The one on the right is closer to (my) home. This is one for anyone who believes the NHS is overly managed and perhaps bureaucratic. What is this sign saying? To whom? I can tell you, as I was standing outside it, that this is the entrance to Walton Community Hospital. That’s despite what the sign says. I?ve never heard of this Hub thing and have no idea what to expect of it or when I’d need it. Presumably this sign reflects some internal NHS regional organisation. But really, who needs to know that as they turn up for their appointment at Walton Community Hospital? It’s less than friendly isn’t it, and anything but patient-centric. Makes you wonder who thought that was a good idea. The no-smoking message is important, but like this?

Spare a thought for the staff who see these signs every day. Hardly inspiring. I’m betting there are people hard at work in internal communications teams in the NHS, maybe even in the Thames whatsit Hub, thinking about culture and engagement and how happy staff allegedly make happy customers (I say allegedly because here’s a counter-argument). They’ll have worked out a strategy and there’ll be all sorts of channels for execution – magazines and emails and team briefings and the like. That doesn’t come cheap.

Signage, on the other hand, is relatively cheap and long-lasting. Consequently, it tends to be delegated to property people who execute with cost and logistics in mind. This is truly a missed opportunity. Signage is outstanding value for money. It reaches staff and customers, day in day out. It deserves time and thought. A sign may be the first thing a customer sees. Care is needed unless “Keep off the grass” is indeed the welcoming message a hotel wishes to deliver to arriving guests. There’s form and content in a sign. Used thoughtfully, it’s an opportunity. In the wrong hands, gaffs may result.

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It’s universally accepted now that smoking increases cancer risk. Cancer charities want us to think of obesity in the same way. It’s a simple but controversial idea. So the first step is to establish the idea. Justifying it, and telling us what to do about it, comes later.

Good strategy, now to execution. The creative idea, using cigarette packaging, demands a lot of the passer-by. Great ads do involve the viewer. But posters work best as a snapshot. They need to be quickly and easily absorbed. Complex messages don’t land. (Tube ads which we read to pass the time are a notable exception.) The quick read from this ad is the familiar story, not the novel one. It’s an advertising version of the Stroop effect.

Graphics are so powerful that they will tend to override words. Advertising is first and foremost an appeal to the emotions. The battle of Christmas ads among UK retailers is primarily about who will win our hearts. This obesity campaign may eventually trigger some emotion – surprise, perhaps. But many people will see it and register the familiar message, smoking kills. No reason to take a closer look. It relies too much on the viewer’s willingness to engage, and the clever metaphor is as likely to mislead as to persuade.

It might still work, if the charity can afford to give it enough exposure. If they stick with it, then in time we’ll know what it’s saying. It helps, too, that their message on the health risks of obesity gets media attention without the fancy creative work. For that reason, I think they could have been a step further down the track of changing behaviour, if they’d skipped the clever posters and spent their money, and our attention, differently. There is a very powerful idea in here. But the execution risks being too clever. It’s a great illustration of how both strategy and execution matter.

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While everyone else is diving headlong into “content marketing” in an attempt to be worth paying attention to, entertainment businesses – film, TV, literature, music, sport – are role models for how to do it well. You might say they start with an advantage, that we are interested in them. But maybe they made it that way. Travel, cars, property, all are sufficiently interesting to make endless tv shows of, but their industry awards are not on the news.

To earn, and keep, people’s attention you have to inform, educate or entertain – as per the mission of the BBC. Doing it well takes patience. The annual Academy Awards are, in effect, an advertising campaign for the film industry that’s been running for over sixty years. (They started as a private dinner in 1929 and were first televised in 1953.) It’s possible to grab attention short term but it won’t build trust or respect if it’s done disingenuously. That’s ok for clickbait but it won’t do a genuine business much good.

So how to explain the near-obsessive coverage of Apple product launches? They have their own rather dry style. They don’t pretend to be anything other than purely commercial. They don’t even try to entertain. Perhaps the technology sector has learned from their neighbours in Hollywood. Behave as if your products are not just for sale but are actually important to humankind, and the media start to respond as if it’s true. If you can take yourself seriously enough without laughing – Apple seem to have no problem – then you’re in with a chance.

