This spike in media attention is attributable to a report commissioned by the UK Government and written by a committee led by Lord Davies of Abersoch. We were happy to help this worthwhile cause by designing the report, which you can find on the Department for Business Innovation and Skills website.

Interesting highlights for me in the report are that the UK trails South Africa and Israel in the proportion of women to men on corporate boards, that the top reason cited for this effect is boardroom attitudes (‘bias, prejudice and stereotypical behaviour’), and that at the present rate of change it will take 70 years for the UK to achieve gender-equality on boards.

You can read the report (and enjoy the lovely information graphics) here.

Melinda and TEDx Host

Yesterday I was lucky enough to be invited along to the latest TEDx event in London. As we’re arranging our own TEDx event in October – TEDxNewSt – I was interested to see, first hand and up close, how they are run.

The event was held at the Science Museum in London and was the first event, of its kind, ever. The first session (95 mins) was broadcast live from New York. 82 events took place in 40 countries, simultaneously, around the world, all live-streaming the NY feed. Once NY had wrapped up the first session, each individual event got on with hosting their events independently with their local speakers live in the room. There was a group in Auckland (NZ) who were hosting their event at 03:30am in order to take part and as we live-streamed them in to say hello, we were told how their adverts for the event read “Pyjamas are optional, progress is not”. Nice. What was even nicer however was the fact that there were indeed people in their pyjamas in the room too.

The overarching theme of the event was about the future and how we can positively effect global issues such as eliminating polio, fighting malaria, reducing child mortality rates and empowering women.

The speakers on the live feed from NY were really engaging and inspiring. As the event was co-conceived by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Melinda was one of the key speakers. Her talk was very insightful as she spoke about how development agencies and NGOs could learn a few tricks from Coca-Cola in how to reach the far corners of the earth and inspire people to want to purchase their products/lifestyles. Hans Rosling was also on stage with some very encouraging stats on child mortality rates, delivered in his own highly inimitable style.

Hans Rosling

Also Mechai Viravaidya (or Mr.Condom as he was fondly referred to) showed a presentation on his foundation’s innovative and, frankly, awe-inspiring methods of introducing condoms into the Thai communities. He is responsible for this post’s title as that was one of the first things he said in his talk and it’s really stuck in my mind.

Mechai Viravaidya

There were many, many other speakers involved in the entire event, all of which were rich with content and inspiration. I would urge you to watch the recording of the NY live-stream available on the website as it’s really compelling.

And if that whets your appetite for being inspired and wanting to do things better/differently then be sure to find out more about our upcoming TEDxNewSt event on October 15th.

Six centuries and three years later it’s not unreasonable expect financial services professionals to have built upon that learning, evolved and moved on. So consider this piece in last week’s Marketing Week by Cheryl Toner, Group Marketing and Communications Director at AXA – a contemporary pan-European financial services giant – speaking about a review (presumably lengthy and costly) of their brand positioning, in which she says the following:

“One of our key findings was that trust was key to the relationship with our customers. We have been looking at all the areas where we need to be seen as reliable, which is a key driver of trust in our industry. It’s basically about keeping our promises.”

No shit, Cheryl. You don’t say! Even Sybil Fawlty, whose responsibility for customer experience didn’t extend beyond the outskirts of Torquay, might have found that statement of the bleedin’ obvious a bit too, well, bleedin’ obvious to commit to print.

I mean, come on, this is hardly an original insight in to what makes financial services brands tick, is it? Trust, and therein keeping of promises, is the foundational principle of money itself – “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of twenty pounds” it says on the British notes in my wallet; “In God We Trust” on a US dollar – not a 21^st Century phenomenon hitherto unseen. For years, centuries and millennia of financial transacting it is a basic and obvious truth. That Axa describe it as a “finding” makes me wonder where they’ve been looking all these years.

