An allegory continued...

A week later, the doors again hiss open and the man in the suit walks in. This time, he has his wife with him. The salesman sees them coming, checks in vain for any colleagues and realises - despairingly - that he’s alone.

“Morning, Sir.” the salesman says, mustering some enthusiasm from the depths of his soul.

“Morning,” says the man, “this is my wife. She’s the one who really makes the decisions round here.”

The salesman and the man’s wife shake hands, sitting down across the desk from each other.

“Right.” says the wife, “About this car...”

“Ah yes,” our hero responds, “the car. It’s here - I’m just having it brought round for you. The mechanics have been working on it all week to get it ready. All we need to do now is sort out how you’d like to pay.”

“Pay?!” she says. “What do you mean, “pay”? We wanted to make sure it was right for us first, before we bought it. I mean, we’ve got three other cars we’re trying out at the moment before we make a decision.”

“Right. So we’ve spent a week working solidly to get your car prepared as you wanted, now you’re telling me you have three others to try out and you don’t want to pay for it anyway?”

“Yes, that’s right,” she says, nodding, with a smile, “you prepare the car the way we asked, then we drive it around to see if we like it. If we like it, we might buy it - but it really depends on how much we’ve got after finishing building the conservatory.”

The salesman stares at her, blankly. “OK, you want a test drive, yes?” he asks.

“Oh no,” says the man, “we want you to build the car to our specification, then we drive it around for a bit along with three other cars we’re trying out. Then, after three months, we might buy it.”

“...if we’ve got enough after the conservatory, darling.” the wife adds.

The salesman - who needs to pay the rent on his showroom, his staff’s salaries and the taxman his ever-expanding wedge, quietly walks to the doors and turns the sign round to read “Closed”. Then, he walks out of the showroom to find a nice, quiet, stress-free job in bomb-disposal.

The curse of Dickens

I was amazed to get a letter from my bank this week. 

Apparently, I'm in credit on my credit card.  Leaving aside the rather inverted idea of a card that gets you into debt being a 'credit' card, the letter was a bit grim.  It had that finger-wagging, milk-monitorish tone that bank admin staff sometimes adopt.  

It was a classic admin letter - written entirely from the bank's point of view, treating me as a bit thick (ok, I am, but I still don't like being called thick) and making no attempt to build any sort of relationship with me.  You'd have thought, by now, we'd have learned a bit more about customer communications.  Apparently not at HSBC.

The note was also a bit convoluted:

"You may be unaware the bank requests you do not place your account into credit; this is stated in our Terms."

I particularly liked the capitalisation of "Terms" - they must be ever so important if they need a capital letter.  I also liked the implication of "You may be unaware..." - it's always good to call your customers morons; goes down reeeeeally well. 

Of course, like every admin letter a bank ever sends, it was in the third person: "the bank requests".  In my opinion, the only person in the UK who is allowed to use the third person is the Queen.  And of course, "requests" sounds more pompous than "asks",  so the bank thinks it must be better.

Now, what was wrong with:

"We've noticed you've overpaid your credit card account.  Please call us and we'll transfer your money to your bank account - or you could even use it to start a cash or equity ISA with us..."

Simple.  Easy.  Understandable.  And even an attempt to sell the customer something.  Hell, why not?

But it got better...

"Therefore would you please contact us, supplying a UK sterling bank code and account number, so we may return these funds to you."

Why?  Why be so bloody pompous and Dickensian?  I'm sure that Paula Stevens from Card Operations doesn't speak like this.  I'll bet she's good fun, enjoys a laugh, uses the word "money" more often than "funds" and would never call a customer "unaware" (although I'll bet she thinks a lot of them are utter morons - and fair game, we probably are).  I'll bet if I met her she'd be good company.  So why does she write like this? 

  

It's not Paula's fault.  The blame lies firmly on the polished glass desktops of her bosses.  They think it's OK to invest no money or time at all in admin letters.  

"So what?  They're just admin letters, aren't they?"  

Well, no they're bloody well not.  

This is the first letter I've EVER had from HSBC that's been signed by a real person - thank you Paula.  But with it, all the branding work your agencies have done has been dropped in the shredder.  You tell me in your ads that you're all friendly and nice and modern.  You tell me that you care about me as a customer.  You tell me that you're different from all the other banks.  But you're telling me porkies - this letter shows you're just the same, stuffy old bank that you always were.

How much did HSBC spend on its brand last year?  It'll be in the millions in the UK alone.  And every time a letter like this goes out, it's wasted.  The dissonance between the brand communication and the customer services communication is massive.  It's the corporate equivalent of a warm handshake followed by a slap round the face.

It would be less damaging if Stephen Green, the bank's Chairman, sat in his office stuffing fifties from the ad budget into the fireplace, handfuls at a time.