Beyond entertainment, there are only a few times when business events can justify national news coverage. Progress in travel – a giant new plane or somebody’s rocket launch – have sufficient novelty. A breakthrough in healthcare has sufficient importance. For the rest of us, the lesson is to centre our communications in the mindset and circumstances of the target customer. It doesn’t matter if no one else has heard of your product as long as the right people have. Be useful and interesting to them. That’s the best way to create the impression that your business will be, too.

Advertising is getting harder because people can avoid it – adblockers on line, streaming TV or skipping through the breaks. The old principles are more important than ever and they still work. Be interesting, useful or entertaining. That means considering what the target audience might value, not just what a business wants to say. Advertising isn’t getting a message out. Anyone can do that. Effective communication has to land, not just be launched. Communicating with confidence helps. We can’t all have the outrageous self-confidence of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but you can still act as if you have no doubts about the value of your message. That is a lot easier if you know that, for at least some of the audience, that is true.

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On the other hand, the share price fell on the news of anti-Nike protests, and brand tracking data has shown a dramatic drop-off in brand regard, among brand buyers and non-buyers alike, and across the political divide. Even people who support the Take A Knee protest think less positively of Nike now, though their view may change, and their behaviour may not.

Both these positions are about whether the decision Nike took – to get involved with a controversial, arguably political, issue and figure – is good or bad for business. What puzzles me is why people at Nike thought this had anything to do with their brand and needed a response in their advertising. Whether it’s naïve to think your consumers must share your political beliefs, or self-important to think brands should use their reach and clout for whatever their version of good is, or cynical to piggyback for profit on someone else’s principled stand, which cost him money, it’s a long way from “Just do it”. Given they are about sport it’s not surprising that taking a knee was talked about in Portland. But why make it a consumer issue?

Nike is about participation. Wearing Nike helps me feel I can perform and compete. Nike-sponsored athletes embody this attitude, and the achievement it can bring. I can’t see that the brand needed to adopt a position on TAK. There are social issues on which brands have to be clear. If you buy Nike, you are in effect endorsing its sourcing practices, so you may want reassurance that it doesn’t use sweatshops or child labour. The company is also defending lawsuits alleging horribly sexist practices in its US offices. But now they’re making me take a stand (knee) on US civil rights. Even people who agree with the take a knee campaign may want their leisure choices to be apolitical.

Levi Strauss has recently announced donations to, and participation in, gun control campaigns in the USA. This is no closer to its core business than civil rights for Nike, but at least it’s a corporate move, in that it’s their behaviour as a business that’s changing, not their marketing messaging. One wonders what behaviour from Nike would legitimise its use of Colin Kaepernick in its advertising. A demonstrable commitment to equality of employment opportunities and practices, perhaps?

Those cynical that Nike has suddenly found a social conscience say this is a hard-nosed commercial decision which indicates Nike’s confidence that non-racists are in the majority – or at least spend more on “athleisure”. But which side of the political divide is commercially best for brands like these isn’t the point. It’s whether marketers are getting it wrong in embracing every social and political issue out there, instead of focusing on, and fixing, the ones that connect to their business, on which their customers need to know where they stand.

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A natural disaster presents an obvious business opportunity. Urgency and scarcity remove price sensitivity. It’s not uncommon for petrol stations to limit sales and charge more as people evacuate. In the aftermath, retailers may hike their prices on basic groceries which are in short supply. Classical economic theory says the right price is where demand matches supply, so why not?

Any business that cares about its reputation should ignore economic theory and take a different approach. Social media ensures that those who are perceived to take advantage of people’s distress, or to price-gouge, won’t get away with it. Businesses that do good, especially if they seem to put consumer interests ahead of their own, will be recognised for it.

Contrast the approach of two US airlines as Hurricane Irma approached Florida. Some 6m people were ordered to evacuate. JetBlue capped the price of its flights out of the stricken state just as demand was reaching frenzy levels – undoubtedly leaving money on the table. They added capacity but actually reduced walk-up fares. That’s a real head-scratcher for the economists. Meanwhile, Delta seemed to have left it to the yield management algorithm (if we give them the benefit of the doubt). Fares for their flights out of Miami rose almost six-fold. Twitter ensured that tens of thousands of people got to hear about it, and eventually the mainstream media reported it too. Delta was publicly shamed for seeking to profit from people’s misery.

