Pressure on microbusinesses

Recent research takes a look at the legislative pressures faced by microbusinesses.

Microbusinesses are defined as businesses employing less than 10 people. There are 5.2 million apparently in the UK, by numbers - some 99% of all UK companies. It seems that 'red tape' and increasing employment bureaucracy is becoming a big disincentive to taking on more staff. Just in the recent budget a big hike in the minimum wage was sprung on business in general.  By  these standards our company must be a sub-microbusiness as we employ other specialist supplier companies rather than take on staff ourselves. But this does not mean we are exempt from issues such as auto enrollment in pensions for example. We are apparently known as a director only company in auto enrollment parlance. We have to register to opt out.

So here is the story. Our accountant writes a letter explaining the background, what is the best option for  our business, then goes on to supply screen shots of the online process. It look straightforward  given he had done the research and got all the numbers for us. Five to ten minutes at the most. Wrong.  OK so we get to the web site of the Pension Regulator  at htpps://automation.thepensionregulator.gov.uk/NotAnEmployerhttps://automation.thepensionsregulator.gov.uk/notanemployer  - OK , done that, 'submit'. Up comes the red triangle and exclamation mark symbol - 'Mismatch ... check you have entered data correctly and try again.' Do that, get my fellow director to verify - same result. Now I am asked to telephone 0845 600 1011. A recorded message of 1minute 18 seconds tells me to visit the web site, then gives various fixes for problems such as substituting numbers for asterix or something before finally a menu of options and last option of all to speak to someone. This is no 5 minute job. Eventually after being asked to participate in a questionnaire I get to speak to Olivia, after of course the usual security questions. After explaining the problem she explains that I  cannot submit the data because it has already been done as we are a director only company and they have helpfully done this for us. I don't ask the obvious question as to why they don't explain this on the web site as we can't be the only ones. She takes a note of my email and promises to send an email noting we have registered. Great - all done the. Well not quite there's the survey I agreed to take.

I watch my email inbox and after a short while up pops Olivia's email. Oh dear, they have got the wrong company, we are not beauty consultants. Back on the phone, same message, swerve round the survey and speak to a young man with an unpronounceable name after all the security questions of course. Explain the problem which amazingly he is authorised to sort out. Soon his email arrives and I duly forward this to our accountant for reference. And that is just one reason why small businesses feel over burdened by employment legislation, even when you have no employees - yet this is where new jobs should be being created.

Now how about doing some paid for work!

Picture this - images for PR

Compelling images are an important element of a news story, but despite everyone having a digital camera, ownership of a camera  doesn't empower everyone to be a photographer.

Going back some years, most b-2-b PR agencies would commission a professional photographer to come up with an interesting and creative image to accompany the text and often elevate an otherwise uninspiring product into an object of interest or intrigue. And photographers often specialised. Those specialising in images of buildings for architects might not achieve the best, or most flattering  portraits of the managing director. When we commissioned a photographer to photograph a new building in the City of London he paid a crane operator to let him ride up in the crane's bucket to capture a great image from an elevation nobody else would ever see. The resulting image was widely used, but nobody ever asked how it had been taken.

In the b-2-b world, the expense of professional photography has been dropped from budgets and instead images, typically supplied as  jpg files are user/client generated. While not expecting creative work, it would be nice to receive something which was, well lets say OK. Here are 10 common problems with images we receive from clients:-

1. Out of focus, blurred, fuzzy and indistinct - these are useless, so trash can for them.
2. Bad lighting - subject in shadow, silhouette or over exposed.
3. Poor composition  - boring stuff, load of clutter, product lost amongst irrelevant junk.
4. Rubbish in shot - typically in installation photos; scrap materials or builders drinks cans  right in the middle of the shot.
5. Empty scene - buildings or exhibition stands curiously devoid of people.
6. Colour  tinges- strong colour from light reflected from a wall, drapes, background paper,  lighting results in apparently changing the colour of the product.
7. Low res files.
8. Finger over lens.
9. Image lacks any interest, is uninspiring - in short it's boring.
10. The product is not the star of the shot.

So what do we need?
1. Interesting, relevant and engaging images.
2. Technically good quality - in focus, hi-res and reasonably lit would be nice.
3. Good composition - at least to show the product to good effect.

