ThinkingSparks

Alexis and JR

On the news yesterday morning was an item about Shell being sued for being involved in the death of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. On several of the news casts it was told that Shell had changed their ways and were taking their social responsibility seriously when doing business in Nigeria.

As it was only 14 years ago that mr. Saro-Wiwa was hanged for his activism, I was wondering why behaving ethical and socially responsible was such a hard thing to do back then. And is it so much easier now.

Yesterday at the end of the day while driving - the best time for thinking - I was wondering if we have had good role models in business for behaving responsibly and ethically. Maybe we do now and maybe there were examples in the past, but a whole generation grew up with Dallas and Dynasty. And I was wondering if Alexis and JR may have colored our view on how (oil) business should be done. You would certainly think so when hearing stories like those about Shell.

Too productive - 2

I have been productive the last half year, but not here. Sparkers did an assignment for the City of The Hague and I became a partner in an import/export company FreshPepper. We sell the food supplement Vital Greens; the Australian market leader in the category "Greens". Greens are food supplement formulas consisting of phyto nutrients.

In the mean time I have taken on another assignment doing employer branding so I am still being productive. Just on other fronts.

More thoughts on FreshPepper, employer branding and the topic of my thesis to come....

Too productive

At the moment I do not have too much time keeping track of my favorite blogs. I try not to have too many of them because too many feeds just do not fit into the time I have. However, the blogs that I have selected, produce so much that it is too intimidating (click on the picture to see the 467 unread...) to open my Feedreader. And when I do I simply close it again as not to be confronted with so much, too much information.

What does that mean? Is it overkill on the part of the productive blogger? Are they becoming ineffective because of it? Or should I have a different approach or strategy? Fewer blogs I subscribe to?

Suggestions anyone?

The alibi of schmauthenticity

Tom Asacker has problems with the concept of authenticity. He thought about it for a long time and wrote an article to express his point: Authenticity Schmauthenticity! He doesn’t believe in it. He believes that consumers want a great experience even if the inauthenticity hits them in the head.

I posted on authenticity before and referred to Tom here and here and here again. All my posts on authenticity can be found here. Basically my point is that most consumers do not care about authenticity, but:

1. Consumers do care about the consequences of organizations not being authentic; they do not like to be taken for a fool.
2. Being authentic means living up to your promise. A lot of organizations don’t. Again, consumers care about not having their expectations lived up to.
3. Authenticity makes it easier for for brand and organizational culture and behavior to align and be consistent over time. Especially for organizations that bring an experience. Inauthenticity requires good actors to give a consistent performance.
4. Authenticity has to do with Corporate Social Responsibility. Inauthentic CSR is worse than no CSR at all. Just like claiming authenticity when one is not is a big no-no.
5. All in all authenticity in itself means nothing. There can be good authenticity and bad authenticity.

So I think there is more of a nuance to the concept of authenticity then Asacker’s presents. His position creates an alibi for every organization that wants to be untruthful or even misleading; the consumer doesn’t want authenticity or truth. If organizations are given this alibi not to be genuine, where will that lead? To tobacco companies bamboozling their consumers into the false belief that smoking is a pleasant experience without any effect on their health…..? I think we passed that point a long long time ago…………………

Molblog

It has been quiet for the last month. I have been "auditioning" for Molblog (Dutch only) over the last month. Molblog is the Marketing On Line weblog of the Dutch journal on marketing. It is also the most popular blog in the Netherlands.

Molblog is different from ThinkingSparks as the latter will try to give food for thought of just present my questions on certain topics. Molblog has much more of a signaling function of what is going on in marketing at the moment. Interestingly enough my posts that come close to what I do on ThinkingSparks generate more comments then when I post current marketing happenings.

My auditioning was rewarded with a spot on the molblog team. :-) It means I have to divide my time between those two blogs. So after this month long break, I will be back.

A salesman’s advice on building brands

The tension between sales and marketing is a given. The short term results vs. long term planning and goals; like a brand for instance.