My point here is not that Axa is wrong. Sure, trust is important. But it always has been, so unless this is a confession to past untrustworthiness, I really don’t see how or who this helps. It’s not a brand strategy, it’s table-stakes for staying in business. It’s not differentiating, every financial services business in the world is pursuing the same goal. It’s not a ‘big idea’ that will spawn innovations in products, services and customer experience. And it’s not a rallying cry for internal staff or customers to get behind – no one gets excited for very long by the Emperor’s new clothes. So, for me, that’s a waste of time, effort and money because if you’re going to review your brand strategy you should make sure it aims to achieve every single one of those things.

Even if you fail to achieve that, at least try to come up with something that a medieval brand manager would not already have known.

To anyone who’s read my previous posts it will also come as a surprise that I would be praising a rail company, but believe it or not here it comes…

Just before Christmas I had to make an urgent trip from London to Essex. I arrived at Liverpool Street station, checked the departure time of my train, shovelled a big wedge of cash into the ticket machine and just as my tickets printed out the automated departures and arrivals board lit up in a frenzy of flashing lights as one-by-one the trains changed from ‘On Time’ to ‘Cancelled’, ‘Bus Service’ or ‘Delayed’. Mine was cancelled. The tickets, still warm from the printer, cowered in my clenched fist.

I then embarked on the most excruciating train journey of my life. Both the outward and return journeys were subject to cancellations, delays, lack of onboard refreshments due to a broken boiler, overcrowding and general displeasure.

On my return I set about drafting a letter of complaint to the train company responsible, National Express. Seeing as there has been a lot of talk of will they/won’t they mergers with Stagecoach recently I wasn’t holding my breath in getting a positive response to my request for a full, and immediate, refund.

As Christmas set upon us I received a letter from National Express to inform me that they had read my letter and would attempt to come back to me within 6 days. Actually, it was more like 15, but hey, it was Christmas and who’s counting? I was stunned to receive another letter the other day profusely apologising for the ‘unforgiveable’ experience I had had to endure that day on the train, and explaining the reasons for the delays/cancellations but in a tone that was more apologetic and responsible than blame-ridden and bitter. Neatly tucked in the folded letter were vouchers for rail travel (on ANY network in the UK) for not only the full return fare but for the full fare + 25%.

Now, I’m not too sure whether it should be a big cheer for National Express per se, or a big cheer for the cranky insistence of a grump like me, but regardless, I thought the communications tone, and the ‘above and beyond’ value of the vouchers were a great example of a brand’s ability to create a positive experience out of a bad one. Well done National Express.

Welcome to Manchester

When considering my journey, I flirted with the possibility of traveling first class in order to be able to get some work done. I’ll admit, I was seduced by the idea of a quiet haven where you could focus on your work, undisturbed other than to be offered coffee at your seat, and would generally be made to feel as though you could just get on with being ‘terribly important and busy’.

So, 2 weeks before I was due to travel I popped on to thetrainline.com and looked up times and fares for the date I needed. £66 for an off-peak standard day return. Lovely. Seems reasonable.

My eyes scanned down the page to where the first class fares were listed…

What was that?

Sorry, what was THAT?

£355 for a day return?

Wrestling my eyeballs back into their sockets I began to contemplate what one would get for their £355 ticket. Seeing as I could fly BA (return) to Milan and have a night in a 4-star hotel for the same price, I imagined that a train company commanding the same money must do something pretty special. Do we travel via Capri with a night in a luxury villa, where I’m massaged to within an inch of my life and fed fine cheeses and cured meats until I burst? Do I get to dress in black tie, be drowned in expensive champagne and flirted with by top supermodels for the entire journey whilst, in the background, the London Symphony Orchestra play a collection of my personal favourites? Nope? What do I get then?

A coffee and a newspaper. Fantastic. For the bargain price of £289 I can get some coffee and a newspaper.

I’d be intrigued to have a chat with the head of the particular train company in question and ask him “So, Richard, how do you develop your pricing structure exactly?”

