I've started a review of Predix and it's turning into something much more deep and fascinating. In particular it is interesting to read older articles, to see which of the predictions that GE spokesmen and trade commentators made have come to fruition. For now, I've posted here but get in touch if you want the full version.
I love GE and they way they manage their brand. See some observations I made this morning having read the CEO's letter to shareholders. What I didn't talk about was Predix, GE's operating system for the industrial internet. In a world where more and more we talk about platforms and ecosystems, it becomes harder to tell your own story. So, rather than trying to tell a better story, GE has built its own platform. It's a bit like a writer deciding that the best way to engage with readers is not to write a better book, but to open a bookshop. Clever! More to come on that in another post.
Read about my excitement and misgivings over one of my Christmas presents this year. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/alexa-stop-responding-ads-yourself-fred-burt?trk=prof-post
I posted today on integration. It's a huge challenge, and one that involves a different set of skills than simply communicating because it lives or dies on your success in involving the organisation. Understanding the organisation, how it works, where the blocks are, what the opportunities for engaging them are, what bring the brand life might mean in their world, etc etc. No wonder I'm finding our work sitting alongside HR and change management teams more and more.
Wow, it’s been a hell of a summer. I was hoping to ease off over August, but it went the other way. It’s what my wonderful former CFO used to call a high quality problem, and of course I’m thrilled with the work. A consequence of all this has been posting silence, so I’m trying to get back on it.
But I did have a couple of weeks off and took stock on where we’ve been successful and where we need to work harder. It seems there is one over-riding reason why our clients like Olix: it’s that we shape our teams to their problems, and not the other way around. Too many are fed up with having agencies twist the brief to fit their own spare capacity. We don’t have spare capacity, so we’re able to focus entirely on the business problem at hand.
What does this mean in practise? It starts with me. I know what I can do and what I can’t. So if I can help a client I will, if not I’ll try to introduce them to someone who can. Then I deliver what I can for clients, but I know where my skills end and where I need help. If I need help I find brilliant partners: writers, designers, photographers, video producers, researchers, data analysts, amazing people and partner firms who leave me in awe at what they can do…and they knock the socks off my clients. All of which makes Olix look good in the process, which is lovely.
It sounds simple…and it is, in truth. I don’t know if I’ve reinvented the agency or consultancy model here, but it’s certainly working for now.
Olix has been working with the Workers Educational Association (WEA) over the last couple of months. The WEA are a fantastic organisation, providing adult education across the country, reaching out into parts of society that aren’t served by traditional higher or further educational establishments. It’s also an organisation whose time has come around again, being driven by a strong social purpose. With course content around Culture, Health and Wellbeing, Community Engagement and Employability, they are doing amazing work to represent some of the most fundamental learning needs of people living in Britain’s diverse communities.
The 1992 Further and Higher Education Act established entities called Special Designated Institutions – SDIs for short – as part of a broader review of adult education and the WEA is one of 9 of these SDIs. In the 1990s the Act was fresh in politicians’ minds, and so a name referencing the organisations’ genesis made some sense, but over time the SDIs (rightly) stopped focusing on where they had come from and started focusing on where they were going, and what their purpose was. Meanwhile colleagues and partners were increasingly asking what an SDI was, and so collectively they agreed that a new, more relevant name was needed.
That’s where Olix came in. We developed the name and logo in two weeks. We were clear: keep it simple, keep it descriptive, keep it anchored in what makes you all special. Without any marketing support anything else would be counter-productive. An apparently simple task then, but finding an answer that all 9 organisations could rally around was not easy.
With our guidance a solution was found. So goodbye Specialist Designated Institutions, hello Institutes for Adult Learning. The name and logo was launched in conjunction with a report commissioned by the All Party Parliamentary Group for Adult Education, calling for a cohesive national strategy for adult education last month (July 6th).
