Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

Stumbled across this Ad Age infographic showing media consumption by generation,

type of media and by time of day today via @robbrown on Twitter. Missed it first time around - is broad in approach but useful topline trends data.

Created by: MBA Online

When I pick up a shiny new top off the shop rail, nothing makes my heart sink faster than a “one size” label.  Why? It never fits.  You’re pretty much guaranteed either your boobs, your tummy or your bum will be mercilessly exposed by a garment designed to be OK for everyone but that usually provides a poor result.  And it’s usually the one part you want to hide that ends up on show.

I hadn’t intended to start with a shopping analogy but hey ho, I am short of time so let’s press on.

We’ve been doing a lot of work recently with small to medium sized businesses and it never ceases to amaze me how many companies just don’t get what they need.

Small yet individually formed

In March this year, when David Cameron told the Conservative Party Conference ““There’s only one strategy for growth we can have now…and that is rolling up our sleeves and doing everything possible to make it easier for people to start (and) grow a business,” a line was drawn in the sand.

Only two months later, business secretary Vince Cable stood on a national stage alongside Lord Green and William Hague to announce that, “we’re rightly proud of British firms and making sure they can increase their exports to a worldwide audience is vital if we are to rebuild our economy.”

From grassroots campaigns to large-scale media pushes by the likes of The Mirror and The Independent; Google’s “get your business online competition” to HSBC’s small business confidence monitor, championing British small and medium-sized businesses and wanting them to succeed has never been more fashionable.

This is different.

If the UK is to recover from recession and bounce back from the economic woes that currently face us, we need small businesses to succeed.

Q. But how many large organisations truly understand the needs of small businesses?

A. Not many…..at least not when they are trying to communicate with them.

The most common complaint we hear from journalists (and the counsel we provide for our clients) is that the story IS different….solutions selling doesn’t work in the same way for SMEs as for large enterprises.  As for targeting audiences by job title, how does that achieve the desired results when the HR director is the finance director and the marketing director and the managing director all rolled into one?

From IT complexity to changing taxation; super-fast rural broadband to money laundering regulations; cloud security to the cost of “free”; understanding changing privacy laws to increasing remote working and the power of micropayments to the impact of mobile technology.  As the managing director of a small British business today, there is currently a LOT going on in your head.

And the end game? Cutting costs and achieving growth.

So where are the danger points? And why do (according to Experian) over 1800 small businesses a month fail in the UK?

According to Jonathan Hogg in April’s Independent SME supplement, “businesses fail to understand that the most successful time in a company’s life is its most dangerous time” and attributes this to what Freud called “totems and taboos”.

“Totems are ideas that become so sacred they cannot be questioned and taboos are the questions that cannot be asked. They arise from some very deep-rooted human instincts…reflect our natural conservative bias in the form of a reluctance to change….and the herd instinct where everyone wants to agree with the majority.”

And why this reluctance to change? At an enterprise level, businesses usually have non-executives to lean on.  To spot trends, point out pitfalls and to provide experience from learning the hard way.  But what do SMEs have?  Very often a combination of gut feel and a very small amount of spare time.

Doing well by doing good

In the UK at present there is a real opportunity to provide not only support, education and competitions/giveaways to the SME market but genuine help. The media want this, the government wants this and only a very few global organisations are really doing it.

I believe here is a wealth of industry knowledge, support and mentorship sitting within vertically-focused global businesses that can be shared to mutual benefit with the SME market in the UK.

What does this mean for PR and social media?

Where the focus on technology in the broadsheet media has shrunk over the past ten years, the tabloids, regionals and small business/consumer titles have seen an increase, particularly online.  An increase in blogger credibility, search and link-led marketing, has meant that ideas MUST be good enough to be shared amongst friends and colleagues and campaigns must deliver more than just news.

What works?

Businesses that are succeeding in reaching SME and industry audiences through print, broadcast and social media are using a simple but successful communications formula:

Simple language + human angles x strong support from real businesses= PR success

In the UK, there is a real opportunity to take initiatives such as business mentoring and community partnerships a lot further.  PR-wise, it amazes me that still companies are not talking the language of small businesses, instead burying all the interesting stuff under mountains of product marketing speak.

The smart company that can couple the wealth of interesting business news that its end users generate EVERY day with the political, social and macroeconomic picture in the UK today (alongside providing genuine support for British businesses) is a PR success waiting to happen.  So come on then, who’s game?

(cross posted with my personal blog)

Starbursting is essentially breaking companies up into more profitable pieces and despite not being familiar with the term until recently, it is apparently seeing a revival at present according to The Economist.

Notable mentions of rumoured or high profile starbursts include Pfizer, Motorola, Fiat and Foster’s. The Economist cites the main reasons for the revival as:

… companies seeking buyers for parts of their business are not getting good offers from other firms, or from private equity.

…the “conglomerate discount”—when stockmarkets value a diversified group at less than the sum of its parts.

…that this discount is real seems to be confirmed by the positive stockmarket reaction to the latest starbursts. From 20 days before the announcement of a spin-off to 60 days after, the combined value of the parent and spun-off children has on average outperformed the market by eight percentage points

This trend is much more common in the US and Western Europe with emerging markets seeing the opposite,….hence a popular alternative seems to be diversification.

This may be why, in some parts of the world, conglomerates are becoming even more diversified: witness Samsung Electronics, which is moving into pharmaceuticals.America’s big tech firms are also bucking the starburst trend and diversifying. Oracle, a software giant, has moved into hardware, and Hewlett-Packard, a computer-maker, is expanding further into software and services. Their big corporate customers increasingly want a one-stop shop for their information systems.

Whichever path an organisation chooses to take, one thing is for sure, excellent communications will be imperative both with investment audiences but also customers and prospects. Interesting times for PR.

