What’s your legal position when someone posts on your company’s Facebook

You may have noticed late last year the AANA broadened their official definition of “advertising” beyond that of a paid-for message. To reflect the changes the Internet has brought about, they now refer to “marketing communication” activity as brands are now often engaging in two-way conversations, not just pushing messages one-way via ads.

Early this year CommBank’s CMO Andy Lark, an ex PR man himself, told PR agencies they risked losing their traditional area of expertise to digital experts and integrated agencies.

The issue for businesses isn't simply which external supplier or internal staff is running your social media. With new technology comes a lack of control over how customers choose to seek information and engage with you, which brings a new level potential for confusion. And just as there is confusion around whom within a company or it’s preferred communications partners should be in charge of the conversation, the laws we all operate under right now are equally confused.

Who is responsible for comments posted on your business Facebook page?

In response to an ACCC ruling and fine of a liquor brand for leaving comments on it’s Facebook page deemed to he inappropriate, the AANA extended the reach of its Codes to cover most forms of advertising and marketing communication over which the advertiser or marketer has a reasonable degree of control.

In two recent determinations dealing with brand-owned Facebook pages, the Advertising Standards Board (ASB) reflected the AANA’s intent and stated:

“The Board considered that the Facebook site of an advertiser is a marketing communication tool over which the advertiser has a reasonable degree of control and that the site could be considered to draw the attention of a segment of the public to a product in a manner calculated to promote or oppose directly or indirectly that product."

"As a Facebook page can be used to engage with customers, the Board further considered that the Code applies to the content generated by the page creator as well as material or comments posted by users or friends.”

While you may think this ruling is a bit rough, at least you know where you stand. Until this week.

The AANA at least gave clarity, we now have a contradictory new set of guideline by the IAB

“After a careful analysis of existing laws and regulation and industry practice around social media IAB Australia has reached the view that user comments directed towards an organisation or social media platform, or to other users who are drawn to a particular organisation, do not constitute advertising,”

According to Samantha Yorke, director of regulatory affairs at IAB, “There is a real risk that organisations who treat user comments as advertising will err on the side of caution and moderate user comments very conservatively, which will adversely impact their presence on social platforms and which arguably undermines the very spirit under which social media thrives,”

I wonder what a judge will say about a marketer’s immoderate management of a social media campiagn in a yet to be held ACCC hearing?

UNO is one of a small number of marketing communications agencies accredited by The Communications Council of Australia. We believe self regulation only works when all of our customers' messages within our control are held to the same highest standards of paid-for and signed-off ads, irrespective of whether published in a traditional, new or yet to be invented medium. At least that way our clients have minimised their risks, both known and unknown.

Yes, you can now measure the best medium. But your message?

There are many tips and how to guides claiming they have the key to revealing the relative strengths and weaknesses of where to advertise, promote and connect. Media sales reps have a long history of presenting charts and graphs that show their medium in a favourable light. To ensure the best ROI marketing, we only rely on those studies that have rigorous methods and meaningful numbers to make the findings reliable.

Don't trust every media benchmark you can Google

For those who want to know what medium is most effective at acquiring new customers in the digital era, here is a chart we feel is valid:

Trend in performance of digital channels for acquiring new customers

Custora came up with these figures by analysing data from 72 million customers shopping on 86 different retailer sites. They tracked where customers were clicking from (email, Twitter, Google, etc.) and what and how much they bought, not just on that visit but for the next two years.

Over those two years, Custora found that customers who came to retailers from search were 50 percent more valuable than average. In other words, they were more likely to shop more and spend more. Email customers were nearly 11 percent more valuable than average. Customers who came through Facebook were just about average. Twitter customers, meanwhile, were 23 percent less valuable than the average during the two years following that first click.

I've written before that our reluctance to spend clients' money on banner ads is based on one amazing fact: you are more likely to win Lotto than click on a banner ad.

In comparison to these digital channels, research by the Direct Marketing Association shows you may still be best served with good old direct mail:

Average response rates for direct sales, DMA 2012

There is one new piece of research though that ultimately makes the discussions about differences between media effectiveness become a secondary consideration. It's proof of what many of us have always suspected.

How you craft your message is more important than the medium

The latest research into advertising effectiveness in Australia has proven creativity makes a big difference. The Association of Data-driven Marketing & Advertising shows that after 12 months ads with better ideas are both more effective and increase a brand's ability to harden pricing.

This reminds us you’re potentially wasting your time and money if you don’t get your pitch right. As consumers we remember big ideas, like “Think small.” Or the pulling power of a well crafted headline like “It’s Time.” Or a picture worth a thousand words...

The truth well told has been proven yet again to be more important in getting the best ROI from your marketing than any optimisation techniques digital specialists may dazzle the bean counters with. We are not animals, we are human, and we respond to emotions, not numbers of targeted exposures.

For those who want to make the most of their investment in airtime/space/or face-to-face, remember to invest a little in the art of communication.

It's not just consumer brands that can benefit from better communication

An ability to express your message is just as impotant for both service businesses and B2B. This is especially true for financial services, as shown by this chart of what customers say are the most important qualities in a financial adviser.

AFA White Paper: The Trusted Adviser May 2013

The report found the biggest difference in success of the top 10% of financial planners and the rest isn’t expertise, or credentials or technology – it’s the ability to communicate. Communication is not talking at people, it's the art of speaking with empathy. This is where social media excels. Use it to listen to your customers, then respond in a way that makes the individual believe you understand where they are coming from.

Irrespective of digital or traditional, face-to-face or in writing, where you have the conversation is secondary to the way you express yourself.

Just remember to make the message suit the medium. Our burping cow ring tone for Sipaah was downloaded by lots of kids who knew exactly where our brand was coming from.

Fame is the game of the name

The exponential pace of change is increasing the pressure on businesses to stay competitive. You know it’s not going to slow down. Fortunately there are still ways you can take control. One proven method is to revisit some simple building blocks to help make your brand relevant in today’s complex marketplace.

4 step process to make a challenger brand famous:
GAME
NAME
FAME
CLAIM

Game:
When did you last define what it is you do you do that makes you a specialist. In a cluttered business environment it pays to play in a defined niche where you know more about the rules of the game than your competition. Define the things that are of value to your prospect. Make sure you understand what it takes to be world’s best at your game, and work to stay at the top. People will still pay you a premium for something special that means something special to them.

With a fresh outside perspective, define your true differentiators, your “authentic truth.”

Name:
Your reputation, the brand and everything it does must be aligned with what you do that is special or your efforts will be diluted. Today, any business with integrity can compete against established incumbents. The cost of entry is no longer big budget mass media campaigns, the spoils now go to the nimble.

