Marketing Talk

Life,  Keith Richard’s modestly-titled autobiography,  has recently appeared to rave  reviews. One of the most interesting is an article in The Economist’s Schumpeter column drawing attention to the veteran Rolling Stones guitarist’s value as a business guru (November 13th, p. 84). His insights into his enduring creative relationship with fellow ‘Glimmer Twin’ Sir Mick Jagger offer clues on to how to manage partnerships – an underestimated but essential aspect of many world-leading businesses through the years. Where would Abercrombie be without Fitch, Fortnum without Mason, Marks without Spencer, etcetera?

Apparently Jagger and Richards’ joint venture came under severe pressure in the late 1980s when the latter cleaned up his pharmaceutical act and started noticing he was getting sidelined in the global Rolling Stones empire. One frank-talking trip to Barbados later, and rock’s most enduring duo was firing on both cylinders again – held together by a friendship that dates back to now distant youth, a genuine recognition that they complement each other’s talents, and a shared enthusiasm for astronomical earnings.

Business lessons from axe-wielding sexagenarians would appear to in the air at the moment if a recently-announced  Open University Business School Alumni Christmas Event is anything to go by. We are promised an evening of wisdom culled from rock stars (with an additional sprinkling from celebrity chefs to add spice to the proceedings).

Ever anxious to maintain its position in the vanguard of management thought, Marketing Talk now extends this trend with its own tribute to Keith and Mick’s commercial nous. We proudly announce the Marketing Talk top five Rolling Stones tracks for marketers:

5: (I can’t get no) Satisfaction. Originally banned from UK airwaves because of its sexual references, this topped the charts in 1965. Not only an object lesson in the get-banned-get-noticed school of marketing, it offers early admonition to cigarette advertisers, as well as sounding a note of realism about the degree of whiteness claimed by leading detergents as a result of using their products.

4: Fingerprint File. The closing cut on the Stones’ underrated 1974 effort It’s only rock and roll, this fretful slice of funk anticipated contemporary concerns about privacy issues by about thirty years. Take note direct marketers and data miners! Consumers don’t appreciate the fact that you’re watching them (cf. recent research by my colleagues in the Open University Business School on this subject).

3: Paint It Black. Number one in 1966. Reputedly Henry Ford’s favourite song.

2: Yesterday’s Papers. From 1967, when people still read them. In spite of its blatant sexism, equating cast-off girlfriends with chip wrappings, this remains a wake-up call to marketers to stay ahead of demand.

1: You can’t always get what you want. A personal favourite of mine, from the epoch-making Let it bleed (1969) and the B side of Honky Tonk Woman (without the choir bits though). I use this song to illustrate the difference between ‘wants’ and ‘needs’ to my students (or at least those of them who are old enough to remember it!). In spite of its apparent pandering to what people say they want, the only way that marketing succeeds long term is by connecting with what people need. And some marketers (particularly social marketers working in areas like health or environmental policy) have to convince their customers that what they need is actually more important than what they want right now.

Rock on!

We’re almost at the end of the Open University’s Information and Records Management Week 2010, a subtle ultimatum from the powers that be that I really should grab a biodegradable bin bag and sort out the small rain forest currently obscuring my desk. To make it slightly less traumatic there will be convenient collection points around the campus for secure and environmentally-friendly disposal of documents as the week reaches it celebratory climax on Friday afternoon at 4pm. I remember last year the Business School incentivised members to get shredder-ready with the offer of cream buns for participants in this communal clear-out.

Paper at work is only part of the problem of course. Getting rid of stuff in general is more and more of a headache as we have more and more of it at work and at home in the affluent West.  Cardboard, paper, all sorts of packaging, even, after all too short a while, the products that come in the packaging – yes, even those termed ‘consumer durables’ in marketing parlance (a contradiction in terms if ever there was one). For example, try hanging on to the same computer for more than two or three years, and you quickly find that – like so many other things – it’s part of a constantly evolving system rather than something that has a life (and therefore lifetime) of its own.

