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Planning: Expecting the Unexpected

Planning - expect the unexpected

I had a pleasant surprise on my first day at ‘proper’ work after college (I’d joined Gillette on a graduate entry scheme). We were all given a large pay rise from the graduate offer – in my case, more than 35%; and we were told that our pay would be increased each month in line with inflation.

Yes, you’ve guessed it I started work in the mid 70’s, when inflation was more than 2% a month in the UK. Difficult to credit now, or to imagine that those days can ever come around again. But, it’s very easy to forget the lessons learnt in that period, and to assume that current experience is the norm.

Which leads me on to the point of this blog: how do you get strategists and planners to genuinely think the unthinkable when they are considering the future, and where to go with their business? It’s difficult not to be driven by two main factors when considering the future; extrapolating current trends, or calculating the impact of an impending – but predictable – big event.

At the moment then, many business strategists will be considering where digital technology takes us, and working out the possible impact of Brexit – which, it is clear, is of global significance. These are important – but they don’t fully allow for the consideration of the truly bizarre ‘what if’ scenarios, which may be unlikely but which genuinely can change everything.

The biggest single ‘event’ of my working life was the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1989, and the subsequent breakup of the USSR in 1991. The aftershocks of this seismic event will continue for years, and have had profound effects on every organisation we have worked for since that time. My guess is, however, that few organisations outside a select few sectors, such as defence, made any assumptions about the events of 1989 when they produced their strategies and plans in 1988.

Planning, and planning assumptions, always sound like one of the drier parts of business. In fact, they should draw on, and benefit from, the best brains, and seek to equip organisations with the greatest of planning gains – sustainability. We may not be in for another seismic event like 1989 in the next few years, but I hope you’re including in your planning the likelihood and impact of a new leader in North Korea, the end of the Syrian Civil War, and England winning the European Championship! (only kidding about the last one!)

New Day – How Not to Launch a Product

New Day Logo

Does anyone still remember New Day? I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t.

Sadly, for those of us who value media diversity, the latest addition to the newsstand, New Day, lasted just nine weeks and will be quickly forgotten.

One school of thought says that this was inevitable. The UK’s universe of newspaper buyers has shrunk by a million since online news and news apps established themselves. So launching a new print title was high risk. I would have to agree, it was always going to be tough.

However, Trinity Mirror – the publishers – managed to make their task even more difficult by the way they chose to launch and manage their new title. Let’s draw some value from the whole awful experience by observing and learning from some ‘how not to’s’ when launching a new product.

  1. Pick a weak name. Basically, New Day doesn’t sound like it’s a newspaper – it would (and has been) applied in a number of sectors. It would be easy to see it on a shower gel, breakfast cereal, or deodorant. We have a client which recently rebranded itself as ‘New Day’: it runs a credit card business.
  2. Don’t pre-sell. New Day arrived as a surprise to many, particularly its target customers. Where were the previews, soft launch, PR announcements, celebrity columnists tweeting about it, pre-launch advertising. Didn’t spot them.
  3. Confuse your customers and the trade. Provide the first edition for free, then go up to 50p, then occasionally drop back to 25p. Price in the newspaper world is a clear signal of where you stand – so where was New Day?
  4. Create a major structural disadvantage. New Day was printed on the Daily Mirror presses, and had to finish the print run before the Mirror started. In a world where the latest news is a critical issue on the newsstand, looking like last night’s paper every morning isn’t sustainable. On Tuesday 3rd May New Day was the only paper in the UK not to feature the Leicester City story on the front page; they’d gone to print long before the story happened.

When you write a marketing strategy, you’re required to focus on four things, and identify an advantage for each – particularly for a new product. It’s an impressive fail that Trinity Mirror managed to create a disadvantage in three of them.

  • Product – early print deadline
  • Price – what will it be tomorrow?
  • Promotion – awful branding, surprise launch

In retrospect, maybe nine weeks’ life was not that bad!

Quangos – 7 steps to stay off the bonfire

Quango on the bonfireQuangos are a hot topic of discussion in the UK; the acronym being quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation and typically meaning an organisation to which the government has devolved power. They cover different ‘arm’s-length’ government bodies, including non-departmental public bodies, non-ministerial departments, and executive agencies.

Around five years ago, the UK coalition government announced that hundreds of publicly funded government agencies would disappear with the aim of improving accountability and costs, the famous ‘bonfire of the quangos’. In fact, according to a National Audit Office report from March 2014, 285 public bodies had been abolished, apparently saving over £2.6bn, but 184 new organisations were created at the same time. Interestingly, of the 184 groups set up between 2010 and 2014, 66 of them are companies in which the government owns some or all of the shares.

This suggests that quangos are not the epitome of bureaucratic waste and excess, as some have suggested. In our experience, these types of organisations often have good people, brand goodwill and engaged customers. At a time when their government funding is either being reduced significantly or withdrawn completely, what they don’t typically have is a commercial approach or culture.

What therefore to do with an organisation that has a future, but not enough funds?

  1. Identify what market you are serving; as a quango or similar, you will have had a captive or guaranteed market for your services. Using a combination of market research and consultation with your existing contacts, the market in the commercial world can be identified and quantified, enough to help strategic direction and help raise funds.
  2. Develop a customer proposition; transform your existing offerings into a customer (value) proposition, to answer the question – ‘what can you do for me (target market)?’ and test with a few prospective customers
  3. Create a distinctive positioning; there will undoubtedly be competitors already providing similar services, so evaluate what you have to offer and determine what is distinctive (unlikely to be unique) versus others
  4. Initiate product development; identify how the current services could be developed and improved, for example by talking to existing customers, and start a programme of new product development; initially building on your in-house capabilities
  5. Produce (or update) a business case and plan; an important discipline to help establish whether there really is a commercial opportunity but also for approaching potential funders with a well thought through rationale
  6. Consider future status and structure; there are many options for the future status of the organisation, including whether the team want to continue to be part of a not for profit enterprise. There are also key questions about governance and structure; who has the expertise for different roles, where are the gaps and how are they going to be addressed, how is remuneration and ‘equity’ to be decided etc?
  7. Develop a communications plan and ‘launch’; the new enterprise cannot be the best kept secret, it needs to communicate and promote your services. Quite likely a ‘soft launch’ initially, contracting with some warm contacts before committing to more ambitious plans

7 steps; quite straightforward in principle, not so easy to achieve but a robust way of transforming from quango to a flourishing enterprise.

How many will then find themselves on fire as opposed to being on the bonfire?