One final thought. Are the people who take the images ever given any brief other than can you take some photos for us? Why not tell them what you need? If you have equipped a building  interior how about some shots of the exterior to set the scene, or people using the place rather than an empty room. Would close up products shots help tell the story? What about pictures of the client for testimonials?
Hopefully with some brief the outcome will be more usable.

Keep on blogging

This blog began as a trial almost 9 years ago.

When I started in August 2006 it was an experiment in several ways. First of all to gain experience with the blog platform itself, secondly to use a free and informal route to talk about our business - the business of technical marketing - and thirdly to discover whether there was enough to say going forward.  

The blogger platform, now owed by Google, is pretty easy to use and over the years I have also changed the design a few times. Currently I  have gone for a simple black text on  a white page with red the only use of colour, in a style that reflects the graphical look of the Madmen TV series. There is a reason for this too and that is the look is used in an upcoming book. 

I  have opted for blogging weekly, partly because the blog is syndicated weekly to recipients of an eNews service and partly to have something interesting to say each time. Some business bloggers write daily which must demand not just a lot of time, but a  constant quest for something new to say. Over the years I have generated a lot of content which I am in the process of publishing as a book. So the blog has achieved some useful business goals all without cost other than my time. I have also been able to blog when travelling overseas to maintain continuity.

But like newsletters for example, it is hard to discern how much it is read. Of course the Google Analytics  give me numbers, but few people sign up as followers - well there is no real need for that - and few comment either, so mainly one way traffic. But then so were printed newsletters except they don't have any SEO value.

Before the blog, further back in 2000 we published a book - Technical Marketing Techniques - at a time when marketing stood on the threshold of a new age - an age dominated by the Internet. The new title - Technical Marketing:Ideas for Engineers - currently being edited, is a story of three parts. Retained is a whole section discussing the rationale of marketing, a new section integrating offline with online marketing communications techniques and a wide ranging final section based on content from this blog evaluating new ideas, new tools and new opportunities.  I will keep you posted.

Is RSS making a come back?

Just when it seemed RSS  had gone the way of other promising technical developments and headed into oblivion, it seems to be enjoying a revival.

Or perhaps it never really went away. We have been using RSS for at least 10 years for news feeds - maybe longer - and required an RSS Reader which few could bother with loading, but when built into browsers became easier to use. Why RSS? Basically as a news feed from our Virtual News Offices to provide headline news flashes. OK - lets step back ten years or so. With self publication the "news" available has become a torrent - the problem how to keep in touch with the information you need and not sink beneath this torrent of content, little of which is actually of interest.

At the time we figured that many people typically would want to monitor news streams from various sources and RSS offered the opportunity to create their own customised headline service. For example news from their professional world - new technologies, product introductions, industry news  etc. Then news from about their special interests - sport and their favourite team, music, entertainment etc. General news of events, politics, weather and finally social news from their friends and relatives. RSS  offered the opportunity to collate headlines from all these sources, quickly scan them and follow up those of most interest and ignore the rest.

The BBC  offers a good description of RSS, Facebook offers an RSS option too, but the RSS button seems to have gone from a lot of company web sites if it was ever there at all. In today's content overload, perhaps they are missing a trick in not offering an RSS news feed.

Small office, home office, no office

With 5 million UK small businesses, there are more and more people working outside of traditional offices.

What was once called the SOHO - small office, home office sector was still a dedicated space in a home, or shed, but today for many workers the office is actually an iBook or lap top plus iPhone. The home office has its problems - typically other residents scheduling deliveries for example. Very disruptive to concentration to break off and deal with someone's Amazon shipment, often a neighbour's as the delivery guys have figured out people working from home. So it was time to road test the iBook office.

There was a fair amount of planning to ensure communications would be as smooth as possible, starting with organising an Internet connection in Spain. Checking on to the Ryanair flight at Luton with a bar code on my iPhone - printed documents were not required any more than I needed a printer. I did back up all my client files on a portable drive and that was it to run the business offshore for three weeks.

The age of the NO - No Office - is here!

Marketing the politicians

With political parties busily promoting their brands in this General Election, how are they doing so far?