Here's a suggestion - invest just 1% of your above the line budget to make sure the brand message is carried through into ALL your customer communications.  The impact would be massive.  

Why creatives get stroppy.

Some pretty impressive teddy-throwing goes on in agencies.  

A copywriter once started a memo to his Production Director (who had screwed up his project by printing it on bog-paper) with the words "Where I come from, we have a saying.  A dog doesn't shit on his own doorstep..."  An Account Director got asked outside for a fight by another writer (our money was on the writer - a hard Glaswegian who now runs his own agency in New York).  In another client meeting, the agency responded to the client's "I don't like it" with "I don't give a fuck whether you like it or not - does it work?"

Why get so up-tight?  It's only a job, right?

No, not really.  It may not be fashionable to care about what you do, but good creatives do.  That's why they're creatives and not corporate lawyers, accountants or civil servants.  It's also why they get stroppy.  They really do give a toss about your brief for a bingo hall flyer or a new range of mild steel widgets.  If they didn't, they wouldn't spit the dummy.

A good creative should have pulled your product apart, found out what makes it work and what makes it appeal, then developed a way to communicate it.  They invest time, effort and sometimes even a bit of love in what they do.  If they're like our team here, they'll have thought about your stuff riding home from the studio, in the pub, over supper, out walking.  They'll have sketched stuff on the backs of envelopes and napkins.  It's not a job you can turn off when you lock the door and go home.  They'll have fought for their ideas over the studio meeting table and developed them further.

They give a damn, they really do.  That's why they throw strops.  And I hope they always do.

Sales & Marketing Director? The ultimate hospital pass?

Are you a sales and marketing director?  What did you do in a past life to deserve it?  Did your ancestors go around defiling cursed ancient Egyptian tombs or something? Seriously - whatever they're paying you isn't enough. 

This isn't creepery on our part - far from it.  It's simply that being the S&M Director (never a more appropriate combination of initials) is an almost impossible job.  Why?  Because although both elements of the job have a common goal (and in a perfect world should work together), in reality it ends up as either a constant feud between sales and marketing or a clear win for one side that ends up damaging the business.

The problem is that sales and marketing - although having a common fundamental aim - have different ways of going about it.

The two should work in harmony.  Marketing should set 'em up and sale should knock 'em down - but it so seldom happens that way.  The marketers think the salesforce are target-focused neanderthals who don't give a tuppenny toss about the brand.  The salesforce think the marketers are effete, namby-pamby dreamers who couldn't survive three minutes in the commercial world. 

I'm exaggerating to make a point, but that's it, isn't it?

The difficulty comes in the way the two parts of the organisation operate.  Sales is about NOW - it's about developing and closing prospects in the short term.  Targets are monthly, perhaps even daily.  That sort of target mentality doesn't give a damn about a brand development that'll pay off in a year, it wants to know about NOW.  Marketing takes (at least it should...) the longer view.  Where's the market moving?  What are the trends?  How do we anticipate and capitalise on them?  'Now' is no use to the marketer - she's interested in the future.  

At the most basic level, that means the salesforce resent every penny spent on the brand - they'd spend it on reducing the price of the product or service so it was simpler and quicker to sell.  The marketers pull their hair out as they see the salesforce devaluing the brand by discounting.   Stalemate. 

In our perfect world, the S&M Director manages to keep the contemptuous and feuding camps apart, using the tensions to his advantage.  But it doesn't happen that way.  One 'side' usually wins and rules.  I've worked in businesses where the Salesforce are the gods - and in others where the Marketers sit on Olympus and pass down their wisdom.  Neither worked well... 

You can see it so clearly in many industries - but let's look at the motorcycle industry.  Open any bike magazine and you can see pages and pages of ads.  Not one demonstrates an understanding of the brand - they're all 'sales NOW' ads.  Even Harley Davidson - a brand so powerful that its devotees will tattoo it into their skin - is leading on a price and finance offer.  Sales has won.  It always has in Bikeland.  Look back to copies of the motorcycle press from the 1940s and it's just the same - leading on price and platitude.  OK in the short term, but looking at the figures shows an industry with some serious long term problems. 

It's perhaps because the industry is dominated by concessionaires and importers who have always had a powerful sales focus.  And because they're concessionaires, trying to turn a profit, investing in the brand has seldom been their priority.  The saddest thing is that manufacturers seem to be happy to allow the brand to evolve at their hands rather than control its progress and development.

The thing is, you only have your brand.  Now, a technological advantage is eroded in months.  A price advantage is destroyed in hours.  Very, very few products are unique anymore and points of difference are tiny.  So what's left?  Brand.  That's it.  That's all that differentiates you from everyone else.  Harley understand it - big time.  The Japanese manufacturers?  Not yet - but they'll need to.