Today, the truth is what counts, the public can find the facts faster than businesses can attempt to shape opinion. Ensure your brand reflects your truth in everything you say and do.

Fame:
The art of being noticed. And remembered. And talked about.. You can do this several ways. Spend a lot of money, like Swisse, who invested up to 60% of annual revenue to marketing to achieve business growth, which stands at about 50% year-on-year over 4 years.

Or take the stand out in the crowd approach. An elevator pitch is only of value if people are listening, be too polite and you will be invisible. There is something to be said for the fart in a lift approach, however can you risk going viral with the wrong tone of voice?

Ideally, you can take the hero approach: be noticed by the right people for the right reasons. To do this ensure you choose the right medium for your message. There have never been so many communications options – a pitfall for the unwary, and an opportunity for the savvy

Claim:
Tell the truth, especially now the customer can search the Internet to discover what is a genuine claim and share with their friends what they find out. Decide what will differentiate you in your game – do you do it faster or smarter, cheaper or better?

Then find a creative way to express your difference. As J Walter Thompson said almost a century ago, “the truth well told” is the value add of great advertising.

Famous campaigns start with a defined customer benefit

What’s your “Which Bank?” How will you enter the vernacular, as this one of mine did 25 years ago:

With a creative leap, you can express the human insight that will resonate with your prospects. And they’ll repeat it to friends, again and again.

12 simple ways to ensure return on investment from digital

How do you explain to the manager who signs off your budget that today customers want more from your website than a brochure online? You can start by pointing out how you can replace existing fixed and recurrent costs with keener priced digital alternatives. Then remind the cost controller that technology is moving so fast they’ll be surprised how much more you can do today for less. A lot less than many of the savings to be made across existing business practices that digital can now enhance or replace. This 12 point digital checklist can help you keep it simple and the returns substantial.

Your digital project 12 point checklist

Keep an open mind, what the site needs to include is based on what the customer wants, don’t limit scope by prescribing whats to be included by your what your preconcievd ideas of what the competition have already done.

Engage with the user in the context of where and how they are accessing you. Are they on a mobile while in a shop, in bed on a tablet or at their workdesk on a PC? At work, at home, on the move, your site experience needs to change accordingly.

Educate or entertain? Ask yourself are they visiting your site to learn more, or simply because it is an enjoyable experience? Or would they like it if you did both? Deciding this helps shape your content and navigation.

Personalisation. "Allow users to personalise their experience. People love to add personal touches because it helps them feel at home and in control. Provide sensible, beautiful defaults, but also consider fun, optional customisations that don't hinder primary tasks." - Google Android

If you don't treat each customer as an individual, a competitor will. Technology now enables you to serve each visitor exactly what they want, a bespoke site just for them.

Innovate.The digitisation of everything now allows you to reinvent so many of your business functions and methods, take advantage of what is now possible.

Tone of voice is more important than what you say. The way the site looks, the colours used, typography, whether there are pictures or videos and the style of vocabulary you use will make a bigger impression about your brand image than what is in the text.

Services is what you build today, not websites. "Our service doesn’t begin and end at our website. It might start with a search engine and end at the post office. We need to design for that." - GOV.UK

Iterative, our most used word to describe our process for scoping, designing and building a digital service. Start small, constantly evolve and develop the service offer. We learn and improve the offer together as we go.

Marketing. A site without marketing is an island resort that’s not on any map, let alone an itinerary. Don’t launch and leave, have a plan that will drive customers and prospects to your site, align what the promise is and how your site will deliver to expectations.

P, there are 4 of them in marketing: Product, Price, Promotion, Place. Consider which of the Ps is most useful to enable you to best engage with each type of customer. The 4Ps of marketing aren’t all the same for every person or every occasion.

Load time is more important than looking good. Too many fancy things can slow down the experience.

"Make important things fast: Not all actions are equal. Decide what's most important in your app and make it easy to find and fast to use, like the shutter button in a camera, or the pause button in a music player." - Google Android

Effectiveness. Know what you want to achieve and why. Most importantly decide how you will measure with meaningful metrics that can be acted upon. Then you can build in measurement techniques to track what is working and what needs to be improved. And make sure someone is in charge of tracking results and implementing improvements.

If in doubt about what matters most, remember the customer's perspective comes first. Look at the first letter of our 12 points. In an increasingly complex world, when you connect with customers they will appreciate it of you can KEEP IT SIMPLE.

Radioactive ads from when people didn't know better

Classic ads from 1910-1930 for radioactive products

What can’t radium cure? A century ago it was legal to advertise radioactive products, from toothpaste to suppositories, condoms and check out the chocolate!

If looks could kill: Radium lipstick advertisement from the 1930s. (via 109.com)

More classic ads from the 1930s for the Tho-Radia range of makeup.

Nil by mouth, guaranteed harmless?!! Gives new meaning to "the ring of confidence"

Anyhow, have a radium.

Now in a convenient pocket size pack of 20s. They didn't know smoking kills.

Mrs Marsh could give us a demonstration of the brighter effects on your smile of Radium toothpaste.

Chockaholics aren't left out, Radium is everywhere. The ads claimed eating a block would make you look younger.

Time wasn't on the side of those with radioactive numbered watches that glow in the dark.

Another ad campaign competing for share of the toothpaste that glows market, now with added thorium.

 
Radioactive wool keeps you warm on the slopes.

Dress your baby in it.

Advertised as a cure for arthritis, rheumatism, mental illnesses, stomach cancer and impotence. (via Real Food University and Oak Ridge Associated Universities) Triple distilled, who needs a whickey chaser?

Condoms, that glow in the dark?

They didn't realise you can't wash off radiation poisoning.

Dr Curie started something big. Cosmetics companies continue to claim they have the secret to eternal youth.

Like to see some more classic ads?

Have a look at 12 great vintage politically incorrect ads for Christmas gifts.

Dead business walking? Food for thought for managers

Everyone knows the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more.

Yet year after year most Australians are getting fatter. Fatter people aren’t as healthy. Fatter people die earlier than fitter, leaner people.

A whole industry makes money out of fat. Fitness clubs. Personal trainers. And diets. None of it works over time. The stats prove it. It’s not enough to know you have a problem. Personally I have never been better educated, yet I’ve never been so overweight.

Science has shown only cognitive behavioural therapy ensures long-term positive change and a healthier longer life as an ex-fatty. 21 days of mind reprogramming is just the start to breaking the usual fatso habits.

Business as usual doesn’t work. How long till the business you work for dies?

