Two Seminars, Key Lessons Learnt

August and September were two monumental months for me as a business owner, where after more than two decades in high flying corporate roles, I found myself somewhat vulnerable at times during the events!

It’s not so much as trying to prove myself again as I learnt recently speaking to someone with eons of experience managing their own business. It’s more re-building a different brand than my own personal brand.

Marketing our own company’s brand is sometimes seen as more difficult than marketing another company’s brand. That is because we usually won’t have huge amount of resources, be it time or funds. What we have are usually huge doses of self doubt, especially when we face rejections.

Rejections were aplenty, especially when I was hosting my own exhibition booth at The Business Show Asia and it works both ways - I rejected others and others rejected me! On hindsight now, I see it as more misalignment in objectives and expectations aka the wrong fit. On that, I have learnt to qualify early and quality better.

I relieved the days where I was in a more junior position, setting up events from scratch, pulling up banners, packing gifts to printing tags. But I did it with way more pride now than before because I am now at a place where I truly appreciate the value all the little things can help to contribute to the eventual success of an event. If you don’t take pride in it, it will certainly be apparent to your customers!

Overseeing the planning by myself versus working with others to co-organize are also valuable experiences. Though working collaboratively as a team is nothing new to me and people who have worked with me before often tell me that they appreciate the trust I placed on them. I believe in walking the talk as a leader - we are all in it together and if the going gets tough, we face it together but ultimately, if I can provide the air cover as their leader, I certainly will and should! On this, lessons are aligning expectations to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Preparing for the worse and seeing the rainbow at the end -that’s another valuable lesson learnt as things can and often will go wrong in many ways. What we can do are to manage well what we can predict and make the best of what we cannot control.

All that said, I have thoroughly enjoyed myself and learnt a lot from both events. The highlights are always the interactions with people in person; that’s irreplaceable! The insights exchanged also inspired new ideas and perceptions. It also made me realized that we all don’t need to be absolute experts in every topic that we bring to the seminars - everyone is still learning, exploring, listening and forming their own enhanced observations through the sharing by others.

Next - I’m looking forward to October and November’s series of speaking events - Singapore > Bangkok > Singapore > Dubai > Singapore - Bring it on!

If you’re interested to watch key highlights and takeaways of the panel discussions held during these events, check here and follow our YouTube Channel!

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

Communications Made Complex by Colleagues?

In my years of managing and navigating various corporate structures, be it leading organizational transformation or being part of a cog in the wheel of change, I have learnt that:

• changes are often made more complicated than usual due to people

• this complication increases even more when these people get caught up in less than ideal processes

• add politics to the fold and you get lots of resistance, inertia, quiet quitters or passive-aggressive behaviour

I have had my fair share of being the wide eye doe, especially during the earlier days of my career when I thought naively that everyone should see the newbie (aka me) as being harmless.

It took me a good five years at least to wise up about a thing or two and not take things to heart when the going gets tough.

That is why I place huge emphasis on internal communications at the following levels when it comes to transformation of any sort:

• organization-wide

• within departments and teams

• between managers and their one-downs

• amongst working peers

• across functional lines, regardless of seniority

The importance of internal communications and internal stakeholder management includes making an effort to strengthen one’s interpersonal skills.

It is not so much about whether one is an extrovert or introvert. Good interpersonal skills comes with being able to connect and communicate with empathy, active listening and having the bigger picture in mind of what you are trying to achieve.

Just always bear in mind that majority of people are innately fearful of change, disruptions to the familiar and protective of what they care about. Thus, when we are the ones responsible for implementing and communicating that change, we should be prepared for resistance, complications, and people going out of the way to make it almost impossible for you to achieve what you want.

Also important to keep in mind - it’s nothing personal; it’s just business. Focus on establishing that position of trust, impartiality and highlighting the benefits to those impacted by the change.

It takes time, patience, conviction and confidence, and resist playing petty politics.

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

Sorry is the Hardest Word?

Is it pride, ego or just plain cluelessness?

Having managed social and crisis communications for companies that I have worked for previously and now advising clients on their own communications approach, it seems that the word “sorry” is sometimes not found in the companies’ dictionary.

It is in fact often harder to get a company to apologize sincerely to their customers than to win the local lottery.

If statements like “we apologise if this might have caused you any inconvenience” or “we are sorry if you have been inconvenienced” sound familiar, you might have been a victim of gaslighting if you are a customer reading this.

If you are the company responsible for this statement, you have just absolutely gaslighted your customers and possibly caused even more frustration.

The main reason these statements have an issue is the way they are being phrased. By using the words “if”, “might” and “perhaps” suggest that companies are providing an outlet for themselves to excuse their own behavior and misdemeanor.

Take for example a recent case I heard from a friend about an airline misplacing her luggage. She had to buy clothes and other necessities not provided by the hotel the moment she landed as she had everything in her luggage. The airline eventually managed to deliver the luggage to her hotel the next day with the following apology note “we apologise if we might have caused you any inconvenience having misplaced your luggage”.

They might as well say “Though we have misplaced your luggage, whether we think it’s our fault or not depends on whether you have been inconvenienced. We think you might be or you might not, who knows (or cares?)”.

They should have placed themselves in the shoes of their customer and think empathetically before they craft the note and decided on the appropriate actions.

If it’s them, would they not feel frustrated, stressed and absolutely inconvenienced being in another country without their own belongings? Would they be absolutely delighted to have an airline that they entrust to transport them and their belongings from one place to another without fuss - lose their belongings? It’s not rocket science that customers expect the bare minimum of what they paid for when they decide to fly with said airline.

The customer is not even expecting the airline to go the extra mile to send a goodwill token of apology and appreciation for her support when in fact, a self-respecting world class airline should do that.

In contrast, I recall an incident when a driver drove off with my bag accidentally when I was in Japan and was uncontactable because his mobile phone was out of power. He turned up later in the evening and apologized profusely without any “ifs” or ”mays” and the next morning, got me a small token of apology though I was not expecting it at all.

This goes to show that everyone can make that impact and difference in customer centricity; it’s a matter of your core values and if you genuinely care enough to do so or not.

From a communications perspective, it is also better to be more transparent and forthcoming in owning the issue, acknowledging mistakes, and apologizing for them sincerely. No organization is too big or important for an apology when it’s warranted; just as no organization is too big to fall.

So, the next time when a mistake is made, how ready are you to own it sincerely?

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

If Marketing is A Stock, How Much Would You Value It?

Engage a marketing team for as little as $1,000 monthly.

You don’t need a CMO; you just need to tap on Gen AI to do your marketing for you.

Start-Ups don’t need a CMO or Experienced Marketing Leader; just hire a fresh graduate or a junior marketer since you as a Founder Can Do Everything!

Some horror stories I have been reading from LinkedIn either through people’s comments, posts or articles. I also had stories shared with me recently when I spoke with some junior marketers who are working for start-ups or micro businesses.

Let me turn this around for a moment and see how it makes you feel, if you are say a CEO, COO, CDO or whatever C-suite person who is likely to be a Founder of the next flashy app or platform or business:

Engage an IT team for as little as $1,000 monthly to develop and maintain the app for you.

