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 NEWS-TRENDS-ANALYSIS
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RECENT EDITORIAL FEATURES The following is a compilation of major Editorial Features written by leading business experts that have appeared in InsideTrack in recent months:
Marketing Higher Education to Students 
Professor Mark Durkin, Director of Student Marketing at the University of Ulster, addresses the challenge of adopting core marketing principles to convey the benefits of the higher education experience to potential and existing students Let's face it. Higher education is having to adapt to change like every other activity sector. In the deferred fee-paying environment undergraduate students and their parents are increasingly looking for value for money. Part of my role as Director of Student Marketing is to help to convey the benefits of higher education; and this is a very worthy challenge. In today's society which is characterised by a yearning for immediate outcomes and a desire for effort minimisation (particularly in the young) it has become fashionable to knock the longer-term challenge of a higher education degree. Indeed there is much talk in the media that degrees are no longer relevant to succeed in life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Irrespective of what choice of degree a student may make there is one common universal outcome - an ability to think and problem-solve with a perspective that was not present before that education experience was undertaken. 
The differentiator for graduates may no longer be having a degree and there is some truth in that given the government's policy in recent years of getting more people into the HE system. But this makes for a more competitive graduate market and underscores all the more the need for graduates to differentiate themselves in demonstrating how they can add real value through their contribution so as to benefit prospective employers. Contrary to popular belief it is still the case in Northern Ireland that young people suffer from a lack of confidence in articulating what they are good at. It is seen as uncool or boastful to sell yourself and there is a deep cultural insecurity that one might be found out. How unlike our American cousins we are!. At University of Ulster we are working hard to give students the confidence and skills to be better positioned to talk with authority about themselves and how they can add value as prospective professional employees. This is a key employability skill. 
What becomes important in achieving all this is the culture of the University that the degree comes from, how relevant the knowledge and skills learned are and the way this knowledge and skill mix can be applied for the betterment of the graduate and the employer. This is where the value of a University of Ulster experience really accrues for the individual, the economy and society more generally. Higher education is not a service that provides immediate effects or instant gratification - it is a slower consumption experience. This is also what makes the higher education experience an investment rather than a cost. The differentiator for today's graduate becomes what that individual can do with their degree in terms of (1) their new ability to think and (2) their ability to evidence that thinking in a way that employers will see as being of distinctive value. At University of Ulster we hold the view that our added value rests in our graduates being enabled to apply their knowledge and skills in more innovative and creative ways; from flexibility in problem-solving through to cretivity in opportunity identification. In essence they are being educated for professional life in today's world - while their subject knowledge will inform their performance of a given role, their creative communication and innovative problem-solving skills will add value and make them a real asset to employers as we become more reliant on a knowledge economy model. 
Obviously as a University, research is a critically important part of what we do and in combination with the knowledge and employer-ready skills we inculcate in our students it is research which adds value to our overall teaching proposition. To thrive in the global economy our graduates must have a global perspective and be addressing issues in the lecture theatre that have impacts beyond these shores. Global knowledge and understanding gained through research but applied locally makes for real regional benefits. In our dominently small business economy it is speed in the identification of opportunity, flexibility in the application of knowledge and an entrepreneurial action-oriented perspective that will allow us to stand out. Populating firms with excellent, innovative and creative graduates is what our University is all about and what our regional economy needs. Traversing all subject/discipline knowledge is the ability to think in an informed and creative way, and with that, a global perspective. 
So to those that question whether a degree and indeed the overall University experience is still important I would argue - without a knowledge-based economy our standard of living and our way of life will founder. As cutting-edge knowledge repositories new graduates are therefore the lifeblood of our future economy. Indeed graduates are our future. Success is all about seeing lifelong learning as an all important investment and not a cost and as society, employers and indeed prospective students we would forget that at our peril!
