Page 54 - Strategic Marketing Complete

MARKETING MOMENT

Change is inevitable

(except from a vending

machine)

boardroom bingo So why (to use another couple of There’s a further irony in the fact

relieves the tedium BB front-runners) do we not “walk that attitudes to novelty evolve over
time. What began as a knee-jerk
the talk” or “put our money where
of those seemingly our mouths are”? After all, we’re “I don’t like it” reaction at launch,
aimless and endless more than up for a bit of risk-taking matures to tolerance and then from
acceptance to outright preference.
in our personal lives – think about
management meetings the experimentation we enjoy with So hang in there marketers, let a
like nothing you’ve clothing (my gold sequined cat-suit little time go by and everyone will
be wondering what the fuss was all
springs to mind), restaurants, travel,
tried before – other adventure sports and so on. Yet about.
than a Valium the moment we park the company But the most important lesson to
car in our designated bay at the
smoothie. office, we become another of those be learnt about creatively-driven
obsequious cowards whose only change is simply that it works. The
he boardroom version is just war cry in business is “steady as debate is over; it has been proven
like regular bingo, except that she goes, captain”, and whose only in countless empirical studies that
instead of someone calling strategy for forward planning is “last brands that embrace responsible
out random numbers printed on year plus ten percent”. risk-taking outperform those that
ping-pong balls, you mark your watch cautiously from the sidelines.
card whenever a piece of hideous Importance of differentiation We need to grab hold of that
business jargon escapes from the Perhaps it’s human nature to resist willingness to experiment in our
lips of one of the overly keen yes- change and to seek comfort in the private lives and bring it into the
men managers smugly sipping familiar. Just look at the outcry boardroom. We need to behave like
their skinny soya cappuccinos whenever a well-known brand the brands are our own possessions,
around the boardroom table. And adopts a new identity – Absa being built or destroyed by our own
believe you me, in this age in which the most recent in a long line of actions.
superficiality is admired more than new visual identities that have been
substance, it doesn’t take long for pilloried for no better reason than We need to have some “skin in the
your Boardroom Bingo card to fill being different from what we’re used game”.
to the brim. The jargon just flows, to. This is somewhat ironic when we
relentlessly, like a river of utter consider that the one thing that is Bingo!
meaninglessness. beaten into every aspirant brand
manager’s brain is the importance of
The words and phrases that differentiation.
score you points are things like
“disruption”, “paradigm shift”, highly regarded and
“game-changing”, “swimming influential strategist,
upstream”, and “zigging when speaker and writer, Andy
the others zag”. These are just a Rice is one of South Africa’s
few of the dozens of entries in best-known branding and
the Boardroom Bingo lexicon, but advertising experts. He headed up
they are certainly among the most Ogilvy Johannesburg’s account
frequently used. And the eagle- planning department before
eyed among you may have noticed founding specialist brand strategy
that these expressions all allude consultancy Yellowwood.
to that much-praised business
strategy of having an appetite for
risk and challenging the status quo.

p52 - Strategic Marketing