CROSS POSTED FROM MY PERSONAL BLOG

I found this two-part advert on the London Underground intriguing.

LloydsTSB is advertising the use of infographics to display accounts information as a way of differentiation from other banks.

Where this gets interesting is that it puts a management accountancy-type function directly into the bank account. This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

One of the key criteria that you should have when joining an agency is looking around at your potential colleagues and working out whether you can learn from them and grow as a PR professional.

At Ruder Finn, I work with a number of people across our offices who are pretty smart across a number of different issues from transmedia campaigns to global health campaigns. Some of this knowledge is captures in an annual publication called Move. You can find an online archive of previous issues here.

I have the latest copy in a large coffee table print format and have a number of copies that I can give away, if you would like a copy drop me a line with your full contact details.

The rail strike in London has come with an extreme weather warning across the country and surprise tax demands dropping across the country from HMRC. Looking at the updates the strike seems to have done a good job in shutting down much of the London Underground.

Looking at the rhetoric from the RMT and TfL I don’t think that there will be any obvious point of compromise. The RMT think that there is only a 15 per cent of a normal service going on. This was cross-posted from my personal blog.

Since the coalition government’s decision to rule out further expansion at Heathrow, Stansted or Gatwick, the often controversial subject of aviation seems to have taken a back seat on the political agenda. This is odd as 2010 has been a very difficult year for aviation and it looks set to get even worse.

BAA has had to abandon plans for expansion after spending £220 million on their proposals. The aviation industry argue that Heathrow will now continue to operate at 99% of its capacity and as a result they will face problems including delays, which will encourage passengers to turn to other European hubs, such as Paris, Frankfurt or Amsterdam who will reap the financial benefits.

There is a public consultation due to take place later this year on a ‘per plane tax’ which aviation insiders are concerned will seriously affect both air freight business in the UK and transfer passengers who will avoid UK hub airports to avoid extra taxation. Add to this the huge disruption and lack of revenue because of adverse weather in the UK at the start of the year, the closure of airspace following the volcanic ash incident, 22 days of strikes by British Airways staff with the threat of more to come, the recent decision by BAA workers to strike, which has the potential to close Heathrow and five other airports and it is clear to see that the aviation industry is having a particularly difficult year which doesn’t look like it is set to improve.

227 new MPs have been elected in 2010, the biggest influx since 1997. Most MPs will admit that they do not possess a complex knowledge of aviation issues - there is no reason why they should!
For the aviation industry, this is a crucial time and a significant opportunity to inform the new intake of the plight of UK aviation and the important role it plays in the UK economy.

Put simply the Gruen Transfer is when the confusion of a shopping experience sets in wearing down our determination, changing the consumer from a destination shopper on a mission to purchase a particular item and instead turn into an impulse shopper who wanders through the stores.

Gruen Tranfer is named after Victor Gruen who invented the modern shopping complex: the Southdale Mall in Edina, Minnesota. The delicious irony of it all is that the Austrian was a committed socialist in his younger days. This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

Due to increased shpping costs: the cost of containers, fuel, insurance, improved worker’s conditions in China and increasing costs for lines of credit some are wondering whether manufacturing jobs will be located closer to the market for a number of products. This move back to local manufacturing has a name: nearsourcing according the New York Times.

Some companies have been very smart in product design and process engineering so have managed to nearsource rather than outsource, a great example of this is the shoe company New Balance and hi-fi company Schiit.

Whether this will become a real trend though is a bigger question, many post-industrial countries like the UK have their manufacturing eco-system so hollowed out that they couldn’t take advantage of nearsourcing if they wanted to as they no longer have the knowhow, staff, plant, electrical grid, railways and base industries to take advantage of it.

If one thinks about the UK, the government had to give 50m GBP to INEOS in 2003 in order to keep chlorine manufacturing going in the UK. Chlorine is one of the basic chemical building blocks required for modern industry and very hard to transport due to its aggressive chemical nature. Could the UK become a shadow of what it used to be from an industrial point-of-view? I don’t think so.

This was cross-posted from my personal blog.

Earlier this week, I was at a lecture at the RSA where Sky’s Adam Boulton was in conversation with Stephen Green, chairman of international banking group HSBC. They had both just returned from the G20/G8, which provided a backdrop to discussions on financial turbulence, money and morality. The presentation was especially interesting as it took a long-term historical view: King Edward III was noted as the first British sovereign to default on his debts; Franciscan thinking from the middle ages on poverty versus wealth was quoted; the ebb and flow of world trade was examined. You can watch the RSA’s video of the talk here. Well worth a look.

Mr Green was questioned on his book, Good Value: Building a Better Life in Business. He gave his perspective on the current macroeconomic climate, talking about a clear rebalancing to the East. He says ‘emerging markets’ is a misnomer, preferring the re-emergence of markets. China was the world’s largest economy until 1820 – before the growth of super powers – and was the dominant economic power in 18 of the last 20 centuries. Over a generation, he says, we will see the rise of the ‘new G20’ states, and the relative marginalisation of the G7/G8.

However, he is positive about the opportunities for business offered by this rebalancing. Companies that plan responsible, sustainable business strategies, in tune with the cultural needs of growing markets will thrive. Real CSR will have real impact.

As a spokesperson for the global banking community, Stephen Green is impressive. Highly engaging and authoritative, without a hint of arrogance. He expertly batted away questions inviting comment on BP’s current problems and focused on broad issues of strategy and morality. As an ordained Anglican priest, his views on ethics in business are especially interesting. From a reputation manager’s perspective, he is a valuable asset. A thought leader with original, coherent thoughts and a distinctive view of the world. Good value.