Australian businesses are fat. They aren’t fit enough to cope with today’s rapid pace of change and increasingly complex issues. They don’t exercise their brainpower by trying something new. And like most of us with a weight issue they are looking for the quick fix. So they outsource it.

The diet industry equivalent in this instance are the service providers, from the Deloitte pre-prepared meal programs and the peddlers of management boot camps, to the efficiency fitness trainers selling the benefits of Sigma 6 and Lean. Even the language is the same as The Biggest Loser.

The answer for struggling businesses isn’t in doing the same things more often, or paying more personal trainers to lift your motivation. Nor is it enough to reduce the excess fat by cutting costs. Stomach stapling the business results in staff suffering reflux, hunger pains and mental stress for no performance improvement.

The answer is cognitive behavioural change.

The answer is developing an innovation mindset.

Here’s how it works and why most businesses are doomed to die early.

It starts with the owners of the business recognising they have a problem. An attitude problem. Their brains have been thinking the same way so long their synapses have turned a well-worn groove into a rut of superhighway proportions. The problem is, it’s now a road to nowhere.

The new business opportunities aren’t where the brain has become accustomed to drive to, every category is seeing their marketplace become a ghost town. Today’s marketplace is somewhere new, and management not only don’t know where it is they don’t have a map to show them how to get there.

The new destination is growing, profitable and exciting. It’s enabled by the Internet and feeds on new ideas made possible by software as a service, unified comms and the cloud. The new place isn’t a city or a country or a category, it’s everywhere and anywhere the customer happens to be, 24/7. Now every customer or prospect can pick and choose what they want via a mobile device. From cat food to cars, retirement plans to restaurants, you can research and purchase without talking to a salesperson.

Yet business owners continue to think the value of their business is existing fixed assets and legacy systems, current supply contracts and distribution arrangements, proprietary processes and procurement systems. Australian managers continue to tweak a little here and there around the edges of their business models. Generally, the bigger the organisation the more cholesterol blocked the arteries of internal management and external communication.

Figuratively speaking, fat dead men walking the corridors of offices around the country are about to be knocked off by fit and nimble female and new age male entrepreneurial thinkers who are open source and open minded.

So what do our business leaders do? They buy another diet book, like the biography of Steve Jobs. What they don’t realise is reading about Apple is as relevant to middle managers as middle aged men reading about Usain Bolt’s exercise regime. Apple was a challenger brand from day one. It was in the DNA.

The answer isn’t reading a book on what someone else has done. It comes from doing what hasn’t been done. It comes from the confidence to try something new with a willingness to fail. Accepting you’re likely to fail again and again. Because continuing to do what you do now is guaranteed to fail. While with every new thing you try your chances of discovering a winner increases.

Changing your habits and practicing to do what doesn’t come naturally, every day, is the proven method for success. It’s making a habit of taking small risks often so you don’t stand still and become another Kodak. The proof is in understanding how Fujifilm could innovate itself a future as a cosmetics company.

Memories might be priceless, they just don’t make money like they used to.

How a traditional business became a challenger brand

Fifteen years ago Kodak entered a death spiral, from a global peak in 2000, camera film sales dropped 90 per cent in 10 years as the digital revolution swept the world. “We’d known it was coming since the 1980s,” says Yojiro Yamashita, general manager of Fujifilm’s life science products division.

Kodak didn’t make it, going bankrupt last year. Fujifilm not only survived but emerged into the digital world of today with a series of innovative new businesses.

Fuji recognised what its’ true strengths were says Tomoyuki Yamazumi, a cosmetics industry analyst for the research firm Fuji-Keizai. “It had the financial power plus a strong marketing ability and existing ties to consumers.” One of the small risks Fuji management took was launching a cosmetics range in 2007. By 2010, sales of Fuji’s upmarket Astalift brand were already over $100million a year. By 2018 the company is looking to increase skincare and supplement sales by ten times that.

Look around your business. Are you a Kodak, or can you recognise your strengths, try something new and innovate your way to a future as a challenger brand?

This article first appeared in AdNews, 30/5/13

How can a country of 22 million people compete in a world of 7 billion?

At CeBit 2013, Salesforce Vice President Vivek Kundra’s big question for Australian leaders is “how can a country of 22 million people compete in a world of seven billion?” His answer?

“It’s not about size. It’s going to be about innovation. Innovation policy and an innovation agenda have to bethe come building blocks of a nation that’s going to compete in the global economy.”

Third wave of computing is changing the global economy

Competition in the global world of business is being driven by a ‘third wave of computing’. Essentially the shift from hardware to cloud based software and services and super fast mobile broadband networks that allow consumers and workers to access data on portable devices. Our clients have seen a doubling of visits to their websites from mobile devices over the last year. In fact, this year more people globally will access the Internet from a mobile than a computer.

The opportunity for challenger brands

The biggest risk for businesses I’ve observed are the internal stakeholders defending their hard fought for legacy systems and infrastructure, and managers who are obsessed with efficiency through fine-tuning traditional methods. As Kundra points out, competitiveness now comes from letting go of what you’ve currently got now. “Most large scale organisations are still stuck in 1980s technologies. If you’re still stuck in an old mindset then unfortunately there’s a young entrepreneur who is imagining the way the world should be rather than it is.”

“The most amazing opportunities lie in reinventing entire sectors of the economy.”  Vivek used the usual examples of US companies like Amazon, Netflix and Uber as businesses that are challenging categories today.

If you are running a business you have a clear choice he says – “do you want to be Amazon or Barnes & Noble?” This isn’t a particularly new view, as a global survey by Boston consulting summed up a couple of years ago, in this world of rapid change the spoils go to the nimble. Still, many managers still don’t seem to be responding.

“There’s a Darwinian spirit to the extinction of those who are holding onto the 1960s ways of doing business.” Vivek states, “not because it’s in the interest of the customer but because it’s easy and it’s because that’s what they know what to do.”

A marketer’s mantra for today: “The customer. The customer. The customer”

This is the biggest differentiator for challenger brands. “Companies that are embracing the third wave of doing business are doing it in the interest of the customer.”

Kundra recognises the fear of change within businesses when he suggests the best way to introduce a change culture is to build a prototype. “I think for too many people the expectations for transformative technologies is that it takes too long, costs too much and they’ve been burned in the past.”

A test and learn approach reduces risk

Last week at the launch of an AGSM Mid-Market program a professor specialising in innovation for business pointed out success today comes from having a portfolio of new initiatives that can be tested quickly in the marketplace. Rather than over researching only one strategy in an attempt to minimise risk, be willing to fail and fail frequently. The chances of some prototypes being winners with the customer will increase the more you try.