Some businesses have baked this into their operations. From time to time, US brewery Anheuser-Busch replaces beer with water on the packing line at its Cartersville, Georgia factory. Canned water from a brewery? No good for a p***up but welcome across the southern states after a tropical storm, and distributed free. As part of the normal production schedule, it was ready to go as soon as Harvey and Irma cleared.

Several mobile carriers, including Sprint, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, waived charges for usage in Florida during the hurricane emergency. After Tropical Storm Harvey passed through Texas, Airbnb mobilised its network to offer lodging free of charge to people in need of shelter.

Smaller businesses can punch above their weight at times like this. Google Mattress Mack to see how an independent furniture retailer with three stores in Houston won national approval by providing shelter to hundreds of people displaced by Harvey last month.

There’s a cost to providing emergency relief, and, arguably, an opportunity cost in not taking advantage of the short term conditions to push up prices. But it should be seen as a marketing investment. Short term, there?s plenty of media coverage to be had. Longer term it can do a brand good or harm. For any business that’s mad for social media coverage (and aren’t they all), this is the perfect opportunity to go viral. Just make sure it’s for the right reason.

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This was Paul’s way to keep in touch with his running club friends while he was injured. He recalled long sociable Saturday mornings in Johannesburg that started with a run and ended several hours and countless coffees later. The coffee bit was integral – he would time his mates but they had to come and spent time with him afterwards. It was that simple. Paul created something he wanted, that he knew his friends would find useful and enjoyable.

Twelve years and a name change later, there are over 1000 parkruns a week, in fourteen countries, with over three million registered parkrunners. Three new countries will host their first parkrun this year. A new parkrunner registers every 29 seconds. The 2k junior parkrun is also expanding rapidly. The growth is seemingly unstoppable. Yet it does not advertise and it operates on a shoestring. Paul says, “It was never supposed to be more than a single event.” So what kind of start-up goes global despite itself? What can businesses in pursuit of growth learn from it?

I interviewed the people behind this remarkable growth story – parkrun’s founder, its former UK chief (now global COO) and its first CEO – for the business journal, Market Leader. For the answers, read the full article here: Lessons from the ultimate start-up Market Leader June 2017

This article is reproduced with permission of Market leader, the strategic marketing journal for business leaders. To subscribe visit warc.com/bookstore. Copyright  Warc and The Marketing Society.

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There is one huge lesson from this vote, and it applies to marketers as much as to politicians. It’s this: how dangerous it is to cut oneself off from listening to and acknowledging how people feel. Not everyone feels the same, nor is there a “right” view. Listening may not be comfortable but it is necessary.

Most of us in the marketing business, much of it in London and the South East, don’t feel the economic pain of other parts of the country: the decline of manufacturing, the contraction of the public sector, and, especially, the loss of job prospects for them and their children. That’s not a political point, just an observation. If you lose your job in marketing, there are other jobs – imagine if most of the jobs in marketing were disappearing. We’d all want someone to blame. I suspect it had nothing to do with sovereignty for many “out” voters and much more to do with economic prospects.

Then there’s immigration, for years the topic that voters wanted to discuss and politicians refused to engage with. Remember Gordon Brown on the campaign trail in 2010. Ignoring people’s concerns, no matter how unpalatable they may be, is no way to make progress.

Voters across the political spectrum wanted out, for a variety of reasons. The trouble with the referendum is that it is a binary choice. So people with little in common find themselves on the same side. That doesn’t make them similar – it only shows they are aligned on this one reductive question.

Happily, in business we have more options. We can segment markets and offer more than one simple choice. Market segmentation is the fundamental building block of any marketing strategy, and therefore of any business strategy. It is often abused, though, as when businesses describe “product segments”, as if those are a perfect reflection of people’s wants and needs. Segmentation cannot only be about what people are currently doing and buying. Current behaviour is only a reflection of the compromised choices they are making, based on what is available to them. As with the in/out vote, there are other choices many people might have preferred, like staying in a reformed EU, or getting out while keeping the trade agreements in place. To be useful, and future-proofing, segmentation must rise above the current market offerings and assumptions. It must be about people’s wishes, priorities and feelings. That’s how we find out what they might do if given other options. It’s why good segmentation is inspiration for product and service innovation – along with customer dissatisfaction, the other great source. Politicians are largely disinterested in acknowledging dissatisfaction, preferring to try to persuade us that we are wrong, or should not be feeling that way, and need to see things the way they do. Inside business, there can be the same pressure to focus on the satisfied not the dissatisfied, and to persuade ourselves and others that everything is as good as it can be.