A final point here, one often missed. This work won’t win creative awards. But it’s the right solution for the organisations in question. I think we often overlook the practical, unsexy-but-effective solutions that we as brand practitioners quite rightly put in place for our clients.
Summary report – not designed by us - can be found here: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/ier/research/adult_education/adult_education_too_important_to_be_left_summary3.pdf
I’ve been busy in the last few weeks working for a charity and two large B2B multinationals. They have more in common than you might think. The multinationals have thousands of employees they need to re-orientate around a sharper go-to-market strategy. The charity has thousands of participants (I use this word to protect their anonymity) who engage with their end users in order to deliver what they do. What they have in common is that their key ‘delivery mechanism’ if you will is people. Their people interact with other people to create an impression.
No matter where I wander, professionally speaking, I always seem to come back to the centrality of the brand owner’s people in brand strategy (with the notable exception of FMCG brands). Do our people understand the brand? Are they clear on how their behaviour contributes to the delivery of a brand experience?
I’ll share a story from a few years ago. I was working with a chemicals business, highly B2B, selling adhesives and pre-treatments to various industry verticals. They had 150 product brands that they needed rationalising, and thought this would clarify their value in the market place. But, as we working with them, we stumbled on a lovely story about an account manager who had been talking to an automotive client. The account manager realised that the residual value (ie the second hand price) of your car after, say, 18 months had an impact on the new price you were likely to pay. If the value was likely to depreciate rapidly, you’d be less willing to pay a premium. So the longer the car could look new, the better the new price for the manufacturer. And so the more the paint could maintain it’s ‘new look’ shine the better the new price for the manufacturer. We might be able to help there, he said, by treating your metal work with a pre-coating that will ensure the nice shiny paint adheres to the body of the car better and maintains its ‘integrity’ longer.
The point I’m making here is that the value in this exchange was not in the product, but in the intelligence and responsiveness of the account manager. A seemingly low value, downstream exercise, immediately created upstream value to the client. The automotive client’s loyalty was firmly rooted from that point in the company brand (those smart people from Company X) not the product brand, as a result of the human interaction. Bottle that, I said to the client, embed it across the whole of your business, and stop worrying about your product brands.
More and more brands are waking up to the power of their brand to guide and energise their people, and that this in turn is a key driver of business value. In particular businesses that are undergoing significant digital transformation need a compelling reason to persuade new talent (eg software developers) to join them and not to go to Google, Facebook or some sort of start up. If you want to learn more about people-based brand strategy, go to my very smart former team mates at People Made (http://www.people-made.com) as they spend all their time thinking and working with their clients on this basis and have a lot of good content to review.
It’s thrilling when your work hits the market, and so I’m very proud that IFS has started to roll out the WHAT’S NEXT platform, developed by Olix Consulting working in partnership with Ian Styles and the team at Verbal Identity. IFS is a global enterprise software business, headquartered in Sweden, that we’ve been working with. They’re fantastic people to work with, passionate about their product and deeply caring about the verticals they operate in.
We’ve developed a communications platform that gives them a visual and verbal framework to better tie together the various brand-building activities they undertake.
As with many clients, ease of implementation was a key consideration, so we have developed something that is easy to implement, simple to use with a variety of visual assets, and impactful.
Part of our project deliverables included an approach to verbal tone of voice and narrative structure, including a simple framework that helps IFS writers structure longer-form text – something they use a lot to explain their products, services, and point of view – in a way that supports the WHAT’S NEXT idea.
We’ve also been hands on with implementation and created the ad that has appeared in yesterday's Sunday Times Raconteur supplement with the UK marketing team (see above for a screen shot from my phone). This was relatively simple to put together because the foundation was set…which is what a strong platform should do, of course.
IFS is in the process of rolling the platform out globally and we expect to see many more touchpoints influenced by the work we’ve done. IFS team, thanks for being great clients, looking forward to helping make the work count for the business in the coming months.