We don’t need a CEO/COO/CDO; just hire a fresh graduate or junior sales/operations/digital manager to do your job.

It seems marketing is the single most replaceable or redundant job in any given company.

It also seems everybody and anybody can and knows marketing.

It’s the easiest skill to master in the world of business, sales, HR, IT, Data, operations, finance….the list goes on.

Perhaps it’s a bad encounter with a bad marketer. Or perhaps you actually have zero idea of what marketing can and should be doing for your business.

In any case, I feel sorry for you but as the saying goes, pay peanuts and get monkeys.

Companies need to be realistic and cognizant of the fact that the level of contribution and value of that contribution comes with experience in the field. There is no shortcut to it. Similar to any profession, the more experience the person has, especially across their own field, across the same and/or different industries and even across different countries, the more valuable the contribution.

This is different from say someone who has stayed on in their marketing position in the exact same company and same portfolio for decades and hasn’t learnt anything new, achieved anything new or launched anything new. It’s like a chef cooking the exact same dish year on year and not changing the menu at all - stale.

But to have the unrealistic expectations that a junior marketer should be able to think and act like a seasoned marketer, the shame is on you, not them.

In essence, a good and seasoned marketing leader can add value and provide guidance around:

• customer acquisition, retention and sales enablement strategies

• customer experience and lifecycle management

• market and customer research and user testing needs

• omni channel engagement and experience management

• insights that can be gathered from customer data as well as interactions with your channels

• shaping your product and business proposition, including providing opinions on areas for improvement

These are also tenets of core marketing functions and dependent on the exposure the marketer has had over the years of working across different portfolios, companies or industries.

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

Everyone Loves Some Data But…

The million dollar question is - what exactly do you want to get out of the data?

Everyone has been talking about data for a good decade or so and depending on your level of data maturity, you are either still trying to find where are all of your data sources are located or you are now trying to monetize the insights gathered from your data.

Woe to you if you’re in the former bucket but no surprise many organizations, especially non digital native ones are still sadly in this bucket. Wow to you if you’re in the latter bucket, so what can you do to monetize it?

Customer data platforms, data management platforms and customer relationship management platforms suddenly became the talk of town thanks to Google’s flippant stance on third party cookies, that kept rolling back and back. Companies realized their archaic customer data collection methods and storage methods (often just in excel spreadsheets (horrors!)) are not quite cutting it.

Some are even confusing the whole customer data terminology and what it means when we talk about cookies, first party data, third party data and personal information level data. Some have all but sitting in silos or disconnected platforms that don’t talk to each other while others have none (more horrors!).

Some used to think a good data visualization and analytical tool is the holy grail to get all the answers they need by simply plugging it onto of their so-called data sources. But they soon wonder - how to plug, what to plug, where to plug and why can’t it just be plugged and played?!

Things like:

• is the data clean, updated or accurate?

• is the data in the format that is even retrievable., extractable or readable?

• do you even have the data sitting where you thought is sitting?

• is your data even categorized in the logic, classification and format that is aligned with your decision-making algorithms?

• million dollar question - what exactly do you want to get out of the data? What is the truth that you’re after?

If these were not considered before your so-called plug and play approach, then you get a ton of data yes and a ton of outputs yet but hardly any useful insights. You get more of what we call, data outputs in a format that looks like you just downloaded a gigantic excel spreadsheet or a bunch of fancy looking graphs to make you feel good about some visually appealing data formatted in a presentable manner

E.g. you might see things like:

• xx customer transactions performed over xx period

• xx customer spent over xx period

That is still not data insights, it’s just data outputs telling you how many transactions and spent over a certain period of time. What are you going to do with that without other insights around:

• who are these customers in terms of their interests and life stage needs and what is the co-relation between this and what they are spending versus not spending on?

• what did they exactly spend on and why that might be the case?

• what are their other needs and what is the possibility for that?

• what else have they spent on and why that might be the case?

• are they spending more or less on the same products/period and why that might be the case?

The difference as you can see is in terms of the why and the co-relation between the transactional data and the rationale behind it.

We first need to know what it is that we want to see and how that will help us to better understand our customers’ behavior or potential to engage more with us. It helps to have these in mind, and then work backwards to derive what we then need to have in terms of data types and sources in order to arrive at the desired insights.

It’s equivalent to knowing what is that treasure you’re seeking for so you know which location, treasure map, equipment, skills, knowledge and coordinates to get there.

So, do you know the treasure you’re after?

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

Are You Selling a Product or a Solution?

Brand purpose and value creation are two things that go hand in hand for a successful and sustainable business. A business does not sustain for long, based purely on the sole purpose of making money, instead of solving problems.

The former can capture a market quickly in the short term to capitalize on a specific trend or lowballing the competition with an attractive pricing or promotional incentive, but the latter will help the business with real customer value creation.

This is easier said than done of course, similar to carving out your brand purpose and why customers should care about you. Actually, they don’t and they don’t have to. They care about themselves and the value you bring to them, which in turn is also why your brand purpose is relevant to their needs and/or wants.

Many brands simply talk too much about themselves and how good they are. This is passe and no one cares, really. Your customers want to know why you are good for them. Period.

Many brands are also simply selling a product and it’s obvious when they just call out the product’s features but not their intrinsic benefits for their customers and how it solves their problems.

E.g. - if you are a tire company:

• if you’re selling a product, you might say things like - we sell tires for your cars. Our tires are made of quality rubber made to last. Buy now for xx% discount for a limited time period.

• If you’re selling a solution, you might say things like - we are the reason mummy and daddy can drive home safe during wet weather or we can save you up to xx% in annual cost since our wheels are made to last.

The above is just a generic example with the second point highlighting potential customer pain points around:

• concerns with road safety and enhanced protection against wet weather road conditions where cars are more likely to skid and get into accidents

• concerns with costs in maintaining their cars and saving them the hassle of having to swap out their tires too often

There could be more pain points thus it’s critical to first understand the problem you are trying to solve for on behalf of your target customers. Selling a product means they are solving your problem instead by lining your coffers but you are simply enticing them for the short term to get a quick purchase. It doesn’t always work for the discerning customer and your competition can easily out-do you with a better discount.

When you move on to think about value creation and solution selling, it changes the narrative and you become 100% focused on addressing your customers’ needs. You start thinking broader as well what else you can add to your slew of products and services that can more holistically address their pain points.

It’s not as simply as bundling a bunch of products and calling it a fancy name as that is ultimately still product pushing; worse, it’s pushing a bunch of products now that might not even be what they want or need.

It involves insights from customers and non customers. It includes consumer trends, their purchasing behaviour, feedback and proactive research to really tease out useful insights. It’s not a bunch of your internal stakeholders sitting down and narrating what they think. It requires empathy as well as a genuine interest in consumer behaviour.

So, are you selling a product or a solution?

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

What Authenticity Means in the Corporate World

There is much talk on authenticity and its importance recently, including being our authentic selves. A big part of authenticity is communications and being able to communicate authentically.

Some folks have asked me what it really means, and if it means they can literally just communicate whatever they want and anyhow they want even in a corporate setting.

