Alex Singleton

How marketers should think about about stationery and branded swag

May 28, 2020 By Alex Singleton

Personally, I’ve always liked nice stationery made of thick paper. It goes back to when I was a teenager, when I was pretending to be an adult and wrote regularly in newsstand technology magazines. In those days, when most people weren’t on email, Conqueror and a fountain pen signature helped me get access to the right people.

Yet, now that I’m actually an adult, I’m usually the guy advocating cost-saving around written correspondence, encouraging email or, if needs must, using so-called “hybrid mail”. This is where a postal company takes a letter in electronic form, and prints it on photocopy paper before using a machine to insert it into a low-cost, white C6 envelope, and then gives it to Royal Mail for the “last mile” of delivery.

Is there a conflict going on there? And is there a conflict between me being a marketer, who surely cares about the brand, and being relentlessly sceptical of branded promotional products?

Here’s how I think about the subject.

1. Personal correspondence vs transactional correspondence

Personal correspondence is different from “transactional” correspondence. When I send someone a letter on 160gsm A5 wove paper, it’s generally to express appreciation and sometimes to get noticed. It’s never “transactional”, which is what hybrid mail is for, and which ideally would be sent by email.

Likewise, at work, if a colleague suffered a personal tragedy, I wouldn’t want to send a hybrid mail letter – but send some flowers. So the medium should be tailored to the message.

2. Customer value proposition

The decision about stationery type should be thought of in terms of the customer value proposition. If you’re a luxury hotel in central London charging £700 a night, your differentiation strategy is likely to include making everything luxurious in order to support the pricing. You probably want to use top-end 100% cotton paper with the Connoisseur watermark (and matching tissue-lined envelopes) for absolutely everything.

On the other hand, it is often the case that, even if you are going for a differentiation strategy (rather than a low cost one), you might want to be economical with printed material. That’s because your differentiation is, let’s say, about the technology you’ve investing in or speed of delivery. That creates a cost environment where you invest a lot in certain things but are looking for savings in others – which lets you increase the customer value proposition.

3. Delighting customers at touchpoints

Delighting people at every “touchpoint” is an idea that might seem to justify always going expensive on paper stock and giving out lots of branded promotional products. In fact, research by CEB/Gartner finds that “delighting” customers isn’t what drives loyalty. Instead, what’s important is “how well companies deliver on their basic, even plain-vanilla promises”. Issues like “can I get through on the phone?”, “did they resolve my problem quickly?” and “where they helpful?” are what companies should be fixing at every “touchpoint” rather than increasing the paper stock or giving out branded teddy bears.

4. Transactional vs direct mail

There is a difference between transactional mail and direct mail. In the former, recipients are expecting your communication. They know why you’re sending it. Therefore, you don’t have to spend money grabbing their attention.

If sending direct mail – that is to say, mail aimed at selling something – there is plenty of evidence around the effectiveness of messages on the outside of envelopes and the use of inserts. So I wouldn’t use hybrid mail in such a situation but, if sending in volume, a print house that’s more geared up to this sort of media.

5. Branded pens and teddy bears

I’m a sceptic of branded promotional products. They are a tick box for non-marketers, but we should be asking what they do commercially, how they sit with modern thinking on single-use plastic, and how they fit into the value proposition.

At conferences, B2B companies have stands with a couple of men in suits, a brand name that does who-knows-what, some attractive notebooks, and a bowl of sweets. The notebooks are great to pick up, but has the vendor communicated anything useful by being there? Thoughtful stands ought to be about interesting delegates in the vendor’s proposition, and gimmicks – like free coffee – should be about increasing dwell time.

Illy’s espresso coffee tin is a masterclass in branding

May 22, 2020 By Alex Singleton

Marketers know that being a commodity is the road to ruin. So rather than being in a mythical market with a single market price, marketers try to segment customers into different types with different needs, and then choose which segments to target.

I love coffee. My favourite brand is Illy. To me, Illy’s espresso coffee tastes great, but it’s more expensive than the supermarket brand. What have marketers done to make me pay £6.50 a tin as opposed to £3.50 a bag of Taylors of Harrogate – or less for a supermarket value brand?

Firstly, the higher price itself is an indication that it’s better. There’s no law to force more expensive products to be better, but they’re relying on a heuristic – that is to say, a mental shortcut – which is that if Illy is bold enough to put a higher price on it, then I’m likely to believe it’s better. I stay as a repeat purchaser because, although I haven’t conducted a peer-reviewed, scientific blind tasting of espresso coffee brands, I like how it tastes.

