How has your manager rated you so far this year?

Strategy is invariably linked to execution.

World acclaimed CEO and author, Larry Bossidy, believes that poor business performance is often not the result of poor strategy. But from poor execution.

Peter Drucker is often credited with the quote "What gets measured, gets done". If you know exactly what is expected from you, exactly what needs to be done, exactly how it will be measured and what this means for your bonus, career prospects - and possibly job security - there is a pretty good chance you'll focus on it.

Sounds obvious. Yep. So is this what happens?

Well, given it is two months into the year. My question is - do you know exactly how your manager has rated your performance, so far, this year? And if you're a manager, do your team members know exactly how you have rated their performance? If they were asked today, could they confidently say exactly how their performance has been against defined objectives? And how their performance rates on the scale your company uses?

You should know. And so should they. It's not much use telling them at the end of the year that they've missed their objectives. It will be too late at that stage. Not fair to them. And your company may pay the price.

If you don't know - why is this? I think there are several reasons and will scribble these down for a later post.

What's your thoughts?

What is the most inspiring thing your manager has said to you?

This post is not connected to marketing or advertising. It's about people and their jobs. The tenuous link of course, is that the people I work with are primarily responsible for advertising. And their efforts ultimately determine how good or bad the end result is.

So I've a selfish reason to try and understand what motivates them. Which is why I picked up "The three signs of a miserable job". Yes, I'm guilty again of judging a book by its cover. It's a fable for managers, which sounds naff, but I enjoyed the book.

So the three signs?

1. Anonymity - Nobody wants to be invisible. We all need to be appreciated and recognised, ideally not just by peers, but by people in charge.
   
   
2. Irrelevance - We need to know that the work we do matters. We don't have be changing the world. But at the very least we need to know that our work matters to our boss.
   
   
3. Immeasurement - We all need to be able to measure our progress. Our results. And we need to be able to see this for ourselves.
   

I'm always a bit sceptical of simple solutions laid out in books. However, it's not a bad starting point when organising or structuring roles. I might add my own views in another post.

Everytime...

Think I am going to be using this quote a lot - when talking about advertising anyway. Love it.

Not sure if it is the influence of classic VW ads like 'Think Small', but where possible, I've always gone for a 'less is more' look in press and outdoor. Which is why this, this and this all appeal to me.

Found via Helge Tennø in one of his many wonderful presentations.

What the f**k is social media?

Thought I'd share this along. While it isn't anything new, I often find myself looking around for good visuals, quotes or stats when doing presentations. This has some good stuff. It would be useful to anybody trying to get their head around digital. I'd also recommend Groundswell

Found via Fallon

Companies don't write letters. People do.

Image courtesy of LarimdaME

"A mailing with a letter, but without a brochure will almost always outpull a mailing with no letter" - Denny Hatch

Last week I wrote a short post 'Direct Marketing Tip' acknowledging the many learnings available from DM tests. While these little nuggets are widely available, I'm not sure if they are widely used. For a nice example of how not to do it, read the "Dear valued customer" letter here.

So apologies if this is old hat. But if you are new to direct marketing or have not trained in it, I'm hoping this is a useful DM tip:

If you are posting stuff to your customers - include a letter.

Not everybody will read it. But some will. Some will skip the brochure and go straight to the letter. Denny Hatch, a DM author, suggests that the letter is actually more important than the brochure. And if I had to dump one for cost reasons, I'd dump the brochure.

Of course, the brochure and the letter serve different purposes. Your brochure is often the glossy bit from your company but the letter is the personal note from you.

Also, remember that companies don't actually write letters. People do. And I'd recommend that the name at the end of the letter should be a real person's at your company. The days of putting a fake name at the end of a letter so customers can't contact you must be coming to an end.

Leo Burnett quote

"I am one who believes that one of the greatest dangers of advertising is not that of misleading people, but that of boring them to death." - Leo Burnett

Read this today on a comment on an advertising blog. So true.