It's with some shock that I've spotted that nearly 3 months have passed since my last post here. By way of explanation, if not excuse, we've been busy, working on projects as varied as a UK charity, a large multinational engineering group and a stately home. More very soon, I promise.
It's hard to fathom how the Trumpdozer is ploughing his way through the American political system, but he is. Some observations on my Linkedin channel this morning here
I try to be selective about the conferences I go to, as they take time out of one's working day. It annoys me when lazy conference organisers allow speakers to talk on anything, and then they stand up and give a thinly-veiled pitch. As a participant, especially a fee paying participant, you can feel robbed. That being said, when you filter out the pitches and try and sift for nuggets of insight, the presentations can be instructive, and can help reinforce - or challenge - your thinking in a constructive way. So it was at the BrandFinance Forum last week (although I was grateful for the freebie from David Haigh). I summed up my takeaways here
I'm not particularly political, but I am fascinated by the challenge the Labour Party in the UK is currently facing. Beaten by a surprisingly comfortable margin in the last election, they're going through an identity crisis. It's similar to the angst I've seen with a number of big-but-struggling clients that I've worked with before. This is how the Labour Party diagnoses its own shortcomings.
I recently posted here on some fish renaming that caught my attention. My points were light-hearted, but I was actually shocked to discover just how 'effective' some of these renaming exercises had been. The Patagonian Toothfish went from being ignored to near-extinct thanks to being renamed the Chilean Sea Bass. Anyway, read on, and you decide whether to laugh or cry...
I'm in a festive mood so apologies for the cheesy headline. To make it up to you, here's an early Christmas present in the form of some hard evidence that emotion matters in B2B. I’ve outlined why I think this is important and useful in my Linkedin post here. Thanks to Al Hussain at Verbal Identity, with whom I’ve been working recently, for bringing to my attention. Get in touch if you want the white paper.
I like the guys at Transform Magazine. Andrew Thomas, their fearless leader, is one of those unstoppable people that keeps going when others would give up, and he's achieved a huge amount with limited resources and in a relatively short space of time. So I'm always happy to help out when I can, and so I spoke to Emily Andrews extensively here.
I felt her starting premise was too pro-change: that brands need to be put down rather than perked up. As you'll read, I felt otherwise...
No profound thoughts in this post, but I’m feeling good about work at the moment so I thought I would write. Today I had the pleasure of getting the current team working with me together for a session on one of our bigger clients. They’re all amazing, and bring a mix of talents to the table…which is exactly what I hoped for when I set up Olix.
A couple of things struck me.
Ideas need to stay open for as long as possible. If you come into a working session closed-minded about an idea, you’ll spend your whole time defending it and not building it. We started the day with some good thoughts and executions, and these morphed into something really exciting. We had some debates, but they were never fights, everyone was listening, trying to find solutions. The outcome was real progress. Of course, you can only do this if dedicate real time to a client (but then that’s what we do here at Olix).
The value of lunch. I made lunch for everyone. Those of you who know me will know I like cooking, but this was an opportunity to stop, get around the table, talk together about the work, but also about other things. It was a simple soup, salad and water affair, nothing fancy. We all talked, listened, asked what we were all up to at Christmas, that sort of thing. The corporate al desko lunch has taken these important moments of bonding out of our working days, and I think teams – so important for good work - are the weaker for it.
So nourished intellectually and physically, I better get back to the work. We’ve got an exciting presentation to build….
I didn't expect quite such an avalanche of positive response to my post on Few Better Brands, so I decided to post a few tips on brand architecture here. I've been working with a number of large brands recently where it has been clear that their approach to brand architecture has been inadequate, characterised by static thinking from text books by inexperienced brand managers who clearly aren't paying attention to business today. There, I've said it.
It's been a busy month! Several new clients have joined us and we're going to focus on "doing the work" for the foreseeable future, as we have some fast approaching deadlines. If there is a bit of radio silence, hang in there, we'll be back soon!