 The UK General Election of 2015 has been more notable for the  arguments over the staging of the televised debates than the core values the parties represent. It is a bit like the argument some decades ago of the peace talks for Vietnam where the shape of the negotiating table was the only topic for months. The first TV debate lined up leaders of the two major parties - Conservatives and Labour (note the previously re-branded "New" Labour has been dropped - plus the Liberals. To these three established parties were added UKIP's leader which as winner of the last European election in recognition of a new disruptive market entrant and the Green Party who had a single MP in the last Parliament. Then curiously leaders of nationalist parties from only two of the UK's constituent countries - Scotland and Wales - but none from Northern Ireland or England. The leaders' debates are important because the leaders have become the public face of their individual political brands. A bit like the role played by Sir Richard Branson as the personification of the Virgin brand. Three wealthy ex public school boys, university educated, career politicians, who could easily be inter changeable with each other but without the charisma or flair of a Branson. Then UKIP's leader who clearly is different and three ladies - Australian, Welsh and Scottish.

The 3 biggest parties held 94% of the seats in the last parliament - the Scottish Nationalists held just  6 seats, Welsh 3, UKIP 2 and Greens 1 -  less than 2% between them and fewer than the Northern Ireland parties. The TV  debates gave the niche parties a level playing field opportunity with the leading brands; a debate that the big players by no means dominated.

Meanwhile what of the target audience - the voters? Well first of all, the target market. With the two nationalist brands only contesting 15% between them of the total seats at the 2010 election there was a mismatch between the target market and target audience. In other words two of the seven did not compete in 85% of the market, but were given a platform to disrupt those who did compete in the total market.

Next a quick look at the product which traditionally is documented in the party manifesto - a series of promises for legislation in the next parliament. I suspect few voters buy, let alone read the manifestos and rely on news coverage for the 'elevator speech' - 30 second version. Big issues such as the economy,  the NHS, immigration etc are hardly differentiated in product terms and mainly disputed in costs of each programme which run into billions of pounds. The target audience has little concept of what a billion pounds looks like - a suitcase full of notes, a van load, more? And is more interested in how things work for them - getting a doctor or hospital appointment, buying an affordable home, decent education etc. There are no big ideas it seems, no real political ideology or inspiration, no Churchill with the rhetoric to translate into memorable words, Thatcher with the concept of a property owning, shareholder democracy, or for that matter Benn to articulate socialism. Apple's Steve Jobs created a desire for the company's products, not how much they cost. The leaders of the 3 old parties debate the nuts and bolts and costs.

So building a trusted brand comes down to the leaders being able to motivate the target audience - so far it is pretty dull stuff.

Media streaming and other technologies

Panelists positioned against the light appear in silhouette

At times it can seem that  technology solutions are ahead of the need for them and marketers are hunting around looking for ideas to utilise these new platforms and tools.

The Internet has been the catalyst for major changes in marketing, but for many this adds up to a company web site, email campaigns and dipping into the social network pool at best. There are lots more options for marketing content, often demanding their own share of the budget and some of these have already come and largely gone. Example. QR codes for a while appeared on ads in the trade press, bill-boards and even on products. Some still do. The technology was great for customers to quickly be transported from the media of print to the Internet and given access to masses of further information. And yet could people be bothered to switch on the app on their iPhone? For news feeds RSS was a great idea too and for a while was built into browsers, but outside the techie world is not widely used.  Then there is Blippar - the window to augmented reality. "We turn your phone into a magic lens giving you a whole new, interactive view on the physical world around you using Augmented Reality and Image-Recognition technologies." Podcasts and apps have been around for some time, so too webinars and streaming video. In fact a whole raft of new tools. But in the b-2-b marketing world are many people using them?

Last week one of our clients was participating in a panel discussion from a conference in London which was streamed live to an audience watching on the Internet. It raised some technical issues in my mind and some marketing ones as well. This particular example simply shot in the venue and clearly without the benefit of suitable lighting - participants sat in front of large panoramic windows, so appeared in silhouette. The biggest problem was transmission, but unlike buffering where the action pauses while the download catches up, parts of the presentation were skipped once the feed restarted. Technical issues aside what about the marketing value? Is the subject sufficiently compelling for your target audience to spend 30 minutes or more viewing? It seems to me this calls for more research before spending marketing money on them to discover the benefits they deliver and the value to your clients.

Political advertising - a shop window for agencies?

General Election campaigns have often provided  exposure for the advertising agency as well as the client.

Campaign - the advertising world's newspaper - describes the impact of the Saatchi & Saatchi poster for Margaret Thatcher's  Conservative Party, "It only appeared on a handful of sites, was backed by a minuscule budget and its imagery was faked. Yet it's fair to say that the 1979 poster for the Conservative Party declaring "Labour isn't working" was a game-changer." As with political poster campaigns it wasn't intended to be posted on every bill-board in the country, but to generate PR and news interest. It certainly achieved that, enraged the then Labour Government and did no harm to the advertising agency's creative reputation either. What the ad did was combine a cleverly crafted headline with a memorable image - a subtle play on words that was effective in communicating a single message.