I wonder what the answer would be…

So yesterday via Twitter I received two identical tweets from the same ‘company’. Being a little more specific, one form the ‘official’ Twitter feed of that company, the other from the ‘personal’ Twitter account of the MD of that company. I say personal, however in the profile he states that he is MD of X…. so in my book, that counts as a representation of that company is a ‘pseudo corporate’ feed. So, two identical tweets, sent from the same ‘company’, to the same individual, me, in the space of a few seconds.

Now if that happened with email, to which I had subscribed, i.e. which is permission based, as is Twitter… I’d be annoyed and think ‘what a stupid company’. Well the same thing happened with those tweets, I thought ‘what a stupid company’. Just because they are short, possibly less intrusive than email, it’s still really dumb to send identical messages over different accounts when you have the same person subscribing to both accounts on the other end! We wouldn’t do that with email would we? And as the business that did this was, surprise surprise, a social media agency (ROFLMAO)… that makes it, as we say on the Internets, an EPIC FAIL.

So, to an extent you have to say ‘bless’, let’s face it a lot of people working in social media, on the face of it, aren’t that experienced in the grand scheme of things, email is for old people right? But more seriously it points to the fact that platforms such as Twitter, even when combined with some of the 3rd party corporate tools, are still massively lacking in maturity and functionality to run at the same level of ‘permission’ and accuracy as email or more traditional direct communications. To my knowledge, (I did say this was ill-informed) no tool exists to manage Twitter subscribes across a companies multiple accounts in the same way as email (i.e. with really thorough, get prosecuted if you mess up, list and subscriber management… yes I get that Twitter is a little less complex in that if you unsubscribe that’s that, to an extent). If it does I get the impression many companies aren’t using it. As far as legislation goes, again I’d welcome an update on this… however, if the law doesn’t hover channels such as Twitter in b2c communications, isn’t it about time it did?

However, fret not, as deliveries of the important stuff – the parcels and presents ordered up to the 11^th hour from on-line retailers such as Amazon and John Lewis are destined to find their way to their recipients in a timely and reliable fashion. These businesses you will not be surprised to hear have opted to drop Royal Mail in favour of alternative providers. There are unfortunately some on-line retailers who won’t have that choice.  Just as Britain is trying to fight its way out of recession, not only will Royal Mail potentially lose over £100m of combined letter and packet business, the disruption could cost general business over £220m in direct lost business and increased delivery expense not to mention damage to reputation and customer loyalty.

So it would seem that the current dispute of Royal Mail employees with the management over pay, conditions and modernisation plans continues to erode not just the trust and reputation of another institutional brand but ultimately drive it closer to the edge of an inevitable precipice.

Sure, the history, politics and organisational issues that underpin the machinations of Royal Mail and the current dispute are complicated but the stark reality is much simpler. This is a business model that makes little commercial sense or in its current guises delivers a relevant consumer service for modern Britain.

Royal Mail was created in 1516 by Henry VIII when he established a Master of the Posts. It was no doubt of formidable use in days gone by for sending threatening letters to the French or Scots, communicating with your army, courting another potential wife or demanding taxes and favours.

But today, my letterbox at home is rarely straining under the weight of anything of such urgency, value or contempt.  Bank statements, mobile phone bills, energy bills,  tax returns, passport and driving licence applications are all now managed on-line. In our fast-paced digital society, we can’t wait a few hours, let alone a day or two to for a piece of communication to wind its way through the ‘Snail Mail’ plumbing.

So what future for our postal champion and its significant army of foot soldiers?

The solution for Royal Mail is to leverage its capabilities in a more effective and innovative manner.  It benefits from an amazing local community presence and infrastructure. It just needs to mobilise it and charge for it in a more valued and valuable way.