So if you're an S&M Director, you have our very, very best wishes.  Lion taming's an easier career.

What do you want?

"...the purpose of this document is to specify the marketing requirements for our new campaign..."

That's what the brief on my desk says.  It's pretty typical of most of the briefs on most agency desks in the UK, I guess.  It's what clients do.  They ring us or e-mail and ask for a website, a brochure, a PR piece.  But it's going too far.  Clients should be lazier when they brief.

What do I mean?

Those clients don't really want a brochure.  They want their sales figures to go up.  They don't really want a website, they want people to find them on the web and order things.  They don't really want a press release, they want to change someone's mind somewhere.  So what if a brochure won't do the job and a press release is a better idea?  It takes a brave agency to say "NO - no brochure for you Mr Client, here's a brand extension instead."  And it takes a very flexible client to listen.

Perhaps it's because the creative 'industry' (that term always makes me snigger) carves itself up into camps.  There are 'design agencies', and 'PR agencies' and 'advertising agencies'.  That makes clients think about outcomes, not objectives - makes them fix on the brochure rather than what the brochure should achieve.

But what if clients did what one of our hospitality clients has done this morning?  What if they came to us and just dumped a big, steaming problem on our desks?  This morning, our client said 'we want more people to visit our pubs on a certain night in the week - how could we get them to do it?'

No-one started talking about brochures or postcards or any other sort of outcome.  We all started talking about the problem, why it was, what caused it, what influenced it and how we could solve it.  Then, once we understood the problem, we started talking about the messages we'd need to use to solve it.  And it was only then that we began thinking about the outcomes. 

They got a solution that mixed PR, sales promotion and a bit of advertising.  They wouldn't have got that mix if they'd specified the outcome rather than telling us their objective.

Try it next time you brief your agency.

Search engine obfuscation

Maybe it's some of the people who 'write' for the web.  Maybe it's short deadlines or bad briefs.  Maybe it's just plain old lack of thinking (the bane of 'creatives' everywhere).  Whatever it is, I'm starting to hate - with a vengeance - writing that's been search engine 'optimised'.  You'd like an example?  Here you go...

Affordable Web Site Design for Anytown Businesses
If you're based in Anytown (or any of the towns and villages surrounding Anytown) and looking for help with your web site design, then We Can't Write for Toffee  Studios can help - we're ideally located to provide Web Site Design in Anytown. Additionally, as a small web design agency, we're not only able to deliver high-quality web site design solutions, but affordable ones too. We aim to make all of our web site designs high quality but low cost. We truly believe you won't find better value for money from any other web site design agency offering Web Site Design in Anytown.

I really wish I'd made that up to make a point.  But it is real - I copied it three minutes ago from a live webpage for a design agency.

Now, is it just me or is that a little clunky?  Or clunky is it?  A little?  For people who like clunky, those clunky people?  Clunky people (underlined - issalink!!) like this sort of thing, especially if they enjoy a little bit of clunkiness.

Even forgiving the cliches packed like First Great Western commuters, that's appalling writing BEFORE it was 'optimised'.  Now it's been optimised it's a mess of repetition, garbage and drool.

Write like this in print and - if you're lucky - your Creative Director will sack you.  You really deserve to be eviscerated with a spoon, but sadly, namby-pamby employement law forbids it. So why write like it on the web?  More repetition than a Janet and John book but rather less likely to sell.

It's perfectly feasible to write copy for the web that's as compelling as good print copy.  It's just bloody rare at the moment.  At the moment it's not very common.  Rare in fact, as a somewhat undercooked rare thing with a rare helping of rarebit - or something like rarebit in a village called Rare-on-Sea...

[the author is spending some time with a bottle of something French and red to recover] 

How do you do it?

Agency new business is an odd thing.  The best new business simply seems to come from chatting to existing clients and people in your black book.  

"Oh yeah - Steve over at Lehmann Brothers was looking for an agency - give him a call.  Another glass of Sangiovese?  Don't mind if I do."

But how about the clients you'd kill to work with but don't know?  What do you do?

Should you call them?

I used to be a client, back in the miserable days before I ran my own agency.  I worked for a City investment and pensions company.  We got a LOT of calls from agencies.  An average day would see the phone ring at least four times.

"Hello, my name's Martha Moggins from Blue Dingo's Arse.  We're an agency that produces really great work for our clients and blah, blah blah blah..."

I never met one of them.  We had an agency - and a very good one too thanks to Kirsti and Peter who looked after us.  We weren't going to change agencies.  But the quality of calls wasn't great - lots of telling me stuff and not asking questions.  

So now the receiver is on the other ear, and I'm in charge of new biz for Freeman Christie, should I be calling you?

What do you think?  Useful to know what's out there in Agencyland or a pain in the bum?