As Kundra says, aim to “be relevant and simplify the customers’ or citizens’ lives”.

3 reasons for marketers to resist the call to cut prices

The latest statistics on online fashion retail sales, research on the main purchase driver for financial advice and a Californian think tank pricing model all give marketers strong reasons to reconsider Price as a useful tool.

Evidence 1: Online fashion sales prove price not the motivator

No wonder Australian retailers are scared of online stores. British online retailer ASOS recently revealed that Australia is its single largest foreign market — with Australians buying something from the ASOS website every 6 seconds. The latest research from Roy Morgan shows at December 2012, 7.6% of Aussies aged 14+ (or 1,430,000 people) had made an online fashion purchase in any given four weeks — up from 5.7% (1,062,000) one year earlier.

Online fashion-purchasing habits by Australian women by sub-category, 2011-2012

What is really interesting is the opportunities for marketers this research reveals. Most people would probably jump to the conclusion that these online sales are being lost by Australian stores because clothes are available cheaper from overseas. Everything on the web is cheaper, right? Well actually, no.

Roy Morgan’s research has found “scoring a bargain is not the main motivation for women purchasing fashion products online. Far more important is quality, with 75% of them agreeing with the statement ‘I believe quality is more important than price’.”

Discretionary spending by women on clothes has parallels with the way men seek financial advice. A recent national survey by an independent network of financial advisors found the vast majority of customers were more concerned about the quality of service and the frequency of face-to-face time they received than the size of the fee. Of hundreds of customers surveyed, price was rarely mentioned. Value was the primary concern, and the value equation was grounded in the perception of the quality of advice. .

None of this is new. I’ve been segmenting customers using the New Economic Order for nearly two decades since it was first developed by two Australian academics.

Evidence 2: choose who you want to be your customer

You can segment the population by three distinct sets which allow marketers to predict discretionary spending behaviour. The biggest segment, the Traditionals, sre generally cash poor with most of their spending accounted for with essential services, utilities bills, rent, transport and food. They have neither the capacity nor the predisposition to purchase discretionary items.

The other half has a common mindset, they share a desire to buy quality goods and experiences. This group is divided in half by their capacity to spend, one half are NEOs, and while they are only a quarter of the population they represent half all discretionary spending. Transitionals are NEOs on a limited budget: a career couple with one at home with a baby, or a high achiever that's just started their own business, or perhaps they have retired.

For 50% of consumers, the Traditionals, a cheap price is their opening and closing consideration. However these are the people who don’t spend much. They also deliver no sense of loyalty and don’t refer new customers. Every sale to a Traditional is a new sale that starts from scratch. And risks going to the lowest priced competitor on the day.

Most restaurant and airline customers and B2B purchasers are NEOs. These people research purchase decisions on the basis of what they believe are the features and benefits that mean the most to them. Price comes LAST, and isn’t much of a deal breaker. 

Those latest stats on online fashion sales make sense in light of NEO behaviour. NEOs are online researching what’s hot in the world of fashion. In fact, it’s where they do most research when considering any major purchase because it’s where they control the levers, avoiding the unsavoury hassle of being sold by a salesman face to face. While Traditionals continue to spend the majority of their clothing budget on essential items like socks and undies in stores when the sales are on, NEOs continue to buy more discretionary fashion items, more often, both from the Internet and instore.

So what’s the best marketing model for selling to NEOs?

Evidence 3: all value is subjective

According to Ron Baker, the founder of Californian think tank the VeraSage Institute there are two fundamental approaches to pricing:

Cost-Plus Pricing

Labour Theory of Value

Product » Cost » Price » Value » Customers

Pricing On Purpose

Subjective Theory of Value

Customers » Value » Price » Cost » Product

You can see how subjective value pricing turns the order of cost-plus pricing on its head, by starting with the ultimate arbiter of value – the customer. In Baker’s words: “Goods and services do not magically become more valuable as they move through the factory and have costs allocated to them by cost accountants. The costs do not determine the price, let alone the value. It is precisely the opposite; that is, the price determines the costs that can be profitably invested in to make a product desirable for the customer, at an acceptable profit for the seller.”

As a marketer, for decades I found software one of the simplest products to approach from the Pricing On Purpose model; it’s the only reason Microsoft had education, standard and professional versions. The mid range product best reflects a fair margin for the cost of production of the product. The same product is then also sold at a low entry price with a few features turned off to maximise sales volume at the low end and repackaged in a fancy big box with a few extra features to maximise margin at the upper end of the market.

Choose who you want your customer to be, only then pick a marketing P

Whether you are selling clothes or cars, fair trade coffee or boutique wine, building materials or investment services, remember when your sales force wants you to discount, ask them to stop and think about the customer. Are you selling a basic product to a student, an authentic experience to a Transitional or a professional service to a NEO? Agree with sales who your customers are before you decide to use the PRICE lever.

Depending on who your customer is, Product, Place or Promotion may be more valuable to them than Price.

How to be seen on Facebook: all marketers need to know

Just being active on Facebook isn’t enough. As with any communications medium, there are smart ways to achieve more for less effort.

Don’t be baffled by social media marketing spin doctors. Sure, Facebook has it’s own set of best practices. Hopefully by getting to know what matters and what doesn’t you can ensure any supplier will make the most of your investment.

The key to making the most of Facebook for your business is understanding it’s all about making sure everything you do improves your chances of being seen.

Much of this isn’t about paying for black art, it’s about basic step by step craft.

40% of time on Facebook is spent on news feeds

Only 12% is spent on profile or brand pages. So:

• Post articles on other people’s pagesPost on less pages more often
• Choose pages with high numbers of fansPhotos have higher ranking than links or text
• Use images
• Keep your text posts short – between 100 to 250 characters get 60% more engagement
• Ask a question
• Post daily and frequently
• Post about relevant topics – don’t push the brand
• Test your audience for their engagement times – 18-24 year olds are most active 9pm – 10pm, women 25-45 even later

How edge-ranking works is the key for marketers

All of these individual steps are only important because of something called edge-ranking. This makes or breaks social media marketing. This infographic shows how it works.

The health checklist for your sales process

15 questions to help your business determine the focus for your sales activity.