Perhaps Royal Mail should consider stopping those daily letterbox deliveries of increasing amounts of junk mail.  Household mail only accounts for about 10% of volume anyway.  Apart from certain government departments, rarely do we send anything of real urgency or value through the postal system.  Perhaps we need to be educated that we should go and collect our mail from the local Post Office.  Use the Post Office as a micro-sorting office from where we rent our own PO Box for a convenient Saturday morning collection before popping to the coffee shop next door to peruse it.

Equally, Britain is a universe of micro and small and medium sized enterprises. These smaller businesses need to move things around and most often within a fairly narrow geography and relatively minor window of time.

Couldn’t Royal Mail do this? Couldn’t Royal Mail be exactly the kind of local community logistics champion that we could really use on a daily basis.

With assets out on the roads local independent grocers or traders who can’t compete with the likes of Ocado can offer to deliver direct with Royal Mail. Plumbers, electricians and tradesmen can call suppliers for parts and have them picked up and delivered by Royal Mail within 90 minutes. For domestic customers, dry cleaning can be delivered or collected and  those cakes you’ve baked for old Mrs Jones who lives on the other side of town can be sent and received and still be warm.  Maybe if I’m really running late, they can pick up and deliver my kids home from nursery.

Now that really would indicate a level of trust and give valued meaning to those letters within the Royal Mail brand name that make it a service we can all be proud of.

But in this case, no such conversations need take place.  That’s because the drawing has been produced not by a well-remunerated corporation, but by a child. It is the work of nine-year-old Florence Jackson, from Bristol, who was one of 17,000 children who entered a BBC Blue Peter competition to design the new coin. The media, the public, most (not all) designers, when they know that it is designed by a child, will soften their eyes and celebrate, rather than criticise its flaws. And, even if they missed the press release, no one’s going to be in any doubt about its youthful provenance because the design is so obviously juvenile. Crude, puerile and naïve her art may be, but in the context of such a competition these are exactly the criteria that the competition judges would have desired. Indeed, I am confident to assume that many more accomplished submissions will have been rejected for being too good; not childlike enough. This competition was never about the quality of the design but what it is that the design represents.

This highlights a crucial aspect of human judgment that applies to design and much more widely beyond. It’s the reason why brand consultancy is not only the most important discipline in the marketing mix but a critical component of modern business strategy. It might even help us to define what “brand” means. Yep, I’m making a big deal of this one, because I think Florence has hit on something important here.

To up the ante a little from 50p, let me ask you a question about another piece of art. If the Madonna of the Pinks that hangs in The National Gallery turns out, as some suspect, not to be by Raphael but a fake, is it worth less than the £22M it cost to buy? Philosophically, the painting could be said to exist in two parallel universes. One, where it marks a brave and progressive watershed in the history of religious portraiture that inspired not just art but generations of social history. Another, where it is simply a derivative work by a talented, yet insignificant forger. Physically, the two universes of the paintings collapse into one – its tangible attributes are the same. Intellectually, they are forever apart.

Old Masters may be an extreme example but the point is this: we judge things not for what they are but for what we think they mean. To truly understand something we need to look beyond its tangible qualities and consider its intangible attributes too. We seek to explain what we see (hear, touch, taste, or smell) by giving it a back-story – a meaning beyond the physical experience it provides. The Madonna of the Pinks is not just a well-executed painting of the Madonna and child but a landmark moment in art history. Florence’s coin is more than a badly drawn picture, it represents the hope, potential, and the carefree joy that only a child would have the courage to see, yet to which all adult human beings aspire.

Don’t just take my word for it. This aspect of human intellect is a fundamental philosophical concept. In the 4^th Century BC, Aristotle defined hypokeimenon, literally meaning the “underlying thing”, as the quality that sits behind a thing’s physicality and persists through any change. In the 13^th Century John Duns Scotus described haecceity, literally “thisness”, as the quality of a thing that differentiates it from another with identical form (where its form expressed in generic terms is called quiddity, or “thatness”). Neuroscientists have explored these concepts in their analyses of how the human brain makes decisions, examining the complexity of the relationship between rational and emotional processing. Some, like Chris Frith, even suggest that rational decision-making is an illusion created by our own brain to defend us from the incomprehensible reality of our truly irrational selves. The scientific and philosophical facts are clear: things are not as simple as they seem.