Direct Marketing Tip

"Even if small is less beautiful, it is more efficient" - Graeme McCorkell

One of the great things about direct marketers is they test all sorts of stuff. They test offers, lists, formats, creative, media and lots more. So we have loads of learnings available.

Graeme McCorkell is a highly regarded direct marketing professional and author. The above quote refers to press advertising sizes. Tests show that smaller ads are more (cost) efficient than larger ads.

Sure, you will get higher responses if you make the ad bigger, but the additional responses will not be in proportion to the size increase. So for example, if you double the size of your ad, you won't double the number of responses.

A good rule of thumb is to expect 40% more responses if you double your ad size. But good to test for yourself.

We just need loyal customers

'Customer loyalty' is often quoted as a goal for many company execs. Loyal customers = lots of profits. Even if this is the real goal, this is the wrong starting point.

Our starting point should be this:

"Customer loyalty is not about how customers demonstrate their loyalty to us, it is about how we demonstrate our loyalty to them"

- Sir Ian MacLaurin, ex-Chairman of Tesco

Simple concept. Apparently very difficult to execute.

"There is too much copy there. Nobody will read all that"

When working on ads, I often hear comments like "There is too much copy there. Nobody will read all that".

And while this is often a valid argument, I thought it would be useful to quote Claude C Hopkins, one of the most respected advertisers ever:

"Some say 'Be very brief. People will read but little'. Would you say that to a salesman? With a prospect standing before him, would you confine him to any certain number of words? That would be an unthinkable handicap."

My own view is the amount of copy depends on the challenge. If they are online, you can say less. They can click. If it is outdoor - less is definitely more.

But in press or direct mail, as long as the copy is focused and works well with the design, long copy can work just fine. If your readers are not interested, they won't read beyond the headline, so it doesn't matter how much copy you have. But if they read the headline and are still interested, you should give them as many reasons to buy as possible.

This then becomes a question on how to balance the copy and design so they are not crowding out each other.

I love quotes

I love quotes.

I often waste many hours searching online and through books for an appropriate quote to kick off a presentation or document. If I'm honest, I suspect that some insightful words from somebody wiser than me will somehow make me look intelligent and somewhat academic. This probably stems from my Dad - who is wise and an academic. He always used quotes at the beginning of any chapter or paper he published.

So I've decided to start adding quotes to my blog.

If nothing else, it will be a place for me to collate them, but hopefully they will be useful to you when putting presentations or pitches together. I'm planning to keep to marketing or business-related quotes for the most part. Please feel free to send me any.

I'll kick off with this, one which very relevant to marketing:

"Those who defend everything, defend nothing" - Ferdinand Foch, Marshal of France, Principles of War.

People will only spread your virus if there's something in it for them

As marketers, we sometimes forget this in our desire to make stuff go viral.

Why will they send it on to their friends? "My mates will like this, and think this is very cool / clever / funny / interesting - and in some way, I get kudos for telling them about it first"

Isn't this one reason why we share on blogs?

Found via Hugh MacLeod.

"The most useful book about advertising that I have ever read"

I'm pretty sure I first heard about this while reading Drayton Bird's Commonsense Direct Marketing. If I remember correctly, he made that point that many marketeers are simply not trained in the basics and his advice to anybody starting out would be to read everything possible. His first book recommendations were Claude C. Hopkin's Scientific Advertising and this.

As you can probably guess by the title, this is a practical book. John explains very simply why one advertisement will outperform another. His statements are bold because they based on tests. If you don't already understand the importance of headlines, you will after this. There are three chapters (ch.2, 3 + 4) written entirely about headlines.

While this was published in 1932, it is still very, very relevant today. It has been suggested that some of his advice is not as important as as it was in the 30's. Perhaps, but I had a quick look over at amazon and wasn't surprised to see that it has a five-star rating from 42 reviews.

The copy I have has a foreword by the late great David Ogilvy. I just grabbed it off the shelf to read his quote directly - "This is, without doubt, the most useful book about advertising that I have ever read".

This is a keeper. You won't give yours away.