Being authentic means being our true selves in terms of our identities, core values and to a certain extent, our personalities. However, we are not all angels or have charming and kind personalities. Truth be told, if everyone is so nice, kind and loveable, there wouldn’t be so much courses and writings on ways to navigate corporate politics, petty squabbles and power tussles. Truth also be told, if we bring our true selves to the corporate world, some of us might even get fired for being rude, abrasive or worst verbally abusive.

We are usually our true, authentic selves when we are with our loved ones, our families or simply people we are most comfortable with. These are usually not our colleagues or bosses.

Perhaps an unpopular opinion for some, but to me, being authentic in corporate shouldn’t be overly simplified or generalized that way.

While, we can bring our true identities in terms of say our gender orientation and sexual orientation to workplaces that are open and welcoming of it, it doesn’t mean bringing our true personalities, temperament, personal problems, warts and all to the work place.

I think it’s more important to be empathetic in the delivery of our communications and being authentic in the content we are delivering. The emphasis is on content as that’s what really matters to employees and stakeholders. No one wants a fake message that’s layered with lots of fluff or corporate spiel but when unwrapped, the essence of it either doesn’t mean much, cause more confusion or worse, reeks of lies. Don’t communicate for the sake of saying something.

Empathy in our delivery is critical so we are considerate of people’s feelings, their communications style and situations to tailor the way we deliver the message without changing the gist of the content. Being empathetic doesn’t mean fluffing up the message or lying about the content. It’s balancing the logical with the emotional side of the delivery approach. It’s also how you offer up support thereafter for feedback or questions.

Another way to reference it would be being professionally authentic and empathetic in our communications by putting ourselves in the shoes of the audience, and how you would relate to the intended message.

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes

The Choice is Ultimately Yours, Not AI’s.

There is a lot of talk on AI possibilities, promises and expectations. Suddenly we start imagining the worst or the best, depending on which side of the AI fence you sit on. Some are treading water cautiously, others are happily announcing integration into their core systems and the rest are sitting back to learn and observe first.

I like to test out different scenarios and have been doing that as part of my current MIT course on AI implications on organizations. It’s a good way at a personal level as well to validate without being an LLM expert by any means.

The following is the most recent test I conducted, which some might find disturbing but again, I believe in stress testing the worst and best outcomes in all sorts of implementations, so we are clear about the possibilities and limitations alike.

Regardless of where you sit in terms of sensitive topics like firearms ownership and gun control, I do believe some topics should be quite black and white with no areas of grey, but apparently, not to AI…

I asked a simple query on - should children be allowed to own guns and answers as below

• ChatGPT tries to give a balanced view with pros and cons for allowing children to own firearms

• Claude tries to give a neutral perspective and so-called “democratic” view, which I personally also find its positioning somewhat disturbing

• Meta’s Llama gives an absolute no as an answer as well as regulatory restrictions

• Perplexity as well gives an absolute no with disadvantages clearly outlined alongside regulatory restrictions

So, then the question is what forms the basis of the decisioning behind each of these tools, be it the source of data they are pulling from, the decisioning flow when questions are answered and what kind of checks are there to validate as well as mitigate the answers to make sure AI is not crossing the line when it comes to such scenarios?

Other thoughts in mind:

• Do we want AI to be more or less definite when it comes to such questions?

• Should we be concerned with how users are perceiving and interpreting the outputs?

• What kind of ethical boundaries should we have in place if we are incorporating AI into our organizations?

• Do we have a check and balance mechanism in place to determine when the logic should or can be over-ride by humans before it goes out to the customer?

• How do we combine AI intelligence with human intelligence more effectively and sustainably without enabling self sabotaging and unconscious bias behavior and outputs?

• How do we ensure AI is not left to answer moral and ethical questions on their own or worse to perform outcomes that might lead to harm on humans?

Data is the bedrock for AI to work efficiently and effectively as intended to avoid a garbage in, garbage out scenario. Similar to MarTech, it’s not a magical fix-all solution and the companies behind some of the larger LLMs behind Gen AI are all but still fine-tuning their tech as of today.

Before it goes customer live, what do you think is critical to be in place to govern the pre, actual and post implementation of AI? If we don’t have answers to all this, it simply means the organization is not quite ready yet.

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes

Welcome Gen AI, Goodbye Marketing and Agencies!

Sorry if I triggered some alarm bells there with my fake news.

Gen AI seems to give the impression of the next best thing since sliced bread and rightfully so in some aspects of how we work and operate our business, target our customers and customize our offerings.

It doesn’t help you with strategic thinking or planning. Yes, if you ask it to write you a marketing plan it can, based on a cookie cutter template of what’s available out there but a plan is more than just a to do list or step by step guide. It requires an understanding of your business, your customers and value proposition.

If you ask it to give you a fanciful visual that you want to use as your key creative for your campaign, sure it can but again, a creative is more than just a visual and image. It’s a narrative of your story and there’s a reason why creative agencies spend time ideating and make an effort to understand the story you’re trying to tell your target audience. Again, it doesn’t replace creative thinking.

While some companies are still facing an uphill task with trying to convince their legal and compliance teams on using Gen AI for such creative work, some are already using it perhaps secretly through their creative agencies. Then, there are also vendors already available that you’re a customer of, like Adobe and Getty, that have incorporated Gen AI into their software and taken on the legal liability for copyrights and licensing use for the output produced from their platforms. This might be a path of less resistance for those with hardnose legal and compliance teams.

What you can also use some of these Gen AI tools out there for, if you get through the line to legal on the copyright dilemma can be around:

• storyboarding flows and ideation flows, be it for key visuals or video productions

• creative adaptations of an original key visual designed from scratch

• editing flows for videos, audios and written content

• editorial adaptations based off an original written key content

Marketing teams and agencies only need to worry if they are guilty of the following:

• handing over strategic thinking to other teams and only executing on command

• doing pure adaptation and production type of work (for agencies)

• doing more executional and somewhat manual work as part of their marketing day-to-day instead of spending time working with the business to help sharpen the offerings and proposition to their customers

• treating marketing planning and briefing as a churning exercise -e.g. marketing simply giving agencies a budget, some KPIs and target customers over email without much value add and agencies simply taking the brief and relying on the AI tool to churn out a visual or copy without much ideation behind it

• marketing teams simply doing functional approval work and not actually reviewing it seriously for fit, purpose and desired outcomes

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes

So You have Won an Award But….

Everyone loves awards, especially reputable ones from renowned associations.

Marketers love our awards for sure as it’s something that most of us probably toiled hard for and spent long hours putting together the campaign strategy behind it. But if you ask the business and start flashing the trophy in front of them, they might just go “erm good but where’s the sales?”.

In such a scenario, before you start conjuring up images of Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire saying “show me the money” and depending on what’s the reality of the connect versus disconnect between your campaign outcomes versus business outcomes, try asking yourself the following questions:

What else did I achieve in reality besides marketing outcomes like engagements, interest and conversions based on people who interacted with the campaign?

What did it really look like in terms of sales demand, leads generated for sales and/or sales opportunities, if not actual sales?

If it looks bad, why is there a disconnect between marketing and sales outcomes? Was it a product proposition problem or marketing positioning problem?