And this helps us explain what a brand is. A brand is the complete set of criteria upon which the human brain decides. (Note that lower order mammals don’t use ‘brands’, just sub-conscious instincts; they don’t ‘decide’.) Brands are a complex interdependency between rational and emotional propositions where each works to shape and explain the other. They are about hypokeimenon (essence), haecceity (differentiation) and quiddity (experience) and touch not just logos and marketing but every aspect of what an organisation thinks and does. It follows then, that managing a brand requires profound and holistic consideration, with the intellect and imagination of a deeply enquiring mind. If we are to believe Chris Frith, then it’s the most important thing that any business should consider, overriding all the rational considerations that businesses typically prioritise in their plans.

Of course some philosophers (the empiricists and phenomenalists) disagree with this point of view. For them, a thing is no more than its tangible self: The Madonna of the Pinks is just paint on canvas, worth no more than, say, 50p. They would consider a conversation about brands to be an exercise in vanity and a waste of money and time. Such people should be introduced to Florence. Sometimes it takes the perspective of a nine-year-old to help you open your eyes.

Read more…

“I want a brand as strong as Apple” is a statement we often hear from senior managers in very un-Apple-like organisations. The problem is that they’re just not prepared to do what it takes to make it happen.

In our research, brands such as Apple, Virgin and Google were mentioned consistently as the companies that business leaders said they most admired and aspired to be like. There is a tacit understanding that these organisations are driven by a different kind of engine to most others — their creativity — and it is this, fundamentally, to which these senior managers aspire.

Yet our study also revealed that for most business leaders creativity is not regarded as a serious topic for debate — only 10 per cent discuss it at board meetings and more than 40 per cent say that nobody has responsibility for it in their business. They prefer, instead, to talk about sales, costs, timeframes, supply chains, resources and other seemingly more tangible matters. The subject of creativity, with its inherently unconventional nature, subjectivity and lack of immediate measurability, is the sort of thing that most business leaders have been taught to avoid. Saying that you’d like to be more creative is one thing; doing something about it is quite another.

Yet, in this economic environment, this is a huge opportunity missed. Despite their reluctance to act, business leaders already acknowledge the value that creativity brings. Ninety-six per cent of respondents in our study cite creativity as integral to business success. More than 40 per cent place more value on creativity as a source of business advantage than on those traditional deliverables of knowledge and efficiency. And they are entirely right. A recessionary, or post-recessionary, world demands new thinking, new approaches, differentiation and innovation, certainly not merely more of the same. People are looking for change, for stronger, more meaningful relationships in which businesses help to solve the problems that matter most, not only those that generate most profit. They want radical, brave solutions. This is a time for creative thinking and action, the transition from the knowledge economy of the past 20 years to the ideas economy of the future.

To make this transition effective, businesses need to overcome the barrier that prevents their acknowledgement of creativity’s value from being acted upon in practise. As 46 per cent of our respondents told us that they would be happy to take increased responsibility for creativity, we can conclude that the problem is not a lack of desire but a lack of know-how.

The good news is that providing the know-how is not as daunting as it may seem. Despite its esoteric reputation, creativity can be taught. Despite its non-linear thought processes, it can be systemised. Despite its often peripheral role, it can and should be installed as a fundamental strategic platform that informs every decision and action. What is needed is a firm commitment from the organisation’s leadership to embrace it and external, specialist help to plan and deliver it. It needs companies to realise that you can’t simply talk a good game, you’ve got to deliver one, too.

Business leaders already know the superior value that creativity can bring. Now they must act on it, with courage and conviction and the mindset of a new, creative age.

• Jim Prior is managing partner of The Partners, a branding consultancy

Article taken from The Times Online.