Deloitte are one of the more enlightened professional service firms. From their thought leadership to green dots, they are a bit of fresh air to their sector. Of course the big challenge in every professional service firm – accountants, lawyers, consultants – is that their highly intelligent, highly paid partners think they know best, and usually better than clients. Maybe on specialist issues, yes, but necessarily about what they really want, aspire to, and prefer. Getting customer-centric thinking is not easy, even if they tell their clients how to do it!
So we’re talking about brands. Thousands of years ago, brands (at that time, more likely a branding of cattle) signified ownership, and so was about the owner. But power has shifted, supply exceeds demand, and customers are discerning. Brands are no longer about business and products – how good we are, how old we are, what great products we make. Brands are about people – and in particular their aspirations. Talk about me, and I will listen. Talk about yourself, and go home. You get the idea.
This is incredibly important for professional services, where the product is intangible, and the perceived value is high (or at least the fee is!). Accounting, legal and consulting brands need to be about their client’s aspirations, and how by addressing their challenges more effectively, they can realise their potential – improved effectiveness, better returns on investment, accelerating growth. Propositions are then crucial to make brands relevant and substantial – not by service, but by the issue clients are grappling with. Deloitte has come along way with its green dot, and leads its field. The opportunity is to go further with new propositions, innovative solutions and business models.
Email peterfisk@peterfisk.com to get my keynote on branding in professional services
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Jakarta, Indonesia
Indonesia really is one of the most exciting emerging (fast growing) markets. Whilst China and India grab all the attention, Jakarta has become a tech metropolis, and the huge new middle class has a great desire for brands that symbolize and enable a better life. In many ways similar to countries like Mexico and Turkey, the youthful population walk with smartphones in hand, wirelessly connected to a new world of possibilities.
Frontier is the leading marketing publishing and training company in Indonesia, and we’re working together to put on Marketing Genius Live, an inspiring one day interactive masterclass, in a country where there is a thirst for knowledge, entrepreneurship is everywhere, and growth is faster than China or India (and almost anywhere else!).
My book Marketing Genius is now 8 years old, but still a bestseller on Amazon, and particularly in Asia. Translated into more than 35 languages it keeps on spreading. Of course marketing moves on at a rapid pace, as do the best examples. On top of that a one-day masterclass with 150 people is long enough to get to know people, and solve some real problems (the most exciting part!).
So what would I include in Marketing Genius in 2014, that I didn’t in 2006?
- Amazon sells everything … the whole idea of sectors is dead, everything converges, any brand can sell anything.
- Real-time marketing … campaigns are dead, advertising is wallpaper, people respond to fast, topical and relevant engagement.
- Millennials and Mobiles … markets are influenced by a new generation, who also see the mobile device as the centre of everything.
- Design thinking … despite the name it simply means, start with deeper customer insight, explore ideas, and the aesthetic power of design
- Customer co-creation … customers are your best R&D team, with better ideas, developed, tested, produced, delivered and supported together
- The legacy of Steve Jobs … fanatical, obsessive, visionary … I developed a 3 day masterclass about his leadership, innovation and marketing.
- New business models … beyond Osterwalder’s canvas, brands from eBay to Nespresso demonstrate the power of innovating the whole business
- Collaborative consumption … what’s yours is mine, indeed why do we buy so much stuff and hardly ever use it, lets share it and have more fun
- Brand movements … brands are about people, their ambitions and passions, so bring them together, to do better what they love
- Zuckerberg speaks Chinese … ok having a Chinese girlfriend helps, but maybe its time for every English-speaking CEO to learn a new language?
You can read about all these topics, plus 100 new case studies and 16 practical roadmaps, in my forthcoming book “Gamechangers” which is finished and waiting to be published by Wiley. Next year I will be back in Jakarta working again with Frontier to create another one day masterclass plus “Gamechangers Indonesia” competition to find the best local innovators.
Eindhoven, Netherlands
CitizenM hotels try very hard to be cool. Yes the cubicle style room is modern, with wall to wall bed, and a glass shower cubicle that emerges in the middle of the floor. But in reality everything just ends up wet. The black and white typography tells you to sleep with the stars, and wake up energized. And the lobby area kitchen serving thai curry at a communal table is empty. CitizenM tries to be the smart car of boutique hotels. But it’s more like a Fiesta.
Into the car, we headed south to Eindhoven, for SAP’s day of marketing inspiration, a small physical event in a TV studio setting, so that each speaker could be videoed for the CMOs who didn’t show up. But what got me was the content. It’s now 25 years since I first read Lanning and Philips’s paper on how to develop value propositions that deliver customer experiences and loyal relationships. But speaker after speaker talked abut them like a new magic.