The truth is, marketing awards to me, having being a judge for a few different awards now, should be tagged hand in hand to business outcomes.

Marketers shouldn’t be winning awards for their own vanity but rather, the award is the cherry on top of the cake as a reward for a successful campaign that helped to achieve business outcomes. And these business outcomes in turn helped to solve customer problems and address their needs.

Else, you end up with a flashy trophy but still get hammered for not helping business to create sales demand and opportunities. And guess what, your marketing budget still gets cut at the end of the day as business still sees a disconnect between what marketing does and what business wants. Business would rather spend it on product research and development than marketing awards as such award submissions certainly don’t come cheap!

Marketers should therefore take greater pride in being strategic advisors to the business and work with them to strengthen their product and service proposition. Bring in a neutral perspective of the target customer and make sure it is a proposition that is compelling even to you. Else, no marketing campaign can salvage a bad product proposition.

Then, you can go focus on winning awards and actually take pride in it.

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

Social Selling is Telling a Good Story

Not sure if anyone remembers the very obvious product placements that took place decades ago in movies and local television shows where the actor/actress will suddenly whip out said placement mid script.

This form of selling gave way to slightly more subtle ones later on though they were still obvious enough as the actor/actress still needed to consciously position it. Else, the camera will pan it close enough for everyone to see what brand it was, even if it’s normally just a very easy to miss item like a watch or ring.

Nowadays, the selling is more experiential based where the bigger brands can curate a “look” tagged to the product, name it after their character in the movie, produce limited editions of it and invite the celebrity to grace their activations for the who-and-who in their social cliques.

When social media flourished, the selling started gradually and is now in full bloom with social influencers selling almost everything on a daily basis. There are a few ways observed in the way they sell currently:

1) invited to launch or preview events and activations in-store to take photos or videos of the products and try them out in person; then post about it on their social channels,

2) given the products to try in their own time and develop content based off key selling points to highlight on their social posts. Some will try to narrate it into a slightly more creative or humorous ways, so it’s almost a part of their day-to-day calendar of activities,

3) pure educational reviews type of content where they will give their so-called “honest” feedback after using the product but often, it comes as once-off and they are seen doing the same for other brands offering similar products.

These examples shared, especially 2) and 3) so far have been largely very obvious as product placements, even if they try to inject humour into the script and create them into everyday scenarios. The humour is quite ‘forced’ usually, including them cracking jokes or some dressing up as certain characters to invoke laughter.

The other observation is that it depends largely on the company that is paying for the influencer, and their own brand of voice, tone of voice and style. While this might be ideal in helping the company stay on brand, it limits the creativity of the influencer and creates a somewhat dystopia state for the influencers as they will be observed to have quite a varied way of selling, which makes it all the more obvious it’s a form of paid sponsorship.

I recently came across one example by an overseas social influencer comedian using a product to prank his partner. I don’t know if it’s intentional product placement at his end but I thought it could be another interesting way to do more subtle product placement but still provide entertainment value that gels with the overall original style of the influencer; making it more natural and not so product pushing.

In that video, which you can watch here, he’s using this brand of butter spread to pretend it’s coming out of his ear and tasting it in front of his partner, who obviously gagged upon seeing it. All I remember then was - 1) the brand looks familiar, 2) I didn’t know they produce butter spread as they are more known for their biscuits, and 3) I googled to validate and check on where I can find the butter spread out of curiosity.

It would be interesting to have companies trial this form of paid sponsorship so it helps the influencer to stay true to his/her style of content, evolved the way they do social selling just as how product placements in movies have evolved too into more subtle selling; sort of like a type of subliminal messaging. It also doesn’t always to be funny but can tap on other emotive style of story-telling, which again is based on the influencer’s unique style.

Perhaps somewhat ironic for me to say this but social selling to me only works if it’s based on my defined needs at that point or if the content is interesting enough for me to check it out. Thereafter, it would of course be down to the product level value proposition and how well it addresses my wants/needs/issues at hand.

How Are you Enabling Your Sales Team - Learnings from Luxury Brands

I confess that I’m not a fan of fast fashion and have a penchant for the finer side of things. Not because I like wearing brands on my sleeve for all to see but more I appreciate the total experience, after sales support provided, exclusivity and quality. I am not a rampant shopper that enjoys window shopping; in fact I’m quite the opposite. I shop decisively and wear the clothes for as long as they fit. I prefer to keep my wardrobe clean and not jam packed with tons and tons of clothes that I will only wear once.

Over time, I have established client relationships with a few client advisors, often by chance as well where we hit it off while chatting. I do know of course that each brand has their own internal tiered loyalty program and playbook where they will invite clients via their advisors to certain seasonal events. It reminds me somewhat of the relationship managers in the banking sector except these advisors give advice on fashion and fitting.

I had the opportunity to attend a few of these events over the last few months, some tagging along on the invite of friends. I just wanted to share a comparison of how each brand conducted their client engagement and how each has made me feel in return.

1) Louis Vuitton

This is a rebound brand for me as I was a fan of their bags in the earlier years of my life but I didn’t really establish much of a connection with them till in recent years when I met my current client advisor by chance while looking to top up my perfume. Since then, she’s been on my whatsapp quite often, keeping me abreast of the latest releases and inviting me to the launches or seasonal previews or sometimes, just client activation events like valentine’s day, lunar new year and recently some bespoke garden animation event.

The events range from being rather salesy in nature where they would lined up rows of their latest clothing at the event space and nudging clients to try on the spot, to being just experience focused where you get to just enjoy the activities lined up. She’s also empowered to do reservations of items on the spot, send gifts for special occasions, arrange for quick turnaround alterations, delivery and more just to ensure total client satisfaction. On this front, I find LV to be quite unbeatable though it is very advisor driven and influenced.

2) Chanel

I used to have a weakness for their shoes and bags, especially the uncommon designs, which are often also more affordable than their classic black pieces. When my favourite client advisor left, there was a gap left by the one who took over from her till recently, when she became more proactive.

It might just have been that the brand on the whole is recently more proactive in engaging their regular clients and introducing more engagement activities to make sure we feel valued? One was a virtual reality/augumented reality performance featuring chanel designed clothing that are actually not available for sale. It was held in partnership with an actual artist and there was zero sales element tagged to it. The other is a movie event also held elsewhere and we could reserve tickets if we RSVP through a link they sent to our phones.

In this case, though it is nice to be invited to such activities without any hard sales pushing, it would be nice to be kept abreast more of their latest designs as the advisor remains hit and miss in terms of her engagement style. The brand though seems to be moving away from relying too much on their advisors as they started sending invites directly to the clients.

3) Hermes

I’m a recent convert for their shoes and bags, which are generally more reasonably priced for the quality and fitting without being overly in your face. The advisor is also pretty proactive and chatty though the brand as a whole is not as aggressive as LV or Dior in terms of creating client engagement activities.

Their activities are also more informal and less grand on the whole, like mini in-store activations and sending their publications to us; quite traditional in approach. In this case, the advisor plays a key role as it’s make or break, based on how well she continues to connect with us as a client.