Do you have a sales department? Here are 15 questions to help change your sales force from sales takers to sales makers:

1. How much time are you investing in new business a day?
2. Is the total revenue and the sum of your clients’ budgets growing more slowly than in the past?
3. Will growth levels come from present client budgets?
4. Where will growth come from?
   More frequency of purchase
   More volume of each sale
   More value? Up sell/or cross sell?
5. Will growth have to come from new business won from competitors?
6. How do you sell to prospective clients?
7. What’s your process?
8. How do you find them?
9. How do you win them?
10. How do you prioritise sales calls?
11. How is a sales call pre-qualified, (telesales/email/CRM)
12. How long is spent face to face?
13. What is your conversion rate?
14. Is the sales call to the final decision maker?
15. Who is the primary decision maker, how are they managed?

ROI marketing can help improve the performance of any of these sales metrics.

Marketing can speed sales, pre-qualify and build loyalty once you’ve made a sale.

In the past business owners were frustrated by an inability to measure what worked and what didn’t. Today there are tools and technques to enable you to measure the return on your marketing investment.

Get social media right or "you're stuffed"

Every time you use something that you aren't being charged for, remind yourself, it's because you are the product. SMH.com.au, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest all let you read and/or post for free because they are making money out of YOU. Businesses of all kinds are constantly gathering data from you and about you and your contacts most of the time you do something digitally. Facebook can now access your phone’s microphone to eavesdrop on what you are listening/watching while you post an update.

The upside is you will be served ads or content or search results that have been vetted just for you. The downside if you're marketing your own business online is you have to recognise the average person will increasingly expect to receive only what they care about.

Social marketing 101: What's in it for your customer?

As Jane Caro told a room full of online marketers recently, people are "entirely able to screen you out no matter how much money you put behind (your message.)

“If the message is not relevant, if the message doesn’t mean anything to them, you’re stuffed.

“the power has moved from those people with large pockets to the population at large. But you can have no money at all and send a Tweet that resonates and takes off like wildfire and suddenly you’re famous.”

Research by McKinseys has shown businesses have found the primary benefit of embracing social media is the ability to open a dialogue with customers and actually listen to what customers want. Not talk at them like a brochure, but understand what they care about and respond, or learn and move on. Here's a reminder of the simple etiquette of doing a business on the Itnerweb.

3 rules of social media engagement: the 3 Rs

To participate in social media as a representative of an organistion or company it is important to remember 3 rules.

Be clear about who you are representing, take personal responsibility for ensuring that any references to your company are factually correct and accurate and do not breach confidentiality requirements, and show respect for the individuals and communities with which you interact.

Remember, you are personally responsible for the content of the posts online. If employing a ghost writer, it is your responsibility to sign off on final content. Ensure any information about your products and services that you provide is true and factually accurate.

Respect copyright, privacy, financial disclosure and other applicable laws when publishing on social media platforms.

If you break the law you may also be personally liable.

There is no best way to compete

Remember that scene with Steve Martin ordering coffee L.A. style – "a half double decaf decaffeinated half caf... with a twist of lemon." (The video is at the end for you to enjoy.) It seems every single decision we now make throughout the day comes with an endless number of choices.

So it came as no surprise when a global a marketing guru presented research to the World Business Forum in Sydney that proves, in industry after industry, there is no single best way to compete.

How to differentiate your brand today

The worst mistake in strategy is to compete with rivals on the same dimensions, Professor Michael Porter says. The man who’s made strategy his life work says many businesses still get confused around the definition of the concept of differentiation, and that even trying to be ‘the best’ means a business is starting in the wrong place strategically.

Porter points out "we all know it’s impossible to meet every need of every customer uniquely well. That’s impossible. There’s no one way to deliver value.

“Strategy starts with a notion that the fundamental question is not how to be the best, it’s actually how to deliver something unique. To the customers you’re choosing to serve. Not because what you’re doing is ‘the best’ but because what you’re doing is delivering distinctive value.

Strategy is about being unique. That’s ultimately what all successful companies are able to achieve for some period of time."

The formula for growing challenger brands

If today we are spoiled for choice, it follows the prospective customers for our business are too. So instead of seeking some magic wand global answer, a better strategy is to identify one thing people you're trying to serve actually care about. Something that you're good at delivering. Finding your mojo is the fundamental starting point in our formula for growing challenger brands.

What happens when the CMO spends more on IT than the CIO

The head of marketing will soon be spending more on IT than the head of IT, so a recent study by Gartner found. Last week at the annual adfest in Cannes, Ogilvy's top creative warned of how too much faith was being put into data and not enough into ideas. This was resulting in well planned and placed ads that don't actually achieve much.

Where is the real value to be found in marketing?

The more things change the more they stay the same. The problem in the past was IT managers spent a fortune, first on hardware and then software to sytemise the running of the business. Whether or not the customers' experience was improved was not the concern of the CIO. You only had to dial 3 for support to know that. The main focus of the CIO was all about having bragging rights his IT budget was bigger than the competitors'.

Now we are seeing marketing managers playing the same game, "my Big Data budget is bigger than yours." Businesses are paying more and more to collect big brother levels of information on people. You've experienced the result like everyone else – being hit with ads on Facebook when all you want to do is see a picture of a friend's fishing trip. This may be how Zuckerberg will try to make an earn for shareholders, it isn't the road to marketing Nirvana. Just like the IT managers of the past, what the customer wants once again isn't the focus.

The constant here is managers within the business concentrating on the business of the business, rather than looking for ways to make a customer's life better. You probably recognise the trap, I fell for it. For several years I paid too much time and money on experienced professional staff and IT consultants to implement and manage programs to systemise my business. None of it added to the power of connecting and motivating, inspiring or creating. It was money spent on smooth bureaucracy for neatness sake and failed to grow my customers' businesses, nor consequently my own.

Rational Vs emotional marketing approach

"Investment" in IT has always been a rational spreadsheet sell to the chief decision maker. How often have you witnessed a marketing department asking for a "brand building" budget lose out to the CIO who could promise a guaranteed ROI from some new IT? Problem is marketers seem to be giving up the fight at the board level for using emotion to connect with customers, instead choosing the easy route of asking for funding for data. Spend X get Y. Yet economic modelling consistently shows the customer is innately irrational, human beings are pre-programmed that way. This is at the heart of getting the best marketing ROI.

Your customers are more emotional when making purchase decisions than rational

The influential role of emotion in consumer behavior is well documented, here is a summary by Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California –

• MRI neuro-imagery shows that when evaluating brands, consumers primarily use emotions (personal feelings and experiences) rather than information (brand attributes, features, and facts).
• Advertising research reveals that emotional response to an ad has far greater influence on a consumer’s reported intent to buy a product than does the ad’s content – by a factor of 3-to-1 for television commercials and 2-to-1 for print ads.
• Research conducted by the Advertising Research Foundation concluded that the emotion of “likeability” is the measure most predictive of whether an advertisement will increase a brand’s sales.
• Studies show that positive emotions toward a brand have far greater influence on consumer loyalty than trust and other judgments which are based on a brand’s attributes.