There’s something wrong with how too many people still talk about customer propositions and experiences … Time to move things forwards:
- Propositions are not products … “customer value propositions” are about customers, their needs and aspirations, and the distinctive benefits you offer them, ie the value to them. One proposition can introduce many products, and a product can support many different propositions.
- It’s the customer’s experience, not yours … look beyond your own “touchpoints” to see how customers perceive you, and the broader journey they experience beyond you. A payment experience is as much influence by a retailer, and payment system, as by your bank.
- The purchase is just the start … yet most “experience designs” still focus on the pre-sale, with a little “after-sale”. Focus on supporting people once they’ve got the product or service, enabling them to do more. This really is a big one for creating more value for customers. Enablement.
- Customers do not want a relationship with you … despite millions of dollars spent on CRM, customers will never be loyal, and probably don’t even want a “relationship” with you. The best you can hope for is advocacy. Try facilitating relationships between customers.
- And more one that is creeping in … building communities. A community connects people. Better is a movement, which connects people with a purpose, to achieve more together. The brand helps to articulate and support it. Movements are incredibly powerful if you can get them right.
Zaha Hadid designed an incredible swimming pool for the London Olympics. The organic-like structure will hopefully stand for years as a symbol of sport, as well as architecture. Unfortunately during the Olympics, her design was rather distorted by huge temporary seating which was bolted onto the perfect structure. But it’s perfect now, although through some stupid (non-legacy!) IOC rule, it has to drop the name of Olympic Pool, and is renamed the London Aquatics Centre.
Two years after I sat in the huge crowd watching Michael Phelps add yet more gold medals to his Olympic collection, and new sensation Missy Franklin break world records, my 14 year old daughter Anna was competing for Teddington Swim Club. One of the first people to try out the pool since its two year post-Olympic refit, she was competing in the London Regional Swim Champs. Standing on the blocks for her first of her multiple races, it really did feel like 2012 again. I was very proud of her!
Seb Coe and is London 2012 team won the right to stage the games, based largely on a promise of legacy. There is still much to do. Whilst this year’s swimmers got the chance to feel the water of champions, in future years, the cost of pool hire is likely to be prohibitive. Even this year, spectators were restricted, because again the cost was too high. Why? If legacy isn’t the next generation in regional competitions, encouraging participation and support, then what is it? Come on Seb, in whichever role you’re in now, sort it out!
Parnu is an old Baltic port on the west coast of Estonia, and a popular beach resort in summertime, particularly in the Soviet era, when the Russian leaders flocked west. But today we’re here to look forwards – with some of the leading innovators in Baltic business – telecoms and retailers, publishers and educators, plastics and aggregates, alcohol and fashion. The first “Gamechangers” two-day workshop. Stretching, provocative and highly practical!
Estonia is sometimes called the “Silicon Valley of Europe” … ever since Skype was created by Niklas Zennstrom and his team in Tallinn in 2003. More recent innovations include:
- Fitsme – virtual fitting rooms now used by retailers including TopShop and Burberry
- Playtech – world’s largest online gambling software, now valued at around £2bn
- Stigobike … a nifty folding electric scooter, weighs 15kg, top speed 27km/h, Eu1900
So how can this workshop generate the next big Baltic idea? We started by exploring changing markets, recognising that geography doesn’t matter, and global is as easy as local today. We focused in on new types of strategy, from franchising to ingredient branding. Including our unique Pilot Fish process. We reframed brands and propositions around customers not products. We redefined solutions as molecular clusters and experiences around enablement. We worked hard on business model design, finding new revenue streams, and then focused on storytelling to explain the big idea in new and compelling. Hard work. High energy. Great results:
- We reframed Estonia’s Technical University into the “university of tomorrow“
- We redefined a large wast management brand around a “better futures” concept
- We even recreate an advertising agency with confidence to deliver “the right answer“
Watch a compilation of recent Estonian innovations
Download the Gamechangers Workshop Brochure
Driving two hours southwards from Vienna the landscape is rich and flat. The road signs suggest we are heading towards Hungary, however our destination is just short of the Austro-Hungarian border. It was at this border crossing, 25 years ago this week, that the “Iron Curtain” began to fall. Nobody challenged the young man who dared to cut the barbed wire that day, or the small trickle of Trabants that soon flowed westwards. Within days news had spread, and from my University room in Freiburg, Germany I watched as Germans, from east and west, hacked away at the Berlin Wall, as it crumbled into history.
Today Raiffeisen Bank has brought me back to look forwards to the next 25 years. How will markets continue to change? What will customers want? What is the future of banking? And do business leaders make it happen? Raiffeisen is an impressive bank, but rethinking the rules is not easy. Sectors like banking are full of regulation which can intimidate new ideas. And to be honest, leaders got to where they are by playing the old game, so have limited interest in changing it. But we need to look beyond that. Like the man who cut the barbed wire.