What we can do, as marketers, is commit ourselves not to make the same mistakes as the politicians. We cannot be representative of our entire customer base. We must keep listening, and truly listening means being open to hearing stuff we don’t like or don’t agree with, from people whose perspective is different. When people complain about poor service, or price, or whatever, ignoring them, or trying to persuade them that it’s really ok, is not a smart response. Any source of dissatisfaction is a business opportunity, for those brave enough to hear it and embrace it.

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We have heuristics in so many areas of our lives that we hardly realise we’re using them. This can extend to important decisions, like choosing a car that won’t crash of its own accord. How quickly we have forgotten other major automotive blunders. Toyota has a stunning list of recalls covering millions of cars and multi-million dollar fines, but they’re still the world’s biggest car manufacturer.

Well-managed brands protect businesses against mistakes, because a one-off bad experience from a good brand will be seen as the exception not the rule. This is the power of brands. People aren’t stupid and these problems do cause temporary setbacks – VW briefly overtook Toyota as world number one, until its own crisis hit. We’re not stupid, just busy and forgetful. Brand perceptions can change, but it happens slowly, and only with consistent reinforcement of the change, both from messaging and from experience.

Our fundamental beliefs and feelings about established brands are resistant to change. We cherry-pick information, seizing on that which confirms what we “know”, and ignoring the things that don’t fit. We’re seeing it now with the revelations from the Panama papers. The stand-out fact in terms of media scrutiny and popular interest is nothing to do with billionaire despots and secret fortunes. It’s the news that the Prime Minister’s mother gave him a gift of £200,000. Amid the frenzied speculation about whether this was legal tax avoidance, morally dubious, or whatever, this has been reported with delight because this one fact confirms what many people already believe about David Cameron. That he is a privileged toff, the thing which defines him for many voters.

It’s not about the money. Well it is about the money, but it’s because it’s his money. The Sunday Times Music Rich List says Adele is worth £85m. She, however, is a wonderful Tottenham girl who done good. Her fortune is considerably larger than Cameron’s but no one seems to mind, presumably because they believe she’s earned it fairly and he hasn’t. Likewise footballers, many of whom operate complex trust systems through which they manage their multi-million-pound salaries and minimise tax, never feature in the so-called 1% who need to pay their fair share of taxes. (Jermaine Jenas believes this so completely that he suggested on Any Questions that people should pay more tax, to great audience applause, despite his own involvement in dubious tax-avoidance schemes.) Like Adele, footballers mostly come from working class backgrounds and have the right talent. You’ll recall that heart-warming story last winter when squatters occupied an empty building in the middle of Manchester, owned by Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville. They postponed its redevelopment into a hotel until the spring so the homeless squatters could spend the winter there. Second home owners are frowned upon but no one batted an eyelid at Giggs et al owning that place.

We have a conflicted attitude to money, especially in the form of property, which is money that everyone else can admire, and which keeps on growing. We can’t make sense of how we feel about it. Instead we fall back on what we already feel about the people who have it. Working class singers and footballers, good. Etonians, bad.

My advice to Cameron, therefore, is make a virtue out of what you are – or what we believe you to be. You haven’t got time for repositioning. Besides, across the Atlantic, it seems to be a winning formula.

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The charity aims to help everyone make the most of later life. Undoubtedly some older people are confused by energy tariffs, and would welcome help to ensure they are not paying over the odds. The same applies to home and motor insurance, savings interest rates, even making sure they have smoke alarms with working batteries. Some people might even pay for help. But with the focus on raising money, Age UK came at the problem another way. Two years ago they agreed a special 2 year fixed tariff with E.ON, which was a pretty good deal at the time. Their website says that “buying this product supports Age UK’s charitable work”. Did people who signed up think they were in effect making a donation to Age UK? Or did they think Age UK was helping them by giving them a special deal? A bit more transparency rather than this woolly language might have avoided the recent media criticism and helped Age UK’s customers too. The kicker here is that people referred by Age UK to E.ON were offered a choice of all four E.ON tariffs. The charity appeared to be endorsing all E.ON’s tariffs.