You may contact Mark Durkin at:
© Quintus Management (2009)
The Proliferation of Awards Is Not The Problem 
In this feature, Michael Maguire, Managing Partner at Quintus Management, addresses the oft heard criticism that there are too many Business Awards now competing for attention in the market place, and suggests some pointers for success. Come on admit it. As a business person have you ever noticed how the unguarded comments of a stranger can often reveal more market intelligence than many market research reports, however well executed they have been? Take the following as a case in point. While having dinner with some business people the other evening, one of our number (I will call her Sarah) proffered the observation that in her judgment 'there are far too many business awards programmes around now and this situation does not serve the interests of the business community'. While Sarah, a senior executive in a major company, was unware of my long involvement in The Chartered Institute of Marketing Awards, I was intrigued by her take on the idea that proliferation somehow worked against the interests of business, thus I enquired of her which awards she would single out for removal! My question caught her by surprise and she struggled at first to name a single awards programme, much less identify which ones she felt to be 'undeserving.' Finally she rattled off the names of two or three with which I was wholly unfamiliar before saying '.....then there is the CIM Awards - it's really good - no one does it like CIM - you can respect them.' While I will admit that the unprompted praise clearly made my day, her utterances on the subject of proliferation made me reflect on why the CIM Marketing Awards has been so successful and popular in a crowded marketplace, and on the qualities that favour a good awards programme. Most contemporary awards programmes fall into one of two types. Firstly there is what is sometimes referred to as the 'Nobel' award type where an entity such as a professional institute, a publisher or a major sponsor nominates an individual or company as deserving, and invites them to take up an award. The criteria for selection is often unstated or unpublished and there is 'no' entry process. The second type is the 'Entry' award where an application has to be made against clear criteria and a judging panel selects a winner based on merit. The 'Nobel' type is good at generating interest for the award host but few such programmes stand the test of time as there is little 'buy-in' to the process. The 'Entry' type is, by far, the most commonplace. However having a glitzy awards ceremony with floorshows, entertainment and celebrity is no guarantee of success or longevity. At its heart, a good awards programme is an honour system that celebrates success and promotes best practice and in my judgment the ingredients of success are quite simple: (1) 'Is the programme relevant and is there a real demand?', (2) 'Does it have real value and respect, and does it excite?', and (3) 'Is it well managed, financed and marketed?' Indeed, while new awards programmes are springing up every year to serve one niche interest or another, I would submit that a failure to satisfy these core issues contributes to the high turnover of many of them - they simply don't survive. When the CIM Marketing Awards first started in Ireland nearly a decade ago, little attention was given to promoting marketing success in the corporate world and the sense of achievement was simply not there. Now it is mainstream and much of that success is down to the tenacity of the Institute and the commitment of its sponsors. The programme evolves year on year to meet the ever-changing needs of the market, and while 'size' is not everything it has emerged the largest, and arguably the most prestigious awards programme of its type in Ireland. In the words of Sarah, 'it's really good - no one does it like CIM - you can respect them.' I guess whatever else is happening in the market, the Institute is doing it right!
You may contact Michael Maguire at:
© Quintus Management (2009)
Marketing For Today 
In this feature, Michael Maguire, Managing Partner at Quintus Management, considers the phenomenom of brands and brand strategies and the influence that brands have on contemporary marketing, and reflects on some interesting case study examples from our past. As the late Fred Dibnah often pointed out, the Victorian era is popularly regarded as a high point in innovation that witnessed the development of the steam engine, the motor car, the typewriter, air conditioning and flush toilets. These were just a few of a host of human inventions that shaped the modern world in the last two centuries. Along with this, they also gave us the modern concept of branding. This was an era that made millionaire folk heroes out of entrepreneur inventors like King Camp Gillette, George Eastman and William Kellogg and while, with hindsight, we may see these people as 19th century opportunists, they were also visionaries even if their perspectives were sometimes constrained by prevailing social conditions, as in the case of Alexander Graham Bell who once commented on his invention of the telephone as intended as "...a device for the Upper Classes, to be used by the public in a limited number of locations."