Jobs are high on the agenda for the 2015 General Election campaign too. Politicians would have us believe they create jobs which in the public sector they may do, but in the private sector the best they can do is create an economic environment in which business can thrive. Here the strategy and messages get a bit mixed up. Business Matters reports, "Now that parliament has dissolved, speculation over the outcome of the general election is rife - and what this holds for businesses. The big debates seem to be dominated by the corporate giants who are getting a huge amount of airtime. But considering that one third of private sector turnover in the UK comes from small businesses, according to ONS, and that in 2014 over 99 per cent of UK private sector businesses can be classed as SMEs (Parliament statistics), it makes sense to place this debate in the context of small and mid-sized companies. Seeing as innovative SMEs have been praised as “growth engines” of the UK economy in the political arena, what can the incoming government do to reward and support entrepreneurship, and, in turn, further economic growth?"

The fact is that much employment legislation originates in the EU in Brussels, not the Westminster Parliament and this growing body of law discourages entrepreneurial start-ups hiring staff.  So instead a different business model operates - a network of small businesses and individuals providing services to each other. SMEs and micro businesses are equally concerned with tax, but unlike the big businesses and the CBI they do contribute tax, not avoid it. Not only do most small companies pay tax, but through VAT collect it as well. Most MPs and candidates at this election have never worked in business (or at all) tending instead to emerge from university, into a political research job and to become an MP.  Corporate big business through take overs and amalgamations - Shell and BG being the latest - are more likely to result in job losses, than job creation, so are these tax avoiding, job cutting companies who are not even voters the right people to woo?

Without a clear strategy of addressing the SMEs - where individuals do have a vote - we are unlikely to see ground breaking ads of the calibre of the 1979 one.

New report says engineers are top earning billionaires

According to an analysis of the Forbes 100 rich list 22 per cent of the world's richest people studied engineering as an undergraduate degree, which is almost twice as many as any other discipline.

Good news then if engineering was your first degree, but probably not so good if you are working as an engineer. The coverage of the analysis in CityA.M.  also claims engineering billionaires are richer than other billionaires.

In a long anticipated sequel to our book Technical Marketing Techniques due for publication this year, the new title Technical Marketing Ideas for Engineers whilst not promising an insight into how to become a billionaire offers a more modest path into marketing.
 

Engineers also work successfully in many other careers ... marketing is one of them. My own transition from engineering apprentice to a marketing role was informed by practical  experience of engineering on the shop floor and in the laboratory. My employers offered experience in the many departments that a major British electrical manufacturing company then operated, including manufacturing, research, even HR or Personnel as it was then known. It didn't take long to notice that the people who actually set the agenda were the bright young men from head office, the product managers. And they worked in the marketing department. On graduation I worked for just a few weeks more back in the research laboratories before being recruited as an assistant product manager located in the company's head office in London's West End. I exchanged my white lab coat for a suit, enrolled on marketing and management courses and learned the job of new product development under the guidance of experienced, senior product managers. In fact my move from engineering to marketing was similar to most of my colleagues who also had the same grounding in the methods, analysis and planning of engineering. 

Infographics - do they work for you? Is a video review better?

Infographics is a term recently back in the marketing spotlight used to describe the visual presentation of information, data or knowledge in an easy to comprehend way.

In fact infographics make me think of long gone parents evenings at my children's school where posters of historic events, geography, science etc displayed information, data or knowledge in an easy to comprehend way. Hold on. Does this suggest that the target audiences need pictures to make them look at this stuff, so we have to treat them like children? Early reading books are mainly picture books with captions, but as they progress and grow up children move on to text only books. An interesting infographic on the subject of Content Marketing was so long it set me thinking that traditional bar charts might actually display the data more usefully.

Then what type of person needs the information made pretty anyway? Engineers have traditionally received data in tables or charts, dimensions marked on drawings and descriptions in specification terminology - all delivered in a data sheet. Where the operation benefits from illustration then video is in my mind much more effective.

An interesting observation here is that a class of apparently amateur reviewers has emerged to provide their opinion on the product - for example electronic gadgets for home and office. The manufacturers send them a 'review sample' which they unwrap, set up, test and offer an opinion as to value and effectiveness. In short a fairly independent assessment for minimal expense and probably saves a lot of calls to the support team too! 