Email peterfisk@peterfisk.com to get my keynote presentations FutureBank and FutureLeaders
The old Flemish town of Gent (or Ghent, depending on which local language you speak) used to be the centre of the world. Its vast canal network brought traders and their goods from across Europe, and from the oceans east and west. Vast warehouses stand empty, where once Egyptian cotton was traded for French wines, Indian spices with Belgian glass. And much more.
Today, Guiyang sits at the centre of the world. Draw a circle with a radius 4100km around the fast-growing city in southern China, and you will find more than half of the world’s population (on around 5% of the Earth’s land surface). Economies are growing faster, wealth is increasing, brands are innovating, businesses are succeeding more in the Guiyang Circle than anywhere else.
My keynote at the Vlerick Marketing Colloquium (interesting word that, and stands out from all the other conferences and summits!) started in China. How companies like Alibaba and QQ are changing our world, right here in Gent. QQ? That’s the Chinese social network that will soon be bigger than Facebook, and also combines search, retail and payment. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Paypal all in one. It’s a bit like an Oreo … combine QQ (the world’s largest network of consumers) and Alibaba (the world’s largest network of businesses) and you get the world’s most awesome marketplace. Time to think different!
Email peterfisk@peterfisk.com to get my “Gamechangers” keynote in Gent
Istanbul, Turkey.
Speaking at the Accenture/Wired CEO Summit I was amazed by how blinkered business leaders become when they start thinking about e-business. Of course digital technologies are transforming every business, in every sector. Almost every customer experience starts on a mobile phone today. Every product features some form of digital ingredient or support. Every supply chain is reconfigured through digital networks that enable virtual business models and partnerships.
So what is the biggest factor which determines success, one CEO asked. Er … Same as ever … Having the right strategy … and making it happen, effectively. For some reason talk of technology means we become obsessed with platforms and functionality, led in new directions by tech specialists. It all matters. Choosing the right solution, that is most relevant, scalable and best value, is not easy.
But the business leader needs to stay focused on the bigger picture – the right strategy and making it happen effectively. Of course digital networks and innovation extend the possibilities for business, and therefore the choice of markets is much wider, the opportunities to differentiate much richer, and ways to make money more creative. That just increases the need to make the right business choices, before even thinking about the technology. It might not sound cool, but strategic thinking still matters!
Vienna, Austria.
Austria’s Erste Bank has become one of the most successful banks to develop in the new markets of the CEE (central and eastern Europe). In particular they have focused on entrepreneurs. But most banks don’t serve entrepreneurs well. They are neither corporates nor individuals. They are seen as small and risky, regardless of their potential for growth and influence. In emerging markets, particularly, this stifles an economy.
My challenge was to define how Erste could become the bank for entrepreneurs. To help me, I had some of the winners of my “Gamechangers CEE” competition, which took place last year. They ranged from Blessus, the modular fashion brand from Poland, to Aeromobil, Slovakia’s flying cars (see previous blogs). I brought together the best ideas from around the banking world. In particular, focusing on Australia’s Commonwealth Bank, FNB in South Africa, and even Jack Dorsey’s Square that was inspired by his entrepreneurial brother, a artisan glassblower.
You can read about the “how banks can support innovators” model emerged, a blueprint for anyone who wants to create Entrepreneur Bank.
Email peterfisk@peterfisk.com to get my keynote presentation Banking for Innovators
Think of Beirut, and you probably think of a war-torn city, stuck in the middle of multiple warzones, and with danger round every corner. True, but its also a beautiful city, for many the Cote d’Azur of the Middle East, and full of modern, peaceful people who have spirit and a joy for life. Well educated and ambitious, Lebanese entrepreneurs flaunt their fast cars and designer clothes, although many more have migrated overseas. I’m here to keynote the 2014 International Franchise Conference, and my message is simple. Lebanon has got so many great ideas, innovative brands and businesses, that franchising is the fastest and simplest way to take them to a wider world. The local market is limited, but the local talent is great. This isn’t a problem. Become a global design lab!
Aline Kamacian is typical of local innovators. I’m sitting in her rustic Mayrig restaurant,sampling incredible range of foods, and finishing off the case study for my forthcoming “Gamechangers” book. She explains how her passion came from her grandmother, to keep the culture of Armenian cooking alive, even when their homeland has largely disappeared. One restaurant become two, in Dubai, then Paris, then New York. She now has a big kitchen with hundreds of women cooking her grandmother’s recipes, then flying them worldwide to the latest venues (some is made there), whilst also developing a premium food-to-go business, and a second brand Batchig to reach a younger audience.
Mayrig is one of the 100 Global Gamechangers … more at www.Gamechangers.pro