However this period in commercial history was also the dawn of mass communication and consumer advertising when names like Cadburys, OXO and Coca Cola were popularised. Now, a century or so later, those same names and many more have become world wide brands that we know and love. But what is it about a brand that gives it an edge? Indeed what lessons can we learn from the past that can help regionally based companies and brands today? The essential feature that marketing professionals learnt long ago is that a brand gives a product or service a personality that goes way beyond mere identification. It conveys confidence, familiarity and trust that consumers look to as 'friendly.' We know that when we buy products with names like Guinness, SAAB or Dromona, we will have a clear expectation how we will feel using them. Being associated with popular brands also says something about our lifestyle to others. Why else would we wear clothes, the essential feature of which is the promotion of a maker's name, and pay for the privilege? Indeed the exploitation of brand goodwill has reached the stage where companies openly tease customers about their lifestyles and aspirations through advertising without the risk of offending the self same customers. Recent examples include campaigns for Smirnoff (remember the squashed BMW and the laughing hedgehogs?), Renault's Papa and Nicole series and Lilt's now famous parody of Levi with the West Indian ladies leaping through walls. Consumer appeal apart, there is a 'hardnosed' reality about brand management. Branded goods (and services) can help companies to outplay and outpace competitors, to weather recessionary storms and even occasional massive errors in marketing judgement. This is because brands can be resilient and even pliable, and they can enrich shareholder value beyond that typically associated with commercial 'goodwill' because they represent a cumulative value investment. In many cases brands are worth more than the plant and equipment used in manufacture. However the emerging power of major global brands is not universally welcomed. In the developing world, and to some extent in Eastern Europe, there has been some unease with the way that brand dominance is moulding social values and aspirations. Even in Western Europe, especially within the Mediterranean countries, multinational brands are sometimes viewed with mixed emotions. What is probably at stake is the recognition that with globalisation can come job displacement as well as cultural change. After all, global brands would not become so if people didn't buy them! So, where is the lesson? Well on the one hand our business heritage and way of life owes much to our historic industries and many towns and regions will be forever associated with key brands. Would Dublin be the same without Guinness, or Maranello without Ferrari, or even Belleek without Belleek? Well Birmingham has survived the demise of Rover and at the time of writing may well have to survive the loss of HP as production moves abroad, but their legacy lives on. Britain and Ireland have long been export based economies and yet it is increasingly argued that our cost base is so high as to render us insufficiently competitive to compete as global players. Further, were domestic investment to be contemplated, it is suggested that it would create units that could not be adequately satisfied by local consumption. I have long recognsied that transferring output overseas has become a soft option; a substitute for robust reinvestment. Sadly such shortsightedness is not limited to the placement of plant and equipment. In many cases we have been remiss in reinvesting in our brands also, such that increasingly, home grown brands that have been vibrant contributors to the regional economy for over a century have become prime assets for non European businesses to develop and grow unaided. Thus I have a challenge for industry. Look closely at your brands and determine how you might exploit them more effectively and consider how this process could help to find new markets and new customers. You owe this to your shareholders. You owe it to your staff and as a business decision taker you owe it to yourself! Much of our housing stock may still be Victorian that has been adapted to the 21st century. On the other hand our market potential belongs to a wholly new era and that is boundless. We can learn much from our Victorian forebears when it comes to tenacity and entrepreneurship. Those brandbuilders conquered the world with much less resources than most businesses have at their disposal today. So what's stopping you?
