Corporate ::

Creating a vision, mission and value statement for any corporate – or agency – underpins where the organisation  is heading and why, for the benefit of employees, shareholders and clients. Or it should do. For many corporates and agencies, this thinking is still to be done, is fluid, has been done but is not outdated – or in the eyes of the board, is just not something that is seen as required.

Kerry Foods has created a vision, and for a corporate, resonates  as relevant, current and empowering.  David Taylor of BrandGym took this photo in their reception:

And I quote:

Here’s why I think this is pretty good:

1. It defines the market well, and does so not in product terms, but in terms of the opportunity: “fridge food”. This really opens the mind to innovation.

2. It has a call to action. And an ambitious one at that: “fill the country’s fridges”. A good Purpose should be an ongoing reason to exist that is hard to ever attain.

3. It is short and sweet. So you’d actually have a fair chance of remembering it

4. It has a distinctive voice and is written in everyday language: “simply brilliant food” for example.

So, a good source of inspiration if you are working on a company purpose.

Good stuff.

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Corporate ::

Always good to see that journalistic privilege is a subject to laugh about.

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Corporate ::

The dominance of Google in search is under considerable scrutiny right now.

And now Martin Sorrell has waded in, representing the views of some of his own major clients whilst at the same time commenting on the business practices of one of his biggest clients – one he calls a ‘frenemy’.

And as a backdrop to this is the new Microsoft patch advising consumers of the choice available for browsers. Microsoft has been mired in anti-trust claims and counter-claims, and lawsuits for the last decade – but are we differentiating the offerings from both companies correctly?

To get to the point that you need to be offered a choice of browsers you need to have paid for your operating system. At that stage, consumers have choice in which free search engine they use – and it is the success of the Google offering that has created their dominance.  It is inertia that stops consumers moving to another search provider – in essence it is conceivable that the EU turns to Google and says ‘ we don’t like the way you are giving out your free service to consumers’.

If there was to be major new and significant traction in Microsofts Bing service offering, the search engine will improve its results. And provde a worthy alternative to the 80%+ share Google has taken.

Market dominance and oligopolies are one thing, consumer inertia and their use of a freely provided service is another.

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Management ::

Be there a new world order or not, and I’m undecided whether if it’s all just a natural progression, albeit at anexponential rate, the 10 Workplace Skills of the Future or the skills workers should strive to have and the skills employers should seek out and promote – as written up by the Institute For The Future.

Is this an antidote to the Gen X/Gen Y divide?

The skills are:

Ping Quotient

Excellent responsiveness to other people’s requests for engagement; strong propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network

Longbroading

Seeing a much bigger picture; thinking in terms of higher level systems, bigger networks, longer cycles

Open Authorship

Creating content for public modification; the ability to work with massively multiple contributors

Cooperation Radar

The ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task or mission

Multi-Capitalism

Fluency in working and trading simultaneously with different hybrid capitals, e.g., natural, intellectual, social, financial, virtual

Mobbability

The ability to do real-time work in very large groups; a talent for coordinating with many people simultaneously; extreme-scale collaboration

Protovation

Fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles; the ability to lower the costs and increase the speed of failure

Influency

Knowing how to be persuasive and tell compelling stories in multiple social media spaces (each space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique)

Signal/Noise Management

Filtering meaningful info, patterns, and commonalities from the massively-multiple streams of data and advice

Emergensight

The ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity that come with coordination, cooperation and collaboration on extreme scales

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Corporate ::

Netflix, the entertainment company by post, has some enlightened ideas on how the organisation should run.

Some interesting ideas here.

Excellent paper on brand advocacy by Paul Marsden.

Marketing ::

Directory-enquiries firm 118 118 has just handed its top job to former Superdrug marketing director Gerry Murphy, while several bosses with marketing backgrounds were listed in Marketing’s Power 100.

ROBIN AULD, SALES AND MARKETING DIRECTOR, DOMINO’S

Yes. It’s said that the two most important skills a chief executive needs are the ability to demonstrate strong leadership and motivate colleagues. You can’t motivate people without understanding what makes them tick, and no person can better understand how different we all are than a marketing director.

As for leadership, it’s all about motivating people toward a common goal, which is a pretty good definition of a marketing director’s role in itself.

Add to this a marketer’s communication skills, logical yet creative thinking, team working and ability to manage people, grow business, hit deadlines and meet budgets, and you have a pretty good chief executive on your hands.

RICHARD HUNTINGDON, DIRECTOR OF STRATEGY, SAATCHI & SAATCHI

Yes. Others in the organisation may have greater experience at managing the supply side of the business, but this is often precisely why marketing directors make great chief executives – because they are dedicated to understanding how to generate fresh demand – they are focused on growth.

Add to that their innate belief in the commercial power of brands to extract value from consumers and the truth is they are often perfectly placed to drive the business forward. Marketing directors also recognise the importance of emotionally engaging their audience. If they apply this within their organisation, they will have a motivated and productive workforce, too.

ROD GEOGHEGAN, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR, WAX COMMUNICATIONS

Yes. But 10 years ago, the answer would definitely have been no. There has been a sea-change in marketers’ calibre – they are no longer about fluffy words and pretty pictures.

Today’s successful marketers are commercially savvy, hard-nosed business people who know every aspect of a business and consider the bottom line in every decision they make.

They also know the brand is everything and have become the spokesperson for the consumer – again vital in today’s market.

Marketers, particularly those who have worked their way up through a business, are perfectly placed to lead the board – and even more so in a recessionary market, where they can deliver real ROI from the front.

JONATHAN HARMAN, SENIOR VICE-PRESIDENT EMEA, CARLSON MARKETING

Yes. The question should be why wouldn’t a marketing director make a good chief executive. Customer-centric businesses are winning today, so who better to lead them than someone able to grow the value of the customer base?

The ability to deliver profits by looking at customers, brands and markets commercially and creatively has earned marketers their places at board tables and make them natural candidates for the top job.

Today’s board-level marketers need great relationships with their finance and operational colleagues, just as chief executives do. An interesting question is whether they change the balance of power and, if so, whether the consumer wins.

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