Photo: Istock
Faster horses: learning from commercial marketing
INNOVATION
Radojka Miljevic
Partner, Campbell Tickell
I caught up with Marc Nohr – chair of the advertising agency Fold7 and group CEO of the new global family of agencies Miroma Group – to pick his brains about what not-for-profit organisations can learn from the commercial sector, especially from brand and customer marketing. Here are some takeaways from our chat.
Stakeholder relationships in charities are often more complex than those in the commercial sector.
In the commercial sector, the customer is ‘king or queen’, we have this singular view which courses through our veins and permeates the corridors of our businesses. Customers are either buying or not buying products. In the charitable sector, by contrast, a customer (or client funding a service) may be entirely separate to the beneficiary. In short, the target audience and the customer may differ; this creates complexity about who ‘gives’ and who ‘receives’, for example in the way that overseas aid used to operate. It’s much more difficult for not-for-profit organisations.
Asking the customer to imagine the future is pointless.
Who would have known that people would want all of this functionality under their thumb on a mobile phone 20 years ago? Apple clearly had a vision. As did Henry Ford who famously said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Customers often tell you what you want to hear or they post-rationalise their choices (decision-making is fundamentally emotional). In the commercial marketing industry, we have myriad ways in which we try to understand the customer, from ethnographic research, to behavioural research, quantitative research around transactions or semiotics. However imperfect it is as a science, trying to understand the customer is hardwired into our thinking.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”
Caring about the customer needs to be in your organisation’s DNA.
You don’t graft it on as an addition. I remember something I learned 25 years ago at a conference when a speaker said, “I only learnt one thing at Harvard Business school,” and all the tops flew off everyone’s pens – “sales is the art of getting customers to buy what the company produces, but marketing is the art of producing what the customers want to buy.” It’s the job of the CEO and everyone else in the organisation to provide the product the customer most wants to buy (even if they don’t know it yet).
In the commercial sector, the notion of satisfying the customer is not discretionary, it’s compulsory.
Grafting on techniques from the private sector may be less appropriate when there is little choice about the product. But the attitudinal positioning may be helpful. Having satisfied customers is the lifeblood of a business. We don’t just say to ourselves as an afterthought, ‘oh maybe we should ask some people what they thought of that product’.
Where market conditions don’t prevail, there are complex democratic questions.
These are questions about what voice users/voters/regular people have in the provision of services. This is more a consideration about representation and accountability than it is about marketing.
Marc Nohr is chair of the advertising agency Fold7 (famous for their ads for brands like Carlsberg, Audible and Coppafeel) and group CEO of the new global family of agencies Miroma Group. Campbell Tickell knows him as our client and chair of the Jewish arts and cultural centre, JW3, which looks to increase the quality, variety and volume of Jewish conversation in London and beyond. Previously he was co-founder of award-winning agency Kitcatt Nohr, which worked with Waitrose, John Lewis, Starbucks and the NSPCC.
Pick an organisation that you think is pioneering and ask what they would do with the problem you’re facing.
Take Netflix as an example. It’s amazing that you can watch the next episode in a series without touching the remote control or order your groceries with a movement of my thumb. Think about removing friction.
The best leaders care about what people think.
It’s not a technique. It’s a belief. They engage and they motivate their whole organisation to live it too. We can make all of these things complicated, but we can also simplify them into some core principles about the fundamentals of communication and of relationships. You need to stand for something and live it. You need to show people that you’re there for them and listen.