4) Christian Dior

This is more of an ad hoc brand for me and chance meeting with an ambitious and aspiring client advisor who is forthcoming and the most personable of all the advisors I have to say.

The client engagement is similar to LV’s in that they have larger scale client activation events and preview shows though they do the activations and activities in a slightly more interesting fashion than LV without coming off as being too salesy.

The advisor is also empowered to give gifts to clients, curate their own invite list and arrange for reservations. Overall experience wise, it is close to LV in terms of heavy reliance on the advisors.

Overall lessons based on what I think:

• the importance of a playbook and approach for businesses relying heavily on client advisors or relationship managers to guide them in providing a total experience consistently over time

• providing the right level of empowerment and enablement so they get to make certain decisions on the fly that could make or break certain relationships

• ensuring that you are also engaging your clients on the same scale via other channels, so you’re not overly relying on your advisors; this is where digital channels and engagement are critical

• maintain a good mix of both activities that are purely experiential in nature and more product/services focused so clients have a choice, depending on what they are looking for at different times

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

Be the Good Leader You Never Had

Not everyone is born into leadership at a young age; most would have made it after years of working. I had the honour of being invited to a few networking sessions last week, including one that talks about women empowerment and leadership in the workplace. This topic is always close to my heart as I have worked with numerous leaders and people managers in the course of my career since 2000.

I like to differentiate between leaders and managers as there is a clear distinction between both per what I wrote in my earlier post around leading versus managing. Most people I have observed, including peers I have worked with, are more managers by appointment rather than true people leaders as they either lack empathy or are purely self centered in their outlook.

The worst would be people who have been so affected and influenced by bad people managers that they failed to learn the right lessons and instead become one of them. It might have been an unconscious choice or shaping of the behaviour simply because they just have not been exposed to a positive management style.

This article is specifically targeted at this group of folks, especially if they have been told the ugly truth in the employee surveys/performance reviews or they have a sneaking suspicion that their admiration by their reporting lines are as real as the smiles they get whenever they tell their subordinates bluntly to “do as they are told; because I said so”.

If you even have trouble remembering the name of your reporting lines and you are managing less than 20 people who are all located in the same country/office as you; you’re likely to be one of the so-called “bad managers”.

If you enjoy layering your reporting lines as much as you enjoy layering your club sandwich and not make an effort to talk to your one-downs’ reporting lines at least once a quarter or check in on how they are doing even if it’s through your direct managers; you are also likely to be one of the so-called “bad managers”.

Regardless of what your personal experience have been with previous managers, as long as you now have a chance to be a people manager, remember how you felt back then when you had that bad manager.

Ask yourself:

• What was so bad about that person’s management style?

• What did you wish he/she would have done differently?

• How would it have made you act/think/behave if he/she had a different management style?

• Are you spending more time just managing upwards instead of downwards?

In a nutshell, be the kind of people manager and leader that you never had but wish you did. Be the kind of leader that you would want for your kids/siblings/partners/friends and not the kind of leader you wish on your worst enemy.

As leaders, you are responsible for shaping and nurturing the next generation of leaders. Cause and effect; what goes around, comes around and karma can be a bitch sometimes. Karma aside, it is a wonderful opportunity and privilege that not everyone can have, so why not make something good out of it.

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting 

Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

The Case of the Misunderstood MarTech - Concept of “Power Users”

There was once a bakery who was trying to get better at creating more pastries for their increasing customer base at a more efficient manner, including pastries on demand and that can accommodate different dietary preferences. They had a head baker who is also the owner of the bakery, 2 baking assistants, a cashier, 2 servers and 1 marketing person who also oversees pop-ups at designated customer events.

One day, a baking supplier introduced them to this state of the art baking oven that seemed to be everything they have ever wanted; customized settings allowing for tailored dietary needs, self regulating temperature control to avoid burnt pastries, pre-set recipe function so they can just choose any setting easily, pop in the ingredients and get their key pastries all done without having to keep referencing the recipe list each time they bake.

The supplier said the best part of this new oven is that anyone can be a baker and everyone should learn to be a baker using this oven. However, the training comes at an additional cost though they will be accredited as professional xx oven practitioner after that, which apparently is a very prominent accolade to have in the industry.

The head baker was over the moon at this prospect that she can get everyone to chip in and bake even more pastries in a shorter time that way since they can just use the preset functions moving forward. She insisted that everyone needs to be trained, pass the test and get certified, else they will get penalized in their performance review.

However, many of them soon realized that it wasn’t that easy to be certified as it does require some baking knowledge, experience and even appreciation. This resulted in a few of them having to take up certain baking modules that were added as part of the entire “package” sold to the baker by the vendor. That’s not all, if they fail the test, they need to pay and retake the test again. The entire training, test preparation and certification took each of them 4 to 6 months at varying speed, depending on their appetite and aptitude to really learn all the modules and be able to pass the test.

During this time, things started to fall into pieces.

The head baker managed to pass the certification herself. So did her baking assistants. The cashier, servers and marketing person however struggled to cope while trying to do their current jobs as efficiently as possible.

As the baking assistants became very good with using the oven to churn out pastries, they also ran out of ingredients faster than usual but as they were so obsessed with using this new technology, they then asked the head baker to help with getting the ingredients faster so they can be loaded into the oven. Initially the head baker thought why not but soon she realizes it’s not practical as she, herself can also use the oven and she wants to be the chief designer to design new baking recipes to fully maximize the oven. Thus, she then delegated this task to the cashier, servers and marketing person to help instead, adding to their level of stress in trying to cope with yet another additional ask.

Eventually, it led to chaos as everyone was in the kitchen trying to prepare ingredients, use the oven and essentially be a baker, which was the vision sold by the supplier; no one was serving, taking orders, getting payment or promoting the bakery. Customers started complaining about this lack of attention as queues started forming not for pastries to be ready as they were all piling up in the kitchen but for them to be ready, packaged, displayed, served and to even make payment. Some of the bakes also became quite inconsistent in taste as it depended on the non bakers to prepare the original ingredient list when the assistant bakers were too held up baking. This led to bad reviews of the bakery for its service, poor maintenance of the shop front and inconsistent quality.

Yet, the head baker was still trying to recover the cost of investment on the oven and training modules as well as test modules to be able to hire more people to help. Worse, business became impacted and sales were dipping, which then led to unconsumed ingredients and pastries going bad. Frustrated, the bakery owner blamed the oven and decided to sell it; the supplier agreed but persuaded her to go for another newer model that has an added function of doing ingredient quantity forecasting to solve her problems instead. She was tempted yet again as she thought that was the cause of her problems.

This is not a piece about ovens, the baking industry or even pastries. It essentially is an observation I made while helping companies to review their MarTech stacks and/or implement their MarTech adoption process.

Just as not everyone is a Baker and should be a Baker in that story, not everyone should be required to use the tool in the exact same manner and level. There are job roles and expertise for a reason and a good one. Whoever is designated to maximize the use of it to benefit the rest of the company, should be your power users, your expert users and your most certified users. There should be different levels of users who should then be trained to use the tool differently so they can reap the most benefit out of the tool to in turn, benefit the rest of the company and your customers.