You may contact Michael Maguire at:
© Quintus Management (2009)
White Noise - The Sound of Seduction 
By Professor Mark Durkin, University of Ulster's Director of Student Marketing Boston, like many American cities, seems to be in the grip of a disquieting social disorder and every other person has become a victim, a feature that I have witnessed first hand during recent visits. As we hurtled along on the ‘T’ the same victims, disguised as evening commuters, stare at their own reflections in the dark windows, appearing not to recognise the existence of the person staring back. These people look lost, distant, remote and I found observing them was at once discomforting yet fascinating – how could these sad faces be reconciled to anything pleasurable at all. They seem less co-ordinated than the rest of us, bumping and shuffling, and deaf to the subtle social cues of the wider society of which they are part. 'They’ are the iPod generation. Their white trailing wires represent this new millennium's symbol for the remote society we have created, become entangled with, given up fighting and then ultimately become seduced by its promise of a personal world for each individual on the planet. An iPod world epitomises a marketer's dream – segments of one, total customisation, individuality – Don Peppers and Martha Rogers were right after all – it has happened before our eyes and I didn't even notice. What of Collective Experiences? There are now 25 million iPod users in the USA, not to mention the additional millions of individuals using alternative music interfaces like MP3. Each is taking his / her own ‘best’ music tracks from their CD collections and supplementing these with Internet downloads of emerging favourites. The collective experience enjoyed when a new album comes out is now lost as downloadable track sales have overtaken ‘physical’ sales for the first time and people are choosing what ‘parts’ of a new album product they wish to listen to and retain. Each iPod memory doubtless represents a unique bastardisation of historic and current albums; an incomplete, fragmented auditory narrative of the wearer’s life. The collective experience is dead – the individual’s desire for expedience has taken over – never does a music track that is not a ‘favourite’ have to be listened to again. So, this iPod symbol which exemplifies the ‘market-of-one’ is actually here and is a cause of celebration, right? Wrong. I think it a cause of great concern for us, both as consumers and as marketers. We now live in a society increasingly characterised by a desire for instant gratification and technologically-driven stimuli that is shortening attention spans like never before. This trend for immediacy is increasingly present in our young people and when one extrapolates out from the individualism of the iPod example it can be seen everywhere. Multi-channel television allows for expanded personal choice but given a limited talent pool it makes for a dilution of quality due to the dramatic increase in quantity. This is a bad combination and if you're one of those people who laments the passing of ‘quality’ television then all that means is you're probably as old as me. Separated Connectedness Think of mobile phones and Blackberries, the tailoring of news items and the convergence of video, MP3, phone and email on the newly emerging 3G ‘phones’ as a kind of telecom Swiss Army Knife. The process is aimed at total convenience, pleasure, the minimisation of hardship and total accessibility of the individual all day, every day. But this accessibility and the ‘ connected-ness’ it appears to create is ephemeral – it is a remote, discrete and inherently ‘separated’ connected-ness; it is not social, personal, shared or truly involving in any meaningful way. We appear to have begun to live in an age lacking mental challenge. In some ways there never has been a time when we have had to seek out more information but at the same time the information we pursue is mainly tailored to our needs, likes and preferences. We no longer have as great an opportunity to be exposed to information sources we didn't choose ourselves or which were specifically customised by us to meet our needs. We no longer want to be mentally challenged – this seems especially the case amongst our young people where there appears to be a parallel desire for instant and disposable learning. Perhaps, as we move towards an increasingly older population the real marketing opportunity lies in re-creating physical and socially driven interaction platforms again – where people take pleasure in dialogue and debate, where views can be exchanged in person without the medium of email or text, where you sit through a programme on TV or movie in a cinema that you wouldn't normally watch to ‘broaden your perspective’, to educate yourself, to foster a desire for and enablement of a permanency of learning. Lessons from the Past Suddenly I'm reminded of parents and teachers who used to say things like this to me as a child; ‘It’s good for you, eat it’, ‘watch it - it will broaden your perspective’, ‘do it - it’s character building’. And that's the problem isn't it? Raising issues like this makes you feel old-fashioned, out of date and a bit of a technophobe. But as I sat in my carriage on the 'T' hurtling from Harvard to Boston's Park Street I couldn't help but be reminded of Franz Kafka’s ‘The Passenger’ written 100 years ago in which he describes himself standing on the platform of a tram ‘utterly unsure of my place in the world, in this city’. A beautiful girl gets on at the next stop with whom he becomes fascinated; he describes her in great detail from ‘her brown face, her nose pinched in slightly at the sides’ through to ‘the wisps of her hair blowing about her right temple, her small ear’. Having consumed the girl’s beauty through all his senses Kafka concludes; ‘I wondered at the time: how come she is not astonished at herself, but keeps her mouth shut and says nothing at all?’ Maybe she was listening to her iPod!