So it follows a business that concentrates on chasing efficiency by spending big on data risks failing to connect on the more powerful emotional level.

Challenger brands care most about what the customer thinks matters most

Challenger brands that actually care about what customers want are winning by using the Cloud to remove superfluous steps from the delivery of products and services, often without big IT budgets. One example I know intimately is an Australian first, UNOsmsf, Cloud based Self Managed Super.

The rational customer benefit: More choice, more control, lower fees. We'll be using an emotional truth to appeal to prospective clients: your fund can do better than your mates with more money who are paying through the nose for an average product the big banks want to sell them using big data.

Check out the superannuation challenger brand taking on the banks from the Cloud.

Top 5 biz management blunders

Have you read any of Robert Gottliebsen's recent articles on the impending 12 billion dollar plane crash coming our way? Australia's purchase of three squadrons of Joint Strike Fighters – 58 at over $100million each is a fine example of the 5 management blunders many businesses tend to make.

5 blunders for management to avoid (& tips on marketing)

Gottliebsen quoted Liberal senator Jensen, a scientist, explaining what a blunder the decision to purchase the JSF is proving to be. Here I paraphrase Robert, with my own warnings on the blunders to avoid when making decisions about marketing::

Rule 1 of management blunders

Ignore expert advice and go with your gut. A decade ago Australia's manager at the top, John Howard, ignored the advice of aviation experts and bought into the development of the JSF. In my experience, being told the CEO doesn't believe in marketing or paying for external advice is more common than finding a boss willing to admit where their expertise ends.

Rule 2 of management blunders

When you make a big decision, those who continue to oppose you need to be pushed aside -- everyone must get with the program. Creativity is stifled by group think, yet it's creative thinking that helps businesses compete on their own terms, rather than taking the category head on.

Rule 3 of management blunders

All staff involved in the decision are ‘looked after’. E.g. In the case of the JSF, Senator Jensen has studied carefully what happened and says "there are too many who get jobs with contractors where they have provided advice favouring that contractor's product.” Advertising is renowned for managers procuring from friends who are designers, family members who know photoshop and printers who give them tickets to the rugby.

Rule 4 of management blunders

Delay as long as possible in telling the people at the top that the decision is wrong. In corporations, big, sudden write-downs are often caused because management down the line keeps putting a good spin on the data to keep their jobs, until finally they have to confess. Or in my experience, they are found out long after they've moved on. One CEO didn't realise that for two years none of my proposals to fix their problems had ever been passed up to him by his marketing manager. It was only after firing the manager he discovered an email trail where my strategies and estimates had been constantly forwarded to her close friend, who was then being commissioned for services beyond their capability at far higher prices.

Rule number five

Obscure the costs with all sorts of creative accounting. In marketing and advertising, this is really easy when so many managers claim to know the cost of everything, when they actually don't understand the value of anything.

The common theme here is the tendency of management to throw staff at problems, at great long term cost, when trusting experts would be better for business.

Get onboard the online retail bandwagon: $14.9bn & racing

The idea that online retail is about discounts isn't in line with the facts. While margins might be tighter, e-commerce is no longer just about bargains and end-of-line clearances. The latest NAB Online Retail Sales Index shows just how broad Australian retailing has become. Daily Deals sites are stuck at 3% share. The biggest online sales growth stories now are in liquor and groceries.

Department stores and appliance retailers the big winners, or losers online?

The mainstreaming of e-commerce can be seen in the leadership of department store products with a whopping one third of online spending. Once slow to adopt, Myer now offers 119,000 individual products online.

Domestic operators still have the lion’s share of online sales at around 75%. Gerry Harvey’s call for a GST on foreign online sales is just noise when you consider he mostly sells homewares and appliances, the second largest online category. I don’t see Australia Post delivering washing machines bought from Best Buy New York via their online store as a threat to Gerry. The threat is internal, his stores are failing to add value to the sales process and Harvey Norman still doesn't appear to have a strategy to compete with local online challengers.

Challenger brands have an advantage online

If anything, e-commerce puts the power back into the hands of customers who want to deal direct with manufacturers. Australian challenger brands, when they make a product that locals actually want, can cut out the blood sucking Coles/Woollies duopoly and the Gerry Harvey’s.

When brands reinvest into marketing a portion of the retailer margins that going online cuts from the delivery chain, they can grow share long term. This way e-commerce becomes a WIN, WIN equation for brand and customer.

An example of this approach is the transformation of a traditional Australian designer manufacturer of compression and sportswear – Quick Response. UNO has helped them transform from a wholesaler at the mercy of retailers to a direct-to-consumer e-business. This challenger brand is now competing with SKINS, (the retail market leader with a high priced foreign made product), by offering superior Australian made garments direct online, at a better price. Check out the QRS compression online store.

The future for online retail marketing

While retail sales generally have been mostly flat, ABS figures show Australian’s spent 27% more online in the year to March than the year before.

The NAB online spend index doesn’t include online shopping paid for by Paypal, transfers or EFTPOS, so the 6.5% of all retail spending measured in the latest report to March 2014 is an underestimate of the reality. Marketers need to view online retail as a growing opportunity for current business growth, not just a nice to have in the future.

Source: National Australia Bank Online Retail Sales Index.

Truth in advertising?

Which professions are most trusted in 2014? Research shows the Australian public rate nurses 91% for ethics and honesty, once again at the top, whereas most professions don't rank well in the trust stakes at all.

No prizes for guessing who rates last at 3%, it's the same profession that has been at the bottom every year since Roy Morgan began their annual "Image of Professions" survey in 1986.

2014 rankings of professions for ethics and honesty 

1. Nurses
2. Pharmacists
3. Doctors
4. High Court Judges
5. Dentists
6. School teachers
7. Engineers
8. Police
9. Supreme Court Judges
10. University lecturers
11. Accountants
12. Bank managers
13. Lawyers
14. Ministers of religion
15. Public servants
16. Public opinion pollsters
17. Financial planners
18. Directors of public companies
19. TV reporters
20. Newspaper journalists
21. Business executives
22. Insurance brokers
23. Stock brokers
24. Talk-back radio hosts
25. State MPs
26. Federal MPs
27. Union leaders
28. Real estate agents
29. Advertising people
30. Car salesmen

Source: Roy Morgan annual 'Image of Professions' survey for 2014

Design Thinking makes more money than traditional business management

Since the GFC businesses and investors have struggled to find consistent ways to achieve double digit returns. You can continue to blame the shake out that the credit crunch brought down on our heads, or perhaps the current tough environment is the new normal. The new normal is a world where businesses and governments and media proprietors no longer have control. Everything has been digitised, and thanks to Google and global Internet access from mobile phones at low prices the slevers are now controlled by the public, your customers.