How many readers get beyond your headline?

In today's time scarce, content rich environment the headline can be crucial for readers deciding whether to go on and read the article, or skip to the next item.

People in all walks of life and professions have a need to keep themselves well informed and for b-2-b communications this will probably include prospective buyers of the company's product or services, specifiers, installers and stockists. The target audience in other words need to be well informed about the benefits of products and will be bombarded by messages from news feeds, email newsletters, advertising and articles. Often the headline is the filter - read or bin the news item?

Until recently PR managers wrote headlines to catch the eye of editors, who in turn wrote something else to attract the attention of their readers. But with the swing to self publication, the press office now needs to write headlines to attract the attention of their own target  audience. And this might be the headline for a news story published on their web site news office, the subject line of an email or a 140 character tweet on Twitter.

The headline will offer the promise of the value for the reader contained in the  content below the headline and rapidly establish relevance, but without giving it all away. It is reckoned only 1 in 5 get past the headline. And a survey of some 2 billion page views revealed 55% of visitors spent less than 15% on a page!

So what works? Numbers and personalization apparently. Headlines such as "10 ways to reduce heating bills" or "Ways you can pay less for heating". There are plenty of variations on the theme. The use of alliteration is memorable for example - "Heating bills: - ten top tips to save money." In fact there are already proven established headlines that can be re-purposed to suit.

Then of course there are the pun headlines beloved of the tabloid press - The Sun in particular.

Interactive outdoor - new tech billlboards

If you thought billboard advertising was 48 sheet posters, then take a look at interactive large digital advertising.

UKIP's spoof poster to Tory one

Traditionally in a general election campaign, political parties have favoured billboards, for advertising - the famous Saatchi brothers "Labour isn't working" is claimed to have won the General Election for Mrs Thatcher's Conservative party. Today the poster - and it is the poster, not posters - doesn't appear overnight as a nationwide campaign,  but on the back of a vehicle which serves as a backdrop for what in effect is a PR event. But this UK General Election is no longer a two horse race between Labour and Conservatives and this week the Conservatives duly unveiled a poster showing Labour leader Ed Milliband in the jacket pocket of former Scottish Nationalist leader Alex Salmond in a reference to the possibility of a Labour/SNP coalition. To this the UK Independence Party re-purposed the concept to illustrate Conservative leader David Cameron in the pocket of Euro boss Jean Claude Junker. Of course, whether most British voters would recognise the President of the European Commission is doubtful.

Digital and interactive

Meanwhile billboard advertising has gone digital and not just digital - interactive. Ocean Outdoor has recently teamed up with a charity and is using facial recognition technology to inter act with the advertisement. Read the story here.

Interestingly where advertising in print media is somewhat on the back foot, outdoor advertising seems to be embracing new technology.

Trying to unbundle package prices

Three things buyers are really interested in - does it do what I want, what is the price, and can I have it now? Product, Price and Place.

Known as the four P's of marketing - with the other being 'Promotion.' Recently I  have had cause to try to unravel the price of telephone calls which proved pretty challenging! Along with energy companies and banks, telecoms companies are pushing hard to dispense with paper bills and in fact charge for the service of providing them. OK so once the bill is retrieved from the Internet we find a typical quarterly bill runs to 7 or 8 pages of A4.

Payments are made monthly, charges for 'price packages' are monthly in advance and calls outside the   plan charged in arrears. Price increases involve refunding a portion of the advance charge, charging the new higher amount and allocating to the portion of the quarter to which the increase applies. So all straight forward so far. These are then totted up compared with your monthly payments, adjusted for any credit or debit brought forward and there is what you owe - or in credit if you are lucky. Now, try un-bundling the cost of calls from the packages so you can figure out how much it costs each time you call someone.

This price bundling gets even harder to work out for satellite TV  subscriptions. Deals of the discount type are reserved for new customers, whereas deals for existing customers are it seems opportunities to buy additional services, not to be rewarded for loyalty, by discounts. Banks similarly keep their loyal customers on the lowest interest rates for savings. Energy bills present similar challenges. It is also quite difficult to discuss price because the numbers you are given to call are for telesales people, anxious to upsell the package. A 30 minute call leads nowhere except back to the beginning when you are offered to be put through to the right department.