Foreign consumer culture positioning

What’s more, there’s the whole Italian positioning going on – what academics label as foreign consumer culture positioning. In the back of my mind, like many people, I see Italy as the home of good coffee and the espresso. The Illy tin emphasises this with the partial use of the Italian language. On the front, for example, it reads “Illy Classico” and I know from the world of wine that Classico on a bottle of Italian Chianti suggests premium. In wine, it’s regulated whether you can add classico to the bottle according to the Chianti Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC) from 1967. So using the word Classico on a tin of coffee is surely a suggestion that this is somehow authoritatively better.

Sonic branding

Then the marketers behind this product have done something truly brilliant. They’ve applied sonic branding. Perhaps the most famous example of sonic branding is the Intel inside jingle that is played on TV adverts. Illy’s tins have sonic branding built in.

If you unscrew the lid of an Illy tin for the first time, you see the next layer of packaging – some metal with something to pull with the words “lift the ring slowly to let the gas out”.

As you pull the ring, there’s a sound. That sound – caused by the rush of gas or whatever it is – has a surprising effect on me. It makes me feel happy – or, as marketers say, it fuels a brand association. A brand association is anything which is deep seated in customer’s mind about the brand.

Brand associations

I associate that sound with lazy Saturday morning where there is not a care in the world and I can spent time with the freedom and time to think. If I ever feel a bit stressed, cracking open an Illy tin cheers me up.

The sonic branding that Illy uses reinforces claims on the tin. The back of the tin says that it’s “packaged in a protective atmosphere”, while in the top it says its “pressurized for freshness”.

You know, I bet all ground real coffee sold in supermarkets is packaged in a protective atmosphere, but Illy is the brand that tells you that, and makes sure you can hear it every time you open a tin.

In a 2003 book, Sonic Branding: An Essential Guide to the Art and Science of Sonic Branding, Daniel M. Jackson says that the key to the Intel Inside jingle being successful was that “it was created to convey the emotions of the brand, not just to be memorable”. And I think Illy’s sonic branding, which is so intrinsic to the product, does that too.

Brand associations are more powerful than people imagine. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, says that “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room”. As a marketer you can help create associations with your brand but you’re not totally in control of it, and the associations can be negative. For example, when you think of your broadband provider, it’s possible that the first thing that comes into your head is spending a long time on the phone to their call centre trying to get them to fix a technical or billing issue – not the association any company should want. Illy’s brand associations, on the other hand, are a masterclass in branding.

How to choose a first job in marketing, advertising or PR

May 17, 2020 By Alex Singleton

Choosing a good first employer can be a huge boost and help direct your career in the right direction. But how do you know if an employer – and specifically their marketing department – is any good?

I like to think of employers as fitting into four categories:

Big and first rate. Here you learn from excellent colleagues who are ahead of you, where the culture is ambitious, and where you also learn how to navigate and successful in big organisations. There are probably some nice perks, too, like private health insurance.
Small and first rate. You won’t learn how big organisations work, and there are fewer formal process, policies and departments. The upside is that you might end up doing more senior and varied work because there are fewer people around.
Big and second rate. There’s still a lot you can learn from these, but the organisation has lost its way and is in decline. If it’s an agency, there may still be some good, prestigious clients to work on, but which the agency is struggling to retain.
Small and second rate. Working here will teach you little about how to be successful as a marketer and it probably won’t sound prestigious on the CV. There are higher risks here to your wellbeing and careers, such as having to deal with the emotions of a manager whose business is stalling, and there’s a much higher risk of unexpected “termination”.

Someone early in his career asked me for some advice, after he’d been let go from a couple of PR agencies in quick succession. Incongruously, he was clearly bright and a good communicator. The issue, I concluded, was that his employers had been in categories 3 and 4, and he probably needed a different environment and someone to take him under their wing. I helped him get some some-short work, and he has subsequently worked for in the world of category 2 (small and first-rate) and been successful.

How to categorise a prospective employer

Of course, this is all well and good in theory, but how do you know in advance what an employer is really like behind the façade of a good-looking website? The answer is that it’s actually quite difficult to know. However, here are some ideas:

Obviously, famous brands can be great options – it’s why so many people apply to work at Microsoft, Unilever and Nestle. They will normally be in category one, but a brand like BHS would have been in category 3. You can determine the category through annual reports or coverage in the business sections of newspapers. However, all big companies have stronger periods than others, and a weak period where a company grasps the nettle and puts in place a turnaround plan (like John Lewis) doesn’t stop it being in category 1.
Go to industry events before you graduate and talk to people a few years ahead of you about who they recommend.
Do summer internships to get an inside look. If a summer job is at an employer you like, it could be perfect for a graduate job. Internships are also a useful vantage point to learn about employers in the sector generally, and to make connections.
If you’re planning to work in an agency, look up the client list. The agency may not be a prominent brand, but do its clients look like companies with significant budgets? The ability to say you worked at an agency on its Sainsbury’s account is much better than saying you handled the local hairdresser’s account.
Check out employer review sites such as Glassdoor.
If they have a team page on their site, think about whether there’s sufficient experience and gravitas among the team for you to learn from. An agency shouldn’t just be fresh-faced new graduates plus the boss.
If not applying for an official graduate training programme, ask potential employers what their commitment to personal development and training is.

How I chose my first employer

Of course, I didn’t know all the above when I started out in my career, but it is a codified reflection of what I learned along the way.

My first proper job was in my gap year before university (and went back to the same employer afterwards). The Adam Smith Institute was (and is) a small but first-rate organisation. My boss had been described in John Major’s official biography as one of only two intellects that Major had respected. He had been a syndicated newspaper columnist in the United States and on the editorial board of a British national newspaper, a professor of logic at a US university, Secretary of the high-IQ society Mensa, and had degrees from Edinburgh, St Andrews and Cambridge.

I had a really interesting gap year as a result, helping to place stories in newspapers, develop ideas for the website and, around a month after leaving school, made my first appearance on BBC Radio 4. Unlike a large organisation, there was no formal HR-led training programme (there was no HR department, either). But there was plenty of learning how to do stuff from someone with expertise.

To take the role, I had turned down an offer to spend my gap year in the Press Office of the Conservative Party, working for someone who is now the eminent Executive Director for Government Communications. That would have been a great learning experience too. Hate to be mercenary, but the deciding factor was simply financial.

How did I know the employer I was choosing was good? I went to a range of the organisation’s events and spent a good half hour talking to someone who was part-way through a gap year job there. It was a small outfit but I understood the internal dynamics and what the job was going to entail.

The thing about first-rate organisations is that they are not afraid of change; it’s the constant iterative process in how they function that makes them first rate. Once a week, my line manager would take me for lunch and the idea was that I would pitch ideas for new activities and tweaks – actually, that might not have been the idea, but it is what I did.

The number one attribute you need to be a top marketer

May 12, 2020 By Alex Singleton

In The Matrix, the most notable movie of 1999, the lead character Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) is able to acquire new skills that would normally take years to learn – including martial arts – by being plugged into a computer and receiving a digital download that takes mere seconds. This sort of learning ability was an attribute that one of the best hires I have made seemed to have.

Jack (not his real name) was working on a reception desk but kept rapidly adding new skills in all the Adobe applications and in design. He didn’t actually have Neo’s rapid downloading capability, just a hunger to learn and he spent his evenings doing online learning. During quiet spots during the day, he started volunteering his skills. With passion like that, Jack deserved to be in a marketing team and I was able to make it happen for him.

Why hunger to learn accelerates your effectiveness

Hunger to learn is the most important attribute that affects if someone is going to be a top marketer. This is the case for three reasons.

Firstly, there is a body of marketing knowledge that has been built up over the past century, in areas such as copywriting, advertising and psychology that can fast-track your marketing abilities. The best copywriters are the ones who have read the classics such as books by Joseph Sugarman and Drayton Bird, which give techniques for using words to convince and sell, and read novels and poetry, which show how to use words with style. There is a huge body of knowledge out there – such as why a photo including someone’s face works better than a pretty scene – which can be learned faster by studying than through your own work.

Secondly, the pace of change in marketing is speeding up. While you can learn plenty from personal experience, it’s much better to also learn from other people’s experience – such as by watching online videos about Photoshop, attending seminars, listening to experts on Audible or watching Ted talks. Sometimes people think that they only need to talk strategy and don’t need technical knowledge. In fact, a good level of technical knowledge is necessary to be a senior marketer. That’s why the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Professional Marketing Competencies framework, even for CIM Fellows, incorporates a Technical capabilities section.

Finally, hunger to learn advances your career because a proven commitment to continuing professional development tells a powerful story. People will see your skills are growing and give you more opportunities to work on bigger, and perhaps more interesting, projects. Most marketers underinvest in the time needed for learning, but for those who take their development seriously, it can be surprisingly easy to become a top performer.

Five youthful experiences that influenced my marketing

May 10, 2020 By Alex Singleton

My teenage years and 20s were phenomenal learning experiences in which I made lots of mistakes and pieced together some of the building blocks needed to be a great marketer. Here I’ve compiled five experiences that most strongly affected my understanding of marketing.