They used to call this planned obsolescence and blame marketing whizz kids for it. And, I suppose, there’s something in that. In order to have sustainable industries you need to be able to sustain demand with constant innovation and new product development. So in an ever more connected society that means that new generations of things like mobile phones, home entertainment systems and MP3 players are condemning even their very recent predecessors to obscurity. It’s as if we are caught in a relentless stream of stuff determined to reach landfill at all costs and as soon as possible.

But really smart marketers are actually not very interested in shifting more and more soon-to-be-useless stuff our way. Instead, they recognise that benefits not features are the key to keeping customers happy. If they can offer us the joys of materialism without the material they’ll jump at the chance. Take the physical product out of the equation and you reduce costs, inconvenience, and complexity. So we go from CDs to downloads. And our economy moves efficiently from producing things to providing services. And I’ve got my biodegradable bin bag at the ready….

Readers unfamiliar with university life may not realise just how obsessed we academics are with getting articles published in research journals. The prestige and (at least to date in the UK) a significant part of the funding of your university depend on it. So your career can be boosted – or stalled – by what and where you publish. As our distinguished visitor Michael Polonsky, Professsor of Marketing at Deakin University, observed this week to a crowded room of researchers from across the whole of the Open University ‘It’s our currency’.

Professor Polonsky’s topic was how to convert more of the papers we present at conferences (gatherings of academics to present research at an early stage of writing) into published journal articles. As the author of 120 or so such articles, he’s worth listening to on the subject. Conferences are useful for networking, testing out your ideas and keeping up to date with what’s going on in your subject. But even though quality screening means that not all conference submissions are accepted, what really counts in terms of getting your research ‘out there’ is publishing in a well-regarded journal.

To do that you need to get your work past gnarly editors and reviewers intent on swatting it back to you for repeated revisions before letting it any where near their hallowed pages. And that’s if you’re in luck. Many articles are rejected outright – often because they don’t suit the methodological stance of the journal. Some of the highest-rated American journals, for example, have a distinct bias towards research in the ‘hard science’ numbers-driven school of quantitative methods. Bad news if, like many European researchers, you tend more towards the touchy-feely school of qualitative research, with its concentration on attitudes and feelings rather than things you can count. Like any good marketer, therefore, you need to know your audience and target your offering appropriately. As Professor Polonsky put it, ‘we’re selling our ideas to reviewers’.

Here are a few more choice nuggets of wisdom which I jotted down as I listened (though, as Professor P would be the first to admit, they are not always easy to get right):

• pay attention to designing your research project well in the first place – regard it as a foundation on which you’ll be building for a long time, and resist the temptation to abandon an existing project too quickly for something new.
• it’s much better to become expert in one or two areas and have something to say than spread yourself too thinly and be perpetually playing catch-up.
• always see a conference paper as a stepping stone towards a journal article, never as an end in itself.
• choose your target journal wisely. Think of your article as a contribution to a conversation that’s already in progress through its pages. What’s going to be relevant to the conversation, what kind of language is likely to be appropriate?
• make the best of your material – rather than pouring it all into one or two articles, ‘slice and dice’ what’s there to maximise the number of potential publications. This might sound like publishing for its own sake (heaven forbid!) but what better way to guarantee the clarity of your article than to keep a tight focus on what it covers.

It’s a bit like the hoary old marketing model of the 4 Ps. You can see how it’s essential to get the product right in the first place by designing a good project, or at least packaging a less than perfect one wisely. ‘Price’ is no less relevant. Academics can offer their customers (the editors and reviewers) a ‘discount’ by how clearly and effectively they deal with criticisms and suggestions. ‘Place’ is crucial in the choice of potential outlet for a paper – it’s no use trying to join a conversation where you don’t speak the right language. It’s trickier to put one’s finger on ‘promotion’ in all this – after all, the publishing process is designed to be as objective and rigorous as possible – unless we understand it as the fate awaiting the happy academic with a pile of publications.