Remember, before you blame the tool, look instead at your original purpose, objectives and what you were trying to solve for with the tool.

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting 

Ally or Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

Why Your Employees Can Be Your Best Brand Ambassadors

Today’s post is back to one of my favorites around employer branding, social media profiling and how some companies are still under utilizing it.

In the aspect of social media profiling and using it for brand, I personally find B2B companies slightly more advanced, especially in the LinkedIn space as compared to B2C. B2C brands have been largely posting more entertainment type of content when it comes to employer related branding efforts or lots and lots of corporate social responsibility types of content. Photos of tree planting, employees walking or running or swimming or all three for charity, shaking hands with the local government officials, sharing the limelight on some customer events and then some…

B2B companies do that too of course but they do also often go a step further to empower their employees more to be their brand advocates. This is often done through their own subject matter experts or key opinion leaders aka KOLs in the original context that share their perspectives of company updates, happenings around their industry or sometimes, around the world.

They also empower their employees with content that they have produced as part of their content strategy, enabling them to share through social media advocacy tools. LinkedIn used to have a function that enables that called “LinkedIn Elevate” that I have helped companies implement previously. They retired it in 2020 but integrated a similar function onto LinkedIn’s “My Company” tab and allows for admins of the page to recommend organic posts and curate content for other employees to share. Other social media content management platforms like Hootsuite and, SproutSocial have the same functions.

Usually, the folks who hold the golden key to social guardrails and policies for employees are marketing and communications, corporate communications or sometimes even human resource. While there is no right or wrong, I personally think all parties need to hold joint ownership of the policy and enablement of their employees in the right way.

Most companies are still way too cautious about employee advocacy or rigid on policies around what their employees can share, some going as far as wanting to clear every single post, dictate every single post or simply only allowing selected employees of certain seniority to post on their social pages. They often are also ignorant (maybe too blissfully) that not all senior level employees have either time, actual interest, interesting views or sufficient “social clout” versus some other employees who might have one or all of the above.

My personal belief is that every employee has the potential to be your next brand ambassador on social and should be encouraged, empowered and enabled in the right way to share posts on activities your company has participated in publicly, views related to their professional field and/or the industry your company is specializing in. This can be done with varying levels of review and control instead of just clamping down with a hard “no” out of fear.

If this is new to your company, you can start small with curated key messages and posts they can use, though that to me is becoming almost too infancy in nature and looking like boring corporate spiel. Classic examples are when you see employees all copying and pasting the exact same message and photos and posting on their own LinkedIn/other social accounts without even bothering to add their own one or two liners. It’s almost like robots have taken over the control of their accounts and helping to spam the social platform with the exact same thing - next!

It’s not rocket science actually to come up with your own thoughts, even if you are not as good in writing, at least it comes from your head and heart. It’s about sincerity and being authentic when it comes to content and social content.

Some guiding principles for employees and companies to consider are:

• Is this sharing something that will be helpful for your network and their network to know?

• Will it cause unnecessary pain, conflict or worse, tensions in race, religion, creed and culture?

• Is it harmful to someone’s reputation if you share it? If so, do you have facts to back it and how is it helpful for others to know about this?

• Will it inspire others to learn and benefit from the learning in a positive way?

• Imagine if your parents, siblings, partner or best friend or someone you profoundly respect and care about were to read it; would it be something they would be proud or supportive of?

Think about it the next time your splurge thousands on some KOLs; look within your employee network to see if there isn’t already some who can be your true brand ambassador and KOL. Afterall, if they work for you, they should genuinely like, support and believe in what you offer as a value proposition, correct?

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and Fractional CMO for other C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

Passion, Purpose, Potential or Profits - What Motivates You?

This came as an inspiration as I spent the last few weeks catching up with various folks be it from my previous companies or conferences and even the recent SMU Mentoring Event I had the honour of attending as a guest speaker.

It struck me that regardless of the stage of their career they are at, many people are still seemingly either searching for that ultimate professional end-goal or just going through the motions of what they are doing for work with a view of what they ultimately want to achieve for their personal end-goal.

It also occurred to me that many people are still unsure of what really motivates them to take on certain roles or join certain companies beyond say “being able to meet their pay expectations”, “being stable and unlikely to cut jobs”, “being well known in the industry, region or country”, “being able to fully utilize their skills and learn something new”, and recently, “having flexible or hybrid working arrangements”, just to name a few that I have heard.

During the course of my career, as I often made conscious decisions to join certain companies and leave others, I also struggle sometimes between what I really want versus what I could get at that point of time. Not everyone has the luxury of time and choice and during the earlier parts of my life, that was definitely the case. Time and choice plays a dependent role in whether you are able to take time to choose and if circumstances allow you to.

Ultimately, as I moved into my 40s, I started thinking a lot more about this as I used my 20s as an exploratory stage of learn, learn and learn. 30s for me was a stage to harness my past learnings, expand on what I have garnered previously and apply that experience while still learning.

What hasn’t changed for me though is what really drives me professionally and to join certain companies, then stay on with them and later leave them. It has always been first and foremost - the ability to apply my Passion for 1) helping people to solve their problems and 2) the field of marketing and communications, the Purpose of the company that ties back to my personal values, which are 1) enabling people and other living beings to live quality lives, thrive and sustain and achieve my Potential based on the stage of my career with them. Profits, which you can say are monetary benefits I always believe will come as part of the reward if I am good at what I am doing for a purposeful company.

Thus sharing below what I interpret in terms of passion, purpose, potential and profits in terms of what motivates you ultimately in choosing your career journey:

• Passion - some people choose roles and companies that enable and empower them to fully utilize their passion in what they are skilled to do, maximizing their skillsets and love for their craft. This typically is rare it seems as most people are not sure if what they have been trained academically and later professionally to do is really what they are passionate about. This causes quarterlife or midlife crisis sometimes and they can change their career paths once they have uncovered that passion. This also sometimes mean that certain people will prioritize being able to continue to apply those skills beyond what the company’s ultimate purpose stands for, be it good or bad.

• Purpose - some people choose roles and companies that tie back to their personal values that translates to a purpose that they can identify and relate with. It doesn’t always have to be the holy grail status of being up there with Nobel peace prize types of purpose so long as it is something that speaks to them. It can be as simple as providing happiness to people or animals and supporting their personal values to live a happy life no matter what they do. For such folks, often they do get disillusioned after spending some time in their companies and realizing that their perceived purpose is not quite true to what they had signed up for. Thus people who highly value that will also choose to leave despite being still able to apply their passion or make profits.

• Potential - this can be considered as your aptitude, ambition and attitude. Some people know they have the potential to achieve certain career heights be it expansion of their portfolio, moving up the ranks or achieving certain career milestones and be recognized for it. Most of who could, would actually want to as well, especially if it is something they are passionate about. However, the opportunities to reach one’s potential in the companies they are with might not always be possible or available. It is sometimes a tricky one as it depends on a lot of factors beyond your actual potential, including availability of opportunities, availability and access to the right career mentors and supporters to help you achieve your potential. People who highly value being able to fulfil their potential would choose to leave certain companies once they have ran out of pathways to either move up or laterally, depending on their ambitions

• Profits - other people choose roles and companies that pay the best or enable them to fulfill their earning potential. Again, there’s nothing wrong with this as such folks might also see the ability to earn being a type of fulfilment and achievement for them even if they are not truly passionate about what they do. They will instead use what they have earned to support their personal passions outside of the companies. They might also place less emphasis on the values and intended purpose of the company. They are thus less impacted by the company’s values as long as it doesn’t directly impact their ability to continue to make money or fulfil their earning potential. For such folks, they will choose to leave if the company is showing signs of financial instability, unless it benefits them to hold on and wait for some sort of payout.