The last decade has seen what Deloitte term the era of Digital Disruption. In a paper last year they identified which Australian industries are facing a short fuse, big bang trashing of their business models. Traditional business models that could control supply and demand and charge a premium have dissappeared or in the case of Delloittes hit list of financial services and are about to.

The businesses that prosper will be those that can embrace the new digital normal. It is the business managers that apply design thinking to their entire way of operating that will survive. The good news for SMEs is they have eless to lose than corporations and also have the management structure to embrace change. The best thing about all this si design thinking makes more money for a business than traditional management approaches. Here are some figures on just how much more profitable design centric businesses have been since the GFC. 

Design Thinking has doubled the returns of companies across a range of industries

The Design Management Institute in the US worked together with Motiv Strategies to create a share market index for tracking the returns of businesses that have Design Thinking at the centre of the organisation. Called the Design Value Index, it shows the 15 rigorously-selected companies that understand the value of design beat the S&P Index by a whopping 228% over the last 10 years.

Who are these profit powerhouse businesses and what do they have in common?

Design is an integrated function across the entire enterprise; they invest in design and it shapes the way employees interact and report, management structure is flat or receptive to ideas; experienced design executives are given power to direct design activities; and there is a senior leadership-level commitment to design. Some of the companies on the list won’t surprise you – Apple, Coca-Cola, Walt Disney and Nike. Others might – Ford, Herman-Miller, IBM, Intuit, Newell-Rubbermaid, Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Starwood, Steelcase, Target and Whirlpool.

Designers are lateral thinkers, utilise their creative leaps

The way designers think is much more open to ideas, random thoughts from diverse sources and then building on these. By starting with the question what does a customer want and what makes them happy the designer is liberating from current accepted practices within a business. They challenge all aspects, collaborating across all the people in a business from sales to complaints, production to procurement. Compare this to control and command structures, like the public service where you aren’t allowed to ask a superior a question let alone challenge what they believe is the way it’s always been done.

Change, rather than wait to be redundant. As Deloitte warns, redundancy is coming sooner rather than later.

Design Thinking makes more money than traditional business management

Since the GFC businesses and investors have struggled to find consistent ways to achieve double digit returns. You can continue to blame the shakeout that the credit crunch brought down on our heads, or accept that the current tough environment is the new normal. We now have to operate in a world where businesses and governments and media proprietors no longer have control. Everything has been digitised.

Thanks to Google the information levers are now controlled by the public. In other words, your customers now call the shots.

The last decade has seen what Deloitte term the era of Digital Disruption. In a paper last year they identified which Australian industries are facing a short fuse, big bang trashing of business models. Traditional business management techniques that could control supply and demand and charge a premium have disappeared. You can see from Deloitte's hit list, even industries not used to rapid change like financial services and arts and recreation are about to face significant disruption.

Deloitte's Digital Disruption map

The formula for small & medium business survival in this time of disruption

The businesses that prosper next year and beyond will be those that can embrace the new digital normal. It will be the business managers who apply design thinking to their entire way of operating that will survive. The good news for SMEs is they have less to lose than corporations and more flexibility in the management structure to embrace change.

SMEs are perfectly placed to become tomorrow's challenger brands. The best thing about all this is design thinking makes more money for a business than traditional management approaches. Here is a chart that shows just how much more profitable design-centric businesses have been since the GFC. 

Design Thinking has doubled the returns of companies across a range of industries

The Design Management Institute in the US worked together with Motiv Strategies to create a share market index for tracking the returns of businesses that have Design Thinking at the centre of the organisation. Called the Design Value Index, it shows the 15 rigorously-selected companies that understand the value of design beat the S&P Index by a whopping 228% over the last 10 years.

Who are these profit powerhouse businesses and what do they have in common?

Design is an integrated function across the entire enterprise; they invest in design and it shapes the way employees interact and report, management structure is flat or receptive to ideas; experienced design executives are given power to direct design activities; and there is a senior leadership-level commitment to design. Some of the companies on the list won’t surprise you – Apple, Coca-Cola, Walt Disney and Nike. Others might – Ford, Herman-Miller, IBM, Intuit, Newell-Rubbermaid, Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Starwood, Steelcase, Target and Whirlpool.

Designers are lateral thinkers, utilise their creative leaps

The way designers think is much more open to ideas, random thoughts from diverse sources and then building on these. By starting with the question what does a customer want and what makes them happy the designer is liberating from current accepted practices within a business. They challenge all aspects, collaborating across all the people in a business from sales to complaints, production to procurement. Compare this to control and command structures, like the public service where you aren’t allowed to ask a superior a question let alone challenge what they believe is the way it’s always been done.

Change, rather than wait to be redundant. As Deloitte warns, a big bang of disruption is coming sooner rather than later for most businesses.

How do you lead your business in the Digital Age?

The answer is in the mail. Australia Post is over 204 years old, but that hasn’t stopped it making the most of the digitised world. At a presentation to business leaders at the AGSM Leading The Digital Enterprise event yesterday, I found Tracey Gosling, a director of Australia Post, the biggest surprise. While the usual suspects, like the Head of Policy at Facebook and an author on Innovation helped open the eyes of the bank managers and bureaucrats in the room to the way generation X and Y want to be treated at work, it was the true stories of change at Australia Post I found most useful.

What's the future for AusPost in a digitised world?

Tracey shared real examples of the often simple ways ordinary people in their business have made changes that have worked. They show us what can actually be achieved when the starting point is very grim. Which gives real hope for small and medium sized businesses that aren't as tied down by the inertia of a monopoly like AusPost.

Tracey painted a picture of a vast post office workforce laboring under the emotional burden of the fear of change. Imagine you were a postie, one of my schoolmates from 30 years ago still is. Imagine over the last decade the postie doing the daily rounds would feel the bag of mail on their back was lighter than the week before. And next week it will be lighter still as people stop posting letters. They'd be worrying when will the day come there is no mail to deliver and they're out of a job?

To survive Australia Post has to manage a bigger change to the way customers exchange information than past revolutions like telegraph to telephone, horse borne deliveries to airmail, phone to fax. The Internet has changed everything more significantly than any of those innovations. Manage the change they have.