You may contact Mark Durkin at:
© Quintus Management (2009) The Future of Marketing 
By David Carson, Professor of Marketing at The School of Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Strategy, University of Ulster Is marketing to be entirely technology driven? I have been asked this question in a variety of forms since the onset of the new millennium. Today’s young generation firmly believe that the future is technology driven and that this technology will ‘make the world smaller’, indeed, will become like a global village. But will this new order in marketing be entirely technology driven? The Future of Marketing is Global I do believe that marketing will indeed become more global. I see this development as Global Unification of marketing perspectives. The notion of Global Unification is already clear to see, with international corporate mergers and alliances and political co-operations. I further believe that technology in whatever form it develops will increasingly influence marketing infrastructures and performance to the point of being fully integral to marketing per se. I believe that as technology develops so to in tandem will marketing competency and skill, based on a foundation of knowledge and expertise. However, regardless of the nature and influence of technology there will remain one overriding factor of main influence over any perspective of marketing, that is, the dimension that we are all Human Beings. As Human Beings we will continue to need to interact with each other in a variety of forms but most importantly as individuals and personally. As Human Beings we will maintain all of our senses and use these together in our interactions. We need to see each other, to smell each other, to touch each other, to hear each other. Technology may find ways to provide some semblance of these senses but will always be a poorer substitute for the real thing. As in Woody Allen’s classic movie, ‘Sleeper’(1973), his initial enthusiasm for The Orgasmatron waned towards a longing for “doing it with another person.” (my paraphrase). It is my belief that personal human interaction will prevail. Pragmatically, how will future marketing be manifest? I present in the figure below, conceptualisation of this notion. The focal point of my future marketing will be the strive for Personal Portfolio Relationships, by this I mean that marketing will aim to develop a personal relationship individually with customers by building personal portfolios of these customers and linking their interactions through these portfolio frameworks. How will this be achieved? I believe on some kind of balance between Networking Relationships and Technological Relationships.
Note that I do not advocate a Relationship Marketing perspective, rather than simply adopting a relationship marketing approach, I believe much more is to be gained by developing meaningful Networks and then performing meaningful and effective Networking with existing customers and potential customers. This will be done in integral tandem with the technology dimension. Such will be the sophistication of this technology that I believe it will develop Technological Relationships. Such Systems will mimic human behaviour, Woody’s Orgasmatron again. The effectiveness and indeed foundation of this Personal Portfolio Relationship Model will depend on the competency efficiency of the marketer. Such competence will be based upon Knowledge, Experience, Communication and Judgement used in a fully integrative way, across personal and technological interactions. So, the future of marketing will not just be about technology. Whilst technology, in whichever form it manifests in the future, will still be inexplicably linked to human characteristics and behaviours. There Is No Future Without The Past Whatever the future, one thing we should not forget in any musing is the old aphorism, ‘there is no future without the past’. The notion that the future is in the past should stimulate those of us in the marketing profession to seek out the best of that which has gone before and explore how it might evolve in the future. Future marketing will evolve from this. *This piece is adapted from, Carson, D., (2000), “The Future of Marketing in the 21st Century”, Keynote address at the Australia, New Zealand Marketing Academy Conference, Griffith University, Gold Cost, Queensland, November.
You may contact David Carson at:
© Quintus Management (2009) |
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