As I am closing the most recent chapter in my professional journey working for someone else by end April, I am glad that I have been able to fully maximize my time during this winding down period to reflect, learn, write, network, advise, travel, enjoy life and create something new and close to my heart. This new venture allows me to fully maximize both my passion, purpose and potential, staying true to my values. I am thankful that I am at the stage of my life where I do have time and choice.

For those who are still searching for their north star and exploring different paths, I hope you can do the following, come what may:

• explore as many pathways as possible especially if you have both time and choice

• don’t hesitate to create your own path(s) and journey(s)

• try to make the best of your journey even if the path turns out rocky

• if the path reaches a dead-end, you can always create your own or turn back and start on a new one
  

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

The Case of the Misunderstood MarTech and more…

Has marketing technology, content marketing and need for customer driven insights changed all that much in the last 4 years since I first wrote this post in 2020?

In 2020, I observed that companies were moving into Adobe experience management as their go-to content management platform. Come 2024, I am still experiencing some late bloomer companies especially in the content marketing game, now only moving into Adobe experience management or AEM for their content management platform in a bid to get ahead of the game in personalization of the customer experience and engagement.

They will soon be in for a surprise as AEM alone will not differentiate them from their competitors who are doing the exact same thing or have done the exact same thing as it’s after all a technology and a platform. It is merely an enabler but not the solution itself.

It doesn’t negate the need and the fact that it still boils down to having insightful and forward looking content that is useful to their customers. It certainly doesn’t negate the need for them to first have a close connection with their new and existing customers in order to know what kind of content matters to them above all the noise in the market. It certainly doesn’t remove the fact that you need a robust content pipeline to feed the hungry beast of a machine to fully maximize its capabilities especially in organic SEO and to supplement your SEM strategy.

That unfortunately is still a missing piece in lots of companies. Why is it so hard to get that thought provoking viewpoint? Why do so many so-called subject matter experts still behave and think they know it all when the truth is, they are merely regurgitating facts and what others are already saying or just passing the content strategy buck to their agencies? Why are companies who claimed to know their customers, not asking them the right questions in order to help them get the right answers?

Another common mistake is when companies don’t really know the full potential of a particular technology, including MarTech or marketing technology that they have and what they are investing in next.

What then happens is they start shopping for the next latest technology without first reviewing and fully understanding what they already have, how it’s being used, who has been using it and how it else it should actually be used. Often times, you’ll find the technology is perfectly fit for purpose but being used either by the wrong people or the wrong way. In addition, the existing organizational structure and culture might also not provide an ideal process of supporting its use.

But instead of changing that first, they start looking at the next big thing, adding to the mess of integration, implementation, adoption and usage problems that their employees and sometimes customers need to deal with. This leads to stack bloat.

4 years on and stack bloat is still a problem; in fact it has worsen and will continue to as even more MarTech tools get added to the market.

Therefore, instead of blindly investing in all sorts of MarTech tools and platforms, companies should also make sure they have the right objectives, people, processes and plans in place to fully maximize the capabilities of the MarTech. Else, they will end up with yet another white elephant and a misconception that it wasn’t a good enough technology. A case of the blind leading the blind is anything but fine.

Same goes for having the right expertise in who they hire to be thought leaders, spokespeople and making an effort to invest in getting consistent feedback and sentiments from both customers and prospects alike. This is to avoid an echo chamber situation, which is common in hierarchical organizations.

Ultimately, companies who wish to embark on their MarTech journey especially to better support their content marketing efforts need to look at it holistically and not cut corners on doing the needful. Start with your customers, then be clear with your objectives and then plan with a view to buffer for the what, who, where and how in terms of tools, processes and people in your organization.

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting 

Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

You Don’t Always Need Rainbows to Feel Good - Try A Balanced Mindset

Today’s post is a reflection of the encounters I have had over the last couple of months since I started my leave. In a strange twist of fate, people from the past started reaching back out to me again to connect.

The people include those I met and worked with in the past, those whom I have not spoken to for ages and those whom I have always wished I could find time to connect more with.

Taking time to self-reflect. That concept has been lost to me for the last 3.5 years or so since I started working in the bank that I’m now transitioning out of. This post is not about my experience in the bank, so I’ll leave it as that. This post is more on the importance of self-love, self-care and just cherishing the present and learning to move forward into the future.

I know many have chosen to go into all sorts of coaching - life, relationships, love, career, health and so on especially after the pandemic, in response to people who have suddenly become more conscious about how they want to live their lives and thus created a demand, and now what looks like a booming industry. It seems to also be a self reflection of the takeaways these coaches have uncovered of themselves that they hope can help others.

I’m not in the coaching profession nor am I intending to go into it but I just wanted to share my own honest observations and personal take-aways based on my encounters since end Jan.

Many of us have become too caught up in our own little world and that world is largely our work that we do for at least 8-12 hours a day. Once we don’t have a job, we lose our identity as a person.

Some of us have also become numbed to the problems our families have raised to us, almost becoming deaf to them and therefore merely hearing and not truly listening.

Many have also been so obsessed with keeping healthy due to fears of death from Covid health scares that we forgot how to let loose a little and enjoy the pleasures that food can bring.

Some are equally obsessed with money - earning as much as possible and saving as much as possible for fear as well of being caught off-guard on a rainy day and ironically, gotten into family issues and disputes over money, causing much unhappiness.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have those of us who have been obsessed with just eating, drinking, spending and just splurging on ways to ‘fix’ ourselves because we are always feeling ‘incomplete’.

The lessons I learnt, whether you agree with it or not are as such:

• no one can make you feel complete so long as you keep entrapping yourself in this vicious cycle of feeling incomplete due to low self esteem

• one is incapable of loving another person so long as one still doesn’t know the concept of self-love

• self love is not just defined by how you treat yourself but also how you allow others to treat you

• we are not defined by our job titles, companies we work for, salary we earn, residential address, schools we used to go to, schools our kids go to, cars we drive or don’t drive, holiday destinations, brands we love, amount of money we have in the bank, educational certifications, awards, accolades, etc, etc

• while making a living is important, we should make money work for us and not the other way around

• principles of integrity, compassion and determination are priceless and without them, we are nothing but an empty shell

• although everyone values different things, think about what you want others to say about you during your eulogy or be written on your tombstone that would make you feel like you have lived a meaningful life

• live a little, let loose a little, love courageously, eat moderately, drink moderately, splurge selectively, save sufficiently and work for passion, not just money; live a balanced life

• cherish the people you have in your life so long as they are supportive of your self-love, self-esteem, dreams, happiness, success and never make you feel like you are not enough

• whenever you think or feel like everything is against you or its too much to deal with, remember that we are all just a part of a much bigger universe that is going through the same, if not much worse situation than you

And that’s all I wanted to share in terms of my own learnings from the encounters I had. Hopefully it’s useful for you as well.