A pleasant change is dr. Phil look-alike, salesman Jeffrey Gitomer who seems to know his way around brands and in the process tells advertising agencies the way it is. Short but sweet!

Leave before the gospel

According to the Church of the Customer ‘positioning is a marketing facade that paints a picture idealized by the marketer, not necessarily the customer’. The power of customer evangelism is, according to the author, many times greater then anything dreamed up by marketers.

They use OwenBloggers.com to illustrate their point. Students at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management found themselves enrolled in a better school than they had expected. They decided they could promote their school better than the marketers of the school itself and started a weblog.

Reading the post of the Church of the Customer I wonder about several things:

• Isn’t customer evangelism simply an extreme form of word of mouth where Web 2.0 makes creates possibilities that customers didn’t have before?
• Isn’t the Vanderbilt example just an example of poor positioning, poor marketing, and poor management of expectations?
• If there is no positioning or no marketing, how does the customer know that there is something to evangelize?

To me positioning is making a choice of what and where you want to be. And subsequently as an organization you give everything within your power to get there. When you do it right, your customers join you and help you reach your goals. Customer evangelists then sing the gospel of your brand and praise the dreams of the marketer. When you poorly execute the positioning, your choir of evangelist will have left before the gospel.

(Post in Dutch)

Managing big reputations

Recently I had an interesting experience. I was invited to come and talk about filling an interim position at KLM. They wanted to start a reputation management program and were looking for someone to help them implement it. The conversation was fun and interesting and focused on one of the three main ingredients of the program: corporate social responsibility.

KLM did not offer me the interim position. I was knowledgable, asked the right questions, I was the almost ideal candidate. I possess one flaw however. I am overweight and KLM felt that this would undermine my effectiveness within their organization in establishing a corporate social responsibility program.

When I heard this I just shrugged as it is a fact that I am overweight. I cannot dispute it. I find it hard to believe however that people in general or KLM in particular are this shallow, narrow minded and disrespectful of people.

As a professional I wonder how this practice of discrimination based on appearances fits in with reputation management and corporate social responsibility. For the latter you have to have some sense of morality and discrimination is definitely not a sign of ethical behavior. As to a corporate communication department rejecting someone based on body size, I wonder if the management of the reputation of KLM is in good hands with them.

Chance at a $ 25.000 MBA scholarship

Along with other people I am one of the sponsors of the "The Minority Talent Scholarship for the Americas" offering a chance to do an international MBA at Nyenrode Business University (founded 1946) in The Netherlands. For more information check out the link.

This year we could not give out the scholarship as no students applied for it. I am asking to the readers of this weblog to help us in finding eligible student for the coming year and please forward this information. The deadline is less than two months away.

Of course people could always chose to (not) attend NoBS, but then they would miss out on the experience of going to business school in a beautiful castle in The Netherlands.

Nip tuck marketing

I wrote about attending the launch of the Dutch magazine Vrouw the other day. The day after the lunch I checked on Telegraaf (the largest Dutch newspaper) what their journalists had to say about the launch.

Apart from my observations on networking, I observed the event and its goings on. There was a fair amount of people. I would estimate between 80 and 100. In next day’s newspaper (which is the same publisher as the magazine) they made it seem that the launch had been overrun by an enthusiastic crowd of female readers. They were bending the truth a little I would say. And of course it’s not the only organization that does it. Individuals do it too.

Some time ago I read an interview with an acquaintance of mine in a business magazine. I do not know him well enough to know all his inner secrets, but I know enough. Enough to know that he wasn’t completely truthful in the interview. I have seen other people do it too. And I have seen people believe them.

I understand why people and organizations do it. It makes for a better story. When I know the truth behind the story however, I wonder if misrepresenting the facts makes for a better story. I sure do not see the benefits in some cases. What about being found out? Is enhancing the truth understood? Is it ok and accepted just like fake boobs and botox filled faces?

Nip tuck marketing sure is at odds with the whole concept of authenticity. Can these two concepts exist together or are they mutually exclusive? Who offers an opinion?