To quote the Australia Post annual report: “For the 13th consecutive year, we met or exceeded all of the performance standards that relate to our community service obligations. We delivered 95.5 per cent of domestic letters on time or early (against our 94 per cent target) and we increased the number of postal outlets to 4,429 nationwide. Total revenue grew to $5.9 billion and our after-tax profit increased by 10.9 per cent to $311.9 million. This means net profit has grown 21 per cent per annum since we enacted our Future Ready transformation program."

What has AusPost changed to keep up? Nearly everything, they had to. Last year they lost $189 million on mail delivery. AusPost now makes more from servicing e-commerce businesses and other activities that didn’t exist just a decade ago. There are secure 24/7 Parcel Lockers within minutes drive of most homes for out of hours parcel deliveries, digital self serve kiosks in post shops and soon digital I.D. recognition software that will mean documents like banking applications and contracts won’t need signatures by hand.

If a bureaucracy can go digital, so can your business

These changes to a huge and diverse business are making sure it can remain competitive as digitisation changes the world. As with most things in business, change management is being enabled at Auspost from the top. CEO Ahmed Fahour is a case study in the new style of management required for the digital age – leadership by openness, not power. This infographic sums it up nicely.

View this image on Pinterest.

Here are some examples of how Ahmed Fahour has let go of control:

1. Let staff fail

Individuals in offices can change their methods behind the counter to see if it works better than current processes without asking prior permission from senior management. If it doesn’t work, no great loss. If it does make an improvement, it’s shared across the organisation.

2. Social media is for everyone

While most government departments still don’t allow social media or even Google to be used in the office, Fahour has let employees at every level of share an opinion on Facebook. Just a few years before only 2 people were officially given the role to manage social media, yet even then there were 15,000 conversations happening on social media each year amongst staff.

Businesses need to recognise they can’t control what staff want, or constantly roadblock how they want to do it. Indeed today, in the words of former Cisco Senior Director Martin Stewart-Weeks, "a network routes around an obstacle." It's the same with staff, they will go around you, or leave.

3. What does the customer want that they’re not getting?

To improve the way they can fulfill for e-commerce customers, staff who had never shopped online were encouraged to do so in work hours. This led to an understanding at many levels of post  employee of what online businesses do well and not so well, and discover what shoppers want from the whole order to delivery process. One consequent innovation is the 24/7 Parcel Locker, which means you don’t have to be at home to receive a valuable e-purchase.

4. What can you do that’s new?

Things are changing fast, so what you’ve always sold in the past is less likely to be as attractive to new customers tomorrow. Again, take inspiration from the top postie:

“We capitalised on the boom in online shopping with the Parcel & Express Services segment earning profit of $354.8 million, on the back of 9.3 per cent growth in domestic parcel volumes. And, despite difficult retailing conditions, Retail Services profit again grew to $200.6 million, mainly through adding new financial and identity services.”

“Initiatives are all focused on capturing our immediate customer growth opportunities in the digital economy – especially in e-commerce, digital communications and trusted services.”

We are constantly exploring the new possibilities with our clients, it's how we help to keep them growing as successful challenger brands.

What if consumers were as determined as the businesses they dealt with?

Making meaningful comparisons as a consumer is challenging, especially with superannuation. Christopher Zinn says we need to understand how to make informed choices when incumbent businesses operate in a "confuscopoly". 

It is a big ‘what if’ because too many businesses profit from the lack of determination of their customers for better products, services and even prices.The public’s desire for improvement is dulled by a widespread disengagement, resignation and inertia that anything they do may actually be much better for them.

And the consumer malaise seems worse in those markets which really count most because of the sums involved: superannuation, health and other insurances, energy such as electricity and telecommunications.

The symptoms are a lack of switching to better offers, which tends to benefit the incumbent above the challenger brand, and even paying over the odds by sticking with the wrong plan and perhaps the wrong provider.

The figures are sobering. The Australian Communications and Media Authority says poor plan choice around telecoms has cost consumers a probably under-estimated $1.5 billion a year.

Superannuation is confusing for customers

The ATO holds more than $18 billion in lost superannuation accounts. And despite more than 11 million Australians are covered by private health insurance less than 40,000 of them switch each year.

The fault is not solely the consumers. The ‘confusopoly’ of the mobile phone market in particular makes meaningful comparisons more than challenging.

Our cognitive biases, which make us particularly vulnerable to decisions around money and cause us to favour the present as opposed to the future, do not serve us well when it comes to assessing strategies around retirement savings.

And the complex and changing rules around health cover and premium rebates tend to drive policy-holders to sit pretty instead of seeking better value.

Of course some consumers are determined and realise a little time and effort in acquiring knowledge of these markets can save significant pain and expense.

But there’s a limit to even their patience and how much effort is worth it for how little a reward. There’s also the issue of expertise and the imbalance of information: as consumers we are amateurs buying from professionals.

We may only purchase a new car every few years, but the sales staff sell them every day, and however canny you are they will always know more about the vehicle, its true value and how to upsell you on various unnecessary warranties.

One way to correct this asymmetry, as it’s sometimes called, is to gather like-minded consumers together and use their numbers as leverage in negotiating better terms.

It’s already happening in specific markets such as energy and insurance as One Big Switch, with whom I used to be director of campaigns, has demonstrated here and overseas.

Another way is selectively reforming markets by regulation. In Australia conflicts of interest with financial planners led to the Future of Financial Advice (FoFA) legislation.

The government is seeking to severely dilute these much needed consumer protections, claiming they are somehow excess ‘red-tape’. In fact they represent a much-needed shark-proof cage for consumers to more safely navigate financial waters.

In the US and UK regulation is helping liberate consumers’ usage data from the back offices of utilities and banks so citizens can employ trusted third parties to crunch the numbers and help them make better decisions.

The determined consumer can take back control

Being determined as a consumer is not just a state of mind, although that helps. In the future it will require the technologies which can bring us together quickly and cheaply to use some people power in markets.

It will also require more consumers to get hold of their own data and then find emerging intermediaries to help them make real sense of the complexity and choice fatigue which bedevils too many markets.

Determined consumers do not need to be told to shop around or read the fine print. They already know that, but they do need help in turning their determination into better decisions.

Christopher Zinn is an independent consumer advocate currently running a campaign to highlight the financial advice protections (www.saveourfofa.com.au). His other initiative is www.determinedconsumer.com.au which is aimed at motivating consumer action. UNO worked with Chris on consumer empowering programmes at CHOICE. He also co-founded One Big Switch as well as being a repoorter/producer at the ABC, Channel Nine and several newspapers.