The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

your point about accountants being ceos is a fucking good one though campbell. why the fuck has that happened? no fucking wonder companies have the vision of ray fucking charles these days.

I think someone should bring competent marketing managers back into boardrooms because clearly we aren’t seeing enough of them client-side. There may be an issue with people thinking marketing has lost its way what with digital and the rise of social media – of course I don’t really know what clients discuss when they go back to their offices but it’s just a feeling.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that others tend to think marketing managers as CEOs would give in too early to the pressures of social media and the likes without really understanding how they work and how it can benefit the business (and it may have to do with ROI and how you get that from the digital realm). It’s easy for some agency to say ‘look, all your customers are online’ but the marketing manager may be unable or not confident enough to go back and (reasonably) sell that at boardroom level and work his way towards a more senior position.

A good point my dad has made when I mentioned your post in a conversation is that as a marketing manager you can be very good at the pitch, but not great at the budgeting, disastrous even – bad for your company, or be absolutely fantastic with numbers but not recognise a great ad when you see it and make things hard for the agency (debatable but that’s just a sweeping generalisation intended as a joke…plus some truth in it, depends to what extent).

The sort of marketing person I’d like to see at boardroom level probably needs to be a lot better at understanding digital and by digital I don’t mean social media, lulz etc but a much bigger cultural/technological perspective. There was a survey ’round here saying that 41% of some clients polled have very low confidence in their digital media strategy. Is it them? Is it the agencies? Where’s the breakdown and how can we fix that? Because if it’s us, I’d love to give someone the info to go back to their boardroom and say actually, this is why I think the long-term works.

Maybe you need some level of madness to inspire confidence. Bezos at Amazon is a cliched example now but they are selling Kindles at a loss in order to focus on long-term growth from trapping people into an ebook platform. There’s a method behind it but you know…we’re fixating on like-for-like sales which can mean just about nothing these days. Depending on your business.

Oh snap, I’ve rambled again at midnight. Lalala. But I love it when people who comment here come and at least tell me something new as they’re in much better positions to comment.

The stock market seems a red thread in your three points..

So you either need strong founders who groom early and rule long enough for the culture you propose to become internalised or you should not go public to not succumb to external pressures?

Broadly speaking succession is often tricky.. from Rome to Apple.. never easy often wrong..

Very happy people like this post …

Having Lee, George, Pete and John Dodds is fantastic … having even Andy accidentally compliment it is astounding.

Why?

Because this post matters to me. Well, they all do [even the “horse cock” one] but this matters because I am getting fed up hearing people use terms like ‘best practice’ when what they really mean is ‘lowest quality I can get away with’.

We talk about this ‘throwaway society’ because we’ve created it. The worst thing is it’s literally a ‘throwaway’ … the value of value has seemingly disappeared.

The title of the post – unsurprisingly – didn’t come from me. I paraphrased something I heard a 70 year old engineer say in an interview, but he was right.

Sure, it might mean this attitude has helped companies make more money, but it could also be argued they make less because in many cases, loyalty has gone out the window and they are at the whim of the fickle tastes of the consumer.

However there’s something even worse that has come from all this … as Andy points out, whole countries suffer.

England’s main industry appears to be call centres and credit check companies … a nation that once had a proud manufacturing history, often [but certainly not always] known for quality, now has pretty much nothing.

Of course we all have to take some responsibility for this … from shareholders to voters … but our obsessive focus on the short-term has potentially ended up robbing our future generations of understanding the pride and satisfaction of making – and buying – something of real quality & substance.

We need to encourage more Dyson’s, not Sir Fred Goodwin’s.

Porno is all about the quality.

94 comments. ninety fucking four comments. talk about slow fucking news day.