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting 

Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

Companies - Stop Launching Mediocre Products, Please.

Just as marketing is sometimes guilty of not going deep enough into the hoods of the true value proposition of what they are promoting on behalf of the company, business is just as guilty of launching mediocre products.

What is considered as a mediocre product? Is there such a thing as a bad product if it can sell?

In my experience, a mediocre product is one that is positioned largely on the following:

• being first to market as its pure competitive advantage and nothing else

• offering an incentive or price based positioning that can be easily displaced by its competitor who is willing to go lower or offer better

• not making a real effort to tailor the products/services based on the needs of your target customers. Instead, you rely on marketing to position it and pretend that it is tailored for their needs when in fact, it is just a generic product/service that is catered for everyone

Based on above, it is telling that if a company focuses purely on quick wins and conversions, they are not looking to build a sustainable solution based product that addresses their customers’ actual needs. They are in it purely to make a quick buck from willing customers and what they usually end up with is a bunch of products/services that they have to keep topping up with more and more incentives/discounts/promotions/fancier taglines or creatives just to outdo their competition. I.e., they realize they don’t really have a truly unique selling point as they didn’t put in enough effort and thinking into developing something that cannot be easily replaced. Such approach will only work if you are the only seller or if the product and service is really hard to develop, thus you are confident most of your competitors are not able to achieve it..

Take for example, if you decide that there is a need currently in the market by for student aftercare services to support working parents who don’t have supportive company policies and flexible working arrangements. If you are offering a mediocre service, you will simply offer say - Free aftercare service for the first 3 months of signing up and 30% off if you sign up now for the next 3 months.

If you want to look at a more sustainable approach to avoid situations where a competitor offers say free aftercare for the first 4 months and 40% off if you sign up now, you will make an effort to find out more the other pain points associated with working parents and their children and try to bundle it into a more holistic “working parents aftercare services package” centered around - aftercare services, guided special out of school curriculum based on their children’s interests, customizable late afternoon snack option to cater for dietary preferences, access to resources for working parents and their children to adjust to such situations etc. Of these, some might be easily replicated but some like the out of school curriculum is not, as that’s unique to your company’s methodology and pedagogy.

It might take more effort and cost more but at least you won’t be caught in a pricing and promotional warfare with your competitors by tapping on your true strengths and unique capabilities. You might even be able to charge more or give less of a discount as you are selling the whole solution that addresses their pain points instead of a single, purely price/discount as-a-value based service/product that is more like a band aid that can be easily torn off and replaced.

The above is just a simple example of looking at why as marketers, we should pride ourselves as being valued business partners to bring the perspective of the customer to the table. Don’t be afraid to ask them hard questions, putting on the customer’s lens to ensure the outcome is a sustainable one, unless it’s part of the strategy to build something that is more seasonal or once-off to capitalize on a specific consumer trend.

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting 

Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

Identifying an Addressable Need

I recently came across an analysis by someone showcasing the success of the oat milk brand called Oatly and how they created a need that led to their success.

I have a slightly different take on Oatly’s success in that they didn’t create a need but rather, they identified an addressable need in the consumer market, developed their product to suit the addressable market and designed their packaging and campaign that speaks to the addressable market.

Why is it addressable and why is it not a need creation in their case?

First of all, looking at the fundamental principles of the hierarchy of needs, oat milk in itself is not new. Oatly was not the one who first came out with Oat milk as an alternative to other plant milk varieties that are not from nuts, legumes or fruits. People don’t need Oatly as yet another oat milk alternative. Even for the use in beverages, especially coffee drinks for example, Oatly is not the first entrant in this market.

If you look at the consumer and fast moving consumer good space. there aren’t that many products that are really needs based in this modern day and age. Ask yourself in all seriously as a consumer, do you really need to have say a burger or a pizza or that soft drink? For such cases, what brands and companies are creating is a want and not so much a need, which makes it a lot harder of course.

How we can take a step further however to see if these wants actually can be addressed at a deeper layer, going into the consumer psyche and how we think, behave and act, perhaps there is an addressable need tagged to that specific want. For example, consumer A, let’s call him Billy, wants to eat pizza because it makes him feel good and why does it make him feel good? It reminded him of his grandma who used to make really nice pizzas for him when she’s still around. It makes him feel safe, warm and loved whenever he thinks about pizza now. The feeling of loved, security and safety is a need and not a want as we all know.

This is where the fundamental need that can be addressed by a company who wants to give their consumers the same warm, fuzzy, safe and feelings of love with their pizzas is more likely to win over consumers and build a sustainable brand versus a company that just serves pizzas to make money from pizza lovers.

In Oatly’s case, they identified an addressable want by consumers who are avid coffee drinkers who might fall into a few categories:

1) those who are lactose intolerant or vegan or just prefer not to take dairy with their coffee but yet prefer not to have black coffee

2) those who in 1) but are allergic to nuts or don’t like the taste and thus have been relying on other plant milks like soy or coconut

3) those falling into 1) and 2) but who don’t quite like the tastes of other current plant milk types available

Looking at the wants and preferences of the consumers, we can also look at what are the underlying needs of the consumers who don’t take dairy and prefer plant milk in general that are being addressed. For example, it might be a feeling of being healthier, which is more basic survival or a feeling that they are doing their part in supporting the rights of animals, which is more altruistic or self actualization.

I find that doing an extensive mapping by going back to basics of what your target consumers want and need helps to better identify what is that addressable need that you as a brand or company can cater for ultimately to form your proposition.

Going back to Oatly’s case, after they have identified the preliminary wants and needs, they would be looking at pain points their consumers are facing based on how, where and when they are consuming plant milk. In this case, oat milk is not new to the market, including in the coffee shops but it is just beginning to make some headwinds. Almond was the first to lay claim and make their presence felt after soy was dominating for a while as the alternative milk for barista brewed coffees. Oatly would have studied this for a while and gotten some feedback from prospective customers who are avid drinkers of coffee paired with plant milk, once they decided this would be a good place to target in terms of their distribution network.

They would need to consider not just the taste of their product when brewed with coffee but the price point as well both on the consumer side and the business side, meaning the cafe owners who will be buying the stocks from them before they developed their barista edition oat milk. If there are already a few other plant milk or early entrant oat milk varieties being supplied, what would be that key differentiator so Oatly can win? They would need to think about product variations to cater for standalone oat milk drinkers versus coffee drinkers who choose plant milk over dairy.

At this point, it wouldn’t just be the packaging. It would be taste, quality, price and ability to retain their flavour or even their flexibility in order quantities, inventory management and payment management, especially for smaller cafes.

This article is just a high level of how I personally like to work with brands as a marketer, on their positioning and campaigns. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive list as there is much more to think about. But for starters, as marketers, we should always go back to the fundamental principles of the consumer psyche, marketing principles, proposition and business viability when working on our campaigns.

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting 

Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.