Perhaps it is this  pricing strategy that has created an opportunity for price comparison sites which seem to be running major marketing campaigns right now. Some of these TV  commercials can only be described as bizarre - from talking meerkats (compare the meerkat - get it?) to Sharon Osbourne holding a dog while a folically challenged man in suit jacket and lady's shorts and stiletos flounces past. Would you trust these guys to figure out a good price deal? Or is this really another sales ploy? 

Is advertising more than selling a dream?

"Advertising is based on one thing: Happiness. It's the smell of a new car. It's the freedom from fear. It's a billboard that screams the reassurance that, whatever you are doing, it's OK."

These are the words of Don Draper, creative director of Sterling Cooper in the TV  series Mad Men - or "boxed set" as current jargon now describes the format. It is a 'definition' from the sixties where Madison Avenue created consumer desire and aspirational heights that extolled the virtue of products from cigarettes to presidential candidates. Advertising portrayed a happy world, a permanently sunny upland which could be accessed through the purchase of these desirable products.  Advertising was about manipulation through great creativity.

Of course in the b-2-b world we had less glamorous products and much smaller budgets. However the advertising creativity today would be judged just as politically incorrect as Sterling Cooper extolling the benefits of cigarettes. Our target audience was largely electricians, the white van men who read the SUN newspaper and bought their products from electrical wholesalers. At the wholesaler's counter were copies of our free newspaper which moved the Sun's 'Page 3' girl to the front page with a full page image of her caressing a fluorescent light fitting, or luminaire as they are now called. Trade magazines carried their fair share of advertisements featuring models gazing longingly at, or draped across various electrical products. Many of the products were basically boxes with a label on. As a product manager the photo session could offer a pleasant change to the usual daily fare!

But even for Madison Avenue the limitless expense account fuelled lifestyle of an advertising agency is long past. As Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP has put it, today it is 'Maths Men' not 'Mad Men' in an increasingly digital world driven by data and digital publishing platforms.

The book of the blog

As a spin-off from this weekly marketing blog, a book is now in production, in so far as the text has now been handed over to the publishers.

Why a book? Sometimes a book is just easier to handle - flick through pages, bookmark references, share etc. OK,  so all these features and more are offered with digital versions, but somehow a book is nice to have. May be it's a generation thing having spent all my life with books there is a great familiarity with the format.

The book is divided into 3 main sections starting with a quick review of the rationale for marketing and why the sale of goods and services is not just a simple relationship between supply and demand. Section 2 looks at communication methods where here the digital options blend in with the traditional and are evaluated against marketing benchmarks. The third and final section is part of an on-going conversation, review and ideas of a still evolving digital marketing landscape.

 Over a period of up to 8 years I have experimented with a number of social media platforms to see how they operate and to help make an informed judgment of their value. This is an on-going experiment, the social media tools are constantly evolving, but their business models now depend on advertising revenue. It might be argued that financial success relies on advertising dollars and they have lost their ‘cool’ amongst the younger generation who have migrated to more edgy apps such as Whatapp, Soundcloud and Ello – the latter a rebellion against advertising.  I  set up and ‘road tested’ a few of the leading social media platforms which offer publishing online platforms that can be used for marketing content. The resource allocated to building and maintaining a presence has to be evaluated as you would for traditional print media. Questions such as, does the publication reach my target market, what is the investment and does it work?

 In short it's a constantly changing picture and the book will accordingly continue here - online.

The rise and rise of small businesses

The enterprise culture is being driven forward by small businesses in the UK, not big business it seems.

Two different  items that came my way this week highlighted how small business was contributing to the recovery of the economy. Lord Young reporting to the Prime minister noted that the last report into small business was the Bolton Report back in 1971 which concluded the small business sector of some three quarters of a million businesses at the time was in terminal decline and doomed for extinction. Today that pessimistic view is transformed with 5 million small businesses, 19 out of 20 employing less than 10 people, are leading the growth in jobs. Large firms he says are still important, they employ a third of the work force but thanks to technology they too need less people. Lord Young makes another interesting observation that the skills needed to work in small firms are entrepreneurial, while teamwork is what large firms need.

The second item was a card dropped through the door with the headline - " Your other office" -  promoting funkbunk - "the alternative workspace for people who work from home. "  Funkbunk (I  know - don't ask) is a workhub with "hot desking" facilities and meeting space. They claim 13% of people already work from home with 60% of employees forecast to join them in the next decade and they are providing a base for those who don't like the isolation of working alone and are better motivated in the entrepreneurial workspace they have created.