1. The Cobalt Raq3

At the end of my first year as an undergraduate, a game-changer occurred in the world of web hosting. Dedicated servers had been massively out of reach, and domain names were still to come down in price. UK2 had been aggressively pricing domains, so I was a customer of theirs, and they emailed to offer a dedicated server for three years at something like £1,000 if paid upfront.

The price didn’t include telephone support or any of the sort of extra security you’d definitely want – and, yes, I did get hacked – but it was just what I needed. Because I was working (doing a mix of marketing and comms) as well as studying, I wasn’t too short of cash.

The Cobalt Raq3 was an amazing educational machine to play with, hosted in a data centre in the Docklands. There was a bit of a web-based control panel, but to use it properly I had to learn Linux command line, using a Secure Shell application to connect to the server. I would typically design sites in Macromedia Dreamweaver and a graphics package called Fireworks (which were subsequently bought by Adobe) and, over time, started using an early content management system called Movable Type to make them easier to update.

I read as much as I could about managing the behind-the-scenes of websites – especially technical books published by O’Reilly such as Cricket Liu and Paul Albitz’s DNS and Bind.

So how did this affect my view of marketing? Well, it seems to me that now we are all marketing in a digital world, good technical skills need to be embedded throughout marketing teams, even if not as geeky as managing a server. Spending time learning about web sites work under the bonnet has helped me be good at commissioning and driving improvements to large websites.

2. The family business

I grew up in the middle of a family business and, as a teenager, ran marketing. This is when I learned my love of direct response – a direct mail letter I worked on was used for 20 years. Family businesses are useful experiences to have around when you’re a kid because the marketing you do with them has to pay otherwise you feel it.

Later I learned about David Ogilvy, a giant of 20th Century advertising, whose advocacy of measuring the effectiveness of advertising and making it pay, is central to my view of marketing.

3. Interviewing in the IT industry

As a teenager, I wrote for newsstand computer magazines, and got to interview some of the interesting characters in the UK computing scene – from Arm to Psion. It got me on the right path early on of realising that, contrary to commonly held views, advertising is just a small part of marketing. It was clear that interesting business models, network effects and platform ecosystems were more important than how much money you could throw at TV ads.

As a 15-year old I sat in a business park in Cambridge interviewing one of the top technology marketers in the country, who was involved in the spin-off of Arm, now a microprocessor giant but then a pre-IPO start-up. He was talking about Thomas Kuehn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the relevance of paradigm shifts, creating competitive advantages, and delivering value for strategic partners. We spent two hours talking but never once was a branded pen, DL-sized leaflet or a back-of-a-bus advert mentioned.

Of course the tactical aspects of marketing are important, but they need to be in the context of a grounded strategy – which is one of the reasons I think the MBA along with the more advanced CIM qualifications are such a good foundation for ambitious marketers.

4. Reading books

I have always been a voracious reader – a lot of factual books, plus some novelists such as Ernest Hemmingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Alan Hollinghurst and even some poetry. Geekily, as a teenager doing journalism, I read countless style guides and books of English usage, though these days my guilty pleasure is a subscription to the Times Literary Supplement, which I read to help make me a better, more interesting person.

Why is reading important for marketers? It helps you develop a better style as a writer. For a general marketer, copywriting has always been the core skill, as Aesop Glim noted in his famous book Copy: The Core of Advertising, decades before I was born.

5. Telegraph Media Group

I’d always been interested in newspaper and magazine publishing, and during my 20s the sector was facing creative destruction as a result of internet. I decided The Telegraph was the place I wanted to be, not least because I’d read that it was pushing digital transformation strongly, and there was plenty of noise about how terrible all this digital change was.

These days I like to think that focus is one of my key attributes, but one example of it rather makes me cringe. I had increased the amount of freelance journalism I was doing, and a senior person from The Guardian took me out for lunch near their offices, which were then in Farringdon. As the main course arrived, she asked: “So, Alex, what would you like to do next in your career?”

My transparent reply? “I want to get a job at The Telegraph.”

Nonetheless, the focus worked. I started off as a casual employee doing shifts, and also getting paid as a freelancer, before they hired me full time. Not only did my time at The Telegraph give me an insider’s view on how newspapers work, which helped inform my book on media relations, it also taught me a lot about change management, driving substantial increases in web traffic, and becoming more digital. My stock phrase about the need to “accelerate the pace of our digital transformation” is nicked from my time here. The Telegraph was and is cutting edge at modernising its business model, and my time there helped create a strong preference for grasping nettles early.