being coddled because of what he can do for them.

It’s easy to get outraged when you look at how the FSU athletic department, the school administration, the local police, and other “responsible” entities are behaving here.  They are enabling bad behavior.  The folks in the athletic department at FSU, unfortunately, aren’t that different from many of us and how we deal with problem individuals in our businesses.  Let me explain.

Any of us who have ever managed or worked with other people realize that some of them have issues.  Those issues may run the gamut from a bad attitude or incompetence all the way to serious drug problems or criminal behavior.  Try as we might in the hiring process, people with issues slip through our screen and end up on our teams.  Maybe we inherited them.  In any event, what happens next – or doesn’t – is critical.

Some of us think  that the problem, once we’ve identified it, will fix itself.  It won’t.  Maybe we weigh the pain of confrontation and disruption with the pain of maintaining the status quo.   Perhaps we’re in state of equilibrium – other people have picked up the slack caused by the problem child and everyone is coping.  Every one of those rationalizations is wrong and cowardly.  More importantly, they’re holding back both your business and the individual involved.

You can’t hope to isolate the problem.  Others on the team will see that the high standards you set are lies and are not adhered to by everyone and bad behavior is rewarded or at least not punished.  Eventually, a major crisis hits as the individuals involved hit bottom.  The solution is to identify the problem, document it, and put the individuals on notice that you’re aware there is an issue.  Offer to help in any way you can but make it clear that with or without that help you expect the person involved to stop the bad behavior.  Now.  Otherwise, you’re an enabler and part of the problem.

Make sense?

 

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May 21, 2014 · 10:09 am

Your Data Sucks

If you do any work in marketing or sales or just about anything these days you know that you get an overwhelming amount of data each day.  As it turns out, the real issue might not be the amount of the data but the quality of it.  The chart I’ve included today is from the Experian folks reminding us that “Garbage In, Garbage Out” is a truism we can’t avoid.  In fact, many of us are doing a really lousy job of doing so.


The state of data quality

I don’t think it’s a big surprise that the report states that only one third of companies manage their data quality strategy centrally, through a single director.  That, of course, means that:

66% of companies lack a coherent, centralized approach, says the report. Most have little centralization and manage data quality by individual department. For marketers to really take advantage of data insights, information needs to be accurate, consolidated and accessible in real time. A centralized organization-wide data management strategy is essential for marketing success.

I’ll give you an example.  Say you have great web analytics information and fantastic sales information from another data source.  If nobody took the time to figure out a “key”  – a field of data common to both databases – those two excellent, useful, actionable pieces of information can’t be synched up.  That’s why a coherent data schema is important and too many cooks, especailly unsupervised cooks, can really spoil this dish.

Even within a single data-gathering pool, poor planning can be a disaster.  Let’s say you are gathering address information.  If you don’t use a drop-down menu to populate the “state” field, you’re going to end up with typos, different abbreviations (AR, AK, ARK, AS could all be Arkansas) or someone using an abbreviation that your database thinks is another place entirely.  91% of companies suffer from common data errors, the main cause of which is human error. Experian again:

The high level of inaccurate information is brought about by a high level of human error. In many instances information entered across the organization is typed into a database at some point manually, by an employee or the customer directly. That exposes information to different levels of standardization, abbreviations and errors.

As with any part of your business, the quality of your actions is dependent on the quality of the information you have at  hand.  A little time spent on planning is worth a lot in improving that quality.  You agree?

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