Big business meanwhile is getting bad press all the time - tax avoidance being the current worry. This does not even mention the still large public sector and the legislators in the European Union who write the laws for employment along with everything else!

So what does it all mean for marketing? Perhaps it is time to take a fresh look at where businesses are headed, who runs them, where they are and how marketing can accelerate their growth and success. 

More content posted but less engagement

With marketing teams churning out more content a report suggests this has resulted in less engagement.

A problem previously highlighted on this blog is that with the diversity of user contributed content, particularly through social media channels, there is a thirst for more volume of content published and published more frequently. It doesn't necessarily follow that there is more news of interest to the consumers of this information.

Turn the clock back a decade or so and and the PR person usually held regular meetings with the client to tease out news stories.  It was not uncommon in the b-2-b world for the client to start with the statement that 'we haven't got any news'. The role of the PR person was to probe recent projects that had some unusual features, the use of new technology, major contract wins, new appointments, exhibition plans and the rest to draw up a list of potentially interesting stories. Then to research the story and produce a few deemed worthy of a press release. After all the necessary reviews and approvals the final version and accompanying glossy photograph were mailed to the editors of the relevant trade press. And they dropped most of them in the trash. Approximately one in twenty went forward for publication.

Back to the present. The editorial waste bin no longer weeds out the junk news from the genuine stuff - the problem is now finding enough
to fill the growing options for self published news. The thing is the same old issues remain - there is not a lot of exciting content any more than there was before. But now there is nobody to bin the trivial stuff. Instead the consumer becomes the ultimate editor and soon learns to switch most of it to the junk box.

The report by Track Maven discovered that between the start of 2013 and end of 2014 marketers increased content by a whopping 78%, but engagement measured by clicks, likes, comments, retweets, favourites etc fell by 60%.  Even more telling 23% of content received no engagement at all! And 43% received less than 10 interactions.

The Inventor

Big organisations tend to attract large numbers of pitches from people who claim to have invented a new wonder product.

In previous marketing roles within large multi-national corporations I was frequently called upon to help company directors evaluate these inventions. Today the TV show Dragon's Den provides some outlet for the enthusiasm of the inventor and would be entrepreneur plus the opportunity to win investment capital and just as important expert advice. Typically the approach was made to the most senior people in our organization based on the fear that they didn't in years to come want to be known as the person who failed to recognise something which would emerge as a winner. In my experience, most ideas were neither novel or good and the inventors deluded and whacky.

The pitches were highly unprofessional and the inventors  hated being questioned and seemed amazed we didn't bite their hands off to buy the product. One example was someone who had taken a tungsten halogen flood light that we sold by the tens of thousands for under £10, attached a length of electrical conduit as a stand and a car wheel complete with tyre as a base. This was sitting in the chairman's office to which I  had been summoned to give an opinion. The inventor in this case was chairman of a major company!

A more bizarre example was an Australian who had a small package the size of a box of matches which allegedly contained a high frequency electronic ballast. A large audience had been assembled to witness the demonstration, which apparently showed a fluorescent tube being dimmed. We were all kept at least 10 yards away so we couldn't really see what he was up to. It was not a new technology at the time but was kind of complicated with patents  so we were evaluating different ideas. However, our inventor refused to discuss the technology or let us peek at the electronics without paying a million pound first. Not surprisingly neither he or his invention were ever seen again!

The Wall Planners have arrived

Some trade magazines around this time of year are mailed out with a folded up Wall Planner.

Included in the polythene envelope, along with the advertising material that many recipients open above a waste bin, are the 2015 wall planners. In case you are unfamiliar with the wall planner, they are basically a year's calendar surrounded by advertisements. Advertising space is often sold on the promise that the brand is in front of the target audience for a full a twelve months. Great value. Except, how many people actually stick them on an office wall. How many people actually have an office wall anyway? 

With many people working in open plan offices, at low level partitioned work stations or in a corner office with glass walls, there is limited wall space to stick these large posters. And be honest they don't look particularly elegant and get shabbier as the year progresses. But people still advertise on these wall planners. Why? Even before electronic calendars that sync with various desk top and portable devices the value was doubtful.

What is amazing that wall planners haven't gone the way of Reader Response cards and Fax backs. At least with those you could track the response!

The Book of the Blog

Publishing in 2015 a new book from Technical Marketing drawing on content from our blog.