Now the real deal has been revealed: The long term commercial partnership includes a typical commission to Age UK of £10 for each customer. As we know, if you’re not paying, you’re the product. This one is hard on Age UK’s customers because they are paying for their energy, while in effect they are being sold to E.ON for £10 each.

Major charities are complex organisations. Different teams have their own goals and metrics. The challenge is to keep sight of the primary job – in this case, helping older people – and to check the impact of any activity against the ultimate purpose as well as more parochial targets. As ever, a quick metaphorical walk in the customer’s shoes is rarely wasted.

Part of Age UK’s defence is that fundraising is getting harder and commercial deals are essential. The problem is the conflation of a benefit being provided by Age UK with a fundraising deal to support them. Either is fine. Even this deal is fine, as long as the customer point of view is worked through and made explicit. Plenty of happy customers will have been rattled by the negative coverage, when they may have been quite content to support the charity in this way. Soft-pedalling a message for fear some customers won’t like it is rarely good in the long run.

The wrinkle is that charities have to think about two sorts of customer – those they help, and those who support them. Other charities are under fire for targeting the same willing donors over and over, and for the trading of donor lists, which leads to the best prospects being contacted by many different charities. There’s a donor segmentation seemingly in general use among fund raisers, featuring Dorothy Donor, a typical lower value donor, and Colonel Cash, a major donor. Ignoring the perhaps inevitable gender-stereotyping, it’s a crude approach, since it’s mainly a view from the charity’s perspective, limited to the specific behaviour the charity seeks – can they give, do they give, how much do they give? The result is that poor old Dorothy Donor, the kindly female over 55 who gives regular small amounts to lots of charities, gets hit all the time for money from charities she has no interest in. This can’t be good but on a simple ROI model it generates more money than it costs, so they keep doing it. This is the danger of an overly simplistic approach to ROI, as I’ve written here.

Meanwhile an enterprising marketer at a comparison site has seen an opportunity. The top result when you search Age UK EON is Save on “Age UK energy”, with a link to energyhelpline.com, promising to compare all energy deals. That’s good business that’s good for customers.

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Media reports of this story invariably mention the reputation of German engineering in the car industry, suggesting it will now be destroyed. Who now remembers that the first generation Mercedes A class had to be withdrawn because it had a dangerous stability problem? It was somewhat prone to rolling over if you cornered too fast. Logically, that should have undermined our confidence in Mercedes engineering. How could they make such a fundamental and dangerous miscalculation? But no. We believe Mercedes know about engineering. So they made a mistake? They put it right. That reinforces our belief. The car was relaunched, and the early problems were quickly forgotten.

In this country, German car engineering does indeed have a fine reputation. Yet the objective data, collected via the massive JD Power survey, points to Japanese cars being the most reliable. The JD Power report is widely publicised every year, by the way, but harder to remember if it doesn’t fit what you already “know”.

This is confirmation bias. As human beings, we can’t constantly reconsider everything we believe, or reappraise a person, brand or product when there’s new information. Instead, we tend to filter the information we hear so as to confirm and retain our view, quickly forgetting the bad stuff. A brand is built through consistent messaging over many years, backed by a consistent experience, and it tends to be resilient. This makes it resistant to dissonant messages.

This works both ways. In the years after BT was privatised, it was changing for the better, and people’s experiences were mostly good. In research, customers would report that they had encountered a very helpful person in the call centre, or a dedicated engineer at their home – and how surprising and lucky that was. They saw these people as delivering good experiences despite their employer, rather than as part of it. The same thing is happening now in the NHS. Surveys consistently show that people in the UK think the NHS is in a worse state than it used to be, and at the same time, the vast majority of people report that their own personal experience of the NHS is as good as it’s ever been.

Corporate reputation is another matter. Volkswagen’s share price has crashed. It is damaged goods as a stock to invest in, as a company to work for, as a lobbying voice among its peers and in the halls of power in Europe and elsewhere. But we also see the cars, we know what we think about them, and it’s effortful to change that view. A personal bad experience, perhaps with a rude salesperson or a Friday car, is much more likely to change someone’s purchasing behaviour than an $8bn fine in the USA or an orchestrated misrepresentation of emissions.

Volkswagen can salvage their reputation, with a rapid, honest response. But for a time they’ll be in the news, and not in a good way. Marketing teams at Volkswagen will be tearing their hair out. They needn’t despair. Consistently good customer experiences will always trump bad corporate behaviour.

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